RFK Jr. Surprised to Learn He'd Cut a Grant For Youth Diabetes Research

Earlier this month, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary and noted anti-vaccine crackpot Robert Kennedy Jr. admitted that thousands of laid-off workers had to be reinstated due to "mistakes" made by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency.

Musk's henchmen's cuts to the agency's many health programs are likely to be devastating. But during his first TV interview as HHS secretary with CBS News, Kennedy appeared bafflingly uninformed about the programs that are being shut down.

After CBS chief medical correspondent Jon LaPook asked him if he had personally approved a proposed $11 billion cut to local and state programs, including efforts to fight addiction and foster childhood vaccination, Kennedy appeared to be dumbfounded.

"No, I'm not familiar with those cuts," he said.

"We'd have to go... the cuts were mainly DEI cuts, which the president ordered," Kennedy added while visibly struggling to maintain his composure, referring to Trump's anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion executive initiative.

LaPook pulled out a specific example to illustrate his point: a $750,000 grant to the University of Michigan, which had been focused on fighting adolescent diabetes, was on the chopping block, the journalist informed Kennedy.

"I didn't know that, and that's something that we'll look at," a baffled Kennedy replied.

The grant, which was cut on March 21, had been funding an investigation of the role of circulating meta-inflammatory monocytes, which are associated with low-grade inflammation experienced by obese people and type 2 diabetes patients, in building insulin resistance in adolescents.

Insulin resistance occurs when cells in the muscles, fat, and liver, don't respond as expected to insulin. This can lead to a buildup of blood glucose levels, which in the long term can lead to prediabetes — higher than normal blood sugar levels that aren't high enough for a diabetes diagnosis — or type 2 diabetes.

In other words, considering that one in three American adults in the United States have prediabetes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it's an incredibly important line of work in the medical field.

But now that DOGE has been ravaging HHS grants, those efforts could soon grind to a halt in the absence of oversight.

During the CBS interview, Kennedy once again said that DOGE was likely making plenty of mistakes behind the scenes.

"I just, I'm not familiar with that particular study," he told LaPook, referring to the University of Michigan grant. "But there's a number of studies that were cut that came to our attention and that did not deserve to be cut, and we reinstated them."

The conversation highlights DOGE's indiscriminate budget cuts, which have slashed countless important and lifesaving programs across agencies. Even agency leads appear to be in the dark about what's being cut, shedding light on the Trump administration's careless and disorderly approach to reducing the government's budget.

Meanwhile, Kennedy, a figurehead in the anti-vaccine movement, has attempted to save face by conceding that vaccines are the "most effective way to prevent the spread of measles" — something the world has known for decades.

Nonetheless, he has continued to support iffy alternative treatments, including the use of Vitamin A, which has already led to parents accidentally sending their kids to the hospital.

Despite decades of overwhelming scientific evidence that vaccines are safe and effective, Kennedy once again argued that they somehow weren't.

"I always said during my campaign and every part, every public statement I've made: I'm not gonna take people's vaccines away from them," he told CBS this week. "What I'm gonna do is make sure that we have good science so that people can make an informed choice."

So far, three people, including two children, have died of measles during the ongoing outbreak in Texas, despite the widespread availability of a highly effective vaccine.

By cutting research into insulin resistance and diabetes, many more lives could be at risk. In 2022, just over 100,000 Americans died of diabetes, making it the eighth leading cause of death in the country.

More on diabetes: Woman's Own Stem Cells Appear to Reverse Her Type 1 Diabetes in First-Ever Procedure

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