‘Which is it?’ RFK Jr. waffles on cuts to lead poisoning prevention efforts

“We have a team in Milwaukee,” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testified to senators in a hearing on Tuesday.

He was speaking about a lead exposure crisis in the public schools there. The city health department had requested support from experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to address it. “We’re giving laboratory support to the analytics in Milwaukee and we’re working with the health department in Milwaukee,” Kennedy added.

But Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin, from Wisconsin, had a different story. “There are no staff on the ground deployed to Milwaukee to address the lead exposure of children in schools,” she said. Six schools in the city have had to close because of lead, she said, displacing 1,800 students.

So is there a team of federal lead experts in Milwaukee or not?

“There is no team in Milwaukee,” Milwaukee Health Commissioner Mike Totoraitis tells NPR. “We had a single [federal] staff person come to Milwaukee for a brief period to help validate a machine, but that was separate from the formal request that we had for a small team to actually come to Milwaukee for our Milwaukee Public Schools investigation and ongoing support there.”

Totoraitis says Secretary Kennedy may have been misinformed.

The contradictions about this program that were on display on Capitol Hill Tuesday are emblematic of Kennedy’s approach to the health agencies. He speaks passionately about the health of children and the threats of environmental toxins to Americans’ health, but he’s struggled to explain specific actions his agency has taken to downsize and restructure even in those areas that he says are his priority.

Fired staff, but the program’s ‘continuing’

Lead is a neurotoxin that is common in older buildings, especially in paint and pipes. It can cause developmental problems in children.

On April 1, the staff of the CDC’s Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program was fired as part of the agency’s reduction in force. The program included epidemiologists, statisticians and advisors who specialized in lead poisoning — from detecting the source of exposure to planning an effective response.

At an event a few days after that, an ABC News reporter asked Kennedy about that lead team being cut. “There were some programs that were cuts that are being reinstated. I believe that that’s one of those,” he said.

Not so, CDC staff that had worked on that team told NPR, as none of them had heard anything about being reinstated. Kennedy’s own communications staff at HHS also told ABC, “The personnel for that current division, of how it exists now, are not being reinstated. The work will continue elsewhere at HHS.”

Last week in a congressional budget hearing, Kennedy was asked about the cuts by Baldwin. “Do you intend to eliminate this branch at CDC?” she asked.

Kennedy responded, “No, we do not.” He also said he thought lead poisoning in children was an “extremely significant concern.”

On Tuesday, Kennedy appeared before a different Senate committee, and Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., asked Kennedy to clarify what was going on. “As far as we can tell, staff has not yet been hired, and I’ve seen no statements reversing your decision to eliminate the program.” 

So, Reed said, “Which is it?”

Kennedy responded: “We are continuing to fund the program.” He later added, “my understanding is that program is continuing,” and he offered to talk to Reed after the hearing to “find out what the details are.”

NPR asked HHS whether any of the firings for the CDC staff that had worked on that team had been revoked. In a statement, HHS responded: “As HHS finalizes its detailed reorganization plans, the Department will be looking into all strategic programs and priorities for the Secretary and the nation. The work of this program will continue.”

HHS did not answer a follow-up question to clarify whether that means rehiring staff or doing the work with contractors or something else.

HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard wrote, “CDC is assisting with validating new lab instrumentation used for environmental lead testing” at the request of the Milwaukee Health Department.

Kennedy said throughout his testimony before three different congressional panels that he cannot speak in detail about the reorganization because of ongoing litigation. He has previously said that CDC had “mission creep” and will only address infectious diseases going forward.

Kennedy intends to open a new agency called the Administration for a Healthy America — AHA — to work on chronic diseases, mental health, and other health issues, but details of the timeline for when it will be active and who will staff it have not been made public.

“You can’t just slash funding, fire everyone, slap a slogan on a new agency and say that work will continue,” Baldwin told Kennedy in the hearing. “Your decision to fire staff and eliminate offices is endangering children, including thousands of children in Milwaukee. If you have a proposal to make these programs work better, present it and justify it.”

Milwaukee says it still needs support

Totoraitis, Milwaukee’s health commissioner, says it’s strange that the local lead response has been the center of this national story about the restructuring of federal health agencies.

“I see this crisis, unfortunately, as this canary in the coal mine of what is being dismantled and what could potentially become really catastrophic for our country,” he says.

At this point, several school-aged children have been found to have high levels of lead in their blood, which has been traced back to schools. In the past, the health department has dealt with lead poisoning happening in residential homes. “This is a huge pivot for our department to have to now be investigating schools,” he says. “The district has over 140 school buildings that all have some varying levels of lead paint hazards.”

They wanted CDC expertise to help manage this crisis and had worked for months on a formal request for CDC staff support, he says.

“They were going to send that team to Milwaukee to help us with the investigation, screening, data management,” he says. Once the federal staff was all laid off, the request was formally denied, he explains, “because they didn’t have any subject matter experts within the entire CDC to support the childhood lead investigation that we were doing.”

Totoraitis says the public school lead crisis in his city hasn’t stopped, and now his local team is scrambling to figure out how to manage without the expert support from CDC.

Have a tip? NPR’s Selena Simmons-Duffin can be contacted through encrypted communications at selena.02 on Signal.

NPR’s Yuki Noguchi contributed to this report.