“There’s going to be pushback,” said Donald Trump Jr. after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was tapped as his choice for Secretary of Health and Human Services. “There’s going to be a lot of money spent. It will all be artificial, but that doesn’t mean we won’t have to deal with it because that’s how Washington, DC works.”
The president’s son was referring to the massive lobbying effort, in which “Big Pharma is going to spend money like you wouldn’t believe,” to prevent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from becoming Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services.
The effects of the pharmaceutical industry’s well-funded campaign were already apparent from the tone of last week’s confirmation hearings. The objective is clear: peel away just enough Republican senators to keep Kennedy from taking control at HHS and implementing a Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda that represents an existential threat to the health establishment status quo.
Big Pharma, Big Food, and Big Ag and their lobbyists on K Street are dead set on preserving that lucrative status quo at all costs. It is a measure of President Trump’s bold audacity this time around that he gives less consideration to offending Big Pharma and the ire of their lobbyists than he does to the intensity of his own voters’ desire for sweeping reforms. Not only would RFK Jr. potentially slam shut the revolving-door capture of government agencies by the very industries they ostensibly regulate, but he also knows where the bodies are buried. The potential exposure of the corrupt process by which “science” has been invoked as a magic mantra to undermine public health in the name of protecting it is rightly regarded by the existing players as a catastrophic threat.
The Senate GOP presents K Street with a target-rich environment. The pharmaceutical and health-device manufacturing industries alone have spent upwards of $400 million in just the year 2024 lobbying Congress (about twice as much as a decade ago), and industry contributions to individual Republican Senators will likely exceed $5 million in this cycle. A recent analysis from The National Pulse showed Senators on the Finance Committee, which will first assess the Kennedy nomination, received more than $6.7 million in contributions from Big Pharma between 2019 and 2024, with the majority going to committee Republicans. And, as Kennedy pointed out, Democratic Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were among the top lifetime recipients of Big Pharma money on the other side of the aisle. In applying the screws to deny Kennedy’s confirmation, those industries—as well as Big Food and Big Agra—will be wanting to cash in their chips and get a return on their long-term investment. […]
— Read More: amgreatness.com
