TOLEDO, Ohio — The boy, dressed in a Toy Story sweatshirt, hugged the nation's health secretary.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asked before a carpet full of preschoolers.
“A dinosaur!” the boy responded, squeezing harder.
Just a few weeks ago, Kennedy sat before lawmakers on Capitol Hill and faced intense questions about a dangerous rise in infectious diseases among American children.
Now, with the midterm primaries underway, Kennedy was sitting in a chair the size of a toddler in Ohio, on a mission to change the subject.
Kennedy was advised to stay away from the anti-vaccine rhetoric that launched him to political stardom and has been sent by the White House to evangelize about the less controversial and more popular parts of his agenda. Republicans hope Kennedy's “Get Your Health” tour will help them retain voters, many of whom are deeply dissatisfied with President Donald Trump.
So there Kennedy was in early May, traversing a swath of northern Ohio that includes one of the few congressional districts that Republicans are confident they can flip in November, rotating between a wardrobe of blue suits and blue jeans.
He inspected the kitchen of a Toledo daycare, where hundreds of the city's youngest residents learn and play through the federally funded Head Start program. Under the careful watch of a surgeon, he briefly operated the renowned Cleveland Clinic's robotic hands on a live patient open for heart surgery. And he ate pesticide-free squash blossoms from a 400-acre farm.
“I'm dismantling a corrupt system and replacing it with something better, replacing it with something that actually addresses the decline of the healthy American population,” Kennedy said from a farmhouse dining table during an exclusive interview with KFF Health News. He pointed to what he considers his biggest accomplishments over the past year: pushing some companies to remove dyes from certain foods, updating nutritional guidelines and defining ultra-processed foods.
“People are paying attention to what they eat and the industry is listening; the industry is changing.”
But hundreds of miles from the partisan interrogations of Washington, Kennedy could not escape the uncomfortable contradictions and consequences of the Trump administration's policies.
Taboo budget cuts
Clever Bee Academy classrooms displayed newly printed posters featuring Kennedy's “Eat Real Food” motto and the redesigned food pyramid.
Kennedy came with an offering: a $30,000 federal grant to help the center improve its kitchen and community garden.
In front of staff and parents, he distanced himself from a White House initiative last year that could have been devastating for many of Clever Bee's young students, most of whom live in poverty: the proposal to eliminate the $12 billion Head Start program.
Most of the Toledo daycare students Kennedy visited live in poverty and rely on the federally funded Head Start program, which the Trump administration proposed eliminating last year. (Amanda Seitz/KFF Health News)
Posters with the slogan “Eat real food” and the redesigned food pyramid were displayed in the kindergarten classrooms. (Amanda Seitz/KFF Health News)
“They asked us to substantially cut our agencies,” Kennedy said. “The two programs that I took a risk protecting, and found the money elsewhere, were Indian Health Services, which is always underfunded, and Head Start.”
The next day, Kennedy stood in front of goats on a farm in Medina, Ohio, cared for by people getting sober from drug or alcohol abuse at Hope Recovery Community.
He was there to promise more investment from an administration that has slashed staff and budgets over the past year.
Kennedy, who still attends daily Alcoholics Anonymous meetings to cope with a heroin addiction that plagued him for 14 years, said he hopes to replicate the recovery center model across the country, calling it an “essential role for government to make sure those services are there.”
Broader access to addiction treatment is part of the Trump administration's recently released National Drug Control Strategy.. But recovery advocates are skeptical that more people will get help, and millions of people are expected to lose their health insurance under the Trump administration due to rising premiums from the Affordable Care Act and nearly $900 billion in Medicaid cuts under the One Big Beautiful Bill.
Kennedy dismissed those challenges, pointing to a $100 million investment in addiction treatment services, including sober housing, announced this year.
“We're trying to make it more accessible,” Kennedy told KFF Health News.
Problems at MAHA Paradise
Rows of flowerbeds of green and purple microgreens awaited Kennedy at The Chef's Garden, a farm in Huron, Ohio, that rejects the use of chemicals in growing its produce.
The health secretary tore off handfuls and popped them into his mouth, chewing quickly before a new sample was brought to him.
“We are absolutely thrilled that someone at this level of government cares about how food is grown and where it comes from,” said Bob Jones Jr., co-owner of The Chef's Garden.
Seeing more farmers produce chemical-free leafy greens has topped the wish list of supporters of Kennedy and the Make America Healthy Again movement, and many of those who backed Trump in 2024. But in a move that threatens to fracture that electorate, Trump has pushed to protect the production of glyphosate, a herbicidal and potentially carcinogenic chemical commonly sprayed on crops and lawns.
Although the MAHA Ohio group extols Kennedy's agenda and endorses candidates aligned with his movement, director Elizabeth Frost acknowledged tensions between MAHA and conservative politics.
The glyphosate issue is an example “where conservative interests have to look out for industry interests, and MAHA's interest is to be aware of downstream health impacts,” said Frost, who volunteered on Kennedy's presidential campaign.
Some prominent MAHA influencers have suggested that Trump White House staff are preventing Kennedy from implementing more aggressive policies on certain issues, including further limiting vaccine use, an idea he dismissed.
“To say the White House has tied my hands; the only people who could say that are people who haven't been paying attention for a year,” Kennedy said. “President Trump has let me do more than any HHS secretary in history.”
He added: “The only thing people in the MAHA movement are complaining about is the president's order on glyphosate.”
Stay on message
Republicans consider Kennedy an asset in the newly redrawn northern Ohio congressional district that Democrat Marcy Kaptur has represented for more than 40 years and which is seen as one of the most competitive in the nation.
Fresh off winning the Republican primary for the district last week, Derek Merrin smiled as he shook Kennedy's hand.
“We discussed protecting Lake Erie, strengthening rural hospitals and our shared vision of improving food quality,” Merrin later posted on Facebook. “Let's make America healthy again!”
Still, even when Kennedy was advised to avoid anti-vaccine rhetoric, he found trouble in Ohio. At a forum in Cleveland, family physician Patricia Kellner said the best way to prevent hepatitis B is to vaccinate newborns, a recommendation Kennedy abandoned. He spoke to Kennedy about treating patients with the disease.
“Some of them didn't know it because it can be asymptomatic. Others discovered it when they got liver cancer,” Kellner said. “So why are you opposed to a birth dose of hepatitis B?”
Kennedy responded by suggesting that the hepatitis B vaccine was not safe for babies and was only necessary for certain people.
“Hepatitis B is for high-risk groups like drug addicts or prostitutes, or for promiscuous homosexuals,” he added, prompting exclamations from the crowd.
While the risk of contracting hepatitis B is higher for those who inject drugs or for men who have sex with men, the disease can be transmitted in other ways, including contact with contaminated surfaces or childbirth.
Public health researchers have warned that abandoning the universal hepatitis B recommendation will result in hundreds of new infections in children, costing millions of dollars in additional health care costs.
