Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Thursday faced federal lawmakers for the first time since September as he sought to defend a more than 12% proposed cut to his department’s budget and dodge arrows from angry Democrats along the way.

In his testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, kicking off an expected sprint of seven budget hearings he’ll attend across congressional committees and subcommittees over the next week, Kennedy emphasized the administration’s work to reform dietary guidelines and crack down on waste, fraud and abuse.

Republicans on the committee praised Kennedy as a “breath of fresh air” and asked him to promote his department’s recent actions. Democrats, who have been furious over Kennedy’s sweeping overhaul of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, largely had a different agenda.

They needled Kennedy on what they viewed as the Trump administration’s hypocrisy on fraud, demanded to know why he was cutting budgets for various programs and slammed his efforts to pull back vaccine recommendations and messaging, which they said have caused unnecessary deaths.

Kennedy fired back, often raising his voice as he accused the Democrats of misrepresenting his work and past statements.

Here are three standout moments from Thursday’s hearing:

A standoff over measles

One heated exchange early in the hearing came between Kennedy and Rep. Linda Sanchez. The California Democrat decried recent measles outbreaks across the U.S. and asked Kennedy to answer for the fact that under his leadership, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pulled back public health messaging supporting vaccination.

“As a mother, this horrifies me,” Sanchez said. “Did President Trump approve your decision to end CDC’s pro-vaccine public messaging campaign?”

Kennedy repeatedly refused to answer, saying first he wanted to respond to the “misstatements that you’ve made” and later praising the Trump administration’s record on preventing measles, although protections against the disease have eroded in some parts of the country as vaccination rates have dropped.

“That’s not answering my question,” Sanchez said as the two talked over each other.

But Sanchez also got Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine activist before he entered politics, to acknowledge that a 6-year-old who died of measles last year in West Texas could have potentially been saved with vaccination.

“Do you agree with the majority of doctors that the measles vaccine could have saved that child’s life in Texas?” she asked.

“It’s possible, certainly,” Kennedy said.

RFK Jr. denies talking about Black children being ‘re-parented’

A fight erupted between Kennedy and Rep. Terri Sewell, a Democrat from Alabama, when Kennedy vehemently denied making remarks he’d said in 2024.

The comments dated back to when Kennedy was a presidential candidate. On the “High Level Conversations” podcast last July, he said, “Psychiatric drugs — which every Black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, SSRIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence, and those kids are going to have a chance to go somewhere and get re-parented to live in a community where there’ll be no cellphones, no screens, you’ll actually have to talk to people.”

“Have you ever re-parented, or parented, I should say, a Black child?” Sewell asked, as her staff held up a poster featuring an abbreviated version of the quote.

“I don’t even know what that phrase means,” Kennedy said. “I’m not going to answer something I didn’t say.”

“You’re making stuff up,” he later claimed.

A recording of the podcast shows he made the comments during a conversation about free rehabilitation facilities he was proposing opening at the time in rural areas around the country.

HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard said Kennedy before joining the administration was referring to spaces where young people facing alienation, mental health challenges and despair could get re-parented, which she said was a psychotherapy term for “developing the emotional regulation, discipline, boundaries, and self-worth that may not have been established in childhood.”

For Kennedy and his former party, civility is the exception

Kennedy spent most of his life as a Democrat, the scion of one of the nation’s most famous political families. Both Republicans and Democrats during the hearing began their remarks by expressing their admiration of Kennedy’s relatives, among them former President John F. Kennedy.

But again and again throughout Thursday’s hearing, the fraying of bonds between Kennedy and his former party was on full display as spiteful comments were passed back and forth.

The health secretary grew defensive and visibly agitated. He repeatedly criticized Democratic lawmakers for not giving him a word in edgewise.

“They’ve all shut me up,” Kennedy said at one point. “They give a little speech that they can go and market, you know, for fundraising, and they don’t allow me to answer the question.”

On a few rare occasions, the exchanges were civil. One representative, Gwen Moore of Wisconsin, used humor to make that happen.

“I promise to give you easy, comfortable questions if you don’t yell at me and hurt my feelings,” she told Kennedy. He promised he wouldn’t.

