After ten months of Trump 2.0’s “health” policy, the health of the American public has only deteriorated. Resurgent (vaccine-preventable) disease, widespread care facility closures, mass layoffs of health care workers, and Medicaid cuts stand in direct contrast to the MAHA movement’s promises 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 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 the very corporate hegemons he claims to oppose, Kennedy has staffed the department with various corporate revolvers, and forced former staffers out of government and into the arms of Big Pharma.
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, 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 Abbott Laboratories in 2022 for its key role in creating an infant formula crisis that left parents struggling to feed their sickened kids.
Given this recent history of helping 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 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 for a seemingly boundless number of scandals, several of which stem from their work simultaneously advising 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 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 for McKinsey for eight years before she joined Elon Musk’s DOGE, where she reportedly helped decimate the activities of the National Science Foundation, while also gaining access to huge swaths of American’s (ostensibly) confidential health information. She’s not 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 in medicine or health care. What O’Neill does have is close connections to far-right tech billionaire Peter Thiel. For the past decade, O’Neill worked 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 off of the health care–related investments of Thiel’s firms, even while pushing 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.
Other Thiel connections are littered throughout HHS. Clark Minor, the department’s chief information officer, 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 in support from entities like Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Defense, and the Israeli military.” The firm’s practices have simultaneously “sparked numerous protests in multiple countries.”
Palantir has been a huge winner of the Trump era, with more than $100 million 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 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 and reproductive rights and bodily autonomy, while pushing a devastating public-health agenda that aims to gut Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.
Who does that benefit? Pharma companies. No shocker, considering that Accountable.US found that organizations affiliated with Project 2025 accepted at least $530,000 from Big Pharma’s main industry association, PhRMA, in 2022 alone.
Other interests that win big in Project 2025’s constructed worldview are white Christian nationalists, 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 that has been described as a “Christian Nationalist political lobby” by advocates for separation of church and state. FRC often propagates junk science to attack and denigrate queer and trans-identifying people, while also weaponizing pseudoscience and misinformation to target the reproductive autonomy of Americans nationwide. Guernsey is now a senior adviser in the Office of the Secretary 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 pointedly that “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
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