Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faced intense questioning from the Senate Appropriations Committee on Tuesday as he defended the deep cuts to his department the Trump administration is requesting in its fiscal year 2026 budget proposal.
The secretary sat for his third congressional budget hearing in the past week, with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle bringing up concerns over how the cuts and pauses in funding grants will impact their states.
The full committee was in attendance, and while some Republicans on the panel sought to reframe the budget request as rooting out waste, fraud and abuse, others echoed concerns raised by Democrats about funding cuts to biomedical research and low-income programs.
Here are three takeaways from Kennedy’s Senate hearing:
Research funding concerns
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), acting as chair of the hearing, voiced concerns on maintaining funding for U.S. biomedical research in her opening statement.
“This committee wants to work with you on improving HHS so that the agency can move more efficiently and fund the basic science,” Capito said. “I’m concerned that our science, our country, is falling behind in biomedical research, and this should be a concern for all — for those all of us who want to make investments in biomedical research. Investing in that has proven to save lives while exponentially strengthening our economy.”
Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) said the cuts to National Institutes of Health (NIH) research that have been requested would “cede our leadership in biomedical research to China.”
President Trump’s budget request asks for an $18 billion cut to NIH’s funding, arguing the agency has “grown too big and unfocused” as well as citing its involvement in gain-of-function research and studies on transgender youth.
In his opening remarks to the committee, Kennedy said HHS would fund “cutting-edge research at the NIH while cutting risky or nonessential studies.”
When confronted by Democrats about some cuts, Kennedy at times questioned whether those cuts even existed, at one point accusing Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, of knowingly lying.
In a heated exchange, Murray noted that thousands of NIH grants have been cut along with hundreds of trials.
“Senator, I don’t trust your information, with all due respect,” Kennedy shot back. “You told me two, what, three days ago or four days ago we had cut a clinical trial in your state. And what you turned out — what you said turned out to be completely untrue and you knew it was untrue because you corresponded with Jay Bhattacharya.”
Bhattacharya is the director of NIH.
Kennedy similarly denied the truthfulness of research cuts when questioned by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) on funding for ALS research. Durbin cited the case of attorney Brian Wallach, married to the senator’s former press secretary, Sandra Abrevaya, who suffers from ALS and asked Kennedy funding for research into the disease was cut by 40 percent in the proposed budget.
“I don’t know about those cuts. I will have to — I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know if those were part of the RIFs, in which case the people were not fired, but they were put on administrative leave,” Kennedy responded, referring to reductions in force, or layoffs.
Low-income energy program cuts draw attention
Trump’s budget request also asks for a $4 billion reduction to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which it characterized as “unnecessary because States have policies preventing utility disconnection for low-income households.”
The federally funded program provides assistance in reducing the cost of energy bills, like heating and cooling; energy crises; weatherization; and other associated energy costs. According to the Administration for Children & Families, about 5 million households received heating assistance in fiscal year 2023.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chair of the Appropriations Committee, called LIHEAP “absolutely vital” for thousands of households and asked Kennedy for his assistance in avoiding any elimination of the program.
Citing his family’s history of supporting low-cost energy for communities and feedback he’d recently received from Navajo President Buu Nygren, Kennedy said he understood the importance of LIHEAP but conveyed that the Trump administration believes its policies will save so much money as to make LIHEAP redundant.
“President Trump’s rationale and OMB’s rationale is that President Trump’s energy policies are going to lower the cost of energy so that everybody will get lower cost heating oil, and in that case, this program would simply be another subsidy to the fossil fuel industry,” he said.
Expected scrutiny on farming practices
Mississippi Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R) brought up reports suggesting the Make America Healthy Again Commission was planning to release a report that would “unfairly target American agriculture, modern farming practices and the crop protection tools that roughly 2 percent of our population relies on to help feed the remaining 98 percent.”
A report from the MAHA commission is expected to be released Thursday, and agricultural groups have grown anxious that it will blame modern farming practices of harming Americans.
The American Farm Bureau Federation released a statement this week saying, “We rely on credible science to guide our practices. We welcome efforts to improve health outcomes in America but recommendations to limit farming practices based on unproven theories could have severe unintended consequences.”
As Brownfield Ag News reported, American Soybean Association Treasurer Alan Meadows said he heard rumors the MAHA report may include “some negative implications towards seed oils, and then some negative implications toward pesticides. Possibly naming a couple herbicides in particular that have been proven safe time and time again.”
“I trust these reports are not true, and that this initial assessment, prepared over the course of three months, is not intended to serve any hidden agendas,” Hyde-Smith told Kennedy on Tuesday. “Hidden agendas such as suggesting that products that have undergone the EPA pesticide approval process, which is widely considered to have the most rigorous standards in the world, are unsafe.”
Kennedy insisted the rumors regarding the MAHA commission’s report are “just simply wrong.”
“The drafts I’ve seen, there’s not a single word in them that should worry the American farmer,” he added.
Still, Hyde-Smith implored Kennedy to make sure that the MAHA Commission doesn’t issue “reports suggesting, without substantial facts and evidence, that our government got things terribly wrong,” pointing to the substantive federal legislation that regulates products like insecticide, fungicide and rodenticide.
“You have to be 100 percent certain, and the MAHA Commission needs to be able to refute years and years of scientific evidence and thousands of studies from credible entities before you start suggesting an initial assessment that the methods in which the farmers provide our food is unsafe,” she stated.
