RFK Jr. Is Almost Nowhere to Be Found at His Own Job

Despite deadly disease outbreaks, a fractured dynamic among members of his staff, and myriad public health institutions being stripped of funds, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is “checked out.”

A lengthy New York Times report Sunday describes the extent to which the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, is detached from his colleagues and uninterested in the work his department is meant to handle.

HHS is a massive organization, tasked with designing policy to manage and improve the health of Americans. There are 13 divisions within it; some are well known, such as the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. Forty percent of the country receives health care from HHS through Medicare and Medicaid.

But Kennedy has apparently been coasting through work, even while he tries to strip Medicaid from Americans helping their disabled relatives. According to the Times, Kennedy usually arrives in the office at 10 a.m. after a morning workout and leaves at 4 p.m.—and that’s if he’s in D.C., which he often is not. He rarely speaks to people outside his close circle, and prefers small, closed-door meetings.

The heads of the 13 HHS divisions meet weekly on Tuesdays to discuss their work. The Times reports that Kennedy barely attended these discussions until February, and is now showing up once a month. Even when he deigns to appear, he often is more interested in scrolling on his phone than in the discussion, according to staffers interviewed by the Times. Several said he looked “checked out.”

Kennedy has also failed to lead during times of crisis. After two children died of measles in Texas in early 2025, Demetre Daskalakis, the head of HHS’s response team, requested a meeting with Kennedy. Daskalakis said he was turned down; he has since left the agency. Kennedy, meanwhile, went on to recommend measles patients up their vitamin intake instead of taking a tried-and-true vaccine.

Under Donald Trump, HHS has experienced a staffing crisis that Kennedy is doing little to fix. The president still doesn’t have a surgeon general—Trump is currently on his third nomination after the first two stalled. Acting directors are managing about half of 27 institutes at the National Institutes of Health. Marty Makary, the leader of the Food and Drug Administration, left the agency in May after disputes surrounding Trump’s embrace of flavored vapes.

Kennedy has been slow to plug gaps and has targeted career staff, per the Times. He personally fired CDC Director Susan Monarez 10 months ago after she reportedly refused to approve his wacko childhood vaccine schedule. Jay Bhattacharya, who already leads the NIH, has now been tasked with that massive job, as well.

About the only thing Kennedy remains interested in, besides flipping the food pyramid, is promoting his baseless anti-vaccine rhetoric. It’s a sad state of affairs at HHS, and one that should worry all Americans.

Republicans are trying their best to push the blame for the resurgence of the flesh-eating New World screwworm on former President Joe Biden—even though it was their current boss who cut funding for the monitoring program.

“Under the last administration with the massive movement under the open borders policy that the cartels etcetera, border security, that’s when it began to make its way back up toward America, hitting Mexico in early 2023, moving its way up through Mexico in 2024,” Agriculture Secretary Rollins said Monday morning on CNBC, claiming that Biden’s immigration policy was the direct cause of the screwworm reinfestation.

“This is another thing we can thank Joe Biden for,” Senator Roger Marshall told NewsMax. “That when millions of people came out of Central America, they brought this screwworm with them. It was on their pets, maybe on their flesh as well.”

This is pretty shameless, given Trump has been in office for over 500 days and specifically cut the program that handled this very problem.

“The Trump Admin cut funding for screwworm detection and fired 25% of staff responsible for tracking the disease,” Ohio Representative Shontel Brown wrote on X in response to Rollins. “I’m embarrassed for the Secretary that her only answer is to blame the administration that left office a year and a half ago.”

The return of the screwworm—first eradicated in 1966—has also thrown beef safety into limbo, as the screwworm’s presence could tighten the supply and raise already high prices even higher.

A federal judge on Monday blocked President Donald Trump’s exorbitant $100,000 H-1B visa fee.

In a 42-page ruling, Massachusetts District Judge Leo Sorokin ruled that the fee was an illegal tax on businesses and ordered it to be vacated.

Sorokin used the Supreme Court’s justification in its 2012 case National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, concerning fees imposed on Americans who did not sign up for the Affordable Care Act, to argue that the payment was a tax, not a penalty. In his majority opinion in Sebelius, Chief Justice John Roberts concluded that “if the concept of penalty means anything, it means punishment for an unlawful act or omission.”

“Here, the $100,000 payment requirement for all H-1B petitions does not aim to establish that hiring H-1B workers is illegal. The payment is not a penalty, just as the IRS fee in Sebelius was not, because it is not ‘punishment for an unlawful act or omission,’” Sorokin wrote.

