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MEET RFK’S CORPORATE UNDERLINGS  
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Julian Scoffield and Toni Aguilar Rosenthal
October 24, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ Several top officials in the Department of Health and Human
Services worked for the very corporate interests their boss claims to
oppose. _

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. prepares to
depart a Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission meeting at the
Department of Health and Human Services headquarters in Washington,
September 9, 2025. , Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images

 

After ten months of Trump 2.0’s “health” policy, the health of
the American public has only deteriorated. Resurgent
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(vaccine-preventable) disease, widespread care facility closures
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mass layoffs
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of health care workers, and Medicaid
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cuts stand in direct contrast to the MAHA
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movement’s promises
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of lower costs and improved access to services.

But the administration isn’t just failing to improve our physical
and financial well-being—its assault on public-health infrastructure
threatens to exacerbate the very corporate capture it dubiously
purported to root out.

RFK Jr.’s claims
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of using his power as secretary of health and human services (HHS) to
push a staunch anti-corporatist agenda have been directly contradicted
by the reality of his tenure. In addition to pursuing a deregulatory
agenda that serves
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the very corporate hegemons he claims to oppose, Kennedy has staffed
the department with various corporate revolvers, and forced former
staffers out of government
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and into the arms of Big Pharma
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With MAHA ostensibly at the wheel, the revolving door that has plagued
HHS for decades just keeps spinning.

WHO DOES RFK JR. TRUST TO MAKE AMERICA HEALTHY?

Take, for example, Kyle Diamantas. Reportedly Donald Trump Jr.’s
hunting buddy
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Diamantas is now the deputy commissioner for human foods at the Food
and Drug Administration. Prior to joining the government, Diamantas
was a corporate lawyer who defended
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Abbott Laboratories in 2022 for its key role in creating an infant
formula crisis
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that left parents struggling
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to feed their sickened
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kids.

Given this recent history of helping
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Abbott evade consequences for endangering American children, Diamantas
embodies everything the MAHA movement rhetorically opposes. And yet
Kennedy has entrusted him with oversight of approximately 80 percent
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of the American food supply.

Diamantas, unfortunately, is not the only one. Also staffing RFK
Jr.’s HHS are multiple alumni of the massive global consultancy
McKinsey & Co., which is notorious
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seemingly boundless number
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of scandals
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several of which stem from their work
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simultaneously advising
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Big Pharma and its regulators. In doing so, McKinsey helped fuel the
opioid epidemic by encouraging Purdue Pharma to “turbocharge” its
sales of OxyContin. McKinsey at one point suggested
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paying a rebate to health companies for policyholders who died from
prescription opiate overdoses.

Former McKinsey staffers are now making themselves a home at the
department. For instance, senior adviser Rachel Riley worked
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years before she joined Elon Musk’s DOGE, where she reportedly
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helped decimate the activities of the National Science Foundation,
while also gaining access to huge swaths
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(ostensibly) confidential health information. She’s not
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the only one.

McKinsey isn’t the only notorious company with former staffers
walking the halls of HHS. Jim O’Neill is the deputy secretary of the
Department of Health and Human Services, and comes to the role having
had no apparent training
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in medicine or health care. What O’Neill does have is close
connections
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to far-right tech billionaire Peter Thiel. For the past decade,
O’Neill worked
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for Thiel-founded investment firms and as CEO of the Thiel Foundation.
Despite his lack of actual medical or health care–related
experience, O’Neill does have a documented history of profiting
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the health care–related investments
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of Thiel’s firms, even while pushing
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dangerous, misleading, deregulatory drug regimes that would harm
vulnerable patients while benefiting Big Pharma’s bottom lines.

O’Neill’s views were summarized in a speech he gave in 2014 at a
biotech conference in which he argued, “We should reform FDA so that
it is approving drugs after their sponsors have demonstrated safety,
and let people start using them at their own risk … Let’s prove
efficacy after they’ve been legalized.” O’Neill “has also
called for paying organ donors and setting up libertarian societies at
sea—and has said he was surprised to discover that FDA regulators
actually enjoy science and like working to fight disease,” as
reported by STAT News
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Other Thiel connections are littered throughout HHS. Clark Minor, the
department’s chief information officer
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came to the role directly from Palantir, Thiel’s notorious Big
Brother–like defense contractor and surveillance company.
Palantir’s aggressive surveillance tactics have garnered hundreds of
millions of dollars
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in support from entities like Immigration and Customs Enforcement
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Department of Defense
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and the Israeli military
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The firm’s practices have simultaneously “sparked numerous
protests [[link removed]] in multiple
countries
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Palantir has been a huge winner of the Trump era, with more than $100
million
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in contracts awarded to the company in just the first five months of
the administration. Of the contracts administered in the
administration’s apparent efforts to compile a far-reaching data
book of Americans, there are several across HHS, which has prompted
sweeping privacy concerns
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about what both Trump and the corporation itself might be empowered to
do with the data they compile.

This corporatist mindset has taken hold at HHS. A number of top
officials were affiliated with Project 2025, whose proposals for the
nation’s health policy apparatus include attacking queer
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and reproductive
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rights and bodily autonomy
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while pushing a devastating
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public-health agenda that aims to gut
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Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.

Who does that benefit? Pharma companies
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No shocker, considering that Accountable.US found that organizations
affiliated with Project 2025 accepted at least $530,000
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from Big Pharma’s main industry association
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PhRMA, in 2022 alone.

Other interests that win big in Project 2025’s constructed worldview
are white Christian nationalists
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who now can count on fellow extremist organization alumni across HHS.
Andrew Guernsey, for example is a named contributor in Project 2025,
and also an alum of the Family Research Council, a Southern Poverty
Law Center–designated hate group
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that has been described
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as a “Christian Nationalist political lobby” by advocates for
separation of church and state. FRC often propagates
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junk science to attack and denigrate queer and trans-identifying
people, while also weaponizing pseudoscience and misinformation to
target
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the reproductive autonomy of Americans nationwide. Guernsey is now
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at HHS.

The Trump administration’s populist rhetoric about breaking
corporate power in health care rings hollow against the emptiness of
their staffing decisions. Despite his public vilification of
pharmaceutical companies and regulatory capture, Kennedy has
surrounded himself with advisers whose careers have been deeply
enmeshed with corporate interests. This contradiction is more than
just political hypocrisy—it is a serious threat to public-health
governance.

Earlier this year, the CDC’s former director of the National Center
for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases resigned, noting
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“no CDC subject matter expert from my Center has ever briefed the
Secretary.” That’s a damning indictment of how scientific
expertise is being pushed aside in favor of professionally conflicted,
politically loyal outsiders. Though MAHA may talk a tough game on
corporate power, they ultimately recycle the same corrosive politics
that hollow out public institutions while leaving corporate power
untouched.

Julian Scoffield is a research assistant at the Revolving Door
Project.

Toni Aguilar Rosenthal is a researcher at the Revolving Door Project

_The American Prospect_ is devoted to promoting informed discussion
on public policy from a progressive perspective. In print and online,
the _Prospect_ brings a narrative, journalistic approach to complex
issues, addressing the policy alternatives and the politics necessary
to create good legislation. We help to dispel myths, challenge
conventional wisdom, and expand the dialogue.

* RFK jr.
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* Health Policy
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* Project 2025
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