Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. was greeted by cheers and ovations as he closed out CPAC 2026. As one of the most popular Cabinet officials, he offered insight into what a year of initiatives and programs geared to Make America Great Again and Make America Healthy Again looked like under Health and Human Services (HHS).
In a very personal reflection, Kennedy spoke about his time in the Cabinet, particularly in his relationship with President Donald Trump.
Kennedy said:
"Well, let me just say this: President Trump is exactly the opposite of everything that I believed him to be. And, you know, I meant, you know, I basically drank the Kool-Aid that he was this, you know, malignant narcissist, who didn't read books, and was ill-informed. And then, you know, now I know exactly the opposite. He's the opposite of a narcissist. He's an empath."
President Trump is an empath? Mind officially blown.
Kennedy continued:
"You will see that every time he talks about the Ukraine war, he talks about the casualties on both sides. You will not hear any Democrat ever talk about that. And he talks about the Russian kids who are dying. He gets the reports every week, and they make a huge impression on him about the death rate of 1,000 kids a day who are dying. But my son, my son fought in Ukraine. He's the only member of his military unit who survived.
"And [Trump] understands that these are people's children. And he talks about that. And then also, he has an encyclopedic, molecular knowledge on these, very, very eclectic interests: Music, Broadway shows, pro wrestling, golf, and business. Wall Street knows how everybody made their money and what deals they made. And he tells stories all the time about it, and just one after the other. And one time I was, during the campaign, I was on the airplane with him, and we were sitting across the table from each other eating McDonald's. We started talking about Syria. And he got a placemat, and he turned it on its back, and then he took a Sharpie, and he drew a perfect map of the Middle East. And then he put the troop strength of every country on every border on that map.
"And it just, it challenged a lot of the assumptions that I had been told about. He has, you know, he has this extraordinary depth of knowledge about what's happening in each one of the agencies. My agency and others and that he has an instinct for making good choices."
Kennedy then placed Trump in the consequential presidents league, along with his uncle, John F. Kennedy, and Franklin Roosevelt.
"I think my uncle John Kennedy understood the use of power better than any president who's seen it. I think Donald Trump understands the use of power better than probably any president that we've had since Roosevelt, and maybe in American history."
Those are high compliments from a scion of a family that used to be Democrat royalty.
Then Special Fellow Mercedes Schlapp asked the Secretary to outline the successes over the past year at HHS. Here's what Kennedy detailed:
The Food Pyramid
"I think the food pyramid was really important because for 50 years the government has been lying to us about food, what food we should be eating. When I got into office, a week after I got into office, and Brooke Rollins and I were sworn in on the same day. And it's our responsibility for our agencies to sign off on that. The dietary guidelines we got from the Biden administration that they'd been working on for four years, were 453 pages long.
"And they were written by industry lobbyists. And they reflected the mercantile impulses that had put Froot Loops at the top of the food pyramid. Which is not even a food. And so we flipped the food pyramid. We brought in the best nutritionists in the country from a dozen universities, medical schools. And we gave a science-based food pyramid for the first time. We restored protein."
Loud cheers from the CPAC audience over this.
"Those dietary guidelines are going to change the dietary culture in this country in a couple different ways: One is, particularly, USDA gives huge food subsidies out: 405 million dollars a day: WIC, to Head Start, to food stamps. and a lot of other programs, and now the food is going to change here."
Make Military Food Healthy Again
"The food is changing in our military. Pete Hegseth has brought in this extraordinary Chef called Robert Irvine, and he's already changed the food. I'll tell you something. He's changed the food on five of the biggest bases. By the end of this month, it'll be in 20. So it's all fresh. Really high quality food."
There were many military folks in the CPAC audience, and they approved of these changes with greater applause and cheers.
"He brought in Robert Irvine. At the military bases, only a third of the food was getting eaten because it was so appalling. And the troops were going out and buying food at McDonald's or fast food places, which is not cheap food. It was $12 bucks and $14 bucks for a Big Mac meal. He's now changed diet completely. All the troops are now eating, there's lines around the block to get into the cafeteria.
"The military budget for food is $18.50 a day per soldier, that's for three meals. He's feeding them all for $10 a day."
