Did RFK Jr. Make His Case for HHS Secretary?
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America's energy future begins now. More American oil and natural gas means more jobs, more security, and more innovation. America's moment is now. Learn more at LightsOnEnergy.org. Paid for by the American Petroleum Institute. From the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faces tough grilling at the Senate confirmation hearings as he searches for votes to be confirmed as HHS secretary. How did he do? Plus, the White House issues a memo to pause spending on some public programs, then clarifies that memo a day later, then withdraws it altogether a day after that.

What have we learned about this White House operation from this contentious experience that Democrats really have gone to town on politically? Welcome to Potomac Watch, the daily opinion podcast of The Wall Street Journal. I'm Paul, as you go, editor of the editorial pages. I'm here with my two colleagues, Alicia Finley.

and Manay Ukwe-Berua. So welcome to you both. So Alicia, let's start with RFK Jr. and his hearings, two rounds of hearings. So one before the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday and then on Thursday in front of the Senate Health Committee.

Is he making converts? Well, I wouldn't say that. I think the hearings are pretty polarized. Democrats seem to be lined up against him, which wasn't clear at the outset. There was a chance that he might be able to pick off some Democratic senators, maybe Sheldon Whitehouse, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, because recall, he was a Democrat and actually a very progressive Democrat. He supported a lot of their agenda. But they have come out swinging against him. And then you have Democrats

Now, the Republicans, on the other hand, mostly who have been cheerleaders, you know, saying you are a truth teller, you've done God's work by exposing all these terrible things about vaccines, COVID, et cetera, et cetera. The guy to watch, I would say, is Bill Cassidy, who leads the Senate Health Committee, a

And he's a doctor, has been a doctor for 30 years, and he's kept his cards close to his vest. But he did come out today during the hearing and say, you've said some things about vaccines I find very troubling, I don't think are true. And I want to give you a chance to actually kind of explain yourself and maybe walk back and earn our trust on this issue.

I want to get to the vaccine issue in particular, but let's listen first to Bill Cassidy in the Senate Finance Committee asking RFK Jr. about Medicare and Medicaid. How do you propose that we integrate those programs? Does Medicare pay more? Medicare pay less? Medicaid pay more? Medicaid pay less? How do we do that?

Well, I'm not exactly sure because I'm not in there. I mean, it is difficult to integrate them. I suppose my answer to that is to make sure that the programs are consolidated, that they're integrated, and the care is integrated. I look forward to working with you, Dr. Cassidy, on making sure that we take good care of people.

Well, Monet, that was something. Of course, the HHS secretary does have responsibility for Medicare and Medicaid, two enormously expensive programs, huge share of American GDP. He doesn't seem to understand the difference. Absolutely. It seems like...

He is only just now getting up to speed with the details of some of these agencies with which he would have authority over as HHS secretary. Of course, he's in this position of being put in control of the health agencies potentially because of his interest in vaccines, because of his interest in pharmaceutical drugs and particularly regulation of those things. But HHS has a very, very broad ambit.

which involves dispersal of benefits for Medicare and Medicaid. And obviously, Congress is in charge of setting the top line levels in terms of what those programs are doing, the relationships that they have with medical providers and such. But there is a lot of discretion that the HHS secretary has in terms of specific regulations for how those benefits are issued.

And so he definitely didn't cover himself in glory with his clear unawareness of the details of some of those policies. But I do think that he probably believes that his confirmation is going to hang primarily on the questions regarding drug and vaccine policy and figures that he has enough time to get up to speed on those sorts of issues.

after becoming confirmed? I mean, yeah. I think he probably does judge that to figure that that's not going to be a factor. And there's always the argument that some of his supporters make that the, you can call it the ignorance is bliss argument that, oh, well, we need to blow the healthcare system up because it's not working and therefore we need to disrupt. On the other hand, you would think that somebody would actually, who's in line to run the

These vast programs would actually understand what they do. And Maggie Hassan, a senator from New Hampshire, tried to take Kennedy through Medicare and Medicaid and particularly Medicare and what was Part A, Part B, Part C, Part D. And it's clear he doesn't understand the difference. Now, you know, it's not a high school exam, OK, but it is a big job.

