Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has taken administrative action to block public input on health policy matters and rulemaking.
The action ends roughly 50 years of allowing the rulemaking process by the department to include public comments, reported The Hill. It's a complicated interpretation of apparent intent of the the government's Administrative Procedure Act.
The APA was designed to restrict public comments for some government actions. But that was countered by an exemption from the early ’70s known as the Richardson Waiver that says it is permissible for the public to offer input on government decisions. Secretary Kennedy's decision ends HHS following that long standing waiver.
The move seems to run counter to the secretary's comments at his Feb. 13 swearing in at the White House.
"Our plans are radical transparency and returning gold-standard science to NIH, to the FDA, and CDC — to end — ending the corruption, ending the corporate capture of those agencies, getting rid of the people on those panels that have conflicts of interest," Kennedy had said.
Lawrence Gostin, faculty director of O’Neill Institute for National & Global Health Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, said the Kennedy action presents a problem.
“My impression of the rule is that that the secretary knows that much of what he’s done and what he intends to do to radically transform health policy … has been lawful under the Administrative Procedure Act, and he’s trying to insulate himself from accountability,” he said, according to a report by The Hill.