RFK Jr. melts down over NYT report, admits he blacklists reporters

Anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posted a long, enraged social media response to a New York Times article reporting that health department insiders think Kennedy is disengaged from the work of his sprawling agency. His response, however, seems to back the Times’ claim.

The report, published Sunday, June 7, relied on accounts from a dozen people who have had direct contact with Kennedy during his time as health secretary. Collectively, the sources indicate that Kennedy has little interest in the details of the health department’s work and little direct interaction with career staff. Kennedy misses critical, regularly scheduled meetings with agency leaders, is sometimes “checked out” in the meetings he attends, and has been out of the loop on key decisions, such as the firing of Tracy Beth Høeg, a political appointee elevated to top drug regulator at the Food and Drug Administration. In his stead, Kennedy often refers people to his protective, longtime assistant, Stefanie Spear, who colleagues say has slowed department operations and fueled some significant leadership departures.

On Wednesday night, Kennedy responded to the report with an 871-word diatribe on social media against the reporter, veteran journalist Sheryl Gay Stolberg, and the Times. His key argument was that much of the story could be refuted by a look at his jam-packed public calendar.

“All one needs to refute your argument is to glance at my publicly available calendar,” he wrote in his opening paragraph. At another point, he elaborated, writing “Had you read my calendar, you would have seen that I have back-to-back meetings all day, every day, with both career and political staff…”

The problem with Kennedy’s argument is that he does not have a publicly available calendar. This journalist is not aware of any such calendar. On Thursday, journalists at Stat News reported that Kennedy’s public calendar was news to them, too. Over the past year, they have requested his calendar multiple times through the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) press office and by filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

“Unwilling to talk to you”

“None of STAT’s FOIA requests have been completed, and some haven’t been acknowledged—despite HHS policy requiring a response with tracking and contact information within 10 days of submitting a request,” the journalists wrote. “That includes three STAT inquiries from September 2025. The web page previously used to track requests has been taken down.”

The outlet noted that it’s not just journalists who are not able to get information from HHS; requests from citizens and lawmakers have also gone unanswered, though a leader of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine group, Children’s Health Defense, reportedly is getting his FOIA requests fulfilled, Stat noted.

Ars Technica has reached out to the HHS press office for comment as well as a link to the publicly available calendar. There was no immediate response. Stat reported that HHS did not respond to their comment requests in light of Kennedy’s post.

That Kennedy seems to be under the false impression that his calendar is public adds to the argument that he is not in touch with the workings of his agency, backing the Times’ report that Kennedy is disengaged.

Kennedy’s unfamiliarity with his calendar’s accessibility and the lack of information from HHS are also particularly striking, given that Kennedy came into the position touting plans for “radical transparency.” In April 2025, he told reporters: “We’re restoring all the FOIA offices, and we’re going to make it much easier for people to get the information. We’re going to post as much as we can.”

But Kennedy’s social media outburst on Wednesday further made clear that Kennedy is not committed to transparency as health secretary. In it, he acknowledged that the HHS is withholding information from select journalists, in other words, blacklisting them.

“[S]ince we all are aware of your predictable bias, we at HHS are unwilling to talk to you about the topics that are important,” Kennedy wrote of the Times. “The fact that you have minimal access to decision makers leaves you covering trivia and relying on your own capacity for invention.”