Robert F. Kennedy Jr. scorched a New York Times reporter online over a damning report that painted the Health and Human Services secretary as not being engaged with the agencies under his leadership.
“Mr. Kennedy has shown little interest in managing the details of work in his department, according to multiple colleagues,” Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote in the article. “Instead, they say, he is single-mindedly focused on his top priorities, including food recommendations and pesticide exposures, and hunting for evidence to support his long-held beliefs that vaccines are harmful. “
Calling her piece “unfair, inimical, and inaccurate,” Kennedy ripped Stolberg on X.
“All one needs to refute your argument is to glance at my publicly available calendar and to review my unprecedented list of accomplishments on a wide range of issues, all of which I drove,” Kennedy wrote.
The feud between Kennedy and Stolberg emerged following a series of cuts and controversies surrounding his department.
Under Kennedy’s leadership, a number of senior-level officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention left the agency due to changes in vaccine policy. Just last month, President Donald Trump’s pick for the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Marty Makary, resigned.
Stolberg wrote that several colleagues described Kennedy as “checked out” and having kept a low profile at his department’s headquarters. One colleague alleged the health secretary only made one visit to the CDC headquarters following a shooting last August.
Colleagues looked at Kennedy as “single-mindedly focused on his top priorities, including food recommendations and pesticide exposures, and hunting for evidence to support his long-held beliefs that vaccines are harmful,” Stolberg reported.
Kennedy, however, disputed these claims and defended himself online, telling followers he’s “active on every issue in every division of my department.”
Kennedy added, “You also deceptively quote HHS employees without identifying whether they were among those I fired, thereby depriving your readers of the opportunity to make an independent judgment about their credibility.”
The Times defended Stolberg’s reporting in a statement, saying the “article is based on conversations with a dozen people who have worked directly with Mr. Kennedy during his tenure as secretary.”
The New York Times claimed that Kennedy declined an interview request and did not address detailed questions about his approach to running the department before the report went live.
Kennedy bashed the publication, claiming that The New York Times employs “propagandists” and that those within his department are all aware of its alleged “predictable bias.”
He wrote, “We at HHS are unwilling to talk to you about the topics that are important. The fact that you have minimal access to decision makers leaves you covering trivia and relying on your own capacity for invention.”