• Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is taking his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda on the road this week, stopping in Indiana Tuesday. While Kennedy has only had the job for two months, he’s already made major changes to the American public health system, from firing thousands of agency staff to digging in on debunked theories tying childhood vaccinations to an increase in autism diagnoses. Alice Miranda Ollstein, health care reporter for Politico, breaks down the worrying ripple effects of Kennedy’s healthcare overhaul.
• And in headlines: A federal judge told the Trump administration she wants to see some receipts detailing the ways it’s working to bring back a wrongly deported Maryland man, President Donald Trump doubled down on his desire to deport U.S. citizens to foreign gulags, and Trump also signed a presidential memorandum aimed at stopping undocumented immigrants from receiving benefits they already can’t get.

• Read Alice Miranda’s story – https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/13/abortions-cancer-in-firefighters-and-super-gonorrhea-rfk-jr-s-cuts-halt-data-collection-00284828
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TRANSCRIPT

Jane Coaston: It’s Wednesday, April 16th. I’m Jane Coaston and this is What a Day, the show that enjoys our occasional series, let’s listen to Republican legislators get booed by their own constituents. Today it’s Republican representative Brian Mast in Jupiter, Florida, attempting to defend Trump’s tariff regime. 

[clip of Brian Mast] [indistinct talking] That’s not a godly thing to say in the church. That’s a potty mouth in the Church. 

Jane Coaston: On today’s show, Trump doubles, triples, quadruples down on sending US citizens to foreign gulags. And the president signs a redundant memorandum barring undocumented immigrants from receiving benefits they already can’t get. But let’s start with public health. Remember that? The whole field of public health. This week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been on a tour across the country, taking his Make America Healthy Again agenda on the road. On Tuesday, he was in Indiana, where he joined the state’s Republican governor to announce multiple executive orders aimed at banning people who use the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, aka food stamps, from using their benefits to buy candy and soda. But he also addressed new data released Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that shows the rate of autism has increased here in the U.S. 

[clip of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] One out of 20 boys having autism, one out of 31 kids. And when I was in my generation today, the rate of autism is one in 10,000. And this is just one disease. Our whole, this whole generation of kids is damaged by chronic disease. 

Jane Coaston: The CDC’s report attributed the spike to increased awareness and better screening, a claim that Kennedy threw cold water on in a separate press release from HHS. He said, quote, “The increase in autism spectrum disorder prevalence cannot be solely attributed to the expansion of diagnoses to include higher-functioning children.” Since Kennedy took over the Department of Health and Human Services just two months ago, his term in office has been a study in, let’s say, contrasts. See, there’s the stuff that HHS does, really important stuff, like studying the transmission of sexually transmitted infections and collecting data on issues ranging from rates of sexual violence to cancer in firefighters. That’s the stuff Kennedy doesn’t seem to care about very much. Here he is speaking to CBS News’s chief medical correspondent, John LaPook last week, seemingly unaware that he suggested billions of dollars of cuts to vital research that would result in cuts to viral research. 

[clip of John LaPook] You proposed more than $11 billion in cuts to local and state programs addressing things like infectious disease, mental health, addiction, and childhood vaccination. Did you personally approve those cuts? 

[clip of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] I’m not familiar with those cuts. I you know I–

[clip of John LaPook] I mean there’s–

[clip of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] We’d have to go. We’d have to go. 

[clip of John LaPook] There’s like more than 50 pages of, you know, of cuts that I actually went through. 

[clip of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] The cuts were mainly DEI cuts, which the president ordered. 

[clip of John LaPook] There were a lot, but I’ll give you, for example, about $750,000 of a University of Michigan grant into adolescent diabetes was cut. Did you know that? 

[clip of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] I didn’t know that, and that’s something that we’ll look at. 

Jane Coaston: But of course, there are issues Kennedy seems to care a whole lot about, like say vaccines, or more specifically, fighting them. Under Kennedy’s watch, the National Institutes of Health is canceling research programs intended to find new vaccines for future pandemics. That’s according to the New York Times. And as we’ve discussed on the show before, he’s repeatedly tied childhood vaccinations to autism diagnoses, despite all of the evidence he, you, and pretty much everyone in America can access. He’s hired a discredited researcher who lost his medical license because of his efforts to cure autistic children with unproven treatments that obviously didn’t work. And in a cabinet meeting last week, Kennedy said this. 

