Yo team — RFK Jr just served up a masterclass in accidentally proving your critics right with one 871-word social media outburst. The NYT had already reported that career staff at HHS views him as disengaged, out of the loop on major decisions like firing FDA appointee Tracy Beth Høeg, and constantly deferring to his assistant Stefanie Spear — who colleagues say has slowed department operations while he's "checked out" during meetings. His response was a long-form rant against journalist Sheryl Gay Stolberg and the NYT, where he claimed that anyone could refute their characterization just by looking at his *publicly available calendar* with back-to-back meetings every day. The problem is that Kennedy doesn't actually have a public calendar — Stat News has requested it multiple times through HHS press office and filed FOIA requests that remain uncompleted, some not even acknowledged, since September 2025; the old tracking page was taken down entirely. He also admitted to blacklisting journalists outright by writing "[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," which is basically public confirmation of exactly what NYT's reporting suggested — he's not engaged with his own agency and has siloed information off to select groups. So when he came into office promising "radical transparency" in April 2025, this whole episode suggests that was a campaign line rather than an actual plan.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/06/rfk-jr-melts-down-over-nyt-report-admits-he-blacklists-reporters/