Trump promised RFK Jr. would ‘restore faith in American health care.’ A year in, trust has plummeted

“Our public health system has squandered the trust of our citizens,” President Donald Trump said on February 13, 2025, the day his nominee to run the nation’s health agencies, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was sworn in. “They don’t trust us. They don’t trust anybody, frankly. They’ve gone through hell.”

Trump promised that Kennedy would “lead our campaign of historic reforms and restore faith in American health care.”

A year later, polling shows that RFK Jr.’s tenure atop the US Department of Health and Human Services has had the opposite effect. Trust in government health agencies has plummeted, according to health policy and research group KFF, with declines across the political spectrum. And experts told CNN that they fear things could get worse.

“Today, the federal government’s public health agencies and leaders represent the greatest threat to efforts to prevent measles, whooping cough and other vaccine-preventable diseases,” said Dr. Jason Schwartz, an associate professor at Yale School of Public Health. It’s “a scenario that would have been inconceivable a few years ago.”

HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said that trust in public health was damaged by the Biden administration’s “inconsistent guidance and a message to Americans to ‘trust the experts’ without showing the evidence.”

“Secretary Kennedy’s mandate is to restore transparency, scientific rigor, and accountability to restore the trust the Biden administration squandered,” Nixon continued. “Secretary Kennedy is leading the most transparent HHS in history, with unprecedented disclosure and openness aimed at restoring public trust in federal health agencies.”

Kennedy’s strategy has at times involved gutting organizations; after he fired all 17 experts on the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel in June, he published an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal headlined, “HHS Moves to Restore Public Trust in Vaccines.”

And he’s moved to dramatically reshape the makeup of HHS.

The day after Kennedy’s swearing-in, Valentine’s Day, thousands of employees were fired from their jobs at the CDC, the US Food and Drug Administration, the US National Institutes of Health and other health agencies, part of a Department of Government Efficiency purge. It would precede an even bigger reorganization of HHS just six weeks later that aimed to shrink its ranks by nearly a quarter – a total of about 20,000 employees.

Meanwhile, public health emergencies were already on his doorstep.

Two weeks after Kennedy was sworn in, health officials in Texas announced that a school-age child had died in the fast-growing measles outbreak centered in the western part of the state. Kennedy, asked about it in a Cabinet meeting later that day, called measles outbreaks “not unusual.” It was the first death in the US from measles in a decade.

The year that followed would bring two more deaths from measles, an even bigger outbreak in South Carolina and more simmering in other states. Kennedy’s first year also brought dramatic upheavals of vaccine policy and expert panels, the cancellation of thousands of scientific research grants and a continued purge of leadership from federal health agencies.

“I worry that there are entire domains of knowledge that are no longer well-represented at CDC,” said Dr. Caitlin Rivers, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

She pointed out that the agency has been a source of expertise that local health departments count on.

“If you are facing a case of pneumonic plague or a hemorrhagic fever virus, you’re not going to have that in most state or local health departments,” Rivers said. “You’re going to look to CDC to provide that expertise and support. And a lot of those people aren’t there anymore.”

The CDC is also still without a confirmed director; the White House withdrew its nomination for Trump’s first pick, Dr. David Weldon, a former Florida congressman and Kennedy ally, hours before his confirmation hearing in March amid concerns that he wouldn’t win sufficient votes.

Weldon subsequently released a lengthy statement in which he attributed the scuttling of his nomination to his past focus on vaccine safety, including the preservative thimerosal, which was removed from most childhood vaccines decades ago despite no evidence of harm. He also defended Andrew Wakefield, the British physician who made debunked claims of a link between the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine and autism in 1998.

Trump’s next pick, Dr. Susan Monarez, was confirmed and sworn in in July, only to be ousted less than a month later after a clash with Kennedy over what she described as her refusal to sign off on vaccine policy regardless of scientific evidence and to dismiss career vaccine officials without cause. Kennedy later told Congress that Monarez was lying. Several high-level veteran CDC officials also resigned after Monarez’s departure.

All of this happened just weeks after a shooter fired nearly 500 rounds at CDC headquarters in Atlanta, killing a local police officer and leaving windows pockmarked with bullet holes. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation said the shooter had expressed discontent with the Covid-19 vaccine in written documents and “wanted to make the public aware of his public distrust.”

In a letter after the shooting, hundreds of current and former HHS employees implored Kennedy to “stop spreading inaccurate health information,” noting that the attack at CDC “was not random.”

In response, a statement from the department said that Kennedy was “standing firmly with CDC employees” and that “for the first time in its 70-year history, the mission of HHS is truly resonating with the American people.”

Polling suggests that’s not the case.

In April 2025, trust in the CDC as a source of reliable health information stood at 59%, according to KFF. There was a large divide between political parties: 70% for Democrats and 51% for Republicans.

Now, overall trust in the CDC has fallen to 47%, according to KFF poll results released last week. Trust was down 15 percentage points to 55% among Democrats and down 8 percentage points to 43% among Republicans, although that’s a slight rebound from a low in September.

Trust in Kennedy himself as a source of health information was also low, with 37% of those polled in January saying they trust him a great deal or a fair amount. Only Trump scored lower, at 30%.