[clip of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] We are going to know by September we’ve launched a massive testing and research effort that’s going to involve hundreds of scientists from around the world. By September we will know what has caused the autism epidemic and we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures. 

Jane Coaston: By September, that’s sure to be deeply researched and very, very objective. So, to talk more about RFK Jr. And all the ways he’s managed to reshape American public health in the span of just a few weeks, I spoke with Alice Miranda Olstein. She covers healthcare for Politico. Alice Miranda, welcome to What a Day. 

Alice Miranda Ollstein: Thank you, great to be here. 

Jane Coaston: So, RFK Junior is in his eighth week on the job. Yes. Just eight. He vowed that there’d be tough times at HHS, but he also said there’d loads of transparency on the changes he wanted to make. How is that going? 

Alice Miranda Ollstein: So I have been reporting on how all of these mass firings they’re carrying out, you know, eliminating tens of thousands of jobs. One of many things that is being impacted by all of that are the people who gather data on all kinds of public health problems. And so the concern that um both these workers and outside experts I interviewed expressed is that we’re just not gonna know going forward if various problems are getting better or worse, if things the administration is doing are hurting or helping. It really leaves us in the dark on so many things, on abortion, on STDs, on the level of lead in children’s blood and domestic violence, um firefighter’s cancer rates. Um. But also with all of these you know data and public health surveillance teams, there’s really a concern that this work just not happening going forward or happening at a very reduced level is going to make it a lot harder to get a clear picture of these issues we’re facing. 

Jane Coaston: Now, it might seem obvious, but why do we collect this data? Why do we need it and what do we use it for? 

Alice Miranda Ollstein: It’s really the bedrock of public health. For instance, one of the issues that came up in my reporting was that we have gonorrhea outbreaks that have evolved to be resistant to a lot of antibiotics. Um. That’s pretty scary. They’re known as super gonorrhea, not something we want to have. 

Jane Coaston: That’s a sentence no one wants to hear. Mm mm. 

Alice Miranda Ollstein: Nope um I tried to get Supergonorrhea in the headline, unfortunately was not able to do that. Um. But because of these cuts to the CDC’s lab in Atlanta, that lab and those folks were the ones crunching the data on where these outbreaks are happening, where they’re starting, how bad they are, where there are these pockets of um drug resistance, and that directs local public health departments about what to do about it, how to solve the problem. 

Jane Coaston: Let’s talk about measles. RFK Jr. is an infamous vaccine skeptic, critic, whatever it is you want to call it when you’re not into vaccines. He came into office just in time for seven outbreaks so far this year of measles, and at least two kids have died, the first deaths from measles in the U.S. in a decade. I’ve seen statements where he said the government should concentrate more on caring for kids who get measles and then other times he told parents to vaccinate their kids. Where’s he actually landing on this? 

Alice Miranda Ollstein: Yeah, the the message has been very mixed. Um and you know sometimes there’ll be an official statement that says one thing and then in an interview or an event that’s more off the cuff, it’ll be a very different message. And so I would say there hasn’t been like a full-throated uh promotion of vaccines. And I will say, in addition to the rhetoric, you are also having a resources issue. Vaccine clinics on the ground are closing because of these budget cuts. So it’s really both of those things in combination that have a lot of people concerned. 

Jane Coaston: How does the mixed messaging, especially from the people who are supposed to be the leading authority on health, muddle what people need to know when a disease like measles is spreading? 

Alice Miranda Ollstein: I mean, as we saw during COVID, even when the government is all on the same page on promoting vaccines, it’s really hard to get people to take them and to take it seriously. And so when you have the mixed message, that just gets so much harder. And measles is so infectious. Somebody who’s infected can be breathing in a room, leave that room, and then hours later somebody can go in that room and get infected. So, you know, the vaccine, um Public health officials and experts say is really the best bet, there’s been a lot of focus from the health secretary and people in his orbit about, you know, “natural,” quote unquote, defenses. There’s been promotion of certain vitamins and supplements and people and hospitals on the ground have had to treat kids for being given too much of these vitamins and supplements. It’s actually can be toxic. Um. And so it’s not only not helping prevent measles, it’s you know actually hurting in some circumstances. 

