RFK Jr. hearing live updates: Trump’s pick to head HHS faces bipartisan skepticism
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(WASHINGTON)– Donald Trump has promised he’d let Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “go wild” on health, food and medicine as head of the Department of Health and Human Services.
He now faces two separate confirmation grillings over his controversial views — on everything from vaccines to abortion — that have both Republicans and Democrats raising concerns.
He’s appearing Wednesday before the Senate Finance Committee and then on Thursday before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
Caroline Kennedy urges senators to reject RFK’s nominatio
Caroline Kennedy, RFK Jr.’s cousin, wrote a letter to lawmakers warning she believed he is “unqualified” for the role.
She called him a “predator,” shared disturbing details of his alleged behavior with animals and accused him of being “addicted to attention and power.”
“The American health care system, for all its flaws, is the envy of the world. Its doctors and nurses, researchers, scientists, and caregivers are the most dedicated people I know. Every day, they give their lives to heal and save others. They deserve better than Bobby Kennedy – and so do the rest of us. I urge the Senate to reject his nomination,” she concluded.
Kennedy set for grilling on vaccine views, food guidelines and more
Kennedy is sure to be asked about his past comments questioning vaccine science and the food industry.
In private meetings with senators, Kennedy has been telling senators that he’s not “anti-vaccine,” but rather that he wants more study, according to two people familiar with the discussions.
Some Republicans have also said they want Kennedy, who was a Democrat before aligning with Trump in 2024, to clarify his position on abortion rights.
Read more about about what to expect from RFK’s hearing here.
-ABC News’ Anne Flaherty, Will McDuffie, Cheyenne Haslett and Olivia Rubin
(WASHINGTON) — David Sacks, the White House crypto czar, said Friday that taxpayers have lost out on “over $17 billion of value” because earlier administrations never took advantage of bitcoin already in the U.S. government’s possession.
“Over the past decade or so, the federal government has come into the possession of roughly 400,000 bitcoin through civil or criminal asset forfeitures,” Sacks said in an interview with ABC News’ Senior White House Correspondent Selina Wang on Friday. “We’ve had this very ad hoc strategy where we just would sell the bitcoin, sort of almost willy-nilly, and we sold about half of it. We only made about $400 million. Today, that bitcoin would have been worth over $17 billion, so the American taxpayer lost out on over $17 billion of value.”
Sacks’ comments follow President Donald Trump signing an executive order on Thursday that creates a strategic bitcoin reserve and U.S. digital assets stockpile. Senior White House officials said bitcoin is being treated differently from other cryptocurrencies because it is the “original” cryptocurrency and there is a finite amount.
Sacks brushed off repeated questions about whether this could pose a conflict of interest since President Donald Trump has a personal financial stake in the success of the industry after launching his own cryptocurrency company, World Liberty Financial, days before the inauguration.
“It’s not an issue,” Sacks told Wang.
When asked about Bloomberg News’ reporting that World Liberty Financial appears to have bought more than $20 million in cryptocurrency two days before the White House’s Digital Assets Summit on Friday, Sacks said: “You should talk to them about that. That’s a private company. I’m not a regulator. I’m a policy adviser for innovation. I don’t keep tabs on what individual companies are doing.”
Sacks stressed that the government is not buying any cryptocurrency, just using the cryptocurrency that has already been accumulated through criminal or civil asset forfeitures.
“Any further accumulation of bitcoin by the government has to be done in a completely budget-neutral way. It cannot add to the deficit, it cannot add to the debt, it cannot tax the American people,” Sacks said. “So this is about maximizing the value of assets that we already have on our balance sheet.”
When asked by ABC News how the government could “accumulate” more bitcoin in a budget-neutral way, Sacks said those programs don’t exist, noting the administration is still in the planning phase and that the executive order calls on the secretaries of the Department of Commerce and the Department of Treasury to “think about that.”
“It won’t cost the taxpayer dimes, but if the secretaries can figure out how to accumulate more bitcoin without costing taxpayers anything, then they are authorized to do that,” the senior White House officials added.
Sacks repeatedly compared bitcoin to U.S. holdings of gold, explaining that the U.S. won’t be selling it, unless Trump changes his mind down the road.
“We’ve got about a trillion dollars of gold in Fort Knox and our other depositories,” he said. “We don’t sell that gold, even though we could use it to pay off a trillion dollars of national debt. The reason why we don’t sell it, liquidate it all today is because we believe it’s strategic for the United States to have a stockpile or reserve of that asset.
“In a similar way, we believe it’s in the long term interest the United States to hold on to this bitcoin,” he added. “Look, if the president changes his mind at some point in the future, he could issue a new executive order and say, the secretary of the treasury, get rid of it, sell it. But we don’t want to do that.”
White House officials also noted that an official audit of the government’s digital asset holdings has never been completed but will be following the president’s executive order, allowing the administration to get a more concrete understanding of what the U.S. possesses.
(WASHINGTON) — In a late-night Friday move, President Donald Trump fired at least 17 independent watchdogs — known as inspectors general — at multiple federal agencies, sources familiar with the move told ABC News.
