Politics

‘He’s not a manager’: Former RFK Jr. staffers on how he’d run HHS

Published

2 years ago

November 28, 2024

If Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gets confirmed as secretary for President-elect Donald Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services, it will be the biggest job he’s ever had.

And some of his former campaign staffers question whether he’s up for the challenge.

Kennedy, who comes from one of the most high-profile families in Democratic politics, has held leadership roles as a lawyer and at nonprofit organizations but has more often been the public face of these operations than an executive manager. His presidential campaign was similarly run with Kennedy not closely involved in its daily management, according to interviews with a half dozen former campaign staffers.

“He’s an inspirational leader who’s able to communicate. But he’s not a manager,” said Jeff Hutt, spokesperson for the Make America Healthy Again political action committee and Kennedy’s former national field director.

Kennedy’s campaign — his last professional endeavor — was suspended before anyone could cast a ballot for him and left him with $4.5 million in debt.

“I have no idea how he’s going to run a full department, if that’s how he ran the campaign,” said one former campaign staffer granted anonymity to discuss internal dynamics. “Running a court case and suing folks is a lot different than running a business. I think he’s a fantastic lawyer. I think he does his due diligence and understands law and truly wants to help all people.”

Kennedy has touted his experience as an environmental advocate and litigator as qualification for the role, but Kennedy has never run such a large team. The Department of Health and Human Services oversees 13 sub-agencies and has a budget of well over $1 trillion and more than 80,000 employees.

And Trump, who reportedly considered giving Kennedy a role in his first administration, has also handed down a gargantuan mandate, saying that HHS “will play a big role in helping ensure that everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides, pharmaceutical products, and food additives that have contributed to the overwhelming Health Crisis in this Country,” in a statement announcing Kennedy as his pick.

Such work will involve battling a large bureaucracy, but Kennedy’s campaign was the opposite. By the end, a small circle of friends and family members became the core of his campaign team.

“The campaign was a handful of people that were actual professionals, and a bunch of folks that Bobby’s met along the health freedom journey,” said another former staffer.

This caused conflicts on the team and made the campaign slow to respond to negative press. It also held back the campaign’s operations, including in fundraising.

“I technically think that we could have raised an additional $50 to 75 million from what he raised,” said Dave Murphy, who was the finance director on the campaign. “We should have had exponential growth, and that didn’t happen. And I just think that every campaign and leaders succeed or fail based on the leadership around them, the people that are close to them, and I think there were some people that didn’t understand the vision of what a presidential campaign [and that it] actually needs to bring money in the door to make it credible.”

The campaign ultimately raised about $62 million, but more than $15 million of that sum came from Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, who is independently wealthy.

Former staffers say that Kennedy will be an excellent spokesperson and face of the MAHA mission, which pledges to take on chronic disease through “prioritizing regenerative agriculture, preserving natural habitats, and eliminating toxins from our food, water, and air.”

The emphasis on him as a public face is not dissimilar to the role he played in the successful lawsuit against Monsanto, a chemical company that owns the weed killer Roundup, and as a board chair of Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit from which he is currently on leave.

“He was basically our press secretary and spokesperson, and so that was really helpful. And when we got the verdict, he was the one who helped us organize,” Brent Wisner, who was an attorney on the Monsanto case, said this summer during an interview about Kennedy’s role on the Monsanto case.

Wisner added that Kennedy was also an asset in talking with the press throughout the trial and was especially useful when it came to the pre-trial discovery and research phase, where he found instances of the regulatory agencies deference to industry at the expense of health outcomes.

Kennedy’s later litigation and books focused on vaccine safety ostracized him from some in the environmental movement and eventually the Democratic Party when he ran for president. But Kennedy’s former staffers said that he has the skills to rebuild bridges and forge relationships necessary to accomplish things in Washington.

“He is a very genuine person. He listens and he’s, you know, he likes to find the best answers available,” said a former senior staffer. “And as he’s said publicly, you know, if you can show him where he’s wrong on something, he will change his mind.”

This senior staffer also said he doesn’t believe Kennedy will immediately “purge” the department of staffers, as some in Trump’s orbit have pledged to, and that his former boss has a “cooler [tempered] approach.”

But some former staffer said that good intentions and an aptitude for relationship building aren’t enough to cover leadership skills.