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Kennedy is a huge longshot to win Electoral College votes, much less the presidency. But his campaign events have drawn large crowds of supporters and people interested in his message.

He plans to announce his vice presidential nominee later this month in Oakland, California, and is stoking expectations that he might pick New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers or former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura. His campaign manager said Saturday that Kennedy has made his choice but didn’t say whom he’s picked. She said he had also interviewed Nicole Shanahan, a California philanthropist who bankrolled a Super Bowl ad for Kennedy, and Mike Rowe, star of the television show “Dirty Jobs.”

Here is a look at his campaign and what he’s stood for:

Who is RFK Jr?

Kennedy, 70, is a member of perhaps the nation’s most famous political dynasty. His uncle was President John F. Kennedy. His father served as attorney general and a U.S. senator before seeking the Democratic nomination for president. Both were assassinated.

RFK Jr. built a reputation of his own as an activist, author and lawyer who fought for environmental causes such as clean water.

Along the way, his activism has veered into conspiracies and contradicted scientific consensus, most infamously on vaccines. Some members of his family have publicly criticized his views. Dozens of his family members posed with President Joe Biden at a St. Patrick’s Day reception at the White House in a photo his sister Kerry Kennedy posted to social media.

Kennedy founded Waterkeeper Alliance, which works to secure clean water, and built a small anti-vaccine organization into Children’s Health Defense, a juggernaut in the movement that saw its reach grow rapidly during the pandemic.

Children’s Health Defense has a lawsuit pending against a number of news organizations, among them The Associated Press, accusing them of violating antitrust laws by taking action to identify misinformation, including about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines. Kennedy took leave from the group when he announced his run for president but is listed as one of its attorneys in the lawsuit.

He’s married to actress Cheryl Hines.

What does Kennedy’s campaign look like?

Kennedy’s need to collect thousands of signatures to get on the ballot has taken him to places that rarely see presidential candidates, including Hawaii, Wyoming and West Virginia.

At events in Phoenix and Las Vegas, hundreds of supporters queued up outside hours before he was scheduled to arrive. He attracts a legion of fans, many of whom have listened extensively to Kennedy’s interviews on podcasts or YouTube videos.

In Nevada, massive graphics and photos were projected on three walls as upbeat music played. Drinks and merchandise were for sale.

Kennedy speaks in a quiet, strained voice, sometimes haltingly, the result of a neurological condition called spasmodic dysphonia.

What does he talk about?

Kennedy frames himself as a truthteller with a track record of fighting for the middle class against powerful interests. He points to lawsuits he’s won against corporate behemoths such as Monsanto and DuPont.

“I can fix this country,” he said in Las Vegas in February. “All these agencies that intimidate normal politicians, I’ve sued every one of them. … When you sue these agencies, you get a Ph.D. in corporate capture and how to unravel it.” Corporate capture refers to private interests using their influence to control government decision-making, as when they help draft legislation.

Kennedy has been critical of U.S. support for Ukraine and supportive of Israel’s war against Hamas. He wants to reduce military and health care spending because of the impact on budget deficits, and combat rising housing costs so young people can afford to buy homes.

Kennedy has found a loyal following among people distrustful of institutions and those who believe the government has been captured by corporations, especially pharmaceutical companies.

He hasn’t shied away from his controversial views on health care and vaccines. He wants to dismantle the public health bureaucracy, saying he’d immediately tell the National Institutes of Health to refocus research away from infectious diseases and vaccines and toward chronic diseases.

Kennedy insists he is not anti-vaccine and claims he has never told the public to avoid vaccination. But he has repeatedly made his opposition to vaccines clear. He said on a podcast “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” and has urged people to resist CDC guidelines on when kids should get vaccinated.

While there are rare instances when people have severe reactions to vaccines, the billions of doses administered globally provide real-world evidence that they are safe. The World Health Organization says vaccines prevent as many as 5 million deaths each year.

Can he win?

The United States has a long history of rejecting independent or third-party presidential candidates. In fact, the last president to win without a party’s backing was George Washington, and he did it before there were political parties.

The last third-party candidate to make it to the White House was Abraham Lincoln with the newly formed Republican Party.

