The Dictatorship

In a tumultuous year, US health policy has been dramatically reshaped under RFK Jr.

Published

6 months ago

December 31, 2025

In a tumultuous year, US health policy has been dramatically reshaped under RFK Jr.

WASHINGTON (AP) — In the whirlwind first year of President Donald Trump’s second termsome of the most polarizing changes have taken place within the Department of Health and Human Services, where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has openly rebuffed the medical establishment as he converts the ideas of his Make America Healthy Again movement into public policy.

Since entering office in February, the health secretary has overseen a dramatic reshaping of the agencies he oversees, including eliminating thousands of jobs and freezing or canceling billions of dollars for scientific research. As part of his campaign against chronic disease, he has redrawn the government’s position on topics such as seed oils, fluoride and Tylenol. He also has repeatedly used his authority to promote discredited ideas about vaccines.

The department’s rapid transformation has garnered praise from MAHA supporters who say they long viewed HHS as corrupt and untrustworthy and have been waiting for such a disruption. And both Democrats and Republicans have applauded some of the agency’s actions, including efforts to encourage healthy eating and exercise, and deals to lower the prices of costly drugs.

But many of the drastic changes Kennedy has led at the department are raising grave concerns among doctors and public health experts.

“At least in the immediate or intermediate future, the United States is going to be hobbled and hollowed out in its scientific leadership,” said Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University public health law professor who was removed from a National Institutes of Health advisory board earlier this year with a letter that said he was no longer needed. “I think it will be extraordinarily difficult to reverse all the damage.”

HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon denied any threat to scientific expertise at the agency and lauded its work.

“In 2025, the Department confronted long-standing public health challenges with transparency, courage, and gold-standard science,” Nixon said in a statement. “HHS will carry this momentum into 2026 to strengthen accountability, put patients first, and protect public health.”

The overhaul comes alongside broader uncertainties in the nation’s health system, including Medicaid cuts passed by Congress this year and expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies that are putting millions of Americans’ insurance coverage in jeopardy.

Here’s a closer look at Kennedy’s first year leading the nation’s health agency:

Kennedy’s vaccine views ripple across the department

After many years spent publicly assailing vaccines, Kennedy sought during his confirmation process to reassure senators he wouldn’t take a wrecking ball to vaccine science. But less than a year later, his health department has repeatedly pushed the limits of those commitments.

In May, Kennedy announced the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would no longer recommend COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children and pregnant women — a move immediately questioned by public health experts who saw no new data to justify the change.

In June, Kennedy fired an entire 17-member CDC vaccine advisory committee — later installing several of his own replacements, including multiple vaccine skeptics.

That group has made decisions that have shocked medical professionals, including declining to recommend COVID-19 shots for anyone, adding new restrictions on a combination shot against chickenpox, measles, mumps and rubella and reversing the longstanding recommendation that all babies receive a hepatitis B shot at birth.

Kennedy in November also personally directed the CDC to abandon its position that vaccines do not cause autism, without supplying any new evidence to support the change. While he left the old language on the website to keep a promise he made to Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, he added a disclaimer saying it remained because of the agreement.

Public health researchers and advocates strongly refute the updated website and note that scientists have thoroughly explored the issue in rigorous research spanning decades, all pointing to the same conclusion that vaccines don’t cause autism.

Kennedy has promised a wide-ranging effort to study environmental factors that potentially contribute to autism and in an Oval Office event with Trump in September promoted unproven and in some cases discredited ties between Tylenol, vaccines and the complex brain disorder.

Kennedy reconfigures HHS with massive staffing and research cuts

Within two months of taking office, Kennedy announced a sweeping restructuring of HHS that would shut down entire agencies, consolidate others into a new one focused on chronic disease and lay off some 10,000 employees on top of 10,000 others who had already taken buyouts.

While parts of the effort are still tied up in court, thousands of the mass layoffs were allowed to stand. Those and voluntary departures significantly thinned out the sprawling $1.7 trillion department, which oversees food and hospital inspections, health insurance for roughly half of the country and vaccine recommendations.