And some basic level of knowledge would seem to be required, Alicia. I would say almost every person who works at the journal's editorial page knows more than he does about health care policy or at least these entitlements. He repeatedly mixed up what Medicaid is and Medicare and the affordable care exchanges. He complained that the premiums and deductibles for Medicaid are too high. Well, no, they have no premiums.

He said that Medicare Advantage, he praised it, which no doubt he knows that Republicans are very supportive of the Medicare Advantage program. This is the privately managed portion of Medicare. Right, Medicare, that covers about half of the population. But then he said, well, yes, I support expanding access to it, which is great to hear. But then he complained, well, the premiums and deductibles are too high for those. Well, actually, they're much lower than for fee-for-service. There are other reasons and barriers.

to the growth in that program, but the high premiums is not right now one of them. And so it just evinced his lack of knowledge about a lot of policy details. And to Mene's point, the HHS secretary will have final say on all kinds of things. I mean, Medicaid waivers, for instance, states

apply to the HHS to change certain of their Medicaid policies. And there's a lot of questions, well, OK, he supports innovation, but there are certain innovative experiments that a Democratic state wants to do to squeeze more money out of federal government. And the Biden HHS Secretary Becerra has given them the green light. And this is a big reason for why Medicaid costs are exploding.

And so it'd be nice to know, well, what kind of experiments do you support and what kinds don't? Well, one of those new things that states could stand on is holistic medicine, right? Essentially nontraditional medicine, tribal remedies, for example, in the Indian tribes.

Well, I can see the RFK supporting that, you know, exorcisms for drug addictions. I mean, we're not making this up, by the way. You know, California and New York, other states are also using Medicaid dollars for homeless housing, mini fridges, all kinds of things. And so it would be good to get RFK on record on what he thinks about this. We are going to take a break. And when we come back, we'll talk about RFK Jr. and vaccines.

and whether or not they cause autism when we come back. America's energy future begins now. More American oil and natural gas means more jobs, more security, and more innovation. America's moment is now. Learn more at LightsOnEnergy.org. Paid for by the American Petroleum Institute.

Welcome back. I'm Paul Gigo here on Potomac Watch, the podcast of the Wall Street Journal Opinion Pages. And I'm here with Manet Ukweburu and Alicia Finley. Manet, on the vaccine point, there's no question that Kennedy basically said simply false things about vaccines linked to disease, particularly autism. He was a big advocate of the Wakefield study that said that basic vaccine that most children in America have causes autism.

That has been widely discredited by many, many studies. And yet Kennedy promoted that. He also said the polio vaccine caused more troubles than it actually solved. And I can tell you I'm old enough to remember when polio was still a scourge. And I remember people when I grew up, young kids who were in leg braces because of polio. And my mother would not let us go to the public pools.

in Green Bay, Wisconsin in the summer when there was a polio breakout. And so the polio vaccine was a godsend. And yet he was spreading misinformation about it. Now, he says, I'm not against polio vaccines now. He also says, I'm not against all vaccines now.

And yet he refuses in questioning to say that, in fact, asserted that, is it the MMR vaccine? That it does not cause autism. He won't say clearly that it does not. He has not told...

definitively backtracked on many of his statements about the purported harms of vaccines, which were his calling card and the entire reason why he was in the position of driving forward this political movement and running for president in the first place.

He knows now that his confirmation is going to hinge on reassuring people that he's not going to be able to block new vaccines from being approved. And he has come out and said that in his hearings. He'll say a very short blanket statement, I'm not going to block approvals of any new vaccines. And he's hoping that will be enough to reassure senators on the fence.

The problem is that there are a whole lot of other things in his power to do that would be deeply harmful. One of them would be to potentially expand the pool of injuries which plaintiffs are able to sue vaccine makers for. Right now, there are certain ones where there have been clear studies that have linked potential injuries to vaccines and people are able to sue and get compensation from a federal fund for victims.

