Amna Nawaz
@PBSNewsHour·5.3M subscribers·62.2K videos
WATCH: HHS cuts are 'ripping away hope and life-saving cures' from Americans, Baldwin tells RFK Jr.
Posted
May 20, 2025
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790
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May 20, 2025
790
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1:24Now PlayingSen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisc., confronted Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a hearing Tuesday about the effects of significant federal cuts to the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“You are actively stopping billions of dollars in NIH funding for life-saving research, including on cancer and Alzheimer's disease. You are implementing changes right now that are ripping away hope and life-saving cures from American families,” Baldwin, ranking member of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on health, said in her opening statement.
Kennedy appeared before the subcommittee to testify on the 2026 budget request for the Department of Health and Human Services.
Baldwin warned the secretary that she believed the Trump administration was “heading down the road of illegally impounding funding across HHS.”
“Today, you will allude to consolidating programs into a new ‘Administration for Healthy America.’ But you can't just slash funding, fire everyone, slap a slogan on a new agency and say that work will continue,” she said. “In previous years, I would have called this only a proposal, reassured by the fact that Congress would reject it and rewrite our own, but this year, right now, you are dismantling CDC seemingly in line with your budget request. Congress did not approve that," she said.
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