Jane Coaston: Now, R.F.K. Jr. gunned for this job by promising to make America healthy again, and he wants to take on toxins in food, like artificial dyes and color, stuff that liberals and progressives have been calling for for a long time, if people remember, our first lady Michelle Obama talked about this 15, 20 years ago, and the right made fun of her but bygones, bygones, whatever. How much traction is he actually getting on that part of his agenda, especially since the Trump administration is also pushing mass deregulation, the kind of thing that would stop you from being able to take artificial dyes and colors out of food?

Alice Miranda Ollstein: One, a lot of what he has called for is not within the purview of the job he has um in terms of chemicals and and the way food is produced. So a lot that is under the agriculture department, which he is not in charge of. A lot of the stuff he doesn’t even have the power to do on his own. Um. Two, I think you’re very right to bring up how the politics of this have just shifted wildly over the last few years. I mean, you mentioned the reaction to Michelle Obama. You know I think the right didn’t just make fun of her, they were they were outraged. 

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Alice Miranda Ollstein: They were like, don’t tell me what to do, you know this is nanny state, and now that’s sort of flipped and these concerns that have sort of historically been associated with the left about eating organic and getting chemicals out of your clothing and your food and etc. are really being embraced by the right. 

Jane Coaston: Again, we’re just eight weeks into R.F.K. Junior leading this agency. Let’s start with the short term. What are some immediate impacts of his tenure we should watch out for? 

Alice Miranda Ollstein: RFK Jr. has made a lot of comments about, we’re gonna do more with less, we’re not getting rid of things, we’re just folding it in and consolidating. But the federal workers I talked to told me, no one is carrying on this work. They had basically 24 hours and then they were locked out of their emails and their offices. There wasn’t time to train anyone else. And even if there were, you know these are people with decades of experience on their one thing that they focus on. You can’t just hand that off to somebody who hasn’t been working on that. So you know, for instance, they really decimated the team that tracks um IVF in the country. They track every single fertility clinic and what their success rates of pregnancy is. And that’s you know the source I talked to who was fired you know she said, this is really a consumer protection issue. You know we’re putting this data out there that helps families choose you know which clinic they’re going to go to. And that work they fear is just not going to happen going forward. 

Jane Coaston: And what about the long term? Maybe things we might not notice right away or things that might not have effects until years after Trump is out of office. 

Alice Miranda Ollstein: I’ve been thinking a lot about what of these changes can be sort of easily reversed in the future under a future administration and which things are you know irreparable. The current climate has deterred a lot of people from going into civil service, um going into government work. And so I think the ability to you know recruit really well-qualified um people in the future could be really impacted by all of this. 

Jane Coaston:  And there have been so many cuts to the university systems and labs that are raising the next generation of scientists and analysts. You talked about the population that’s gotten fired being generally older. It seems like we’re losing the next-generation and the generation after that of new researchers. 

Alice Miranda Ollstein: I’ve absolutely heard that concern and you’re seeing universities in other countries doing a lot of aggressive recruiting right now. And so, you know, if you were looking around at the landscape now, it would make sense to want to go to somewhere in Europe or Canada. So we are, it seems, experiencing a brain drain where, you know, both ends of the pipeline, we’re losing people. 

Jane Coaston: Alice, thank you so much for joining me. 

Alice Miranda Ollstein: Great to be here. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Alice Miranda Ollstein, healthcare reporter for Politico. We’ll link to her work in our show notes. We’ll get to more of the news in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube so you can see my facial expressions when I have to discuss RFK Junior, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]

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Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today. 

[sung] Headlines. 

[clip of Jennifer Vasquez Sura] I will not stop fighting until I see my husband alive. Kilmar, if you can hear me, stay strong. God hasn’t forgotten about you. 

Jane Coaston: On Tuesday, the wife of a Maryland man mistakenly deported to El Salvador, pleaded with the Trump administration to stop playing political games with the life of her husband, Kilmar Abrego Garcia. The administration deported him to El Salvador last month, despite a court order shielding him from that. The court worried Salvadoran gangs would harm him if he entered the country. Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, addressed a crowd just before her husband’s latest hearing. 

