HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins visit an elementary school in Alexandria, Virginia, to highlight efforts to improve nutrition to combat obesity and chronic disease.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Good to see y'all, my partner, he's crying.
00:06Hi everybody, great to be here. I know this is our first event together,
00:11although we have been in constant conversation on the importance of making America healthy again.
00:17Secretary Kennedy will talk a little bit about that too, but just wanted to run through a couple of quick stats,
00:23then you can add on and then we'll open it up for questions.
00:26But again, what a joy to be here at the Ferdinand T. Day School.
00:30We've met with their leaders, we've met with the incredible people who are running their school nutrition programs.
00:35We actually got to meet with the kids, as you can hear, that are right behind you.
00:39And it's just been a really, really great day here in Virginia.
00:43As you all know, approximately 1 in 5 kiddos and 2 in 5 adults in the United States currently have obesity.
00:5240% of school-age children and adolescents in the U.S. have at least one chronic health condition.
00:5840% of our school-age kids and adolescents have at least one chronic health condition.
01:05Pre-diabetes now affects 1 in 3 children aged 12 to 19.
01:10This chronic disease crisis is the greatest contributor to the United States health care costs,
01:16comprising 90% of our expenditures, according to the CDC.
01:21Very little research so far, this is about to change,
01:25very little research goes to understanding the root cause of disease,
01:28specifically in the relation between food and chronic disease.
01:3380% of medical schools to this day, 80% do not require their students in medical school to take a nutrition class.
01:40Of course, I am the Secretary of Agriculture.
01:43My focus are our farmers and our ranchers.
01:46I believe so sincerely that our farmers are a massive part of the solution of what I just outlined.
01:52Our farmers, ranchers, and producers dedicate their lives to growing the safest, most abundant food supply in the world,
01:59and now we need to make sure that our kiddos, especially in programs like this, have the opportunity to have access to that food.
02:06The final thing I'll say is, again, kudos to the incredible team at this school.
02:11I mean, look at the beautiful setup behind us.
02:13There's just so much I think we can do together when we're working across the federal government,
02:18with our state governors, with our local officials, and with the leaders in our schools.
02:22Thank you all.
02:24This is really a historic collaboration.
02:26It's the first time that HHS has actively collaborated with USDA to change the quality of nutrition to America's school children.
02:37And I want to thank Governor Youngton, who's not here today, for his leadership in the MAHA agenda.
02:45I was in Louisa County about two weeks ago and went to a school,
02:51and they've pioneered the bans of cell phones in school, which is also enforced in this school.
02:57And violence in that school decreased 100 percent.
03:02And we've seen the same thing across the country with the food exchange.
03:06Emotional behavior, mental illness also declines, but more than anything, academic performance improves dramatically.
03:16And we heard testimony from some of the teachers and administrators in this school
03:22about the direct correlation between providing healthy foods to these children,
03:29nutritious foods, other than the food-like substances that were once ubiquitous in all of our schools.
03:38Give them real food, whole food, farm-fresh food,
03:42and it has a dramatic impact on academic performance and on socialization among the students.
03:50As Secretary Raul said, we have a chronic disease crisis in our country.
03:57When my uncle was president, 3 percent of American kids had chronic disease.
04:01Today, it's 60 percent.
04:03When my uncle was president, I was a 10-year-old boy.
04:07We spend zero on chronic disease in this country.
04:10Today, we spend $1.3 trillion a year.
04:13And our kids, the sickest kids in the world, 38 percent of our children are diabetic or pre-diabetic.
04:19That was unknown when I was a kid.
04:23Seventy-four percent of our kids cannot qualify for military service,
04:27so this is a national security issue as well.
04:31We know a lot about many things, but we know very, very little about the link,
04:37about the exposures that are causing the chronic disease epidemic.
04:41And right now, we are in the middle of a major reorganization and a redirectorship
04:48so that we will be studying and learning what is causing the chronic disease epidemic.
04:54And then FDA and CDC and USDA are going to do their jobs to eliminate their exposures.
