WASHINGTON — As one of his first acts as Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promised a sweeping overhaul of his department — reducing its workforce by 20% and refocusing it on his Make America Healthy Again agenda.
Months later, some of those firings are tangled up in legal battles and the creation of a chronic disease-focused agency, to be called the Administration for a Healthy America, stalled in Congress.
Yet Kennedy has forged ahead and has effectively used his reorganization to cement his power. That includes making key decisions, like reconstituting a panel of federal vaccine advisers with allies and vaccine skeptics. That panel has since laid the groundwork for further scrutiny of the childhood vaccine schedule.
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