“He’s going to need a good deputy,” said Hutt, who worked on the PAC supporting Kennedy.“I don’t know who he has in mind, but I would hope that he would go outside of his campaign [staffers] for this position.”

Politics

Iowa’s Senate rivals pitch independence from their parties

Published

5 hours ago

October 25, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Republican Ashley Hinson wants Iowans to know she’ll pick a fight with President Donald Trump. Democrat Josh Turek wants them to know he’ll work with him.

The rivals in Iowa’s closely contested Senate race each sought to establish their independence in separate interviews aired Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” pitching themselves as willing to put their state ahead of their respective party loyalty.

Asked about her campaign pledge to be Trump’s “strongest ally” in the Senate, Hinson added a condition: “If it’s for Iowa.”

“I will be someone’s ally when they’re with me on the issues that are important to Iowa,” the Republican lawmaker said. “And if they’re wrong, I’m going to pick a fight with them, no matter who that is.”

The conflicting comments come in a state Trump won by 13 points in the 2024 presidential election, but where Democrats now see an opportunity to win their first Senate election since 2008. The president campaigned in Iowa this past week as high fuel costs and frustration with his tariffs complicate Republicans’ efforts to maintain the seat.

Republicans close to Hinson told POLITICO last month that she needed to put some distance between herself and Trump, warning that his tariff agenda and the Iran war were undermining her chances.

On Sunday, Hinson rejected Trump’s positive assessment of the economy. “Well, sure doesn’t feel like it right now,” she said, later criticizing the administration’s dealings with Moscow.

“I don’t think we should be making any deals with Russia,” she said, pointing to her vote for sanctions. Her campaign told POLITICO on Friday that she opposed sanctions relief for Russia while supporting Trump’s use of the Defense Production Act to bolster domestic energy production.

But there were limits to her criticism. While calling for the Iran war to end quickly, Hinson declined to oppose a potential new offensive after the midterms, saying she trusted Trump and the military to determine what needed to be done.

Turek, meanwhile, called himself a “proud moderate” and sidestepped a question about whether Democrats had moved too far left.

“I don’t think a lot about the party as a whole. I think about myself, and I think about Iowa,” the Democratic state representative said.

That pitch follows a primary victory aided by national Democratic support, including from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s leadership PAC — which contributed the maximum to Turek’s campaign, though Schumer did not formally endorse. VoteVets spent more than $10 million advertising on Turek’s behalf. He’s also secured the formal endorsement of former President Barack Obama, who appeared in an ad alongside Turek as the two played basketball.

Asked what Trump had done right, Turek said Trump had done “a better job on the border than Biden, for sure.” He also cited agreement on keeping private equity out of housing and eliminating taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security, while arguing that Trump’s economic policies had concentrated wealth and power.

Also asked whether endorsements mattered, Turek offered a blunt assessment: “Probably not.”

Politics

AI has a language gap. That could be a problem for some voters.

Published

5 hours ago

October 25, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

AI chatbots are feeding non-native English speakers inaccurate information about the election, community activists and researchers warn, creating a barrier for some voters ahead of the midterms.

The challenge — which leading AI companies say they’re working to address — is distinct from intentional disinformation campaigns that have plagued the internet for decades. Instead, some researchers and community leaders warn that voters prompting chatbots in non-English languages are unintentionally being fed inaccurate and ambiguous information — like whether they can vote by mail in their state — or overly literal translations that confuse electoral terms and lack context in various languages’ unique dialects.

But the end result, the activists said, could still be the same: Voters whose native language is not English are more vulnerable to incorrect information and excluded from the most reliable answers ahead of the midterms.

“Latino communities cannot afford to be left behind as artificial intelligence transforms how people work, learn, communicate and access information,” said Héctor Sánchez Barba, the president and CEO of Mi Familia Vota. “The history of the immigrant community and the Latino community has been one where we have been historically and structurally excluded from the best technology and access to information.”

This digital divide has arisen, the activists and researchers say, in large part because AI models are trained in English, and fail to capture the nuances of other languages. Experts and grassroots organizations say this discrepancy in accuracy unintentionally disenfranchises non-English speaking voters across the country, where more than 20% of Americans speak a language other than English at home.

National voter organizations that work in Latino and Asian American communities are grappling with how to bridge the gap and keep up with the rapidly developing technology to ensure that their communities don’t get left behind.