Kennedy also has fired or forced out several leaders at HHS, among them four directors at the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration’s former vaccine chief and a director of the CDC whom he had hired less than a month earlier.

On top of staffing cuts, he has overseen significant cuts to scientific research. That includes NIH slashing billions of dollars in research projects and the termination of $500 million in contracts to develop vaccines using mRNA technology.

Amid the cuts, Kennedy has proposed or funded some new research on topics related to his MAHA goals, including autism, Lyme disease and food additives.

MAHA gains momentum, despite some stumbles

Kennedy started using the phrase “MAHA” on the campaign trail last year to describe his crusade against toxic exposures and childhood chronic disease, but 2025 was the year it became ingrained in the national lexicon.

In his tenure so far, the health secretary has made it the centerpiece of his work, using the MAHA branding to wage war on ultra-processed foods, pressure companies to phase out artificial food dyes, criticize fluoride in drinking water and push to ban junk food from the program that subsidizes grocery store runs for low-income Americans.

The idea has even spread beyond Kennedy’s agency across the federal government.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has appeared with Kennedy to promote fitness with pull-up displays. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy teamed up with Kennedy in early December to announce $1 billion in funding for airports to install resources like playgrounds and nursing pods for mothers and babies. And Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin recently announced he is working toward unveiling a MAHA agenda with health-related goals for his own department.

MAHA has earned widespread popularity among the American public — even as it has endured some administration foibles. In May, for example, HHS faced scrutiny for releasing a MAHA report that contained several citations to studies that didn’t exist.

But to the extent that the initiative has included calls to action that aren’t based on science — such as urging distrust in vaccines or promoting raw milkwhich is far more likely than pasteurized milk to lead to illness — critics say it can be dangerous.

The Dictatorship

Rep. Julia Letlow wins Louisiana GOP Senate primary runoff

Published

7 hours ago

June 28, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Rep. Julia Letlow wins Louisiana GOP Senate primary runoff

Jun. 27, 2026, 9:51 PM EDT

Rep. Julia Letlow won Louisiana’s Republican Senate primary runoff Saturday, defeating former Rep. John Fleming.

Her win comes as a victory for President Donald Trump, who has endorsed her repeatedly throughout the race — including before she was even officially running.

Letlow made history in 2021 when she became the first Republican woman to represent Louisiana in Congress. In that special election, she won the seat that her late husband, Luke Letlow, had won prior to dying of complications related to Covid-19 in December 2020.

Letlow had no political experience prior to running for her late husband’s seat. She holds a doctorate in communication from the University of South Florida and worked as an administrator for Tulane University and the University of Louisiana, according to her LinkedIn page. Nonetheless, she won the special election House race with nearly 65% of the vote.

In Congress, she has served on the appropriations and education committees, and has been a reliably MAGA Republican.

Letlow’s win also comes as a rebuke to Fleming, who loaned himself more than $11 million, according to the Federal Election Commission, and tried running for the same seat in 2016 only to finish in fifth place in the nonpartisan primary. (Letlow did not loan her campaign any money, and took in more than $5.35 million compared to Fleming’s more than $12.1 million, FEC filings show.)

Trump has played a key role in the race. In addition to backing Letlow early on, the president also helped tank Republican incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy’s re-election campaign in last month’s primary, based on the senator’s record of bucking his party and voting in favor of Trump’s second impeachment. In the primaryLetlow earned nearly 45% of the vote, giving her a healthy lead over both Fleming, who received about 28% of the vote, and Cassidy, who earned nearly 25%.

Ahead of Saturday’s runoff, polling showed Letlow and Fleming in a close race, with Letlow retaining a small lead in several polls.

Letlow will now proceed to the November general election to face off against the Democratic nominee, farmer Jamie Davis, who came out on top in tonight’s Democratic primary runoff.

