“Trump should find someone to give kids better food and not give them polio at the same time,” joked Rep. Jake Auchincloss, a Newton Democrat.

For Republicans, it may be the other way around: Kennedy is a hero to many on the right for rejecting COVID vaccination mandates, but is wary of his hostility toward big business. This is particularly the case for agriculture and food products, which are central to the economies of many red states. He attacked the use of pesticides and industrial meat packaging and called for limit processed foods and food coloring. He accused the American food industry of “massively poisoning” the population.

Sen. John Hoeven, a North Dakota Republican and a top farm policy official, said he looked forward to discussing these issues privately with Kennedy.

“I want to talk to him because our farmers and ranchers produce the highest quality, lowest cost food in the world, and that benefits all Americans,” Hoeven said. “He needs to understand the practical realities to achieve this.”

As top HHS official, Kennedy would have jurisdiction over a massive bureaucracy with a $2.8 trillion budget for fiscal year 2024, most of which would go toward funding Medicare and Medicaid. On Tuesday, Trump announced he would nominate Mehmet Oz, who shares Kennedy’s openness to unproven alternative health treatments, such as the herbal supplements the TV doctor endorsed, to the HHS agency which administers Medicare and Medicaid..

However, Kennedy focused largely on two agencies under HHS’s purview: the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health.

Although the Agriculture Department has jurisdiction over many of Kennedy’s areas of concern, it could use the FDA for several purposes, such as changing nutritional guidelines, proposing new consumer warning labels, or revising the process by which food additives and supplements are considered safe.

Kennedy’s potential approach reflects both the unusual coalition forming to support him, as well as the scale of the one emerging to oppose him.

However they approach Kennedy’s views, watchdogs, lawmakers and the many interests likely to be affected by his policies are scrambling to unravel the tangled paradox of views embodied by this unlikely Trump lieutenant. Their views on what might result from Kennedy’s tenure will determine how much resistance he faces in a Senate confirmation fight.

“It’s a real grab bag of internally inconsistent ideas,” said Peter Lurie, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit food and drug industry watchdog group that is critical of big food companies. “To me, they seem mutually contradictory, scientifically incoherent, and I have no way of rationalizing them, in all honesty.”

Kennedy, for example, wants to crack down on a number of food additives that he considers dangerous, but also to end what he calls the FDA’s “suppression” of raw milk. which many health experts believe may contain harmful bacteria and has questionable benefits.

Jeff Singer, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, distilled the clash of ideologies presented by Kennedy.

“On the one hand, he wants to relax the rules and give people more control over health care; on the other hand, he has more authoritarian ideas that restrict freedom,” Singer said. “So, what is it?”

The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment.

Finding a coherent answer to this question may be difficult, given Kennedy’s background. An equally important factor is the latitude he would have to carry out his agenda – however uneven – within an administration that might be inclined to take a very different approach on key issues.

During the election campaign, Trump adopted Kennedy’s slogan “Make America Healthy Again” — reflecting elements of a MAGA movement that increasingly embraces social media-driven feel-good trends — and said he would let Kennedy “go unleash” on health care as well as food and drug regulation.

But the president-elect spent his first term implementing policies that ran counter to Kennedy’s worldview. With a policy team made up of allies from big food and agriculture companies, the first Trump administration tweaked a program designed by the Obama administration to get more fruits and vegetables. in school meals, in favor of allowing more pizzas, fries and pastries.

The FDA, under Trump, meanwhile, rejected requests to ban a potentially dangerous chemical from food packaging and said it was “not concerned” about the prevalence of toxic chemicals known as PFAS in the food supply.

Observers wonder if Kennedy could even put together a team aligned with his views, much less overcoming what could be strong opposition to new regulations from agencies and industries with ties in Trump’s orbit. Kennedy’s past support for abortion access could also become an issue for social conservatives, who have already launched efforts to roll back FDA rules making abortion drugs more available following the repeal of Roe v Wade by the Supreme Court.

Some pro-Trump health care executives want to see Kennedy enact aggressive regulations. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida recently posted on X an unspoken list of possible bans, ranging from fluoridated water to food coloring to high-fructose corn syrup. Meanwhile, liberals such as Colorado Gov. Jared Polis praised Kennedy, saying he would improve Americans’ health by “shaking up HHS and the FDA.”

But Kennedy alienated a wide range of people, including those who sympathized with some of his views. Lurie, himself a former top FDA official, believes in a stricter regulatory process on food additives, which Kennedy says he supports.

“But there’s so much else in there that is based on conspiratorial thinking, anti-scientific thinking and just plain erratic,” Lurie said. “We cannot entrust the reins of the health system to someone like that.”

Meanwhile, among agricultural industry promoters, there are equally deep doubts about Kennedy, but for different reasons. Amanda Zaluckyj, an attorney who helps manage her family’s soybean and corn farm in Michigan, sounded the alarm about what Kennedy’s nomination could mean for farmers in an opinion piece published in the publication specialized AgDaily.

With Kennedy in charge, Zaluckyj wrote, there could be “substantial regulatory disruptions to U.S. agriculture, particularly with respect to pesticide (genetically modified organism) use and labeling — key areas in which Kennedy expressed his strong opposition to the scientific consensus.

In an interview, Zaluckyj expressed concern about Kennedy’s ability to convince people that his vision of “healthy eating” is the right one. “He’s a master at using words and expressions to get people to believe where he’s coming from,” she said. “It’s scary. I don’t know what power he will have.

However, among some Trump-supporting Republican lawmakers who might be sympathetic to these arguments, there has been significant deference to the president-elect’s preferences.

Rep. Kevin Hern, a Republican from Oklahoma, operated a number of McDonald’s franchises before joining Congress. Asked about Kennedy, who recently called McDonald’s food “poison” and criticized Trump’s penchant for fast food, Hern began by saying that Trump thought Kennedy “would do a great job in this world.”

“I mean, I spent 35 years at McDonald’s,” Hern said. “Obviously people are a little nervous everywhere. But I think when there’s transparency, Americans want to know what they’re eating, so I don’t see anything wrong with that. »

A recent photo This is perhaps the best way to grasp the contradictions – and limitations – of Kennedy’s reign as health secretary: the health advocate, sitting on Trump’s private plane, smiling as he was posing for a photo with his new boss at a table full of McDonald’s hamburgers.

Sam Brodey can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow him @sambrodey.