Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will appear before two Senate committees this week, the next steps in his bid to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

There is a lot for senators to dig into. HHS secretary is a consequential job that oversees all of America’s health agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, Medicare, Medicaid and more. HHS employs about 90,000 people and has a budget of $1.7 trillion annually, which is about the size of Australia’s GDP.

Kennedy has been in the public eye his whole life as a member of the Democratic political family that includes President John F. Kennedy. For most of his 71 years, he’s been a government outsider, and he has built his fortune and reputation disparaging the scientists and institutions he’s now in line to lead. He’s also made wild and untrue claims, including that Wi-Fi causes cancer and that antidepressants are to blame for school shootings.

The opposition to Kennedy’s confirmation has been fierce. An advocacy group called Protect Our Care is financing an ad campaign in eight Republican Senators’ states, urging them to reject him.

Kennedy’s allies and supporters remain confident he will be confirmed. “Bobby Kennedy has met with over 60 United States senators” ahead of the confirmation hearings, White House staffer Katie Miller told NPR. “He’s prepared and excited.”

As Congress prepares to grill him this week, here’s a refresher on some of his stated plans, his record and his troublingly counterfactual ideas.

1. For decades, he’s spread misinformation about childhood vaccines

Kennedy has tried to downplay his anti-vaccine views in recent months and years, but he has a record of attacking vaccines, including routine childhood vaccinations. For much of his career, he was chairman of Children’s Health Defense, which advocates against vaccines and spreads misleading and inaccurate claims about their safety, including the thoroughly debunked claim they cause autism.

That work has had real world impact, most strikingly in Samoa, a small island nation in the Pacific. Just before a measles outbreak in 2019 in which 83 people died, Kennedy toured the country and later wrote to the prime minister falsely blaming the vaccine for the deaths instead of measles.

As the head of HHS, there’s a whole host of ways that Kennedy could change the landscape of childhood vaccines in the U.S., which infectious disease experts say could lead to a resurgence of infectious diseases among children, including meningitis and polio.

“It is a fantasy to think we can lower vaccination rates and herd immunity in the U.S. and not suffer recurrence of these diseases,” Gregory Poland, a vaccine researcher at the Mayo Clinic told KFF Health News in December. “One in 3,000 kids who gets measles is going to die. There’s no treatment for it. They are going to die.” (Kennedy has said the treatment for measles is chicken soup.)

Kennedy’s apparent inability to distinguish truth from myth is alarming, says Elizabeth Jacobs, emerita professor of epidemiology from the University of Arizona. “Kennedy has been told repeatedly by experts in the field that his positions on vaccines are wrong and not supported by scientific evidence, and he refuses to listen,” she says. “I think that that is a very dangerous position for the Secretary of Health and Human Services to have.”

2. Scientists worry he won’t prepare the U.S. for the risk of bird flu

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kennedy railed against the federal government’s actions, including vaccine and mask requirements. He frequently said pandemic public health measures were more restrictive than Hitler’s Germany, saying once that at least “you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.”

How would Kennedy use his broad power as secretary if he’s faced with a public health emergency? Kennedy and his allies haven’t publicly addressed the issue. Meanwhile, as there have been several serious cases of bird flu among Americans, including the first death, and there is evidence the virus is spreading widely among poultry and cattle, intensifying concerns about another pandemic crisis.

Kennedy has already begun to discredit public health measures to counter bird flu. In an online post last summer, he claimed there’s “no evidence” the bird flu vaccines in the national stockpile will work and that they “appear dangerous.” He suggested in another post that “someone” might bioengineer a dangerous form of the virus to profit off the vaccine.

The idea is “preposterous,” Dr. Andrew Pekosz, a professor of microbiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health told NPR. The existing bird flu vaccines “have shown a safety record,” he says. “They’re not dangerous.”

Although the threat bird flu poses to humans remains small now, “this is like some brush burning around your house — you better pay attention because it could turn into something else,” Dr. Jesse Goodman, an infectious disease physician at Georgetown University and a former FDA official, told NPR.

3. His financial conflicts are raising eyebrows

Kennedy has made many millions of dollars from anti-vaccine legal actions. New public filings show that, if and when he’s confirmed, he could still financially benefit from lawsuits against Merck’s vaccine that protects against HPV and cervical cancer.

In other words, Kennedy would be in a position to potentially profit from vaccine litigation while regulating drugmakers and overseeing federal vaccine policy as the head of HHS.

