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

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

By Meg Tirrell, Feb 13, 2026

“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.

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