Senator Murray Slams RFK Jr. for Endorsing Cuts to Critical Programs Families Rely on to Fund Trump’s Wars Abroad

RFK Jr. on Trump budget request to spend money on war instead of child care: "It's not my department."

ICYMI : Senator Murray on President Trump's FY27 Budget Request

***WATCH: Senator Murray's full questioning***

Washington, D.C. - Today,-at a Senate Appropriations Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Subcommittee hearing on the FY27 budget request for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)-U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), Vice Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, questioned HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Trump's proposal to slash funding for programs families count on to help fund Trump's massive half trillion dollar increase in war funding.

[CUTTING HHS PROGRAMS TO FUND WAR]

Senator Murray began by grilling RFK Jr. on the president's proposed budget slashing funding for NIH, substance use and mental health, and other key programs while doing nothing to help families afford child care or the basics.

MURRAY: Mr. Secretary, I don't think it's any secret that you and I disagree on a lot of things. But I think we might actually agree that our taxpayer dollars should be spent here at home, not on wars abroad.

That's not what the president thinks. He made clear that just before his budget was released, he said, "We're fighting wars. We can't take care of day care." And he backed it up with the numbers in this budget: his budget increases war funding by half a trillion dollars but he does not increase child care funding by a penny. And it actually slashes funding for preschool programs by $315 million.

Now, I know you don't get to decide defense spending. But I remember our first meeting when you told me that you supported expanding child care access.

So, I wanted to ask you today, as families' everyday costs are getting higher and higher, do you think we should be spending money on foreign wars instead of making child care more affordable for people here at home?

KENNEDY: Senator, do you really want me to defend the Iran war right now? Is that what you want me to spend my time doing?

MURRAY: I'm asking -

KENNEDY: Because I can. But I'd rather talk about health.

MURRAY: I'm asking you, personally, whether you think we should be spending more on foreign wars or on child care?

KENNEDY: I mean, the Democratic party for the last 20 years has said Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, and they have kicked that down the road.

MURRAY: Well, I don't think you are here to defend that. I'm just asking you what happened to childcare in this budget?

KENNEDY: Okay, let's talk about childcare then instead of the war. One of the few agencies-

MURRAY: Well, what's happening-Mr. Secretary just so it's clear, the reason this budget and appropriations is going to be so hard to write, is that the president is requesting $1.5 trillion in funding for defense which cuts our nondefense incredibly.

KENNEDY: It's not my department.

MURRAY: So, we here are not able to help our families because of the president's request. So that's why we are asking about this.

KENNEDY: We're asking about this because we have a $39 trillion debt that somebody else ran up, not this president.

MURRAY: Well let's put this in perspective, I think this is important: the president spent more on bombs in just the first week of the war in Iran than we spend in an entire year for parents to afford child care. And I will just say for all of us out here struggling with this, and the people we see struggling, we need child care in this country. And we have to make choices when we make our budget, and the budget that is presented to us makes the choice of a war rather than helping our families here at home. And I think that's important for us to understand from the president.

Now meanwhile, while this budget bankrolls Trump's war agenda, it is also cutting crucial, lifesaving health investments. It slashes NIH funding by more than five billion dollars, which would mean delayed cures, it means cancelled studies, it means no hope for patients who are fighting for their lives. The president seems to be comfortable increasing his war budget by 100 times that amount.

So I just want to ask you, did you push back on the NIH cuts to the president?

KENNEDY: On?

MURRAY: On the NIH cuts, did you push back to the president and the White House about cutting that?

KENNEDY: As I said, long before the war, we were told we need to tighten our belt at this agency. I said before, nobody in the agency wants to cut these programs.

MURRAY: But your budget does.

KENNEDY: If you end up funding the programs, I'll spend the money. It's Congress's choice about whether to do it or not. It's not my choice. We gave you a proposed budget that does what the president wants, which is to have broad cuts across the agency.

MURRAY: My question to you actually was did you push back on the president when he said he wanted to cut NIH? Did you push back in any meeting?

KENNEDY: You want me to tell you why I think those cuts are justified at NIH?

MURRAY: I would like to hear your rationale.

KENNEDY: We spend-we are providing now at NIH almost 80% of the biomedical research on Earth. A lot of the money there was wasted. And I can read you the kind of studies-the insane studies that NIH was doing before I got there. We're now-

MURRAY: Can you? What I am hearing is that women's health is being decimated. I'm hearing that a lot of the people who are in clinical trials being decimated. You just throw out, "we are cutting waste," and I don't know what you consider waste.

KENNEDY: Oh well, let me give you some examples of waste.

MURRAY: At NIH.

KENNEDY: Yeah, at NIH. $800,000 to the Medical College of Wisconsin to study cardiometabolic impact of gender affirming hormone therapy on transmasculine adults. $650,000 to Georgia State University, an intersectional approach linking minority stressors experienced by transgender and gender diverse adults to alcohol and drug use, comorbid mental and physical health outcomes. None of the-I have got hundreds of these.

MURRAY: Do you?

KENNEDY: None of them developed a drug. None of them did research that told us the cause of a disease.

MURRAY: I noticed you're focusing on gender identity. I know there is a debate in this country, but boy, you are picking on an agency that funds research that finds cures every day.

There are families, there are doctors, there's providers who are counting on getting the answers to this research. And so to me, cutting NIH by $5 billion just seems to be cutting our families out, cutting hope out, cutting medical research out.

We are known in the world for our medical research. And to me, devastating cuts like this mean that we are cutting hope for the future. So you and I disagree on that priority.

[CLOSING COMMENTS]

MURRAY: And my time is about up.

And I just have to say, we have measles and whooping cough ripping through communities. We have got trusted vaccines that have been undermined. We have cancer and other disease trials that are being upended, we have patients being left without options, researchers having to pay expenses out of their own pockets, I hear this from them directly. We have grants being frozen, turned on and off. You actually cancelled more than half a billion dollars in cutting edge vaccine research, only to fund a dangerous, unethical [Hep B] vaccine study, and redirected funding from state-of-the-art vaccine development to replace it with your handpicked vaccine project that uses technology from the 1950s.

So the workforce has been gutted. We are seeing cancelling of billions of dollars in substance use, mental health. We see you pausing $5 billion in public health funding, and terminating grants in blue states only.

So I just have to say here loud and clear, this is hurting public health, it is hurting our families, it is hurting our research, it's hurting the future of the country.

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