Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faced sharp questions on Wednesday from two Democratic senators over official Health and Human Services social media videos and a Trump administration drug-pricing plan that they said could leave patients paying more.
During a Senate Finance Committee hearing on President Trump’s budget request, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and New Hampshire Sen. Maggie Hassan homed in on HHS clips that featured Kennedy alongside musician Kid Rock. One video showed the two men working out to rock music. Another showed them drinking milk while sitting in a water-filled tub. Hassan called the posts vanity projects and asked Kennedy whether the president knew about what she described as a self-promotion campaign carried out with official HHS resources. Kennedy said he did not know about a number of the videos and added that he had not discussed the issue with Trump.
The exchanges landed because the hearing was not only about social media. It also turned into a fight over the administration’s drug-pricing push, including the Trump Rx website and exemptions from the president’s 100 percent tariffs. Warren said drugmakers listing brand-name medicines on the site receive tariff exemptions and warned that there is “a more than one in four chance” that Trump’s discount is actually a price hike. Kennedy said the exemptions are limited to manufacturers producing their drugs in the United States and that the administration plans to disclose the terms of the agreements while withholding proprietary information or trade secrets.
Warren pressed Kennedy on whether he had signed off on the deals, saying, “Did you sign off on these sweetheart deals for Big Pharma, or was this all President Trump’s idea?” Kennedy raised his voice in response and said, “You have the power to make this deal yourself,” before adding, “Why don’t you do that? We did this because you refused to do it.” The back-and-forth grew more pointed as Warren said Americans are getting crushed by healthcare costs and accused Trump and Kennedy of making the problem worse.
The hearing showed how two politically potent fights are now colliding for the health secretary: the use of public agency channels for messages that critics see as self-promotion, and the administration’s effort to frame drug pricing as a battle against Big Pharma. For Kennedy, the immediate question is not whether the videos or the tariff deals will stay in the headlines, but whether he can keep both controversies from defining his tenure at Health and Human Services. Warren left little doubt about where she stood, telling him the American public deserves better.