05:02The last thing I'd say is that right now, Governor Young has to take this extraordinary step
05:09of banning food diets in the schools, seven food diets.
05:14But we are encouraging governors from all over the country to apply for SNAP waivers
05:21that will allow the SNAP program, the food stamp program, to exclude soda drinks
05:28and some other substances that we know are dangerous to our children.
05:32We believe in choice.
05:34Every American who wants to eat a donut ought to be able to eat it or drink a Coke.
05:39But the federal taxpayers should not be paying the boys and our children.
05:43And we're going to end that, and we're going to end it very quickly.
05:47Great. We'll take a couple questions before we wrap up. Yes, ma'am.
05:51Can the FDA ensure food safety now that so many jobs have been cut?
05:55And for you, Secretary Rawlings, you've spoken about better nutrition for children.
05:59How can schools—there were recently millions of dollars in cuts in a cooperative program
06:04between local farms and schools.
06:06Is that money coming back? Is something similar coming back?
06:09Go ahead.
06:11In terms of FDA's capacity, the cuts in all of our agencies are not affecting science,
06:17so the science jobs aren't preserved.
06:20The frontline enforcement jobs and health delivery jobs are preserved.
06:25HHS was a bloated agency, and it was not doing its job.
06:33During the past four years, we saw a 38 percent rise in its budget,
06:38and health care continued to decline.
06:40So we're reorganizing HHS so it can do its intended job, which is to make America healthier.
06:47Yeah, and I appreciate the question on the food programs.
06:51There's been a lot of confusion about what has been cut.
06:54The first thing I'll say is that we are realigning, as all of our agencies are,
06:58the USDA, we're realigning the agency around what works well, what's important.
07:02Almost 80 percent of the USDA budget of $280 billion, I think,
07:06is actually in the food and nutrition program space.
07:09It's actually not even in the farming and ranching space.
07:13And so as we look at that, and under the last four years, under President Biden,
07:18it was almost a 40 percent increase, tracking close to where HHS expanded as well.
07:23So what we are pulling back now is the COVID-era programs that were affirmed
07:29under the last administration that were always meant to come back.
07:33And a lot of the money that we're pulling back is money that is – all of it, actually –
07:38has not been spent or committed.
07:40It is future money, again, under COVID-era programs.
07:43Every child in America that is hungry will have good food to feed them.
07:48And if they don't, then we will immediately realign to ensure that they do.
07:52And the other thing I'd like to say is that the programs like today that are so inspiring
07:57and watching these incredible kids, a lot of them from food-challenged families,
08:02that this is what we should be supporting at USDA.
08:06This is why we're realigning, so that the status quo that has been bloated by 40 percent
08:11in the last four years, that that's not going to work anymore.
08:14That instead we need to realign around leaders like are part of this school
08:18that have completely rethought this and have done such an amazing job
08:21in moving farm-fresh produce as much as is possible into the schools
08:26and into these kids' snacks and lunches.
08:29Sir, I know you said that you want to talk about kids' health.
08:32The CDC program that monitors lead surveillance for kids was cut.
08:36Can you explain the rationale for cutting a program like that
08:39and why that's not an essential service?
08:42There were some programs that were cut that are being reinstated,
08:46and I believe that that's one of them.
08:48Interesting. Do you know why it was cut to begin with?
08:51All of these programs, all of the CDC, NIH, and CDC were not doing their jobs,
09:01and there was tremendous redundancy.
09:03For example, we had over 100 communications departments.
09:08We have 40 procurement departments.
09:10We had dozens of IT departments and dozens of HR departments.
09:15Most of the cuts are to those administrative sections,
09:19which are now consolidating or eliminating redundancies.
09:23We're streamlining the agencies.
09:25We're going to make it work for public health, make it work for the American people.
09:30In the course of that, there were a number of instances where studies
09:34that should not have been cut were cut and reinstated them.
09:38Personnel that should not have been cut were cut or reinstated them,
09:42and that was always the plan.
09:45Part of the doge, we talked about this from the beginning,
09:49is we're going to do 80% cuts, but 20% of those are going to have to be reinstalled
09:55because we'll make mistakes.
