05/25/2025
Senator John Kennedy dismantled the entire Democrat narrative with a few simple questions to RFK Jr.:
**Senator John Kennedy**: How many employees were there at HHS when you took over?
**Secretary**: 82,000.
**Senator John Kennedy**: How many do you have today?
**Secretary**: 62,000.
**Secretary**: Okay. That's about the level it was in 2019, right before COVID.
**Senator John Kennedy**: Is this the first time that an institution in America has ever downsized?
**Secretary**: I don't think so. I think private and public institutions have...
**Senator John Kennedy**: Microsoft just announced that they were going to reduce their workforce by 6,000 people. Do you think that'll be the end of Microsoft?
**Secretary**: No, I don't think so, Senator.
**Senator John Kennedy**: Meta—I still call them Facebook—just announced they're going to reduce their workforce by 3,000 people. Do you think that'll be the end of Meta?
**Secretary**: I imagine it will not.
**Senator John Kennedy**: You think maybe the people at Meta know what they’re doing?
**Secretary**: I think that they do. They make a lot of money, Senator.
**Senator John Kennedy**: Do you hate NIH?
**Secretary**: I love NIH. I grew up with NIH. I visited it when I was a boy. I loved science, and those were my favorite afternoons—visiting the labs at NIH.
**Senator John Kennedy**: Do you hate medical research?
**Secretary**: No, I think we need to lead the world in medical research in this country.
**Senator John Kennedy**: In fact, isn't it true, Mr. Secretary, that you would like to see more money spent on medical research?
**Secretary**: Obviously, I'm the Secretary of this department, and no Secretary wants to see his budget cut.
**Senator John Kennedy**: Well, one way of doing that, it seems to me, would be to stop some of the stealing. And let me tell you what I mean by that: Let's suppose NIH gives a university $100 million to research a cure, and that university takes $30 million of it, doesn't spend it on the research, they use it to subsidize the rest of their university. Is that—does that show a commitment to medical research?
**Secretary**: No, I mentioned before the example of Stanford, which was taking 78% in indirect costs and we don't know what they were spending it on.
**Senator John Kennedy**: That’s theft, isn't it?
**Secretary**: It's not a good way to spend federal taxpayer dollars.
**Senator John Kennedy**: We call that stealing in Louisiana. We call that stealing. Is there any doubt in your mind that a lot of universities are taking this NIH money, which is supposed to be spent on medical research, and using it to fund other parts of their universities?
**Secretary**: And Senator, the other people who are writing grants, like the Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, they pay 10% to 15% in indirect costs. We were paying 50%, 60%, 70%.
**Senator John Kennedy**: So, in fact, what you're doing is adding money to medical research, not cutting it!
**Secretary**: We will be able to fund many, many, many more studies by eliminating that $9 billion, at least part of that $9 billion cost.
**Senator John Kennedy**: Okay. I want to ask you about LIHEAP. Are you familiar with this GAO report they did on LIHEAP?
**Secretary**: I am not, Senator.
**Senator John Kennedy**: They found—they audited seven states. They found 11,000 dead people getting LIHEAP grants. You familiar with that?
**Secretary**: No, but that is pretty typical of many of the other programs that we're working with.
**Senator John Kennedy**: Some of them—they found prisoners getting grants, didn't they? Well, they using the grants to heat their jail cell?
**Senator John Kennedy**: They found 1,000 federal employees getting the grants, with federal salaries that greatly exceeded the income limits. They found some of those folks living in million-dollar homes.
**Senator John Kennedy**: I've got 18 seconds. Why do we allow highly processed foods in America?
**Secretary**: That's a complicated question, but it's driven by profits, by a food industry that is making money by poisoning American kids. And they don’t do it abroad; they make the same products for Canada and for Europe that do not contain many of those chemicals.
**Senator John Kennedy**: You understand, Mr. Secretary, there's nothing you can do that's gonna make many of my Democratic colleagues happy. You get that, don't you?
**Secretary**: I do understand. I'm coming to understand that, Senator.
**Senator John Kennedy**: Thank you.