“RFK Jr’s ethics agreement is inadequate,” Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, who specializes in government ethics, wrote to NPR. “It doesn’t address the bias created by his continuing financial interest in the litigation against Merck.”

4. He wants a major shakeup in scientific research

The COVID-19 pandemic intensified distrust of federal science research and public health efforts, especially among Republicans. The conservative Heritage Foundation and Republican lawmakers have been floating long to-do lists for changing the NIH, including dramatically reorganizing the centers and institutes that constitute the agency.

Kennedy has said he’d like to “immediately replace” hundreds of federal scientists and reorient their work away from infectious diseases.

During the first weeks of the Trump administration, scientists around the country sounded alarm bells about scientific meetings that were canceled with little notice or explanation. Those cancellations have already disrupted research funding and delayed scheduled updates to infectious disease dashboards.

Health agency spokespeople issued a statement last week explaining that these were temporary interruptions designed to allow the Trump team to get up and running. But many scientists worry it’s a sign that political appointees intend to exert a new level of control on the federal health and research agencies. Kennedy’s stated plans to reshape the health agencies and his lifetime of questioning the integrity of federal scientists could intensify those concerns.

5. His long-held abortion views are polar opposite of GOP

In an interview last spring, Kennedy said on abortion: “My belief is we should leave it to the woman, we shouldn’t have government involved,” he explained. Further, he said abortion should be legal at any point in pregnancy. He later tempered that position, saying on Facebook that an “emerging consensus” was that “abortion should be legal up until a certain number of weeks and restricted thereafter.”

Republicans are eager to curtail abortion access now that they have retaken power in Washington, including by potentially reviving a Victorian-era obscenity law or curtailing access to abortion medication. A health secretary who favors abortion access could interfere with those plans to restrict access. Former Vice President Mike Pence’s Advancing American Freedom group has launched a six-figure ad campaign opposing Kennedy based on his abortion views, writing on social media, “We need leadership that defends life and protects the most vulnerable—not radical policies that undermine our values.”

Many other anti-abortion rights groups have remained silent on his nomination. And in recent meetings with Kennedy, anti-abortion rights senators say they came away reassured. “He’s gonna align himself, by choice, with President Trump on pro-life policies,” Sen. Ted Budd of North Carolina told NPR recently.

Groups that support abortion rights largely oppose Kennedy. “RFK Jr. is an unfit, unqualified extremist who cannot be trusted to protect the health, safety, and reproductive freedom of American families,” Reproductive Freedom for All wrote soon after he was nominated.

6. He won’t accept the fact that HIV causes AIDS

It is well established science that AIDS is caused by a virus known as HIV, but it’s a fact that Kennedy does not accept. Instead, he has claimed AIDS is caused by recreational drug use and that scientists, including Dr. Anthony Fauci formerly of NIH, conspired to make up an infectious disease responsible for AIDS so they could “take control of it.”

“They were doing phony, crooked studies to develop a cure that killed people without really being able to understand what HIV was, and pumping up fear about it constantly, not really understanding whether it was causing AIDS,” Kennedy told New York Magazine last year.

This is not true, and Kennedy’s insistence on this point has HIV advocates calling his nomination dangerous. The federal government pays for the treatment of nearly half of all HIV-positive Americans through the Ryan White Program. And during President Trump’s first term, the federal government launched an ambitious effort to end the HIV epidemic by 2030. If HHS is led by Kennedy, an HIV denialist, those projects could be in jeopardy, advocates say.

7. He wants focus on lifestyle and chronic disease, but hasn’t detailed how

Kennedy talks a lot about shifting the focus of the federal health agencies towards promotion of a healthy lifestyle and the root causes of chronic diseases. This is the rare area in which his views garner some bipartisan support.

Kennedy has said he’d like to overhaul dietary guidelines, reform federal programs that pay for ultra-processed foods, take on crop subsidies, and other initiatives. It’s unclear how he could accomplish these goals without new regulations on the food and agriculture industries. “A real litmus test about whether or not they’re serious is whether they take on some of the economic interests that are causing our chronic disease epidemic,” former CDC director Tom Frieden told NPR in November.

Jacobs of the University of Arizona bristles at the way Kennedy talks about chronic disease and nutrition as if scientists have been ignoring them. “To pretend like those are his ideas alone is outrageous,” she says. “You can see for yourself just by a cursory search of PubMed,” a public database of medical and scientific research, she points out. “These are not novel ideas. These are not ideas that are exclusive to Mr. Kennedy. They are ideas that have been the result of thousands of hours of scientific research.”

