The First-Year Checkup: RFK Jr.’s Policies on the Pain Scale
Taxpayers Protection Alliance
April 2, 2026
Visiting a hospital is almost never a pleasant experience. Even though pain can vary significantly from patient to patient, healthcare workers use pain scales with smiley and frowny faces to help figure out what patients are experiencing. This assessment is critical because it allows doctors and nurses to give patients treatments that will hopefully alleviate their pain.
Unfortunately, access to healthcare treatment has been unnecessarily complicated by the policies of Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) Jr. Despite promising that he wouldn’t take treatments away from patients, RFK Jr. has inflicted plenty of pain on Americans through his misleadingly named Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda. Below, the Taxpayers Protection Alliance rates these policies on our very own pain scale for taxpayers and consumers:
For decades, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA; a subagency of the HHS) has been notoriously tight-lipped about why it rejects drugs. The FDA has remained all-but-silent even when the agency rejects the advice of its advisory committees and refuses to approve life-saving drugs. Fortunately, this unwarranted secrecy is (seemingly) no more. On July 10, 2025 the FDA announced it was embracing “radical transparency” by publishing more than 200 complete response letters (CRLs), which typically specify why medications are rejected. On September 4, the agency announced it was releasing even more CRLs, including doing it in real time (i.e., right after a drug gets rejected). These letters have offered a glimpse into the often-bizarre decision-making plaguing America’s drug regulator and releasing them was long overdue.
Americans strive to eat healthy, and innovators have responded by finding safe new ingredients (e.g., natural sweet-tasting proteins such as brazzein) to put into popular foods. Currently, companies selling foods to the public containing new ingredients — or old ingredients used in a new way — can claim that these ingredients are “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS).
Everyone wins under this process. Producers don’t have to undergo an onerous food additive approval process, while the FDA is still free to pull products it feels has sketchy safety data. And consumers don’t have to deal with the high costs that too often come with excess regulation. But this may all change soon. RFK Jr. will likely force manufacturers to submit formal GRAS notifications and increase scrutiny on perfectly-safe ingredients, increasing costs for consumers and reducing food innovation.
Under Secretary Kennedy’s leadership, the FDA has issued a flurry of warning letters to drug producers claiming that their advertisements are misleading and must be changed. For example, the makers of Fasenra (an asthma medication) landed in hot water for showing “compelling before-and-after presentations imply[ing] an improvement in social and emotional functioning. Before Fasenra treatment, the woman is described and presented as bored, stuck at home, and ‘losing [her] groove.’ In contrast, after Fasenra treatment, she is portrayed as someone with an active social life, involving salsa dancing, that is captured on social media as a photo garnering numerous ‘likes.’” Besides the ridiculousness of targeting salsa dancing on TV, the crackdown is harmful to patients, who will now have less information on treatments that can change their lives.
The drug development pipeline is packed with new groundbreaking treatments currently being tested for safety and effectiveness prior to approval—but the FDA is sitting on and delaying these treatments. The number of drugs in development and testing is surging, with approvals falling behind. The biotech data platform RxDataLab notes that active “Investigational New Drugs” currently being tested increased from around 11,000 annually pre-COVID to more than 14,000 from 2022 onward. But as Chemical & Engineering News recently noted, “2025 saw 46 new molecular entities cross the finish line to approval by the US Food and Drug Administration—that’s 4 fewer than the 50 drugs the agency approved in 2024.” The agency is approving about as many drugs now as it did ten years ago. In other words, the FDA is simply not keeping pace with the surge of medications awaiting approval.
Hopefully, things will improve after Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research director Vinay Prasad finally leaves the agency. Prasad gained notoriety for refusing to examine an application by Moderna for its first mRNA seasonal flu vaccine—before reversing course after a cascade of criticism. Prasad also appears to have illegally divulged trade secrets, a surefire way to destroy incentives to innovate.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS; a subagency of the HHS) recently rolled out drug price controls in the form of Guarding U.S. Medicare Against Rising Drug Costs (GUARD) and Global Benchmark for Efficient Drug Pricing (GLOBE) Medicare payment models. Price controls implemented through the GLOBE and GUARD models—which would tie drug prices to the prices charged by socialized healthcare systems—would mean fewer treatments for millions of patients. An in-depth analysis by the oncology news and information platform OncoDaily concludes, “Developing a new drug typically takes an average of 10 to 15 years, depending on various factors such as the type of drug and regulatory processes.” Drug manufacturers will only spend this time and money developing new products if they are able to recoup these investments via flexible pricing strategies. Draconian price controls take away that flexibility and significantly diminish the incentive to bring life-saving new medications to market.