RFK Jr. Wants to Reshape US Health Policy. Good Luck With That

Kennedy’s past makes him an improbable campaigner for agriculture secretary, according to Daniel Glickman, who served successful the relation during Bill Clinton’s presidency. “It’s hard for maine to imagine, fixed Trump’s accepted basal successful the heartlands, that helium would prime idiosyncratic who was an advocator for breaking up ample farms and breaking consolidated agriculture,” says Glickman.

Like apical posts astatine HHS, the USDA caput presumption would request to beryllium confirmed by a Senate vote. “I don’t deliberation [Kennedy] is simply a slam dunk,” says Glickman.

Trump’s prime for USDA main during his archetypal word was Sonny Perdue, a erstwhile politician of Georgia and laminitis of an cultivation trading company. Most agriculture secretaries either person a inheritance successful the manufacture oregon politics—two important constituencies for the idiosyncratic who volition beryllium successful complaint of a section that employs astir 100,000 and is made up of 29 agencies, including forestry, conservation, and nutrition programs. “The quality betwixt Sonny Perdue and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is similar nighttime and day,” says Glickman.

If Kennedy were to beryllium confirmed arsenic agriculture secretary, helium mightiness conflict to enact the astir extremist parts of his program. He is an outspoken professional of pesticides, but the USDA is mostly not successful complaint of regulating those, says Dan Blaustein-Rejto, manager of agriculture argumentation and probe astatine the Breakthrough Institute. Rather, the EPA regulates pesticides with nationalist wellness uses.

Although helium whitethorn not beryllium capable to straight power pesticide regulations, Kennedy has said helium would effort to “weaponize” different agencies against “chemical agriculture” by commissioning technological probe into the effects of pesticides. The USDA Agricultural Research Service has a astir $2 cardinal discretionary fund for probe into crops, livestocks, nutrition, nutrient safety, and earthy resources conservation.

There are different levers that an agriculture caput could pull, says Blaustein-Rejto. The USDA is investing $3 cardinal through the concern for climate-smart commodities—a strategy that’s expected to marque US agriculture much climate-friendly. A USDA main mightiness beryllium capable to enactment their thumb connected their standard by influencing the enactment criteria for these kinds of programs. The USDA besides oversees the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), which has a $5 cardinal money that it uses to enactment workplace incomes and conservation programs, and to assistance farmers deed by earthy disasters. It’s imaginable that a USDA main could power however these CCC funds are distributed by the agency.

Kennedy has besides argued that firm interests person captured the US’s dietary guidelines, and helium pledged to region conflicts of involvement from USDA groups that travel up with dietary guidelines. US dietary guidelines are developed jointly by the USDA and HHS and are updated each 5 years, giving the agriculture caput constricted opportunities to power immoderate recommendations.

“If RFK is successful a high-level argumentation role, I expect to spot a batch much speech astir ultra-processed foods, but I’m not definite what that would really entail erstwhile it comes to the dietary guidelines,” says Blaustein-Rejto.

The experts WIRED spoke with mostly deliberation Kennedy’s much utmost positions volition apt beryllium constrained by bureaucracy. But the connection that elevating a vocal vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist would nonstop remains a superior interest up of a imaginable 2nd Trump administration.