But he could potentially add to that pool other purported injuries that certain people have alleged vaccines contributed to without much scientific evidence behind it. He could also withdraw vaccines from being protected from litigation who currently are included in that pool of vaccines who have been given federal protections so that they aren't directly liable.

for any potential injuries that they might cause. And so he can have a broad effect on

the schedule that's recommended for children in terms of what vaccines are recommended and in the litigation around vaccines without necessarily going so far as to block new approvals. The second hearing for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will finish today, which is Thursday, January 30th. Alicia, Bill Cassidy clearly is the senator to watch here, the Republican from Louisiana.

But most Republicans seem willing to line up behind RFK Jr. and to basically, because I think in part, they think that what happened during the COVID era was a lot of bad behavior by the public health bureaucracy. And they told us a lot of things that just weren't true.

I'm a supporter of the RNA vaccines, as I think you are too. I think they help against much more serious disease that a lot of people who are vulnerable, including older Americans, might have got from the COVID vaccine. But they didn't prevent COVID, and it was arguably oversold by some people. And of course, there were the lockdowns. The lockdowns are good for children. Lockdowns will do all of these good things. The masks are a good thing.

And that distrust, that performance, I think, has seeded enough public distrust in public health officials that Kennedy, with his skepticism, has exploited. And that's one of the reasons I think the Republicans are saying, oh, you're a truth teller. Well, you know, he has challenged some of the untruths that came through for COVID, but he's also spread a lot more. And yet Republicans are focusing on

on that COVID experience. I think that's right. I would say he was just the flip side of Fauci in that he tends to manipulate data cherry-picked studies that he wants to rely on. You can have 20 studies that show that, no, the measles vaccine does not cause autism, and he'll find a case example, or the Wakefield study that really only relied on five boys because much of it was falsified, and he'll wave that around.

He tends to cite studies as evidence for what he's saying, but then you look up the studies and it actually doesn't support what he's saying. He just kind of, as he said, cherry picks evidence.

But to your point about how the public health authorities really squandered trust, I think that fueled the backlash, especially on the right, both with the COVID lockdowns, the school shutdowns, mask mandates. They did oversell the vaccines and I think pushed too hard on the children's vaccines. I think that should have gone through a slower approval process than it did along with the boosters. And, you know, Marty McCary...

who's the FDA Donald Trump's pick for the FDA commissioner, has acknowledged all that.

And he's been with them all along on a lot of these issues opposing lockdowns. But without the craziness. Without the craziness. So if you want someone who, you know, will disrupt the status quo and is for transparency and all that, here's a guy who's sensible and who has a lot of credibility, but isn't actually, you know, basically peddling crackpot theories. All right. Or we'll see if he's going to get through here in the days ahead. We are going to take another break. And when we come back, we'll talk about...

about the White House's short-lived spending pause and its consequences when we come back. America's energy future begins now. More American oil and natural gas means more jobs, more security, and more innovation. America's moment is now. Learn more at lightsonenergy.org. Paid for by the American Petroleum Institute.

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Welcome back. I'm Paul Gigot with Felicia Finley and Manet Ukwe Barua. Let's turn to another big story this week out of Washington, which is the Trump administration's issuing of a memo freezing federal spending on discretionary programs spending that was still hadn't gone out the door when the Biden administration left office, Manet.

And they issued the memo on Monday, clarified it on Tuesday that it didn't apply to a lot of programs, only to certain programs. And then Wednesday withdrew it amid a huge uproar by Democrats who were saying chaos, craziness, incompetence and so on.

You have to say that some of the criticisms were over the top, but implicitly by withdrawing the memo, the White House admitted it made a mistake. Yeah, I think that the entire episode shows the ability of the federal bureaucracy to protect its own interests and protect business as usual, even against President Trump's best efforts to try to slow it down and rein in spending in a gradual way.

It's important to look at what the memo actually said in that President Trump, on his first couple of days in office, issued a whole bunch of executive orders, things like ending DEI in the federal government. That's the diversity initiatives, things like curbing a certain environmental spending.

And the memo then followed a few days after and said, we are going to pause spending specifically related to these executive orders that Trump has issued. So by no means was he saying, I'm freezing all spending across the entire federal government.

But I think that a lot of the employees of these federal agencies saw an opportunity to spin it into a big story. And so a lot of confusion about what Trump was intending and the press, of course, and a lot of corners picked up on that entirely. And so you saw people asking the White House, does this mean food stamps are going to be frozen? Does this mean that Social Security checks aren't going to go out?

