WASHINGTON — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. warned Food and Drug Administration staff about the influence of the “deep state” on the agency in an all-hands meeting Friday where he also made off-color comments about children with developmental disabilities.

FDA employees gathered at the agency’s Maryland-based headquarters for a “viewing party” to watch FDA commissioner Marty Makary and the Department of Health and Human Services secretary, who spoke from a separate room in the same building, according to an invitation seen by Bloomberg News and people familiar with the meeting.

Makary and Kennedy began by laying out their vision for the FDA: examining the U.S. food supply, making regulation more transparent and improving public health.

But the meeting quickly turned to warnings of the “deep state” and influence of the Central Intelligence Agency, according to audio and transcripts obtained by Bloomberg News. The HHS chief encouraged whistleblowers to speak up if their supervisors push to approve unsafe products.

“The deep state is real,” Kennedy said. “There are institutional pressures that affect every institution that’s created by human beings.”

He said the FDA, like other agencies, “became captured by the industries that they’re supposed to regulate.” He said the agency turned away “dissidents” and people who touted “alternative medicines.”

HHS and FDA didn’t respond to requests for comment through a press inquiry submitted electronically. A top Kennedy aide declined to provide comment, referring Bloomberg News to fill out the electronic form.

Some FDA staffers said they were bewildered by Kennedy’s later comments, which focused on children’s health and what he described as an “autism epidemic,” these people said, asking not to be named discussing the private remarks.

He recounted past experiences in which he worked at a camp with “retarded” children, according to the people, a term many in the room found to be offensive when used to describe a person with intellectual or developmental disabilities.

At the camp, he said he helped children who are “essentially just in a vegetative state.” He described how the children “could sit on a bench and push off a bean bag onto the ground and everybody would cheer for them. But we couldn’t have handled the kid with full blown autism.”

HHS Director of Communications Andrew Nixon said “this article factually misinterprets what Secretary Kennedy said to push a partisan narrative. What Secretary Kennedy actually said was: ‘I spent 200 hours at the Wassaic State School for the Mentally Retarded when I was in high school so I was seeing people with intellectual disabilities all the time.’”

Kennedy has long misrepresented information about autism, including data about its prevalence. He has also spread false information linking autism to common childhood vaccinations.

On Thursday after returning from a three-day press junket in the Southwest, he announced that HHS would pursue a “massive testing and research effort” to determine the cause of autism.

“By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic and we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures,” Kennedy said at a televised White House cabinet meeting on Thursday.

______

(With assistance from Madison Muller.)

©2025 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.