RFK Jr. Melts Down in Fiery Screed After NY Times Report on Him Being ‘Checked Out’ of His Job

AP Photo/Alex Brandon

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. erupted late Wednesday, following a New York Times report which outlined his “minimal engagement” with many aspects of his job.

In a fiery post on X, Kennedy lashed out at Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg over an in-depth piece calling out the secretary’s work ethic and interest level in his job.

“Sheryl, Your article exemplifies the biased reporting we have come to expect from you and @nytimes,” Kennedy wrote. “It was unfair, inimical, and inaccurate. All one needs to refute your argument is to glance at my publicly available calendar and to review my unprecedented list of accomplishments on a wide range of issues, all of which I drove. You evidently never undertook these foundational due diligences. Why let facts obscure a good story?”

The Times piece paints a picture of a man who is hardly burning the midnight oil.

“When he is in town, he exercises at his gym before work, then usually arrives at about 10 a.m. and leaves by 4 p.m., his colleagues say,” Stolberg wrote. “He spends much of his day in closed-door meetings, according to those who work with him, and has little direct engagement with his staff.

“Every Tuesday at 10:30 a.m., the chiefs of the department’s 13 operating divisions gather in the secretary’s suite to update leadership on their activities. At the outset of his tenure, Mr. Kennedy was rarely there, either virtually or in person, according to three people familiar with his schedule. Since Mr. Klomp’s elevation, he now shows up once a month. But when he does attend, he often appears disengaged and spends the time scrolling on his phone, according to people in attendance. Several described him as ‘checked out.'”

Stolberg added that according to multiple colleagues, Kennedy is “is single-mindedly focused on his top priorities, including food recommendations and pesticide exposures, and hunting for evidence to support his long-held beliefs that vaccines are harmful.”

Kennedy responded harshly to the report:

“You fault me for missing a couple of monthly counselor meetings. However, I meet one-on-one with my counselors every day to decide policy and strategy. We schedule the monthly meetings to give the divisions a chance to keep each other informed about HHS-wide policies with which I’m already intimately familiar. Had you read my calendar, you would have seen that I have back-to-back meetings all day, every day, with both career and political staff, with my counselors and with outside stakeholders, interspersed with press conferences and other policy announcements.

“I am knowledgeable and active on every issue in every division of my department, and I always make the final decisions. I meet with the principals at FDA, NIH, CDC, and my senior counselor every morning, something, I’m told, is unprecedented in HHS history. I try to get out of the office between 4:30 and 6:00 PM, so that I can spend three hours, in quiet, responding to emails. I normally work until 11 PM every night, mostly on phone calls to staff.

“In order to prove your preconceived case for my disengagement, you quote anonymous employees, some of whom I fired or who quit to avoid being fired. You also deceptively quote HHS employees without identifying whether they were among those I fired, thereby depriving your readers of the opportunity to make an independent judgment about their credibility.

“I came into this job to change the culture of a broken agency that has presided over the worst decline in public health in American history. Of course I fired people—lots of them! It’s an easy task for even the laziest journalist, to comb that flotsam and jetsam for malevolence toward the Trump administration. And of course, this species of journalist will always be able to find disgruntled individuals among the 70,000 employees of the Department from whom to cherry pick “facts” to flesh out a preordained hit piece. All that is required for this brand of journalism is the ethical elasticity that you seem to have in spades. You had a preconceived thesis, and you set out to prove it. This is a widely accepted technique in journalism today, but I grew up in an era when it would not have been tolerated by the New York Times.

In a statement, the Times stood fully behind the piece.

“The Times set out to examine Secretary Kennedy’s leadership and management style in light of numerous vacancies within the Department of Health and Human Services and concerns internally about his detachment from key issues and officials,” the Times said. “The secretary declined an interview request and did not address detailed questions before publication about his approach to running the department. This article is based on conversations with a dozen people who have worked directly with Mr. Kennedy during his tenure as secretary. We are confident in our reporting.”

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