The scion of the Kennedy family, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been selected by the new president-elect Donald Trump, to be the next secretary of Health and Human Services starting January 25, 2025.
This selection is not final though. After Trump officially becomes president at his inauguration, the process for getting the cabinet approved will begin.
The process to get a cabinet position filled involves getting that member approved by the Senate. Getting the full cabinet approved can take weeks to months to complete, starting with the most important roles. The difficulty of this process somewhat depends on whether or not the Senate’s political party aligns with that of the president.
Currently, the Democrats have a small majority in the Senate, but on January 3, 2025, the Republicans will take over the Senate. This will happen before Trump’s inauguration, giving him an easier time appointing who he wants, but not a certainty.
History and government teacher Robert McKerr explained the senate usually approves the new president’s cabinet picks in the first few weeks of the new term. Sometimes that process takes a while.
“It could be late January, could be March,” McKerr said.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is part of the famous political Kennedy family. Being the nephew of the 35th President John F. Kennedy. and the son of Robert F. Kennedy, his whole life was spent in the political field.
At a very young age, his father and his uncle were both assassinated just a few years apart. RFK Jr. graduated from Harvard and then went to the University of Virginia to get his law degree. He spent most of his life as an environmental lawyer and an anti-vaccine activist, up until 2023 when he announced his campaign for the Democratic nomination.
His campaign was heavily noticed, as during this time Joe Biden was still the front runner of the Democratic party and extremely unpopular. It only took a few months for RFK Jr. to switch from the Democratic party to being independent.
Kennedy gained an amount of support for an independent, but that support still remained at five percent, paired with the fact that his name was not present on every state’s ballot, RFK Jr. dropped out of the race on August 23, 2024, along with his heavily anticipated endorsement of Donald Trump.
If RFK Jr. is appointed to the position of Secretary of Human Health and Services, he still will not have complete control over this department.
McKerr described the extent of power with this job by saying, “Normally what cabinet secretaries do is they administer the laws that congress creates, then the bureaucracy can make their regulations,” he then gave an example of this by saying, “… if congress were to make a law that said the FDA had the responsibility to make food safe for consumers, then RFK Jr. could work within the scope of the law to promote different ideas.”
Some of the ideas that RFK Jr. has floated, such as saying seed oils are bad or red dye #40 is bad for children for example, would have to follow Congressional guidance.
So, RFK Jr. and any other potential cabinet member would not have total control over their department. They still have to work within the law and can theoretically only make minor changes that represent what is stated in that law.
