Since entering office in February, the health secretary has overseen a dramatic reshaping of the agencies he oversees, including eliminating thousands of jobs and freezing or canceling billions of dollars for scientific research. As part of his campaign against chronic disease, he has redrawn the government’s position on topics such as seed oils, fluoride and Tylenol. He also has repeatedly used his authority to promote discredited ideas about vaccines.

The department’s rapid transformation has garnered praise from MAHA supporters who say they long viewed HHS as corrupt and untrustworthy and have been waiting for such a disruption. And both Democrats and Republicans have applauded some of the agency’s actions, including efforts to encourage healthy eating and exercise, and deals to lower the prices of costly drugs.

But many of the drastic changes Kennedy has led at the department are raising grave concerns among doctors and public health experts.

“At least in the immediate or intermediate future, the United States is going to be hobbled and hollowed out in its scientific leadership,” said Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University public health law professor who was removed from a National Institutes of Health advisory board earlier this year with a letter that said he was no longer needed. “I think it will be extraordinarily difficult to reverse all the damage.”

HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon denied any threat to scientific expertise at the agency and lauded its work.

“In 2025, the Department confronted long-standing public health challenges with transparency, courage, and gold-standard science,” Nixon said in a statement. “HHS will carry this momentum into 2026 to strengthen accountability, put patients first, and protect public health.”

The overhaul comes alongside broader uncertainties in the nation’s health system, including Medicaid cuts passed by Congress this year and expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies that are putting millions of Americans’ insurance coverage in jeopardy.

Here’s a closer look at Kennedy’s first year leading the nation’s health agency:

Kennedy’s vaccine views ripple across the department

After many years spent publicly assailing vaccines, Kennedy sought during his confirmation process to reassure senators he wouldn’t take a wrecking ball to vaccine science. But less than a year later, his health department has repeatedly pushed the limits of those commitments.

In May, Kennedy announced the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would no longer recommend COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children and pregnant women — a move immediately questioned by public health experts who saw no new data to justify the change.

In June, Kennedy fired an entire 17-member CDC vaccine advisory committee — later installing several of his own replacements, including multiple vaccine skeptics.

That group has made decisions that have shocked medical professionals, including declining to recommend COVID-19 shots for anyone, adding new restrictions on a combination shot against chickenpox, measles, mumps and rubella and reversing the longstanding recommendation that all babies receive a hepatitis B shot at birth.

Kennedy in November also personally directed the CDC to abandon its position that vaccines do not cause autism, without supplying any new evidence to support the change. While he left the old language on the website to keep a promise he made to Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, he added a disclaimer saying it remained because of the agreement.

Public health researchers and advocates strongly refute the updated website and note that scientists have thoroughly explored the issue in rigorous research spanning decades, all pointing to the same conclusion that vaccines don’t cause autism.

Kennedy has promised a wide-ranging effort to study environmental factors that potentially contribute to autism and in an Oval Office event with Trump in September promoted unproven and in some cases discredited ties between Tylenol, vaccines and the complex brain disorder.

Kennedy reconfigures HHS with massive staffing and research cuts

Within two months of taking office, Kennedy announced a sweeping restructuring of HHS that would shut down entire agencies, consolidate others into a new one focused on chronic disease and lay off some 10,000 employees on top of 10,000 others who had already taken buyouts.

While parts of the effort are still tied up in court, thousands of the mass layoffs were allowed to stand. Those and voluntary departures significantly thinned out the sprawling $1.7 trillion department, which oversees food and hospital inspections, health insurance for roughly half of the country and vaccine recommendations.

Kennedy also has fired or forced out several leaders at HHS, among them four directors at the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration’s former vaccine chief and a director of the CDC whom he had hired less than a month earlier.

On top of staffing cuts, he has overseen significant cuts to scientific research. That includes NIH slashing billions of dollars in research projects and the termination of $500 million in contracts to develop vaccines using mRNA technology.

Amid the cuts, Kennedy has proposed or funded some new research on topics related to his MAHA goals, including autism, Lyme disease and food additives.

MAHA gains momentum, despite some stumbles

Kennedy started using the phrase “MAHA” on the campaign trail last year to describe his crusade against toxic exposures and childhood chronic disease, but 2025 was the year it became ingrained in the national lexicon.

In his tenure so far, the health secretary has made it the centerpiece of his work, using the MAHA branding to wage war on ultra-processed foods, pressure companies to phase out artificial food dyes, criticize fluoride in drinking water and push to ban junk food from the program that subsidizes grocery store runs for low-income Americans.

The idea has even spread beyond Kennedy’s agency across the federal government.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has appeared with Kennedy to promote fitness with pull-up displays. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy teamed up with Kennedy in early December to announce $1 billion in funding for airports to install resources like playgrounds and nursing pods for mothers and babies. And Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin recently announced he is working toward unveiling a MAHA agenda with health-related goals for his own department.

MAHA has earned widespread popularity among the American public — even as it has endured some administration foibles. In May, for example, HHS faced scrutiny for releasing a MAHA report that contained several citations to studies that didn’t exist.

