Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s younger brother scorned him for standing with President Donald Trump amid the GOP’s cuts of food assistance programs millions of Americans depend on, calling his stance a “betrayal” of the legacy of their father, Senator Robert F. Kennedy Sr.
“Of course, there is no way to know precisely what he would have thought,” Maxwell Taylor Kennedy wrote in an op-ed published in The Boston Globe. “But I do know what he cared about most deeply: the injustice of poverty in the richest nation in the world and our duty as citizens to make sure that no child goes to bed hungry.”
The younger Kennedy said his father, who would have turned 100 this year, “would have been appalled by the cruelty the Trump administration has directed toward America’s neediest.” He pointed to the government shutdown, when millions of Americans were at risk of losing Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits in November.
“It’s a betrayal of all that my father worked for,” said Kennedy, who advocated for expanding what was then called the Food Stamp Program. “And all those complicit in that betrayal have lowered themselves — not least my brother, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s secretary of health and human services, who knows my father’s legacy as well as anyone.”
Kennedy is not the only sibling to fire criticism at the health secretary. Earlier this year, his sister, Kerry Kennedy, criticized several conspiracy theories RFK Jr. has spread during his tenure in the Trump administration.
“I love Bobby and I find him incredibly charismatic. But I have said — and my other family members have been super clear about this — that we disagree again and again and again on the things that he’s said,” she said.
RFK Jr.’s cousin, Tatiana Schlossberg, revealed in a personal essay published Saturday in the New Yorker that she had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and criticized HHS federal research cuts she said could hurt other cancer patients.
RFK Jr., who has pushed to ”get soda pops off of the food stamp program” celebrated his father’s birthday in a post on Instagram featuring a photograph of the two of them.
In his op-ed, the health secretary’s brother blasted the Trump-loyal GOP for exhibiting “an almost Dickensian cruelty” by “zeroing out funding for the poor” in favor of tax cuts for the wealthy in the “Big, Beautiful Bill” passed over the summer.
“This is unacceptable,” he wrote. “And it is unacceptable, too, that my brother Bobby stands side by side with Donald Trump as these programs, particularly SNAP, are diminished. Preventing hunger is the primary duty of every public health official. You cannot Make America Healthy while denying food to our most vulnerable citizens.”