The last third-party candidate to pull more than single digits in the popular vote was Ross Perot, a businessman who won 19% in 1992 and 8% in 1996. But he won zero electoral votes.

And while the independent share of the electorate is growing, it is still dwarfed by voters who consistently support Republican or Democratic candidates, even if they identify as independent.

In other words, the odds are long.

Kennedy’s case for optimism hinges on his relatively strong showing in a few national polls. Polls during the 2016 presidential campaign regularly put libertarian Gary Johnson’s support in the high single or low double digits, but he ultimately received only about 3% of the vote nationwide.

Horse-race polls are also notoriously unreliable this far out from an election, and many Americans don’t know who Kennedy is. A February AP-NORC poll found, for instance, that 29% of Americans don’t know enough about Kennedy to have a view about him.

Some of the people who say they’d support him may also be reacting to his famous last name rather than his actual pitch as a candidate. A CNN/SSRS poll conducted last spring found that 20% of people who said they would consider supporting Kennedy for the Democratic nomination — for which he was running at the time — said that their support was related to his last name and Kennedy family connections. Only 12% said it was because of support for his views and policies.

But for any of that to matter, he has to get on the ballot.

How does he get on the ballot?

Forget getting elected; merely running for president is an arduous process, especially for candidates like Kennedy who don’t belong to a party.

Every state has different rules, requiring an army of lawyers to make sure everything is done right. Most states require thousands of signatures.

A pro-Kennedy super PAC is helping pay for Kennedy’s ballot access work in several states. His allies have created a political party to ease the process in some states by getting recognized as a party and making Kennedy its nominee.

He has been approved for the ballot in Utah. His campaign and super PAC say he’s collected enough signatures to qualify in several other states, including the battlegrounds of Arizona, Georgia and Nevada, though election officials in those states have not yet affirmed his candidacy.

Kennedy has also said he’s talked with officials from the Libertarian Party, though it’s not clear what a tie-up between the two might look like.

Who is working for him?

Kennedy is looking to his family and his allies in the anti-vaccine world to staff his campaign, building a leadership team that is light on experience working in politics.

His campaign manager is Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, his daughter-in-law who served as a CIA officer and has not worked in politics before.

His communications director, Del Bigtree, is founder of the Informed Consent Action Network, an anti-vaccine group. He also produced “Vaxxed,” an anti-vaccine film that promoted the discredited idea that the vaccines cause autism.

Press secretary Stefanie Spear was an editor for the Children’s Health Defense news website. Charles Eisenstein, a New Age author, is an adviser.

Kennedy also has staff and volunteers spread throughout states and focused on gathering signatures to get him on the ballot.

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Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rose to prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic because of his strident opposition to vaccines. Yet, he insists he’s not anti-vaccine. He has associated with influential people on the far right – including Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn – to raise his profile.

Yet, he portrays himself as a true Democrat inheriting the mantle of the Kennedy family. As he challenges President Joe Biden, the stories he tells on the campaign trail about himself, his life’s work and what he stands for are often the opposite of what his record actually shows.

Though Kennedy’s primary challenge to a sitting president is widely considered a longshot, he’s been sucking up media attention due to his famous name and the possibility that his run could weaken Biden ahead of what is expected to be a close general election in 2024. He’s drawn praise from Republican presidential candidates like Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Meanwhile, Trump supporters, including his longtime ally Roger Stone, have ginned up interest by floating a Trump-Kennedy unity ticket. Debra Duvall, 62, who lives in Fort Myers, Florida, and said she serves on the Lee County GOP executive committee, described herself as a longtime Trump supporter, but said she’s torn for 2024. “I’ll take Trump or RFK. Either one,” she said, explaining that she was drawn to both because she believes they can’t be bought.

That kind of support has demonstrated some of the contradictions in Kennedy’s candidacy. He has said he wants to “reclaim” the Democratic Party, while aligning himself with far right figures who have worked to subvert American democracy.

