Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spent a portion of his speech on Friday to Food and Drug Administration staff deriding their past decisions, at one point saying that the agency “became a sock puppet” for the industries it was meant to regulate.
NBC News obtained a recording of Kennedy’s address, his first joint appearance with the new FDA commissioner, Dr. Marty Makary. The event was meant to welcome both men and highlight the agency’s priorities moving forward.
Those priorities include determining the causes of autism and reforming the FDA’s “GRAS” pathway, which allows food companies to add ingredients without prior approval.
Kennedy claimed that the FDA’s proximity to the food industry has resulted in the agency’s failure to address food contamination.
“Like every agency,” he said, the FDA “at one point really became a sock puppet for the industry it was supposed to regulate.”
Kennedy has long alleged that the federal health agencies are too close with the industries they regulate. It’s not an uncommon critique of the FDA — in 2021, for example, Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., denounced President Joe Biden’s FDA pick citing close ties to the pharmaceutical industry. Some have also taken issue with the fact that the FDA’s review of products, like drugs, is funded by user fees from industry.
Kennedy, however, has suggested that overly cozy relationships with vaccine makers led to lax oversight of vaccines. In a 2015 interview with Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group Kennedy founded, he called the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “a subsidiary of the pharmaceutical industry.” He also claimed that “virtually all the institutions that are supposed to stand between a rapacious industry and vulnerable children have been compromised.”
Just before the last election, Kennedy wrote on X, “If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags.”
On Friday, Kennedy told FDA staff that the “deep state is real.”
“President Trump always talks about the deep state and the media disparages him and says that he is paranoid or a conspiracy theorist,” Kennedy said. “But the deep state is real and it’s not George Soros or Bill Gates and a bunch of nefarious individuals sitting together in a room and plotting the destruction of humanity. It’s more insidious than that. It’s institutional pressures.”
One FDA staffer who watched Kennedy’s speech said: “Sadly, the rhetoric is likely to continue for his entire tenure because he believes that we’re all sellouts for industry,” adding, “in reality, many industries dislike the level of safety that we hold submissions to.”
Another staffer said that at least one person walked out of the room when Kennedy mentioned the “deep state.”
Both staffers were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
The speech came less than two weeks after the administration decided to lay off about 3,500 FDA employees as well as thousands of workers at other health agencies. The layoffs included several of the FDA’s top vaccine regulators.
Kennedy didn’t address the layoffs.
During the speech, he also encouraged agency staffers to speak out against their managers.
“If your boss is making a mistake, if they’re approving something that shouldn’t be approved, we want to hear it,” he said.
“We want to honor whistleblowers in this administration,” he continued. “I want to really empower you.”
The FDA directs all media inquiries to the Department of Health and Human Services. A spokesperson for HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