The conversations about ousting these government watchdogs began during Trump’s transition back to the White House.
While inspectors general can be fired by the president — it can only happen after communicating with Congress 30 days in advance and in 2022 Congress strengthened the law requiring administrations to give a detailed reasoning for the firing of an IG.
There isn’t yet have a complete list of all the IG’s impacted, but at least one high-profile watchdog — Justice Department IG Michael Horowitz — did not receive notice that he was fired as of yesterday evening.
Horowitz is an Obama appointee and has issued reports that have been critical of both the Trump and Biden administrations.
The current law also mandates that any acting IG’s must come from within the IG community, though it’s unclear whether the Trump White House believes they need to follow that aspect of the law.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, told ABC News earlier this week that the president must tell Congress before removal.
“First of all to remind that our Inspector General can’t be removed from office until the president, and that’s any president, not just Trump. So this is a message to all these presidents you’ve got to tell Congress a month ahead of time the reasons for removing them,” Grassley said.
He added, “And the other thing is that inspector generals are expected to be independent of political pressure, independent of the head of the agency, and to make sure that the law is enforced and money spent appropriately, and there shouldn’t be any political pressure against any of his work.”
Grassley said Saturday that Congress was not given the required 30-day notice.
“There may be good reason the IGs were fired. We need to know that if so. I’d like further explanation from President Trump,” Grassley said in a statement given to ABC News. “Regardless, the 30 day detailed notice of removal that the law demands was not provided to Congress.”
In floor remarks Saturday morning, Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer ripped into the Trump administration for the move, saying that the dismissals are a possible violation of federal law.
“These firings are Donald Trump’s way of telling us he is terrified of accountability and is hostile to facts and to transparency,” Schumer said.
Republican Sen. Joni Ernst launched a bipartisan IG caucus just ten days ago.
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump reacted for the first time on Thursday to the fallout from his tariff announcement, which included markets nosediving and foreign leaders threatening retaliation.
Trump had no public events on his schedule a day after his dramatic unveiling of severe tariffs against virtually all U.S. trading partners, but he did take a single question as he left the White House Thursday afternoon for a trip to a golf event in Miami.
“Markets today are way down … How’s it going?” a reporter asked the president.
“I think it’s going very well,” Trump responded. “It was an operation. I like when a patient gets operated on and it’s a big thing. I said this would exactly be the way it is.”
Trump continued to project confidence and said nations to be affected are now trying to see if they can “make a deal.”
“The markets are going to boom, the stock is going to boom, the country is going to boom, and the rest of the world wants to see is there any way they can make a deal.” Trump said. “They’ve taken advantage of us for many, many years. For many years we’ve been at the wrong side of the ball. And I’ll tell you what, I think it’s going to be unbelievable.”
Earlier Thursday, other Trump administration officials were deployed to deal with the fallout on the morning news shows.
Many of them, though, had insisted the tariffs weren’t up for bargaining.
“The president made it clear yesterday, this is not a negotiation. This is a national emergency,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on CNN.
He’s always willing to pick up the phone to answer calls, but he laid out the case yesterday for why we are doing it this and these countries around the world have had 70 years to do the right thing by the American people, and they have chosen not to,” Leavitt added.
“I don’t think there’s any chance that President Trump is gonna back off his tariffs,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on the network.
World leaders are weighing their response to Trump’s historic levies, some of which go into effect on April 5 and others on April 9.
China, which is going to be hit with a whopping 54% tariff rate, urged the U.S. to “immediately cancel its unilateral tariff measures and properly resolve differences with its trading partners through equal dialogue.”
Domestically, stocks plunged in early trading on Thursday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 3.75%, the tech-heavy Nasdaq declined 5.75% and the S&P 500 tumbled 4.4%.
Vice President JD Vance, before the market selloff, acknowledged that Trump’s massive new tariffs will mean a “big change” for Americans. Trump, ahead of Wednesday’s announcement, had admitted there could be some short-term pain.
“President Trump is taking this economy in a different direction. He ran on that. He promised it. And now he’s delivering. And yes, this is a big change. I’m not going to shy away from it, but we needed a big change,” Vance told “Fox & Friends.”
Leavitt, too, defended the policy as Trump “delivering on his promise to implement reciprocal tariffs” during an appearance on CNN.
“To anyone on Wall Street this morning, I would say trust in President Trump. This is a president who is doubling down on his proven economic formula from his first term,” she said.
Neither Vance nor Leavitt directly addressed the increased costs economists say U.S. consumers are all but certain to face or how they would help Americans.
“What I’d ask folks to appreciate here is that we’re not going to fix things overnight,” Vance said. “We’re fighting as quickly as we can to fix what was left to us, but it’s not going to happen immediately.”
Asked about negative business reaction, Lutnick told CNN, “they’re not counting the factories” that he claimed would be built in the U.S. as a result.
“Let Donald Trump run the global economy. He knows what he’s doing,” Lutnick said.