He touts his credentials as an environmentalist, yet pushes bitcoin — a cryptocurrency that requires massive amounts of electricity from supercomputers to generate new coins, prompting most environmental advocates to loudly oppose it. And though he peppers his speeches, podcast appearances and campaign materials with invocations of the Democratic Party legacies of his uncle President John F. Kennedy and his father, Robert F. Kennedy, his relatives have distanced themselves from him and even denounced him. “He’s trading in on Camelot, celebrity, conspiracy theories and conflict for personal gain and fame,” Jack Schlossberg, President Kennedy’s grandson, said of his cousin in an Instagram video in July. “I’ve listened to him. I know him. I have no idea why anyone thinks he should be president. What I do know is, his candidacy is an embarrassment. ”Kennedy’s recent comments that COVID-19 could have been “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people — which he denies were antisemitic but concedes he should have worded more carefully — also drew a condemnation from his sister Kerry Kennedy.

The contradictions between what Kennedy says and his track record were nowhere more apparent than when he testified before a congressional committee in July at the invitation of Republican members. Anti-vaccine activists, some who work for Kennedy’s nonprofit group Children’s Health Defense, sat in the rows behind him, watching as he insisted “I have never been anti-vaxx. I have never told the public to avoid vaccination.” But that’s not true. Again and again, Kennedy has made his opposition to vaccines clear. In July, Kennedy said in a podcast interview that “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” and told FOX News that he still believes in the long-ago debunked idea that vaccines can cause autism.

In a 2021 podcast he urged people to “resist” CDC guidelines on when kids should get vaccines. “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated,” Kennedy said. That same year, in a video promoting an anti-vaccine sticker campaign by his nonprofit, Kennedy appeared onscreen next to one sticker that declared “IF YOU’RE NOT AN ANTI-VAXXER YOU AREN’T PAYING ATTENTION.” A close examination of Kennedy’s campaign finance filings shows that the anti-vaccine movement lies at the heart of his campaign.

Several of his campaign staff and consultants have worked for his anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, including Mary Holland, the group’s president on leave, campaign spokeswoman Stefanie Spear, and Zen Honeycutt, who hosted a show for the group’s TV channel, CHD TV. Children’s Health Defense currently has a lawsuit pending against a number of news organizations, among them The Associated Press, accusing them of violating antitrust laws by taking action to identify misinformation, including about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines.

The campaign paid KFP Consulting, a Texas-based company run by Del Bigtree, head of the anti-vaccine group ICAN, and a leading voice in the movement, more than $13,000 for communications consulting, the AP found. Bigtree appeared to still be working for the campaign last week, when an AP reporter saw him helping facilitate a Kennedy event in New York.

Kennedy also has received substantial support from activists who have spread misinformation about the coronavirus and vaccines, including Steve Kirsch, an entrepreneur who has falsely claimed COVID-19 vaccines kill more people than they save, chiropractors Patrick Flynn and Kevin Stillwagon, and others. Ty and Charlene Bollinger, who run an anti-vaccine business and who the AP has previously reported have had a financial relationship with Kennedy, gave more than $6,000.

The couple, along with Kennedy’s communication consultant Bigtree, were involved in hosting a rally near the Capitol on Jan. 6, and Ty Bollinger has said he was among the people who crowded at the Capitol doors in an attempt to get inside, though he said he did not enter. The couple is a part of the Children’s Health Defense lawsuit against AP and other media outlets.

American Values 2024, a super PAC supporting Kennedy, is run by close associates to Kennedy who have propped up anti-vaccine ideas — the former head of the New York chapter of Children’s Health Defense John Gilmore is its CEO and Kennedy’s publisher Tony Lyons is its co-chair. The Kennedy campaign did not return emails seeking comment about a number of questions, including how he can say he is not anti-vaccine given his record and his support from anti-vaccine activists. Kennedy’s run is also getting plenty of financial support from the right.

A super PAC supporting Kennedy’s presidential run, called Heal the Divide PAC, has deep ties to Republicans, F ederal Election Commission records show. The committee’s address is listed in the care of RTA Strategy, a campaign consulting firm that has been paid for its work to help elect Republicans including Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and the former Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker.

The PAC’s treasurer, who works for RTA Strategy, is Jason Boles, a past donor to Trump and many other Republicans who includes “MAGA” and “AmericaFirst” in his bio on the platform X, formerly known as Twitter. Kennedy denied knowing Boles or the Heal the Divide PAC when it came up at the congressional hearing, saying, “I’ve never heard of Mr. Boles, and I’ve never heard of that super PAC.” But video available online shows he was a guest speaker at a Heal the Divide event just two days earlier.

