Source: United States Senator for New Hampshire Jeanne Shaheen
(Washington, DC) – Today, U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) delivered remarks on the floor of the U.S. Senate to oppose the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for Health and Human Services Secretary. In her remarks, Shaheen highlighted Kennedy’s troubling record of promoting conspiracy theories that put lives at risk, supporting efforts to defund critical public health programs and denying scientific consensus on public health. You can watch her speech in full here.
Key Quotes:
- “We should be taking steps right now to lower costs for families and children. Half of uninsured Granite Staters cite cost as their reason for not purchasing health coverage. More than two-thirds of [uninsured] people in New Hampshire have delayed care and another 25 percent have delayed buying needed prescriptions or said they have to ration their meds.”
- “This decision by the Trump Administration [to cut NIH funding] will cut Dartmouth’s funding by $38 million and we don’t know what future impact that would be. Will we miss the next cure for a pediatric cancer? Will we fail to advance treatments in Alzheimer’s? What we do know is that […] the job loss [and] the economic impact that will result from this decision will be devastating.”
- “Women in this country need to know that the Secretary of Health and Human Services will defend our rights to access all the health care we need. But at every turn, Republicans and the Trump Administration have pushed forward dangerous policies intended to threaten access to full reproductive care.”
- “America deserves a leader at HHS who values science, who protects public health, who defends women’s rights to reproductive care—to the full range of reproductive care—and who upholds the integrity of our country’s core health systems. RFK Jr. has shown time and again that he is not that leader. His dangerous rhetoric on vaccines, his reckless plans to gut critical agencies and lack of understanding of basic health care make him uniquely unqualified to advance the well-being of all Americans.”
Full Remarks as Delivered:
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Mr. President. I come to the floor to join my colleagues with a great deal of concern to discuss the Trump Administration’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to be the next Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
To put it very simply at the outset, Robert F. Kennedy—RFK Jr.—is unfit to lead the highest health office in our nation.
First of all, RFK has no—let me repeat, no—health or medical experience.
That in it of itself should be a red flag on this nominee who is supposed to be tasked with leading our nation’s health agency.
But sadly, that’s not where the red flags end.
From his radical and dangerous opinions on vaccines and public health, to his promises to cut medical research to his ever-changing position on women’s rights to access reproductive health care, he has proven that he lacks the credibility, the knowledge and the capability to be Secretary of Health and Human Services.
So, let’s take a step back.
When the President ran his campaign, he ran a campaign on lowering costs for working Americans. Well, where has that promise gone?
We saw today that inflation has gone up in the last quarter. It’s over 3 percent now.
And we’ve seen nothing from President Trump’s first weeks in office that addresses the high costs of health care, of food, of housing, of child care.
Two weeks ago, this Administration, including the Health and Human Services agency, halted funding across the board for programs like our community health centers and substance use treatment programs.
These centers are often the main source of health care for their community. They serve the people across the states of this country.
In our office, I heard from programs like Coos County Family Heath, a community health center that provides life-saving care to rural patients across the North Country of New Hampshire—what we call the North Country.
Their programs for training new doctors and providing services for victims of domestic violence were, and still are, at risk thanks to Trump’s executive orders and funding freeze.
And I heard from Navigating Recovery in Laconia, that’s a substance use treatment service that depends on federal funding for more than 50 percent of its budget. They’re worried about keeping their doors open.
And this is an organization with providers who will literally sit with a patient by their hospital bed following an overdose to make sure they’re getting the best guidance, the best treatment and the follow on services like housing and child care that allows them to start their recovery.
And this is a real issue for us in New Hampshire, where we’ve been hit very hard by the opioid epidemic.
The Trump executive orders and funding cuts will force Navigating Recovery to lay off staff and to curtail services should those funding cuts continue.
These are actions on the part of the White House that don’t lower costs for families – they do just the opposite.
They put people out of work and weaken our ability to care for our most vulnerable populations.
But when he was asked if he would reverse this policy, of cutting funding for programs like substance use recovery, RFK refused.
The thing is, we should be taking steps right now to lower costs for families and children.
Half of uninsured Granite Staters cite cost as their reason for not purchasing health coverage.
More than two-thirds of [uninsured] people in New Hampshire have delayed care, and another 25 percent have delayed buying needed prescriptions or said they have to ration their meds.
We could help these people right now.
We could pass the Health Care Affordability Act, which would make permanent premium tax credits in the Affordable Care Act that have cut health care costs for 24 million Americans—nearly 70,000 from New Hampshire.
Passing that bill would directly help constituents like the man in Newmarket who contacted our office.
He’s 55 years old, he’s a patient at Lamprey Health Care, which is a community health center.
He had been uninsured and avoided going to a doctor his whole life.
But sadly, he was recently hospitalized for 10 days because of complications from untreated diabetes. He had sepsis and he had an infection in his foot.
Unfortunately, he didn’t have insurance when he was hospitalized.