Of course, the memo, again, had specifically said this is limited to certain areas where Trump has issued executive orders, but they tried to spin it into a larger story. And I think that OMB, the budget office in the White House, decided that they were in a vulnerable position because of how the story had gotten out of hand.

And so he decided to withdraw the memo and maybe revisit it, issuing new guidance that will be much more specific about what spending is going to be frozen. But it shows that there is a huge interest group within the government for keeping the spending going and any action that's

intended to pause that is going to be attacked very quickly and very forcefully. Alisha, the legality of this was called into question by Democrats saying that it was unconstitutional not to spend money that Congress had appropriated. And in fact, a federal judge did put a temporary injunction against the memo. But as he said, we need to clarify what happened. And then it was withdrawn. So that's overtaken by events. But the litigation...

will presumably not go forward. But was there anything illegal about what the White House proposed? I think it's well within the executive's discretion to say, well, let's pause these grant programs. And again, this was a very narrow set of funding. It wasn't even all discretionary grant programs. Some are actually covered by these formula grants to the state, and those were automatically going out. These were things like

The IRA loan guarantees, which the president has enormous discretion over. They don't have to send checks out or loans or grants by any certain date or choose any given recipient. Same thing with the NIH grants. There's a whole bucket of these. And again, you're not going to get tremendous savings because they aren't a large share of the federal budget. But what Trump was doing, he was trying to ensure that these were not advancing the left's agenda with

DEI and green mandates because of recalled what the Biden administration did is for a lot of these grant programs, they tied or put certain kinds of conditions on them. Like a company must spend 40% of the federal dollars on advancing environmental justice

Or they tried to put essentially de facto racial quotas. And it's well within, again, the president's prerogative and authority to pull that back and remove those restrictions. I think that there are some people who are coming to the Trump administration, particularly Russell Vaught, who will be the head of OMB, who would like to pick a fight over presidential impoundment power, which is the so-called power to rule.

withhold spending that Congress appropriated. And after the Nixon era, there was a big fight in the 70s over impoundment power. They passed the Impoundment Control Act, which says the president must spend money. This wasn't implicated here because

As Alicia said, it was only temporary. They didn't say we're not going to spend any money on these sorts of things. But I think Roosevelt would like to pick a fight legally over the impoundment to power and have that go up to the Supreme Court and see if they can't get the Impoundment Control Act overturned.

to give the president more discretion and control over spending. Yeah, it's one of those thorny legal issues where the practicality of what Russ Vaught is advocating is very clear in the sense that when Congress says we want to, for example, build...

whole lot of factories or something like that. We want to subsidize things to support the development of green energy and allots $50 billion to do that. If the executive branch is able to show that they've procured everything that Congress intended for considerably less, they should reasonably be allowed to do that. And as Resfat points out, that was the case for most of American history until the Nixon administration when the Empowerment Control Act was passed.

But as a legal matter, Congress did decide to go ahead and spell out the fact that when they appropriate a certain amount of money for a certain end, they want the ability to be able to tell the president that every penny of it must be spent. And it seems likely that the Supreme Court would rule that Congress can spell that out if they choose.

If there are areas where they want to certainly set a top level for what the president will spend, they can do that too. But I think that Russ Vought is exactly right when he says we should be able to conserve money as long as we're carrying out the intent of Congress. But it isn't clear to me whether the law as it stands is unconstitutional. So he can pick that fight if he wants, but I don't think it's necessarily going to result in that law being overturned. Well, that's a legal debate, legal issue for another day. But

It goes to show you, I think, the ambitions of some in the Trump administration to overturn some Washington conventions. But this whole episode of the spending pause that went awry, I think, does show just how difficult it's going to be for this administration to control spending. It will become a political fight every single time they try to do something. All right. We are going to leave it there for today. Thank you all for listening to Potomac Watch. Thanks to Manet and Alicia. And we're here every day. See you tomorrow.

America's energy future begins now. More American oil and natural gas means more jobs, more security, and more innovation. America's moment is now. Learn more at LightsOnEnergy.org. Paid for by the American Petroleum Institute.