[clip of Jennifer Vasquez Sura] He is a father, a son, a brother, and a proud member of Casa and Smart Union member who has dedicated himself to make our family’s American dream reality. That dream was shattered on March 12th when he was abducted and disappeared by the United States government in front of our five-year-old child. 

Jane Coaston: At the hearing, a federal judge called out the White House for defying a clear Supreme Court order to attempt to bring Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. U. S. District Judge Paula Xinis says she’ll order administration officials to provide sworn testimony about what they’re doing to make that happen. And now it’s not just the courts pushing the issue. Maryland Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen says he’s taking matters into his own hands by checking in on Abrego Garcia himself. Here’s Van Hollens speaking to a DC Fox affiliate. 

[clip of Senator Chris Van Hollen] I think it’s important that we go to El Salvador to show his family, his wife, his mother, his brother, his kids, um that we’re not giving up on this. 

Jane Coaston: Van Hollen said he will fly out this morning. The Trump administration says it’s serious about wanting to deport American citizens who commit crimes. This comes after El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, met with President Trump at the White House Monday. The two discussed recent deportations of migrants to a Salvadoran prison. Trump told Bukele, quote, “the home-growns are next,” those home-growns being people born in the U.S., you know, citizens. And in case you thought this was just another drop in the crazy things Trump says but won’t actually do bucket, on Tuesday, Trump doubled down during an interview with Fox Noticias. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] I call them homegrown criminals. 

[clip of unnamed Fox news reporter] Yes.

[clip of President Donald Trump] I mean the–

[clip of unnamed Fox news reporter] The homegrowns. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] The ones that grew up and–

[clip of unnamed Fox news reporter] Yup. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] Something went wrong and they hit people over the head with a baseball bat. We have, and push people into subways just before the train gets there, like you see happening sometimes. We are looking into it and we wanna do it. I would love to do that. 

Jane Coaston: This raises complex questions like, can he do that? And is that even legal? Well, even Trump’s administration is shaky on this. Here’s White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt during a press briefing Tuesday. 

[clip of unnamed journalist] Deporting American citizens to Central American prisons. Is it legal or do you need to change the law to do it? 

[clip of Karoline Leavitt] Well, it’s another question that the president has raised. It’s a legal question that the president is looking into. 

Jane Coaston: That is a book report ass answer. And apparently the nation’s top lawyer is maybe looking into it or maybe not. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi was asked to weigh in during a Fox News interview Monday night. 

[clip of unnamed Fox News reporter Jesse] Is that legal to do? Is that something you’re allowed to do? 

[clip of U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi] Well Jesse, these are Americans who he is saying who have committed the most heinous crimes in our country and crime is going to decrease dramatically because he has given us a directive to make America safe again. These people need to be locked up as long as they can, as long as the law allows. We’re not going to let them go anywhere and if we have to build more prisons in our country, we will do it. 

Jane Coaston: Notably, she did not answer the question. Many legal experts have said that deporting American citizens would be unconstitutional, but hey, what do they know? 

[clip of Karoline Leavitt] These taxpayer-funded benefits should be only for eligible taxpayers. 

Jane Coaston: President Trump signed a presidential memorandum aimed at stopping undocumented immigrants from receiving social security benefits, even though existing law already bars them from receiving those benefits because this is what we call political theater. Leavitt previewed the directive in her press briefing Tuesday. 

[clip of Karoline Leavitt] The memorandum will direct the administration to ensure ineligible aliens are not receiving funds from the Social Security Act programs. It will expand the Social security administration’s fraud prosecutor program to at least 50 U.S. Attorney offices and establishes a Medicare and Medicaid fraud prosecution program in 15 U. S. Attorney offices. 