Mi Familia Vota, which oversees some of the largest Latino voter mobilization efforts in the country, has built its own AI assistant dubbed “Nubi,” which comes from la nube or cloud in Spanish, for Spanish speakers seeking information on voting, voter registration and citizenship. The model is trained on government and nonpartisan datasets — as well as community data collected over 30 years of canvassing, town halls and citizenship workshops, said Denise Cook, chief innovation officer of Mi Familia Vota.

She said it includes dialects of Mexican, Central American, South American and Caribbean Spanish, which have different words for election-related terminology. Polling place, for example, can be referred to as casilla, recinto or colegio electoral depending on the dialect, she said.

Christine Choi, director of strategic communications at APIAVote, a civic engagement group for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, added that if AI fails to capture cultural and political nuances, “you can alienate a whole community or turn them off if you use the wrong interpretation.”

A study by the Institute of Strategic Dialogue released in September found that accuracy of AI chatbots declined 16% when prompted in Spanish about voter information. Spanish prompts were more likely to produce incomplete or ambiguous answers, omitting relevant details and relying on overly literal translations, said Valeria de la Fuente Suárez, the lead author of the ISD study.

“When voters are asking about registration deadlines or ID requirements, missing details can have real consequences,” she said. “Spanish-speaking voters deserve the same standards of clear, reliable and properly sourced information as English-speaking voters.”

The study tested six frontier models through their respective APIs, or application programming interfaces, which are available for other developers to use. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google said in separate statements that they were working to refine their models for non-English languages, but APIs are not appropriate representations of how consumers interact with the actual chatbot interfaces, because they often include other fail-safes like popups or banners linking to external sources of information on voting.

“Gemini is designed to respond with accurate and timely information and performed well in this analysis,” David Thompson, a spokesperson for Google, said in a statement. “However, this report accessed Gemini through our developer API, not the Gemini App, which has different protections and is how most people use our AI.”

Still, the leading AI companies say they are working to better provide election-related information to a wider swath of voters. To improve election information ahead of the midterms, OpenAI and Anthropic both said they are integrating information from Democracy Works, a nonprofit that collects official election information from the government, in its answers.

“OpenAI’s goal is to support people’s ability to participate freely in elections and make their own decisions with reliable information, transparency, and effective safeguards,” Nate Evans, a spokesperson for OpenAI, said in a statement.

Some groups like Asian Texans for Justice, a nonprofit that works to increase voter engagement in Asian American communities in the battleground state, have opted to steer clear of the technology ahead of the midterms.

“I do know that AI is being used more and more by AAPI communities, and we have made an organizational decision not to use AI for our in-language outreach due to inaccuracies,” said Nabila Mansoor, executive director of the organization.

Spanish, Chinese and Vietnamese are among the most widely spoken languages in the U.S. besides English, but there are more than 500 other languages and language groups spoken across the country, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The vast majority are considered low-resource languages with limited digitized data to train AI models, including Arabic, which has 1.3 million speakers in the U.S., and Swahili, which has about 150,000 speakers.

And leading tech companies say they will try to address language-related access to AI systems more broadly.

The Gates Foundation announced in September a coalition of 60 companies including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google dedicated to improving AI tools for an estimated 3.4 billion people around the world who speak languages underrepresented in AI models over the next five years. The joint commitment said, “The barrier is no longer the technology, which will only continue to improve. It requires a decision — to treat the world’s languages as a shared foundation worth building, together, for everyone.”

Community organizers say that while they welcome industry efforts to improve, the changes need to happen as soon as possible so immigrant communities can be equipped with the most reliable information for not only the midterms but the presidential election in 2028.

“The way people get information has fundamentally changed and civic engagement has to change with it,” said Mi Familia Vota’s Barba.

Politics

Australian defense land selloff runs into multiparty opposition

Published

6 hours ago

October 25, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

SYDNEY — Former Prime Minister John Howard urged the Australian government to reverse its plans to sell defense land in prime locations at a rally Sunday characterized by multipartisan bonhomie on-stage — and angry calls for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to resign off stage.

Howard told a crowd of a few thousand gathered in Sydney near the site of its Victoria Barracks that he would be the first to congratulate Albanese if he changed course on the land selloff.

Also present at the rally were members of the nationalist One Nation party. Orange shirt-clad members of the far-right party and others wearing blue Make Albo Go Away (MAGA) hats called instead for Albanese to resign or be sacked.