Make Home Meals Great Again
"Good food is actually cheaper if you cook at home. The problem is Americans need to cook at home, and we have a program now that is teaching this, because people have forgotten. And that's important not only because it's important to get food, but also gives you time with your family. It's a sacred ritual that's been around forever, and we've lost that. And we have now raised a spiritual malaise in our country. It's a crisis of loneliness, atomization, of fragmentation. And one of the ways that we need to bring people back together is for having this day, by encouraging people to have this daily meal ritual."
Removing Toxins From Baby Food
Kennedy announced the start of testing to remove harmful chemicals, sugars, and preservatives from baby formulas. Kennedy said:
"We've done a first test in Operation Stork Speed on the baby formula. So we're gonna have the best information now about baby formula by the end of this month. For the first time in 30 years, we're revising the nutrition standards so that we're going to have good nutrition in baby formula, as close to breast milk as we can get."
Kennedy added, "We've gotten rid of the nine synthetic-based food dyes."
Training Practitioners in Nutrition
You would think this should be a no-brainer, but the current medical training standards offer little to no nutrition education to medical school interns and residents. Kennedy announced that this will change.
"We've gotten the medical, 54 of the medical schools have now agreed, and many more are coming on every day, to give 40 hours of nutrition training in medical school. The testing companies, the MCAT testing companies are gonna put nutrition on the MCAT for the first time, so the students will actually want to do it.
"And we have 20 states that have now passed legislation that require nutrition training in continuing medical education."
Making Pharmaceuticals Cheap Again
As RedState reported on Day 1 of CPAC, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, along with his top team, outlined how they were working to reduce fraud, transform medicine, and mitigate costs. Kennedy dovetailed nicely into this.
"We've done a lot of things, you know, I think one of the most impressive things that we've done, thanks to Chris Klomp, who is now running the agency with operations for me. We got through the MFN, the most favored-nation status, so that we have been paying the highest price for medicine in the world in this country. We make all the medicine, we pay for the innovation, and we pay in some cases 10, 13, 15 times what they pay for the same medication in Europe. It's made in a factory in New Jersey. And now we're going to pay the lowest prices in the world. And you can already get those."
Read More: CPAC 2026: Team CMS, Dr. Oz Talk Beating Big Pharma and Fraud, Following 'North Star' of Truth
CPAC 2026: NIH Jay Bhattacharya: 'It's No Longer Tony Fauci's NIH'
Price Transparency
"This week we passed new regulations that require hospitals to post their pricing. So, we're going to have price transparency, and the insurance companies. So, we're going to have price transparency. If you go to a restaurant, you can see what the price is before you order a meal. If you go to a car dealer and he tells you, you can buy this car, but I'm not going to tell you what the price is until after you bought it, you would not buy that car. But that's how every hospital in this country works. If you're a pregnant woman, you could go nine months making phone calls every day and not be able to figure out how much they are charging you, that a hospital is charging your insurance company for childbirth.
"We're going to have a website now that has the price of everything on it. So, if you want to get an MRI, it will tell you on one page what the cost is of that MRI at all of the different concierge services and medical centers around you.
"I looked at pregnancy in New York. A mile around Manhattan, there's 30 hospitals. The lowest cost one was $1,350 for childbirth. The highest cost was $22,000. In Detroit, the lowest cost was $6,000. The highest was $60,000 for the same service, the same quality service. The only way you get that price chaos is if you don't tell people — if there's no market, and you don't give consumers the ability to shop. This is also going to dramatically lower the cost of medicine."
Prior Medical Authorization Eliminated
"We've gotten 80 percent of the insurance companies now to agree to eliminate a prior authorization in most of their, almost all of their procedures. Oh, you know, and this is one of the most frustrating things. If you're a patient, you go to the hospital and the doctor tells you you need a knee surgery. It takes you six months to find out whether your insurance company is going to authorize it. Now you will know at the point-of-care, before you leave that doctor's office, whether or not the procedure is going to happen."
The Great American Recovery Initiative
Kennedy gave great detail on the highly impactful changes to how addiction and recovery are handled through President Trump's executive order titled "The Great American Recovery Initiative to Address the Addiction Crisis."
