Trump Has a Plan to Make America’s Children Healthy Again. It’s a Good One

In 2019, the Trump Administration set a course to address chronic disease, funding earlier interventions to curb the growing crisis. Five years later, this issue is exactly where it needs to be: at the center of the presidential debate, now in a unique partnership.
To heal our children, a president must see the possible and lead our nation to act. After more than 40 years in the public health arena, it might surprise some of my colleagues to know I think President Trump chose the right man for the job: Robert Kennedy, Jr.
Talk of healthcare reform often centers on cost to consumers. We know chronic disease is more than 75 percent of the country’s $4 trillion annual health care expenditure. Unfortunately, we have become a sick nation. We’re paying too much for chronic disease, and this must change. It’s time to make America healthy again.
Increasingly, it starts with our children. According to National Survey of Children’s Health, more than 40 percent of school-aged children and adolescents have at least one chronic health condition. Parents reported around 41 percent of children under 18 had “current or lifelong health conditions” when asked about 25 health conditions.
For instance, obesity in American children has increased dramatically since John F. Kennedy’s presidency, from around 4 percent in the 1960s to almost 20 percent in 2024. The causes of childhood obesity are complex, but a primary origin is clearly the modern American diet of highly processed foods.
But our food problem goes well beyond obesity: Pesticides are proven risk factors for neurodevelopmental outcomes in kids, causing maladies like ADHD. If the next president prioritizes the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to identify which exposures are contributing to the spike in chronic disease in children, we will finally find out and end what is slowly destroying our children.
But when we know the causes, our federal government must be ready to fix the problems. Due to increased special interest and corporate influences on our federal agencies, prospects of national success are quite dim unless public trust is firmly re-established. Without public trust, our nation cannot effectively impact public health.
Across a century-plus of cozy courtship, the federal regulators have nearly married the regulated, especially in health care. Today, private industry uses its political influence to control decision-making at regulatory agencies, law enforcement entities, and legislatures.
Kennedy is right: All three of the principal health agencies suffer from agency capture. A large portion of the FDA’s budget is provided by pharmaceutical companies. NIH is cozy with biomedical and pharmaceutical companies and its scientists are allowed to collect royalties on drugs NIH licenses to pharma. And as the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), I know the agency can be influenced by special interest groups.
But it doesn’t stop in the health agencies: the U.S. Department of Agriculture is a captive of industry, too. Created to help the family farmer and to ensure a wholesome food supply, today the agency often favors large corporations over the interests of small farmers and the public’s health. To cure our children, we must reevaluate our food choices and the underlying practices of the agricultural sector. We must prioritize wholesome and nutritious food.
If we do not discover the depth of our corporate capture problem and fix it, we cannot truly address chronic disease in this country. The primary role of these vital agencies is to focus on public good, not corporate interests or personal profit—and most of the public servants working there are eager to do good.
Critics say our public health system has failed chronic disease patients, especially children. I must agree, and I’m even more frustrated that it’s gotten steadily worse during my career. As parents and grandparents, doctors and good citizens, we must finally do something to end this chronic disease epidemic.
President Trump has pledged, if elected, to establish a panel of top experts working with Kennedy to investigate what is causing the decades-long increase in chronic health problems and childhood diseases. He specifically mentioned autoimmune disorders, autism, obesity, and infertility. In 2019, when we took steps to take on the chronic disease epidemic, we also focused on creating earlier interventions in diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, kidney disease, and more.
In response, Kennedy pledged that “within two years, we will watch the chronic disease burden lift dramatically” if he’s given the tools he needs to make a change.
I believe him. And I think President Trump will empower him. I support their noble effort to heal our children.
The exorbitant cost of the failing health of our kids, the needless suffering and death, can be ended by a Kennedy Commission on Childhood Chronic Disease—and the vast burden of chronic disease that now demoralizes and bankrupts our nation can disappear. The key is to see the possible, and lead our nation to act.
Dr. Robert Redfield, an American virologist at the forefront of AIDS research, served as director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2018 to 2021.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.