Will Stone contributed to this report.

If President Trump tries to buy or annex Greenland, he could face a competing claim from an old ally: Britain.

That’s according to Tom Høyem, 83, who served as Denmark’s last minister for the autonomous territory of Greenland from 1982 to 1987, after which the position was discontinued. He has visited the island 46 times, wrote a book about it and says he considers Trump’s interest “very positive and very constructive” for its defense.

Greenland is rich in rare earth minerals and uranium, and may prove strategic for global shipping routes, as Arctic ice melts with climate change. Even though Danish officials have said Greenland is not for sale, Trump keeps repeating his desire for it, telling reporters Saturday, “I think we’re going to have it.”

Høyem says Britain may actually have right of first refusal, based on diplomatic talks that happened more than a century ago, resulting in a 1917 treaty between the U.S. and Denmark. The British government was involved in those talks because of Greenland’s proximity to Canada, which at the time was governed by Britain.

The treaty outlines a deal in which the U.S. purchased a cluster of Caribbean islands — now called the U.S. Virgin Islands — from Denmark for $25 million, in exchange for recognition of Danish sovereignty over Greenland. It was signed by then-President Woodrow Wilson and his secretary of state, Robert Lansing.

“I do not know why President Trump’s civil servants have not shown him the document that his predecessor President Wilson signed — this official document — that says Greenland has been, and will always be, Danish,” Høyem told NPR in a phone interview Monday from Germany, where he now lives.

The final text of the 1917 treaty makes no mention of any British role. But Høyem, who is an expert on Greenland’s history, says British support for the treaty was contingent upon this point.

“The idea was that if Denmark ever got the stupid idea to sell Greenland, then United Kingdom had the first right to buy it or be consulted on its future — because of Canada,” he says.

NPR has asked the British Library and U.K. National Archives for copies of any declassified diplomatic cables that might support Høyem’s account, but has not yet heard back.

Tom Høyem in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 2014.

Uli Deck/picture alliance via Getty Image

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Uli Deck/picture alliance via Getty Image

Another expert on the Arctic tells NPR she’s never heard of any such British claim. It hasn’t been part of any mainstream academic or diplomatic conversations, she says.

“We live in a world of rules-based order,” says Jennifer Spence, director of the Arctic Initiative at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. “If we started opening up historical agreements on all former colonies of different countries, things would get pretty chaotic pretty quickly.”

“Russia could come to the U.S. and ask for Alaska back,” she told NPR by phone from a conference in Norway.

As for British officials, no matter what their predecessors may or may not have said in the lead-up to this 1917 treaty, they are unlikely to get involved in any current discussions over Greenland’s future. U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy has repeatedly downplayed Trump’s claims.

In response to an NPR query, the U.K. Foreign Office wrote in an email Monday that it considers Greenland to be part of Denmark, and that its future status is a matter for the people and government of Greenland, and the kingdom of Denmark.

NPR also contacted the Danish prime minister’s office, the Danish Foreign Ministry and the Greenland Committee in Denmark’s Parliament for comment about Høyem’s account — but has not yet heard back.

For its part, Greenland has asserted its right to self-determination, and most Greenlanders favor independence from Denmark. One recent poll with a small sample size showed a majority favor joining the United States.

But Høyem says many Greenlanders are “irritated” with Trump’s talk of a takeover.

“It’s a U.S. businessman’s way of operating,” he says. “We are modern people now, and to use the words ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ — that’s a ghost from the past.”

President Trump’s order to release thousands of documents related to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., could shed additional light on the events. However, few historians appear to be anticipating any narrative-shifting bombshells.

The National Archives records related to the assassinations in the 1960s were first set to be released in 2017, during Trump’s first term. Many were made public, but some remain under lock. Former President Joe Biden extended some of those exemptions during his term.

But in an executive order issued Thursday, days after his inauguration, Trump said continuing to redact and withhold information “is not consistent with the public interest and the release of these records is long overdue.”

It gives intelligence officials 15 days to present a plan for the release of documents related to President Kennedy’s assassination and 45 days for a similar plan pertaining to Robert F. Kennedy and King.

For decades, conspiracy theories about the assassinations — especially in the case of President Kennedy — have been fueled by the government’s withholding information from the public, citing national security concerns, historians say.

Documents might fill in a few missing pieces on JFK assassination 

More than 300,000 pages making up the “vast majority of the material” related to President Kennedy’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, have already been released, notes Kevin Boyle, a professor of American history at Northwestern University.