"Well, the [Great American Recovery Initiative] executive order basically requires us to revamp the recovery programs in this country, the federal investment of recovery in this country to make sure that it works. And, you know, one of the things that I learned from my own experience with addiction recovery, is addiction is a disease of isolation. People who have this disease end up in either bathrooms or jails, institutions, death... alone. They cut off their relationships with their families, their friends, their community, and isolation drives addiction. And we have an epidemic of isolation now in our country. The way, the ultimate way to deal with that is to reconnect people with community and reconnect them with some kind of spiritual motivation."
Kennedy once again delved into his own personal and painful history of battling addiction to further elucidate this point.
"And the 12-step movement, the 12-steps, are designed to induce a spiritual awakening. It's a movement that's devoid of religion, but it is intensely focused on spirituality to change who you are. I believe that I was born an addict, that I'm hardwired to drink and drug myself to death. And in order to overcome that kind of biological drive, you need a spiritual fire. And one of the things, one of the unfortunate choices they made during the Biden administration was to exclude faith-based recovery programs from federal funding. I had a friend who wrote me this week, who wrote me, a friend from California, who wrote me about her son, and she said that he had been thrown out of a recovery program in California for talking about God. So this is, this has countered everything that we know about recovery, everything science will tell us about recovery. And one of the things that we're doing, as a result of President Trump's order, is we're bringing faith-based recovery back into recovery."
Kennedy expanded on how the initiative will also focus on setting up the addicted persons for long-term gains, rather than short-term successes. He continued:
"The other thing is that we are transitioning out of outcome-based care. It's a very fragmented system. So, you go into a detox, you're arrested on the street or brought in from the street. You go to detox, then you go to rehab, and then you go to sober housing, and then you get a job. None of those agencies are talking to each other. So, President Trump asked us to bring in everybody: the Department of Labor, the Department of, you know, our department at HHS, the Department of Housing, and to coordinate so that we can follow the addict throughout this whole process. So, nobody's responsible for that addict. Everybody's just checking boxes. And like the rest of the medical system, everybody has incentive to keep that addict sick. If you're a rehab, you get paid for 28 days. If that addict goes out and drinks drugs again, you get another bite at the apple. So, every time he goes out and relapses, you make more money. So, you have no incentive to make that guy healthy. And one of the things that we're developing now is a way for that rehab to be responsible for that addict for a long period of time. For example, two years. So that any time that he relapses, they have to treat him the next time for free.
"That will provide an incentive, then to maybe keep him longer the first time, make sure he's in IOP, make sure he's getting aftercare, and take responsibility for his recovery. Because they're going to make more money if he recovers than if he doesn't."
Advice to MAHA Parents
There would be no HHS Secretary Kennedy if not for the MAHA Moms and Dads. Schlapp asked Kennedy what advice he could give to the MAHA parents who were trying to raise healthy children. Kennedy gave general responses concerning the raising of children, like limiting screen time, lots more outdoor time, and encouraging physical activity.
"I would say, listen, I'm a parent, I have seven kids.
"But, you know, for me, everybody has their own strategy and every child is different. There is no cookie cutter for any child. It's one of the things I've learned as a parent. Each child requires something different. I think the biggest threats that we're facing now are cell phones and social media."
Then Kennedy delved deeply into the specific dangers parents should look out for, like smartphone use and the radiation that cell phones emit. "Radiation is very, very bad, and it's very troubling," Kennedy said. He urged parents to never allow their child to sleep with their cell phone at or near their heads.
Kennedy gave more insight into state legislation initiatives to limit cell phone use in schools, and how that legislation was working in Virginia.
"And we've now... now we have MAHA legislation that we're working to pass in almost every state. I think probably about 18 states have already passed it, bell to bell, restrictions on cell phones. And I was in Loudoun County in Virginia the other day, where they have those restrictions. Originally the children were up in arms about it. But I went into the cafeteria and there are 600 kids in there, and they're all talking to each other. Nobody is looking at their lap. The testing scores have gone up, the disciplinary problems have gone down. Parents were there the day that I met, and I pulled them, and they loved it. They said their child, some of them said their children are no longer using their cell phones in their car. And they come home and have dinner with their families, and they're actually talking to them, because they've learned that they can exist without them."
Kennedy ended with, "I was not that focused on their food, but if I had to go back and do it again, I would be laser-focused on what they're eating."
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