In a speech broadcast to the Food and Drug Administration’s Maryland campus on Friday morning, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. introduced himself as the nation’s health secretary with a meandering speech touching on everything from birds of prey to pollution in Lake Erie to the C.I.A.
Mr. Kennedy told the agency staff members, in the throes of losing 20 percent of their work force under his overhaul of the Health and Human Services Department, to boldly avoid the impulse to protect the corporations they regulate.
The layoffs, voluntary departures and cutbacks in funding have already decimated divisions that govern oversight of tobacco, the drug approval process, testing of cow’s milk and cheese for avian flu, and food safety that monitors and protects consumers from food-borne illnesses.
In his remarks on Friday, Mr. Kennedy suggested that the reason the agency did not approve “alternative medicines” was because of its subservience to well-heeled corporations. He has previously accused the F.D.A. of suppressing raw milk, ivermectin and stem cell treatments. Agency veterans have argued that alternative remedies often fail to pass the standards for safety and efficacy.
He urged the staff to resist the temptation to serve a small group of wealthy companies at the cost of public health. “We want to break away from this so we can make our kids healthy,” he said, according to a video and transcript of his speech that was shared with The New York Times.
At another point, he said, “the deep state is real,” a pejorative reference to the sprawling federal bureaucracy that President Trump blamed as an obstacle to achieving his goals in his first term.