09:57One of the things that President Trump has said is that if we make mistakes,
10:02we're going to admit it, and we're going to remedy it.
10:05That's one of the mistakes.
10:07Secretary Rallings, has the administration outlined any sort of bailout plans
10:11for farmers and wider deterrents?
10:13Do you want to see the CCC fund replenished?
10:15Do you feel like there's urgency to that?
10:17Are you communicating that to congressional leaders?
10:19Well, the first and most important thing about the tariff announcement yesterday
10:23is the president is effectuating his vision alongside his cabinet,
10:27who's there to deploy on realigning the American economy about what works
10:31for all Americans and bringing prosperity back to every corner of this country.
10:35There's no doubt, and as we saw in the last Trump administration under Sonny Perdue,
10:40who was the Secretary of Agriculture then, that there were a good number of our farmers
10:45and ranchers, especially in our row crops, that were at least immediately felt
10:51some economic consequence of those tariff decisions.
10:54As a result, the USDA then set up a program that sent money out to those farmers
11:00once they had proved that they had some economic consequences.
11:04So as of today, we don't know what those consequences will look like.
11:08In fact, it may be months before we really know, especially in the row crops.
11:12They are all being planted right now. This is planting season.
11:15We probably won't know until the summer or even early fall.
11:18Having said all of that, the answer is yes.
11:21We are setting up the infrastructure that if, in fact, we have some economic consequences
11:26in the short term to our farmers and perhaps our ranchers,
11:29that we will have programs in place to solve the problem.
11:32You guys have both been really, really critical of ultra-processed foods,
11:35but as you're aware, much of what is served as the tens of billions of dollars
11:39we spend on school food programs is considered ultra-processed.
11:42You've praised what the states are doing.
11:44Are there any plans to update federal rules, or what are you looking at federally
11:48to try to tackle additives, dyes, processing in these meal programs?
11:52We are in the middle right now of very, very energetically revising the nutrition guidelines.
12:01The nutrition guidelines that were worked out during the Biden administration
12:05and that were supposed to be implemented on January 20th,
12:09there's a 453-page document that looked like it was in order for the processing industry.
12:15And we are going to come up with a document that is simple
12:20and lets people know with great clarity what kind of foods their children need to eat,
12:27what kind of foods they can eat, and what's good for them, what's good nutrition.
12:31And we are collaborating with each other to make sure we get that out as quickly as possible.
12:37The other piece of that I'd like to say is that the idea of our founders' constitutional vision
12:43of the states being the laboratories of democracy, of real innovation happening there,
12:48that the federal government doesn't have the answer, nor should it, to every question,
12:52begs the larger policy discussion that we're already having with our governors across the country,
12:58both blue and red states.
13:00I am constantly in contact with several of the Democratic governors
13:04who really want to take a lead on this and have a great relationship with them.
13:07Of course, Governor Yunkin and his Ag Secretary is in the back, Matt Lohr.
13:11I mean, they have been wonderful.
13:12You were just with Governor Morrissey in West Virginia just a couple of days ago.
13:16So I think that the way we should all be thinking about this is as a partnership
13:20between the federal government, the states as the laboratories of innovation,
13:23local leaders, and then our school leaders.
13:26And I think once you see that, and I've seen this firsthand over many years,
13:29the states begin to compete with one another.
13:32And I think that the result of that will be, alongside us with the dietary guidelines
13:37and what we're doing at the federal level through both of our agencies,
13:40I think you'll see a new day in terms of how we think about nutrition and programs
13:45and how we move that out into the country.
13:47Thank you, guys.
13:48We've got to go.
13:50Thank you so much.
13:52They are subject to the tariffs.
13:57As far as I know, we're still working through all of the details.
14:01But I think as the numbers have come down on eggs,
14:04the bottom line is it doesn't become as important.
14:07Well, it draws out the people who are writing the guidelines for conflicts of interest.
14:11And the panel that's writing it will have no conflicts of interest.
14:15Are they writing it now?
14:16Yes.
14:17You kept the entire LIHEAP team.