Of the “fraction of material” remaining solely in the government’s possession, “my guess is that it’s not going to reveal … something new about John Kennedy’s assassination,” he says.

Fredrik Logevall, a biographer of President Kennedy, agrees that the new information will not “dramatically overturn our understanding of what happened on that terrible day in Dallas.”

“But even if they don’t alter our understanding in this deep way, I think there’s still useful information potentially in these materials,” he says.

Logevall thinks there could be something about shooter Lee Harvey Oswald’s travel to Mexico City in the lead-up to the assassination, such as “who he talked with when he was there and what the meaning of that trip was.” He also thinks there might be more to learn about “what the CIA either reported to the FBI about its knowledge of Oswald and his travels or what they didn’t record” prior to the assassination. “That’s really useful information, whatever it might reveal about the murder itself,” Logevall says.

Boyle thinks there could also be other information of interest that’s not directly related to the Kennedy assassination, such as some missing puzzle pieces when it comes to covert activity in Cuba. “There is a lot of information that’s already been revealed about the extent of the U.S. covert operation prior to John Kennedy’s assassination. And I think we could get interesting new revelations from that.”

More might be learned about FBI surveillance of MLK

Previous document releases have shown that the FBI had King under extensive surveillance and made use of wiretaps to uncover information aimed at damaging the civil rights leader — particularly evidence of extramarital affairs.

Kathryn McGarr, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, says she doesn’t think there’s much more to learn. “We already know quite a bit about how much the government was surveilling and looking at [MLK] … and how many enemies he had within the government,” she says. “I don’t think that the narrative is going to significantly change, although of course, we could get some more details here and there.”

King’s death led to violence across the U.S., particularly in cities including Washington, D.C. and Chicago. Dozens were killed. Boyle says he’s interested in the federal government’s “reaction to the racial dynamic” that surrounded King and the response to his killing.

Firefighters tackle a blaze on H Street during the riots in Washington, D.C., that followed the assassination of civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., in April 1968.

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Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

John Stoner, a U.S. history professor at the University of Pittsburgh, thinks the fact that the federal government “worked so hard to isolate King, to investigate potential subversive connections of some of his advisers,” has added fuel to the conspiracy fire. King’s own family has said that James Earl Ray, the man convicted of firing the fatal shot in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968, was framed.

Stoner says he’s hopeful that new documents might “shed light on the degree to which there is any hint of a government conspiracy to have killed [King].”

Robert Kennedy’s assassination has similarly been the subject of speculation, including the claim that the gunman, Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian refugee and Jordanian national, had been hypnotized by a woman standing nearby the scene to carry out the killing. But of the three assassinations in question, his has attracted the fewest conspiracy theories, probably because “so much air is taken up by [the assassinations of] JFK and MLK,” Stoner says.

New York Democratic Sen. Robert F. Kennedy speaking to campaign workers, on June 5, 1968, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. After making a short speech, Kennedy was fatally shot in an adjacent room.

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Sirhan, who remains in a San Diego prison, said after his arrest that the killing of Robert Kennedy was “for my country.” The June 5, 1968 assassination occurred on the first anniversary of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, also known as the Six-Day War. Sirhan felt betrayed by Kennedy’s support for Israel, he said in a 1989 interview.

Stoner says he would be interested to learn whether the government “soft-pedalled political connections that Sirhan Sirhan might have had.”

Why has it taken so long to release the information?

Although national security is the often-cited reason for delaying the release of the assassination documents from the National Archives, McGarr from University of Wisconsin-Madison says it’s more likely that redactions are for “bureaucratic reasons.”

If her own archival work is any guide, she says, it’s most likely that information hasn’t been released because of embarrassment. “When there are certain documents that can’t be released till after someone has died, it’s often nothing more than a snide remark.”

Despite Trump’s quickly issued executive order, the documents still need to be reviewed and it could be some time before they see the light of public scrutiny, author Logevall says. “I could imagine a scenario in which … this is delayed and that there would be some redactions even in these final releases,” he says.

Northwestern’s Boyle says if the release follows the usual protocol, once it gets the official go-ahead, the National Archives will put the material online.

Typically, he says, it “doesn’t make for the most compelling reading,” he says. “You know, it’s bureaucratic material. It’s people files and personnel cases. … It’s not very exciting.”

Even if the documents don’t contain anything dramatic, they will still be of interest to people such as himself, he says. “As historians we never think that the story has been told. There is always the possibility of new information.”