Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tore into The New York Times on Wednesday, accusing the paper of manufacturing a narrative about his leadership at HHS by relying on anonymous sources he says the department already fired.
Kennedy's broadside, posted on X, came after Times correspondent Sheryl Gay Stolberg published a report earlier this week titled "Kennedy Shows Minimal Engagement With Vast Health Portfolio." The piece alleged that Kennedy had been largely checked out from his duties, including during the latest Ebola outbreak in Africa, and was fixated on a narrow set of pet issues rather than managing the sprawling federal health bureaucracy.
Kennedy rejected that framing in blunt terms. And the exchange that followed tells you something about how Washington's information wars actually work, especially when a cabinet secretary is trying to overhaul an agency that doesn't want to be overhauled.
The HHS secretary did not hold back. As Fox News Digital reported, Kennedy wrote directly to the Times on X:
"In order to prove your preconceived case for my disengagement, you quote anonymous employees, some of whom I fired or who quit to avoid being fired."
He went further, accusing the paper of approaching the story with its conclusion already written.
"You had a preconceived thesis, and you set out to prove it."
Kennedy then offered his own account of what he found when he arrived at HHS. He said the building was functionally empty, that roughly 90 percent of employees were not showing up for work. He said he changed that. And he said the Times never covered any of his reforms.
He also took a shot at his predecessor, though he did not name the individual directly. Kennedy said his predecessor "almost never showed up for work here during his four years in office", a pointed contrast to the Times' charge that Kennedy himself is the one disengaged.
The sharpest line came at the end of his post:
"Standards have devolved, and journalism is dead. The Times now employs propagandists."
He added that the paper's lack of access to decision-makers left it "covering trivia and relying on your own capacity for invention."
Stolberg's article painted a picture of a secretary consumed by a handful of favored topics, food recommendations, pesticide exposures, and what the Times described as Kennedy's "long-held beliefs that vaccines are harmful", while ignoring the broader scope of HHS operations.
The report claimed Kennedy showed "little interest in managing the details of work in his department, according to multiple colleagues." It also focused on the Ebola outbreak in Africa, which exposed at least six Americans, and noted that Kennedy made only one known visit to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters.
That CDC visit, the reporting noted, came after a gunman opened fire at the agency's Georgia facility and killed a police officer. The implication was that it took an extraordinary event, not routine oversight, to draw Kennedy to the CDC campus.
The New York Post noted that the Times report described Kennedy as "minimally engaged" with his HHS portfolio and focused narrowly on his top priorities rather than the department's full mandate.
A New York Times spokesperson responded to Kennedy's criticism in a statement provided to Fox News Digital. The spokesperson said the paper "set out to examine Secretary Kennedy's leadership and management style in light of numerous vacancies within the Department of Health and Human Services and concerns internally about his detachment from key issues and officials."
The spokesperson also noted that Kennedy declined an interview request and did not address detailed questions before publication, a detail that cuts both ways. It suggests the Times gave Kennedy a chance to respond on the record. It also means the published narrative was shaped without his direct input.
The spokesperson added:
"This article is based on conversations with a dozen people who have worked directly with Mr. Kennedy during his tenure as secretary. We are confident in our reporting."
A dozen sources sounds substantial. But Kennedy's central complaint is about who those sources are, and what ax they might have to grind.
This is where the dispute gets interesting. Kennedy didn't just call the story wrong. He called it structurally compromised.
His argument: the Times relied on anonymous current and former employees, some of whom were terminated or left HHS to avoid termination. In other words, the paper's sources had every reason to portray the secretary in the worst possible light. They weren't neutral observers. They were participants in a bureaucratic shakeup, and they lost.
That doesn't automatically make their accounts false. People who get fired sometimes have legitimate grievances. But it does raise a basic question any reader should ask: did the Times weigh the motives of its sources, or did it simply find people willing to confirm a story it already wanted to tell?
Kennedy clearly believes the latter. And the pattern he describes, a legacy media outlet quoting disgruntled former officials to undermine a reformer, is not exactly new in Washington. It happened throughout the first Trump administration. It happened to appointees at the EPA, the State Department, and the Pentagon. The playbook is familiar: find bureaucrats who resent the new boss, grant them anonymity, and let them set the narrative.
Kennedy's tenure at HHS has been anything but quiet. He has pushed to reshape the department's priorities around food safety, environmental health, and what he views as institutional failures in public health policy. Those moves have generated fierce resistance from career staff and public health establishment figures.
A linked Fox News headline referenced in the reporting noted that more than 1,000 HHS workers demanded Kennedy's resignation over the firing of a CDC director and broader agency changes. That number reflects genuine internal opposition, but it also reflects the scale of the disruption Kennedy has brought to an agency that, by his own account, was barely functioning when he arrived.
Kennedy's claim that 90 percent of employees were not coming to work when he took over is striking. If accurate, it describes an agency that had already abandoned its mission long before Kennedy walked through the door. The Times, he argued, never covered that part of the story.
Nor, Kennedy said, did the paper cover the attendance record of his predecessor. If the previous HHS secretary "almost never showed up for work" over four years, that context matters enormously when evaluating whether Kennedy is the one who is disengaged.
The Times spokesperson made a point of noting that Kennedy declined an interview and did not answer detailed questions before publication. That's a fair thing for a newspaper to disclose. It also invites a question: why would a cabinet secretary sit for an interview with a paper he believes has already decided on its conclusion?
Kennedy's post suggests he viewed the entire exercise as predetermined. He accused the Times of starting with a thesis and working backward to prove it. If he genuinely believed that, and his public statements leave little doubt, then declining the interview was not evasion. It was a calculation that participation would only lend credibility to a story he considered dishonest from the start.
Whether that was the right call is debatable. But the notion that a public official must always cooperate with a press outlet he considers hostile is not some iron law of governance. It is a preference of the press itself.
Several questions hang over this dispute. The Times did not specify which HHS vacancies it considers most concerning, or how those vacancies compare to staffing levels under previous secretaries. Kennedy did not name the predecessor he accused of chronic absenteeism. And the Ebola outbreak, which exposed at least six Americans, deserves closer scrutiny on its own terms, separate from the political fight over Kennedy's management style.
The CDC headquarters shooting that preceded Kennedy's one known visit to the agency also raises questions. What prompted the visit? Was it a response to the security incident, or was it already planned? The reporting does not say.
None of these gaps are trivial. They are the kind of details that separate a thorough accountability story from a political hit dressed in the language of journalism.
At bottom, this fight is about who gets to define what "engagement" means at a federal agency. The New York Times measured Kennedy against a traditional model: meetings attended, briefings absorbed, bureaucratic routines followed. Kennedy measured himself against results: forcing employees to show up, pushing reforms the establishment resists, and refusing to play by the old rules.
Those are two different scorecards. And the Times chose the one that made its subject look worst, sourced by the people with the most reason to agree.
When a newspaper builds a story on anonymous former employees who were shown the door, it isn't reporting. It's letting the old guard write the first draft of history from behind a curtain.