The video features a “Heal the Divide 2024” logo with clips of him speaking at length about plans to back the U.S. dollar with bitcoin and precious metals. Kennedy says that as president, he would fight for government honesty and transparency, heal the political divide, reverse economic decline, end war and preserve civil liberties. He has made freedom of speech a major part of his platform, arguing that the government’s communication with social media companies unfairly censors protected speech. Kennedy’s press office did not respond to several messages asking about his support from the far right.

It also did not respond to questions about whether his stance on bitcoin was at odds with being an environmentalist. Kennedy lists the environment as one of six top priorities on his campaign website and has spent many years speaking against pollution and climate change as an environmental lawyer. Yet he has made supporting the energy-intensive cryptocurrency bitcoin a key part of his platform. Bitcoin mining, the process of generating new coins, uses massive amounts of electricity — more than some entire countries use, said Scott Faber of the Environmental Working Group.

That’s because it works by tasking a network of supercomputers with solving complex mathematical puzzles — even as some other cryptocurrencies have adopted far more energy efficient mining methods. “No one who claims to be an environmentalist could support a digital asset that needlessly consumes more electricity than all Americans use to power the lights in our homes,” Faber said. “In fact, bitcoin produces more climate pollution than any other digital asset.” Despite the environmental downsides of bitcoin, some Democrats, including elected officials, have advocated for the currency. Kennedy, for his part, told a crowd at Bitcoin 2023 that environmentalists like himself “will continue to pressure you to improve.”

Online, he has promoted the argument that demand for bitcoin will boost investment in new renewable energy projects. Regardless, his financial disclosure documents show he has already personally invested between $100,001 and $250,000 in bitcoin, and he promised at Bitcoin 2023 that he wouldn’t let the environmental argument hinder the currency’s use. “As president, I will make sure that your right to hold and use bitcoin is inviolable,” he said. During the past several years, Kennedy has cultivated his ties to the far right. He has appeared on Infowars, the channel run by Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. He has granted interviews to Trump ally Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson.

After he headlined a stop on the ReAwaken America Tour, the Christian nationalist road show put together by former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, he was photographed backstage with Flynn, Charlene Bollinger and Trump ally Roger Stone. Those appearances have led to goodwill on the right, and he has found enthusiastic support among a segment of Trump’s base, with some suggesting him as a potential vice presidential pick.

At a July 1 rally in the tiny town of Pickens, South Carolina, Adrian Palashevsky – a small businessman who described himself as more of a “libertarian” than a Republican – posited a unity ticket, with Kennedy as his top pick for Trump’s VP. “I think they would get along just fine,” he said. “They’re both anti-establishment, and that’s why they’re under so much attack.” DeSantis, one of Trump’s Republican challengers, has also indulged in praise for the fringe candidate, saying in a recent interview that while he wouldn’t make Kennedy vice president, he would consider appointing him to one of the federal agencies that regulates vaccine safety and protects public health. “If you’re president, you know, sic him on the FDA if he’d be willing to serve, or sic him on CDC,” DeSantis said. Not everyone is buying the Kennedy mystique.

At the annual meeting of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials in New York a few weeks ago, Kennedy leaned heavily on his family legacy, mentioning his father’s alliance with labor leader Cesar Chavez and his uncle’s work in Latin American countries. But in his nearly 20-minute speech, he didn’t lay out any plan or policy proposals of his own, or talk about specific issues facing the Latino community. He spent most of his time telling a story about getting arrested with the Mexican American actor Edward Olmos in 2001, an attempt at relating with the community that disappointed both Republicans and Democrats in the audience.

Mario Ceballos, president of a PAC representing LGBTQ+ Latinos, said Kennedy’s speech — and the candidate’s conspiracy theory beliefs — saddened him. “When I was living in Mexico, Kennedy was an American president that my whole family respected,” Ceballos said. “And what he is presenting are esoteric, dangerous options that are actually going to hurt the same people that his father and uncle wanted to help.”

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