The state has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 2008, when Mary Landrieu won her last term in office.

Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky.

The Dictatorship

‘Horrifying’: Pulte’s choice for top spy aide stokes fears of Trump vote tampering

Published

7 hours ago

June 28, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

‘Horrifying’: Pulte’s choice for top spy aide stokes fears of Trump vote tampering

Jun. 28, 2026, 1:36 PM EDT

Bill Pulte, the acting director of national intelligencehas stirred fear by choosing as his chief of staff a GOP election lawyer who oversaw a poll watching program that included Jack Posobiec and other conservative conspiracy theorists. The lawyer, Christina Norton, also appears to have no experience working in the intelligence community.

“It is horrifying,” a former senior U.S. intelligence official told MS NOW Saturday. “Not only does Norton have absolutely no background, experience or expertise in national security or intelligence, but her principal qualifications appear to be loyalty to Pulte and an embrace of absurd election-interference conspiracies.”

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who has been a vocal critic of Pulte, also raised concerns about election integrity on Sunday while taking shots at the director of national intelligence and the office itself.

“We should eliminate the DNI, and we should eliminate Pulte from the DNI until that happens,” he said on BLN, adding, “I am concerned that we’re gonna continue to cast doubt on elections in November and erode what has been a 250-year tradition of a peaceful transition of power.”

Pulte’s choice of Norton is also likely to increase concerns among Democrats that President Donald Trump intends to use the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to interfere in the midterm elections. Pulte, a loyalist with no intelligence experience, has used his current position as head of federal mortgage agencies to refer political rivals of the president for federal criminal prosecution.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., told MS NOW on Sunday that the choice “just confirms” that the “only job qualification is absolute political loyalty and devotion to Donald Trump.” But he expressed faith in the judicial system during an appearance on “The Weekend,” noting that “right now we have federal courts across the land that are rejecting their various attempts to take over the election process. Nine different federal courts have rejected the claim that the president, by executive order, can compel the states in the union to turn over all of their voter lists to Donald Trump and to the White House.”

The New York Times first reported Norton’s appointment.

The former senior intelligence official, who requested anonymity due to concerns of retaliation, told MS NOW the choice also “signals as clearly as could be that Pulte has been put at ODNI to misuse the awesome power of the U.S. intelligence community to interfere in the upcoming midterm elections.”

Norton, reached by MS NOW by telephone, declined to comment and referred questions to an ODNI spokesperson. The spokesperson declined to comment on Norton but defended Pulte’s tenure.

“Acting Director Pulte and his team are focused on carrying out President Trump’s national security priorities while faithfully executing ODNI’s statutory mission,” the spokesperson told MS NOW. “We are leading the Intelligence Community to provide President Trump with elite, apolitical intelligence that keeps America safe.”

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., appearing on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” Sunday, said his objection to Pulte is “that he used personal information to target a political enemy of the president,” a reference to New York Attorney General Letitia James.

“You should not be using the force of government to crash upon somebody just because the person in charge does not like them or finds them inconvenient. The fact that Bill did that is disqualifying for someone to be the director of national intelligence,” Cassidy said.

Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on Friday that Congress would ensure that the ODNI under Pulte will “report on legitimate foreign threats to elections, not Donald Trump’s imaginary ones.”

Himes warned that, “Trump was explicit when he appointed Bill Pulte to a job he had no qualifications for that he had elections in mind.”

Trump has said in interviews with the news media that he would like to see Pulte shrink the size of the ODNI and investigate election fraud. Pulte’s predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard, participated in investigations in Georgia and Puerto Rico to find proof of Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Democrats and some former intelligence officials say they worry that Pulte may try to falsely claim that his office has found evidence that foreign governments are secretly funding Democratic candidates in the midterms.

Pulte could falsely claim foreign actors have hacked U.S. voting machines, they say, and altered vote totals in favor of Democrats during the midterms. Or Trump could instruct Pulte to be present if FBI agents seize ballots and election records in November as they did earlier this year in Fulton County, Georgia.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned in a statement on Friday that Pulte should not use his position to spread Trump’s false election conspiracy theories.