Therefore, according to Sorokin, the fee should be considered a tax—which the president lacks the authority to levy without congressional approval. The government had tried to argue that the fee couldn’t be considered a tax, because its purpose was to decrease the number of H-1B applications altogether, not raise revenue. But Sorokin said that argument “falls short.”

“Purpose and effect are different. Moreover, every $100,000 payment made pursuant to the Policy does raise revenue,” he wrote.

The judge ordered that Trump’s illegal directive be “vacated in its entirety.”

The Trump administration announced a $100,000 fee for H1-B visas in September, placing the burden on employers to sponsor college-educated and specialized foreign workers to come to the United States on a temporary basis.

The Trump administration’s efforts to wind down the H1-B visa program is just another way that the president is kneecapping the economy for underbaked reasons that reek of white nationalism. Some research has estimated that the arrival of H1-B visa holders between 1990 and 2020 was responsible for 30 to 50 percent of all productivity growth in the U.S. economy during that period, resulting in wage growth for native workers.

This story has been updated.

One of the worst cryptocurrency scam artists is trying to get a pardon from President Trump.

Sam Bankman-Fried has officially filed with the Justice Department’s Pardon Attorney Office, Bloomberg reports. The co-founder of the cryptocurrency trading site FTX was convicted on fraud and money laundering charges in 2024 and is now serving a 25-year prison sentence.

Whether Trump will pardon Bankman-Fried is an interesting question. The one-time crypto baron dropped millions of dollars on the Democratic Party and various Democratic political campaigns and PACs, as well as a smaller amount of cash on Republicans. That might make it less likely for Trump to extend a pardon, although Trump has pardoned Democrats before, such as former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich and Representative Henry Cuellar.

Blagojevich was only able to get a pardon after extensively lobbying the president and conducting a slick PR campaign. Bankman-Fried seems to be trying the same strategy, giving a phone interview to Fox Business on Monday from prison and praising Trump’s Iran airstrikes In March. His real usefulness to Trump, however, is his cryptocurrency background. Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr. are making millions through their crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, which could make the president more forgiving of Bankman-Fried.

Last year, Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the founder of cryptocurrency exchange Binance. Zhao probably helped his own cause by helping to boost World Liberty Financial, as well as hiring people in Trump’s orbit to lobby for his own cause. Bankman-Fried now has to hope he has Trump’s attention to become one of the many white-collar criminals and fraudsters the president has let off the hook in his second term.

The FBI is interviewing former Wisconsin poll workers who helped to fuel President Donald Trump’s long-debunked claims of election fraud in 2020, Votebeat reported Monday

David Bolter, a poll worker whose claims about election fraud were included in Trump’s failed 2020 lawsuit seeking to overturn his election loss in Wisconsin, told Votebeat that FBI officials had arrived at his doorstep with questions about how local officials had handled the election.

In his affidavit, Bolter alleged that someone in Milwaukee’s absentee ballot counting facility had announced around midnight on Election Day that a “huge truckload of ballots” was going to be delivered. There has been no additional evidence of this claim, but it became central to some conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

The FBI also spoke to another 2020 poll worker, who Votebeat identified as Christine, in order to allow her to speak freely. Christine has also submitted an affidavit to Trump’s failed lawsuit claiming that she saw election workers continuing to count votes after she’d been told all of the votes were counted.

“I suspected wrongdoing, but I’m not saying that it actually happened,” she told Votebeat. “I’m just one lowly person that was working there.”

A nonpartisan audit of Wisconsin’s 2020 election found that the state’s elections were “safe and secure.” So what is the FBI hoping to find?

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said that the Trump administration’s efforts to revisit these long-debunked claims weren’t actually about uncovering anything new.

“This isn’t about the 2020 election, this is about the 2026 and 2028 elections,” he told Votebeat. “This is about intimidating election officials. This is about creating a stream of disinformation designed to delegitimize an election the president may believe he’s going to lose. This is designed by the president’s underlings to satisfy the unrealistic expectations of a president that still cannot comprehend that he lost an election that he definitely lost, and it’s incredibly destabilizing.”

The FBI has also reached out to several election officials in Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s largest city. It’s worth noting that the only people who appear to have plotted voter fraud in Wisconsin were members of Trump’s own team, who cooked up a fake electors plot to undermine the election results.