Decades of local opposition to higher density, often characterized by not-in-my-backyard politics, has left Sydney with one of the most expensive housing markets in the world. Most mainstream political parties have responded, now declaring themselves “YIMBY.” The defense land selloff is one exception to this pendulum reversal, uniting groups across the political spectrum.

Few things unite Australia like its Australia and New Zealand Army Corps legend, the belief that the values embodied by its armed forces, such as mateship, are central to its national character.

So the decision by the Albanese government to sell Department of Defense assets around the country, including prime harbor-front properties in Sydney, to raise 3 billion Australian dollars (in gross terms), or 1.8 billion (net), may seem like a strange one.

With calls to reduce the deficit and the need to find land for housing in Australia’s sprawling cities, the government thought it was on firm footing disposing of properties it says are surplus to requirements.

Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles has argued his Department of Defense is not best placed to preserve the heritage value of the sites, and that money for their upkeep would be better spent on future fighting capability.

The selloff proposal has met fierce resistance across parties: from the conservative Liberal-National Coalition, the traditional opposition in Australia; right-wing nationalist One Nation; the left-wing Greens; and even members of Albanese’s own party, his Labor colleagues in the NSW state government.

The Albanese government has been urged by its opponents to spend less to lower inflation and prevent the need for further interest rate hikes. But many savings measures have been blocked: from its attempts to make the private health insurance rebate and veterans’ allied health entitlements less generous, to charging residents of aged care more for services.

Howard, a conservative Liberal, told the crowd he is “all in favor of governments spending less and taxing less” but that was not the issue at hand. “What is more important to the soul of a nation? [Than] its history, its heritage, and those that have gone before,” he said. “You don’t give that up for a few bob.”

Howard’s speech veered from his memories of seeing Australian cricket legend Don Bradman bat at the nearby Sydney Cricket Ground, to Victoria Barracks’ history as the departure point for soldiers bound for the 1885 Sudan War, to his description of the 28-degree Celsius day — 4.3 degrees above the historical late-October average — as “seasonably warm.”

Tony Abbott, another former Prime Minister and now the Liberal Party president tasked with combating the rise of One Nation, said it was “wonderful” to gather with Australians who respect its history and heritage. “And isn’t it wonderful to be at this protest, where the only flag on display is the Australian flag — and not the Palestinian one.”

Labor’s NSW parliamentary secretary for transport, Marjorie O’Neill, one of the protest organizers, was jeered by the One Nation-heavy crowd: first, for beginning the rally with an acknowledgment of country for Australia’s First Nations people and for 150 Aboriginal men who had signed up to serve the defense forces at Victoria Barracks; and then again for omitting mention of One Nation as she credited the multilateral coalition of Labor, Liberal and Greens against the sale.

Liberal senator Jess Collins, her co-organizer, added “I will acknowledge that we do have One Nation here too” — to loud cheers.

Independent MP Allegra Spender urged the crowd to join a convoy to Canberra being organized for Nov. 23 to protest the sale.

One Nation members approached ahead of the rally declined to comment, due to party rules forbidding speaking to the media.

Justin Bowra, a member of the Greens and local resident, told Blue Light News that “despite all the political colours, whether you’re orange, blue, red or green, we all agree on one thing: The wrong thing to do is sell off the land to the highest bidder for private development.”

“The right thing to do is let the community decide, let locals decide, and make those decisions with the benefit of all Australians in mind rather than turning them into a bunch of condos.”

The NSW Government, led by Labor’s Chris Minns, has also opposed the sale, but has no constitutional power to stop it, leaving the ball in Albanese and Marles’ court. Abbott told the rally that “people power” will prevail.

Former Army chief Lt. Gen. Ken Gillespie told the rally that with politically motivated violence on the rise in Australia, including the Bondi antisemitic terror attack of Dec. 14, 2025, it was important to retain the barracks, which is used for counter-terrorism exercises by the Special Air Service. “When police need military support in a crisis, minutes matter,” he said.

Marles angered many by previously dismissing those campaigning against the sale as “a few former generals who liked hanging out there.” The description appears particularly inapt now — a poor read on the practical difficulty of opposing so many political interests simultaneously, and an underestimation of the potent symbolism of the ANZAC legend.