But luckily, Lamprey Health sat with him, helped him purchase insurance on HealthCare.gov, helping avoid potentially devastating medical debt.
These tax credits are vital to his and to millions of Americans’ ability to afford care.
But again, when asked about these tax credits, RFK refused to say that he would support extending them.
So much for lowering costs to families.
Now, if this Administration is not trying to lower costs, what are they doing to help the people they swore an oath to serve?
Last Friday, our research institutions got a notification, almost overnight, that their funding through the National Institutes of Health would be gutted.
This decision threatens our ability to find cures for diseases, to get ahead of public health crises and to hire and retain talent.
I think it was made rashly and irresponsibly without really understanding what the impact would be.
Slashing those funds won’t make research more efficient; instead, it’s going to cripple our ability to treat and cure horrific diseases.
Dartmouth College, which is in Hanover, New Hampshire, is one of our preeminent research institutions in the country.
Last year, Dartmouth received nearly $100 million in NIH funding to help with its cutting-edge research to treat diseases like diabetes, cystic fibrosis and Alzheimer’s.
This NIH decision—this decision by the Trump Administration—will cut Dartmouth’s funding by $38 million, and we don’t know what future impact that would be.
Will we miss the next cure for a pediatric cancer?
Will we fail to advance treatments in Alzheimer’s?
What we do know is that this has an immediate impact on the people living in the Upper Valley of New Hampshire.
More than 1,300 employees are supported by federal grants at Dartmouth, and the vast majority of these are supported by the National Institutes of Health.
The job loss, the economic impact that will result from this decision will be devastating.
And sadly, once those jobs are gone, and the researchers leave, there’s no going back because they’re going someplace else, they’re going overseas.
But we unfortunately know RFK that supports this decision, because he has publicly supported gutting NIH staff and research.
And if, RFK is confirmed, I fear he will do nothing to push back or to reverse these reckless decisions.
The Secretary of HHS also holds immense power over ensuring that women in our country have the ability to access reproductive health services, including abortion.
Interestingly, I thought this was something that RFK and I agreed on.
But now, I’m not clear what he supports.
He used to proudly say that he was pro-choice. But since being nominated, that belief seems to have disappeared overnight.
The only thing I think he truly believes is in his desire to do whatever Trump wants, even if it means compromising his own values.
Women in this country need to know that the Secretary of Health and Human Services will defend our rights to access all the health care we need.
But at every turn, Republicans and the Trump Administration have pushed forward dangerous policies intended to threaten access to full reproductive care.
They put onto the Supreme Court the justices who overturned Roe v. Wade.
At the state level, they have instituted draconian abortion bans that threaten the lives of mothers.
Women are literally dying—dying—from a lack of care because of these bans on our health.
This is 2025. How did we get here?
I remember before Roe v Wade. I remember when hundreds of thousands of women died from back alley abortions. And are we back to that point?
Everyone knows that banning abortion and making women seek dangerous options does not stop abortions, it makes them more deadly.
But with RFK at the helm, that’s the grim reality we face.
He’s not someone I trust to defend a woman’s right to access reproductive health care. He is not someone I want leading Health and Human Services.
Now, one of the few issues we have some actual insight into are his views on public health.
His dangerous, radical and wrong beliefs about vaccines are well documented.
Every child that gets sick or dies from a disease that could be prevented by a vaccine is a tragedy.
RFK will not only undermine public confidence in vaccines, he indicated that he intends to continue to profit from anti-vaccine lawsuits.
It’s shameful and it’s corrupt.
Now, we’ve also heard reports that the Trump administration plans to cut as much as 50 percent of Health and Human Services staff and decimate the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC is our first line of defense for public health, most important, tracking and responding to outbreaks of diseases not only domestically but abroad as well.
The Trump Administration has already taken steps to gut out global health and aid efforts, from withdrawing from the World Health Organization, to cutting the CDC and U.S. Agency for International Development.
They argue that these efforts are wasteful and unnecessary.
But just last Friday, we were notified in New Hampshire that we had only the third confirmed case ever in the U.S. of clade 1 Monkey Pox—or Mpox.
The case is travel-related, meaning the patient caught the disease abroad and brought it home.
Sadly, these things, these diseases don’t just stop at countries’ border. They don’t just happen overseas. They affect us here at home.
The Trump Administration’s efforts to eliminate our public health infrastructure doesn’t make America safer, it doesn’t make America stronger and it doesn’t make America more prosperous. It does the exact opposite.
And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is complicit. He’s complicit in these efforts, and he will only continue them should he be confirmed.
America deserves a leader at HHS who values science, who protects public health, who defends women’s rights to reproductive care—to the full range of reproductive care—and who upholds the integrity of our country’s core health systems.
RFK Jr. has shown time and again that he is not that leader.
His dangerous rhetoric on vaccines, his reckless plans to gut critical agencies and lack of understanding of basic health care make him uniquely unqualified to advance the well-being of all Americans.
I urge my colleagues to reject his nomination for Secretary of Health and Human Services.