Jane Coaston: Last week, the administration also stripped thousands of immigrants of their social security numbers. It’s part of a push to declare them financially dead, and, at least per the New York Times, get some immigrants to self-deport. For the record, the Social Security Administration does allow some non-citizens to receive benefits, but only those who are here lawfully. And even then, they have to meet other qualifications, but we’ll say it just one more time for the cheap seats, just in case someone from the Trump administration happens to be listening. Undocumented immigrants do not qualify for Social Security benefits, and there is no widespread evidence they are obtaining them. Yes, I am talking to you, Karoline Leavitt. Immigrants do pay into Social Security, though. According to the Tax Research Group, Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, undocumented immigrants paid an estimated $25 billion in Social Security taxes in 2022, even though they can’t receive those benefits in return. But, by Leavitt’s own words, maybe they should. If she really believes, and I quote, “these taxpayer-funded benefits should be only for eligible taxpayers,” food for thought. Trump is ramping up his administration’s already heated beef with Harvard University. In a Truth Social post Tuesday, Trump said Harvard, the country’s oldest university, should have its tax-exempt status revoked, potentially costing billions of dollars. The day prior, the Education Department froze more than $2 billion in grants to Harvard, after the university refused to comply with a list of demands in order to secure billions in federal funding. The White House says their pressure campaign is all about eradicating diversity efforts. And rooting out rampant anti-Semitism it says is tied to protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. And on that point, the president also wants Harvard to say sorry. That’s what press secretary Leavitt said during her Tuesday briefing. 

[clip of Karoline Leavitt] When it comes to Harvard, as I said, the president has been quite clear, they must follow federal law. He also wants to see Harvard apologize, and Harvard should apologize um for the egregious anti-Semitism that took place on their college campus against Jewish American students. 

Jane Coaston: Harvard insisted Monday it’s already taken steps to address anti-Semitism on campus. And the administration’s demands were more about the government inserting itself into university operations. Late Monday, a group of universities filed a federal lawsuit over the Department of Energy’s cuts to research grants. Among the schools suing are Ivy League schools like Brown University and Princeton University. But it wasn’t just Ivies. Major public universities like the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois also joined. The new suit was filed in the same federal court that blocked Trump’s cuts to medical research grants from the National Institutes of Health. More of this, please. And that’s the news. One more thing. Last week, I asked for your stories of how you’re handling the tariff madness. You know, the not very reciprocal, reciprocal tariffs placed on more than 75 countries, except those tariffs were postponed, but now we have higher tariffs on China, except for cell phones and computers. But wait, those might get tariffed too. Or maybe? It’s been confusing for us to cover, and I imagine it would be even more so for everyday people just trying to run businesses or figure out what to do with their finances. And well, I was right, because we got a ton of responses from listeners and readers of our What a Day newsletter, like this email from a listener named Maggie. She works in fashion, and she said that her company tried moving production out of China back in November to countries like India, Vietnam, and Cambodia. She said, quote, “You can imagine our absolute meltdown when we found tariffs coming down on every single country. Not only that, there’s only so much we could move. Plenty of our production is still tied up in China with over 100% tariffs in place.” She added, “In the end, I’m worried for my job and my industry as a whole, which is already struggling to recoup what we lost from COVID.” We also heard from a listener who said they are newly disabled and now require a wheelchair. They wrote that trying to get the assistive devices they need is tough at any time, but especially now. They said, quote, “these are time sensitive items and the pressure I feel to delay due to economic uncertainty is fierce.” And it’s not just people who run businesses or might need special equipment who are feeling the effects of the last few weeks of economic madness. What happens to the economy affects every single one of us. Another listener wrote to us to say that she and her husband were both recently laid off before the election. She goes on to say, quote “for five months we were unable to find a job in our area even with the advanced training and expertise we have. He has a master’s degree and I have a PhD. The job market is that hard due to the uncertainty of this administration’s decisions. I literally had an interview that was canceled because, quote, ‘they were not certain of the future.'” Thank you so much to those of you who reached out to us. And if you’d like to share how tariffs in the economy are impacting you and your family, you can write to us at whataday@crooked.com. [music break]

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Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, think about the elephants at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park and how they responded to a 5.2 magnitude earthquake, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading and not just about how the elephants all gathered in a circle to protect the babies and younger elephants, a defensive maneuver familiar to animals called bunching, like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston, and this show really understands anyone who feels the need to bunch right now. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producers are Raven Yamamoto and Emily Fohr. Our producer is Michell Eloy. We had production help today from Shauna Lee, Johanna Case, Joseph Dutra, and Greg Walters. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our executive producer is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]

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