The poll was conducted weeks after HHS announced an overhaul of the US vaccine schedule for children to align it more closely with other countries’, and in particular, Denmark’s – a country with a population of about 6 million and free universal health care. The result was a reduction in routinely recommended vaccines from 17 to 11, a move decried by public health experts as lacking evidence and putting children at risk.

“HHS has largely abandoned the process of evidence gathering and evaluation that guided the recommendations process for decades and helped save countless lives,” said Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “In its place, decisions are being made based on ideology and politics.”

Osterholm cited the overhaul of the vaccine schedule as well as the CDC’s decision to stop universally recommending a dose of the hepatitis B vaccine at birth, a move that modeling suggested could lead to more infections, long-term health complications and deaths.

“The doubt and distrust federal health authorities continue to sow in vaccines will result in fewer people being vaccinated and more people getting seriously ill from vaccine-preventable diseases,” Osterholm said. “We’re already seeing the results of declining measles vaccinations, as measles outbreaks in the U.S. grow larger and larger.”

In December, Kennedy swore in Dr. Ralph Abraham as principal deputy director of the CDC. Abraham had served as surgeon general in Louisiana, where he reduced support for some mass vaccination campaigns.

Last month, faced with the prospect that the US could lose measles elimination status after 26 years, Abraham told reporters that it would be “the cost of doing business” with the nation’s porous borders.

On Sunday, Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told CNN’s Dana Bash that he didn’t believe US health officials’ posture toward vaccines was contributing to the growing outbreaks, a statement that beggared belief among many who’ve heard Kennedy equivocate on vaccine safety and champion unproven treatments for measles.

“We’ve advocated for measles vaccines all along,” Oz told Bash. “Secretary Kennedy’s been at the very front of this.”

Supporters of Kennedy, of course, argue that he’s transforming health care for the better.

Dr. Kevin Roberts, president of the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, last week celebrated “one year of winning at the Department of Health and Human Services,” calling Kennedy “the most consequential public health official leading that agency in modern American history.”

He cited moves including the release of new dietary guidelines “that are going to get Americans eating real food again,” including “a revolution in protein”; “increasing transparency and ensuring scientific integrity across all health agencies”; and the overhaul of the CDC’s childhood immunization recommendations.

“You’re a popular guy at Heritage, Mr. Secretary,” Roberts said.

Nixon, the HHS spokesperson, said the agency “is exercising its full authority to deliver results for the American people,” citing removal of the “black box” warning from hormones used to treat menopause symptoms, efforts to lower drug prices and streamline prior authorization, and increased scrutiny of organ transplants, among other efforts.

The White House is leaning into issues like Trump’s “most favored nation” deals that aim to lower drug prices, as well as its focus on healthier eating, as the midterms approach.

That includes personnel moves announced Thursday that restructure Kennedy’s senior-most ranks, enabling the White House to exercise tighter control over key areas of HHS, an administration official told CNN.

And though nutrition and drug pricing are broadly more popular issues, outside health experts said that even moves in those areas can’t compete in impact with the damage done in the past year to public health systems.

“Everything else pales in significance,” said Dr. Marion Nestle, an emerita professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University.

Nestle had initially expressed optimism about some of Kennedy’s food policy goals as he laid them out before the presidential election. And she noted a few accomplishments: a promise from food companies to remove artificial dyes by the end of 2027, a definition of ultraprocessed foods being worked on at the FDA, and on reforming the procedure for chemicals to be considered GRAS, or Generally Recognized as Safe.

But she wished more progress had been made there, too.

“One big disappointment is the lack of progress on removing industrial and agricultural chemicals from the food supply, as promised,” Nestle said. “MAHA,” Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement, “has so much momentum behind it; it’s a shame more couldn’t be accomplished.”

Last month’s release of the new US Dietary Guidelines did garner support from groups including the American Medical Association, particularly for spotlighting concerns about highly processed foods and sugar-sweetened beverages.

And Dr. Jerold Mande, an adjunct professor of nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who worked in food policy under Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, pointed to efforts to improve diet quality through Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits as potentially particularly impactful.

But he gives HHS an F grade when it comes to investing in nutrition research, which he argues has been historically significantly underfunded by the NIH and hasn’t improved under Kennedy. Moreover, he said, the administration’s messaging even on popular issues is unlikely to fulfill its promise to restore trust.

Last month, Kennedy posted a clip to his social media feeds of a version of a “South Park” episode from 2014. In the original, the joke is that the food pyramid has been upside-down the whole time; flipping it put butter, meat and dairy in the biggest places at the top.

“Nutrition is stabilizing!” a scientist at the US Department of Agriculture declares, and the then-secretary of agriculture says the president should be told to “have some steak with his butter.”

In Kennedy’s version, he’s the one declaring that the pyramid is upside-down. When it flips, it reveals HHS’s new version, which does indeed feature steak and cheese at the top.

And though it’s funny, Mande said, “It’s kind of this scene where what was right was wrong, what was wrong was right – this whole thing that somehow we’ve been all told the wrong things all along.”

It’s a common theme in messaging from Kennedy and his health officials. But, Mande said, “that is not a way to regain trust, to suggest that everything you’ve been told your whole life was somehow a conspiracy, and now you should trust us.”

“Obviously,” he said, “most people will take from that: ‘Gee, we shouldn’t trust anybody.’”