Robert F Kennedy Jr. has odd bedfellows on big pharma, food and agriculture

There is no denying the bromance between President-elect Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., two men with famously big egos and a desire to expose what they view as a corrupt federal bureaucracy.

But if Kennedy is confirmed to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, several of his key priorities may run counter to those of an administration with a game plan bent on deregulation. Trump’s choice for White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, comes from a lobbying firm that represented the very industries that Kennedy hopes to disrupt.

Over the past two decades, Kennedy, a lawyer and longtime environmentalist, has turned his passion toward health issues, many of which — apart from his questioning of vaccine safety — traditionally align better with the Democratic Party he left behind. When it comes to tearing down corporate capture among the giants — Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Food, among others — Kennedy’s ideas echo those of some of the incoming Trump administration’s loudest critics.

Michelle Obama

Kennedy, who recently criticized Trump’s penchant for fast food, has been clear about his plans to go after ultraprocessed foods that contribute to the growing rates of diabetes and obesity in the United States. Those goals sound familiar to anyone who lived through the Obama administration, when Michelle Obama started the Let’s Move! campaign as first lady to encourage healthier diets and lifestyles among children.

Michelle Obama was a driving force behind President Barack Obama’s creation of a task force on childhood obesity. Under his administration, federal agencies released updated nutrition labels and the ubiquitous “MyPlate” icon, which replaced the food pyramid. Most consequentially, she championed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, which increased funding and raised nutritional standards for school lunches. The vegetable requirements and rules for sodium and flavored-drink products under that law, signed in 2010, were dialed back under the first Trump administration.

Gavin Newsom

The week before the election, Kennedy declared the “first thing” he would do as part of the Trump administration would be: “Tell the cereal companies, ‘Take all the dyes out of their food.’” But in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has already beaten him to it.

Newsom, a staunch progressive, last year became the first governor to sign a law banning the use of Red Dye No. 3 in foods like candy, cookies and frostings. Federal regulators prohibited the use of the chemical in cosmetics in 1990 over cancer concerns, but the ingredient remained legal in the food supply. The Food and Drug Administration has said it is reviewing the evidence, and other states are now considering similar bans.

While Kennedy was vowing on the campaign trail in September to get the “poison” off grocery store shelves, Newsom signed a second bill that prohibited the use of six different dyes in food served in California public schools. The authors of the bill cited evidence that the dyes could cause neurobehavioral issues in some children.

Bernie Sanders

Kennedy’s nonprofit group, Children’s Health Defense, may be best known for spreading misinformation about vaccines, but that venture is part of its broader initiative to “systematically remove Big Pharma corruption”: ban drug advertising, remove regulators’ conflicts of interest and — its most universally supported aim — secure affordable drug prices.

Enter progressive senator and liberal icon Bernie Sanders of Vermont, one of the loudest critics of the levers of Big Pharma. As chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Sanders has beaten the drum against a health care system he calls “dysfunctional” and commissioned reports on pharmaceutical companies’ business models — one of them titled in part, “Greed, Greed, Greed.”

Sanders has pushed a series of proposals to control drug costs and at one point vowed to oppose every nomination to a health post until President Joe Biden produced a detailed plan to lower prices. It’s just one area in which the politicians’ messages of anti-corporate economic populism have echoed one another’s so much that a former pollster for Sanders started to wonder whether Kennedy would draw in a proportion of his base.

Cory Booker

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., published an opinion piece the day before the election decrying Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again initiative. To anyone who hoped for change to the broken food system, he said: “Don’t be fooled.”

But he also released a video last week in which he began to sound — at least to some of his constituents — a lot like Kennedy himself.

“We’re prioritizing corporations feeding us unhealthy products instead of family farmers growing fresh, healthy foods,” he wrote in a post on the X social platform. “We all must come together to build a system that works for all.”

Kennedy, who was once known mostly for his work as an environmental lawyer and now promotes regenerative agriculture, shared Booker’s video and thanked him for his “long history of leadership on this issue.”

If Kennedy earns a permanent role in the Trump administration, he might eventually find some camaraderie across the aisle for taking on Big Agriculture. Booker has pushed an array of bills to overhaul the sector and has been vocal about his concerns regarding agricultural pollution.

Kennedy could, of course, face challenges in the new administration. His experience suing Monsanto over the health effects of glyphosate, a herbicide ingredient, sets up an interesting quandary for Trump, whose first administration was responsible for reapproving the chemical.