“The mission of ODNI is to identify and counter foreign threats, not to import election denialism into the Intelligence Community,” Warner said. “Americans have every reason to fear that this administration is once again eroding the wall between our intelligence agencies and domestic elections.”

David Rohde is the senior national security reporter for MS NOW and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Previously he was the senior executive editor for national security and law for NBC News.

The Dictatorship

In Springfield, Ohio, Trump’s rhetoric becomes a grim reality

Published

7 hours ago

June 28, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

In Springfield, Ohio, Trump’s rhetoric becomes a grim reality

Jun. 27, 2026, 4:07 PM EDT

Having lived with Donald Trump’s infamous and baseless insult against them — “they’re eating the dogs … they’re eating the cats” — Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are bracing for a far bigger injury.

More than 10,000 Haitians across Ohio and hundreds of thousands more around the country who had Temporary Protected Status now face the imminent prospect of deportation. The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Trump administration can halt those legal protections for Haitians and Syrians and resume forcing them to leave.

Justice Samuel Alito’s opinionfor the court’s Republican-appointed majority curbed the power of courts to review government decisions to terminate protections under the TPS program.

“They side with him on everything that he says or everything that he does, which means there is no check and balance,” said Viles Dorsainvil, a Haitian TPS holder and executive director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, a town Trump catapulted into a maelstrom of misinformation about immigrants when he was running to retake the White House in 2024.

“The president has that freeway in front of him to do whatever he wants to do, unfortunately, and most of the time to a minority group of people,” added Dorsainvil, who has lived in the United States since 2020.

In a country rife with political and economic instability, Haitians returning from the U.S. are in danger of being killed or kidnapped, said Dorsainvil’s colleague at the Haitian Support Center, Rose Thamar Joseph.

“There is this perception in Haiti that if you are living here in the United States, you have money, so you are living your good life, so sending people back to Haiti will put them in real danger,” Joseph said.

Staying in the U.S. without legal status creates a different crisis.

“We received calls this morning from people saying that, unfortunately, starting on July 1, they won’t be able to go to work anymore,” Joseph said Friday.

Joseph predicted that families would be separated during the deportation process.

“We know that there will be separation,” she said. “A lot of those parents with TPS … they have kids who were born in the United States, so we know that it will happen, not for everybody, not for all the families, but it will happen,” she said.

The oncoming nightmare for the Haitian community in Springfield was, in many ways, predictable after Trump notoriously targeted them on the debate stage against then-Vice President Kamala Harris in the fall of 2024.

“They are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump said without a shred of evidence, greatly amplifying an unfounded rumor that had been confined to smaller corners of social media.

That rhetoric continued Trump’s track record of racist languageparticularly when it comes to immigration, including during his first White House stint when he referred during his first to Haiti and other majority non-white nations as “shithole” countries.

Dorsainvil argued that the Supreme Court’s decision Thursday proved his beliefs are institutionalized, calling it “a validation of all those bad rhetorics of the president against us.”

Asked by MS NOW if those with TPS should expect to be deported, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said, “Well, of course. If you no longer have status in this country, then you’re supposed to be deported.”

Miller, the architect of the administration’s immigration policy, went on to single out the Haitian population by name.

But the outcry against the court’s ruling blurs party lines in Ohio.

“Changing the immigration status of these individuals is not in the best interest of the United States nor Ohio,” Republican Gov. Mike DeWine said.

Springfield’s Republican mayorRob Rue, has denounced Trump’s misinformation about his community as dangerous from the start.

“Many of the individuals affected by this decision are our neighbors, coworkers, business owners, taxpayers, and parents,” Rue said in a statement after the ruling came down. “They contribute to our local economy, support our schools, strengthen our neighborhoods, and have become part of the fabric of Springfield.”

Alex Tabet is a reporter for MS NOW.