But to the extent that the initiative has included calls to action that aren’t based on science — such as urging distrust in vaccines or promoting raw milk, which is far more likely than pasteurized milk to lead to illness — critics say it can be dangerous.

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It’s important to understand this because the majority of Berkshire Hathaway’s assets are invested not in publicly traded securities, but in operating subsidiaries like Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad, Berkshire Hathaway Energy, and Geico. While it’s true that Buffett invested aggressively in wind energy, that was largely because of government tax incentives. In the main, he preferred to milk his operating subsidiaries for cash rather than reinvest in them for the digital age. Exhibit A is Geico, which thanks to a lack of IT investment has fallen behind Progressive as the nation’s leading for-profit auto insurer.

Buffett has called Geico his favorite child, and for good reason. Since it began in the 1930s, the auto insurer has used a direct-sales model to keep operating costs the lowest in the industry. In a commodity business like insurance, that’s a major competitive advantage. In the 1990s, after he bought all of Geico, Buffett found a second moat when he began to brand Geico as a trusted, even beloved American company. The gecko, the caveman, the camel who celebrated hump day—all these were marketing masterstrokes, ones directly derived from Buffett’s deep understanding of the mass brand-mass media industrial complex. The mascots also highlight how, while Buffett was comfortable investing in marketing, he was deeply uncomfortable with, and therefore didn’t understand, investing in tech.

When Buffett took control of Geico in 1996, he octupled its marketing budget. This wiped out almost all of Geico’s profits from a GAAP accounting standpoint, but Buffett was confident that increasing advertising outlays today would lead to more profitable customers tomorrow. And so it was: Under Buffett’s leadership, Geico’s market share grew from under 3% in 1996 to 12% in 2020, and it went from the No. 7 auto insurer to the #2 auto insurer, behind only State Farm.

So far, so good—but while Geico was investing in marketing, its rival Progressive was investing in technology. Founded only a year after Geico, Progressive began to upgrade its IT systems as early as the late 1970s. In the 1980s, it bought its agents computers and sent them floppy discs so they could better match price with risk. In 1996, Progressive became the first auto insurer to allow consumers to buy insurance online, and it continually streamlined its backend systems so that it could accurately quote new business. Today, Progressive brags that it has tens of billions of price points and that its tech stack allows the company to adjust its rates much faster than its competition—nearly once every business day. “We are a tech company that happens to sell insurance,” is one of Progressive’s internal mantras.

Driving the company’s tech investment was an insight that was perhaps even more astute than Buffett’s marketing insight. Thanks to its no-agent, no-commission model, Geico enjoyed a six-percentage-point cost advantage vs. Progressive in its operating costs. Because half of its business is through insurance agents, Progressive is unlikely ever to catch up here. But Progressive CEO Peter Lewis, who led the company from 1965 to 2000, understood that an auto insurer’s biggest cost center is the claims it must pay policyholders—four to five times bigger, in fact, than its administrative and advertising costs. If Progressive could manage these “loss costs” better than the competition, Lewis reasoned, then it could become the de facto low-cost auto insurer. 

The key to managing loss costs was technology in all its glorious variety. Back-end systems at headquarters that could parse price and risk for each driver were important, but so were front line innovations like Snapshot, a shoebox-sized device that in the 1990s Progressive began installing into the cars of willing customers. Snapshot, now an app on your mobile phone, tracks a customer’s driving behavior; more than one in three Progressive customers buying insurance directly from the company opts in for “usage-based” premiums. Thanks to Snapshot and other innovations, Progressive simply knows more about its drivers than any other insurer, and this creates a virtuous circle in which the company knows which to reward with discounts, which to punish with surcharges, and which to purge altogether. 

Thus, while Progressive’s operating costs have historically been six points worse than Geico, its loss costs have been 11 points better, which means that Geico’s low-cost moat has been breached by tech. In contrast to Progressive’s streamlined system, Geico has more than 600 legacy IT systems. It didn’t start working on a Snapshot-like product until 2019, twenty years after Progressive began. 

Buffett liked to say that when the tide goes out, you see who’s swimming naked, and COVID was the perfect storm to reveal how little Geico had paid attention to its digital wardrobe. During COVID, people suddenly stopped driving, and then, when the pandemic ended, they drove more than ever and more recklessly than ever. At the same time, the worst inflation in forty years hit all sectors of the economy, including auto-repair shops. Such rapidly changing conditions favored insurers with robust tracking tools, like Progressive, and punished insurers without them, like Geico. Since 2020, Progressive has almost doubled its personal auto policy count—but Geico has lost nearly 15% of its personal insurance base. Progressive, not Geico, is now the nation’s number two auto insurer.

It turns out that while the branding of the gecko was important, it wasn’t nearly as powerful as employing sophisticated digital tools. Geico is a good example of what happens when a company, even a powerful one, fails to reinvest in its future. Rather than a virtuous cycle—tech investment leading to better pricing and better products, which drives more profits, which can then be reinvested to drive the cycle on—Geico seems caught in the same vicious cycle that afflicts General Motors, Macy’s and other legacy companies.