Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Wednesday he will play a significant role in the Trump administration, floating the idea that he would be a “health czar” operating out of the White House.
Kennedy also touted regenerative agriculture, and he said Trump had told him he wanted to see swift and measurable progress in lowering chronic disease among children, in an interview with NBC News correspondent Vaughn Hillyard.
Kennedy was in Palm Beach, Florida, meeting with Trump’s “senior team,” he said, the day after Trump’s decisive victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, which was called for the ex-president early Wednesday.
“President Trump has told me that he wants to see measurable, concrete results within two years in terms of a measurable diminishment in chronic disease among American kids,” Kennedy said. But he demurred when asked whether he wanted to be secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
“I don't know,” Kennedy said when asked whether he wanted the job, which requires Senate confirmation. “We have not decided yet what my official role is going to be.”
“I may be more effective in the White House as the health czar or something like that, but we don't know.”
Kennedy said Trump wants to do “three things” – clean up “corruption” at health agencies, particularly the Food and Drug Administration; “return those agencies to the gold standard science, empirically based, evidence-based medicine, that they were famous for when I was a kid”; and “make America healthy again, to end the chronic disease epidemic.”
Kennedy has said previously he wants to fire all nutrition scientists at FDA. If that’s not possible, he appeared to joke recently, they could be sent to a new headquarters on the island of Guam. In the NBC News interview, he said there are ”entire departments … like the nutrition departments at FDA, that have to go, that are not doing their job.”
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Kennedy's suggestion comes as FDA is in the middle of reorganizing its Human Foods Program in the wake of the infant formula crisis that exposed flaws in the agency's oversight of food safety.
Toward the end of the interview, Kennedy put in a word for regenerative agriculture, which he said “could absorb 100% of the of the carbon and get us down to pre-industrial levels. ... It's better than anything that we can do [to address carbon emissions]. And that's part of the role that I hope to play in government."
Kennedy has been critical of American farmers’ reliance on pesticides, particularly glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup.
He also has been working with and appearing alongside healthcare entrepreneur and Make America Healthy Again advocate Calley Means during the campaign. Means and his sister, Casey Means, authors of “Good Energy,” have strongly criticized conflicts of interest among members of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee and said Americans’ food is laden with food additives and is over-processed.
In a recent edition of her newsletter, Casey Means said research shows that pesticides “are implicated in nearly every chronic disease and symptom in kids, adults, and the elderly,” and advocated for a “pesticide-free world.”
Kennedy said he had not put any names forward for government positions.
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