Sheryl. Your article exemplifies the biased reporting we have come to expect from you and @nytimes. It was unfair, inimical, and inaccurate. All one needs to refute your argument is to glance at my publicly available calendar and to review my unprecedented list of accomplishments on a wide range of issues, all of which I drove. You evidently never undertook these foundational due diligences. Why let facts obscure a good story?
You fault me for missing a couple of monthly counselor meetings. However, I meet one-on-one with my counselors every day to decide policy and strategy. We schedule the monthly meetings to give the divisions a chance to keep each other informed about HHS-wide policies with which I’m already intimately familiar. Had you read my calendar, you would have seen that I have back-to-back meetings all day, every day, with both career and political staff, with my counselors and with outside stakeholders, interspersed with press conferences and other policy announcements.
I am knowledgeable and active on every issue in every division of my department, and I always make the final decisions. I meet with the principals at FDA, NIH, CDC, and my senior counselor every morning, something, I’m told, is unprecedented in HHS history. I try to get out of the office between 4:30 and 6:00 PM, so that I can spend three hours, in quiet, responding to emails. I normally work until 11 PM every night, mostly on phone calls to staff.
In order to prove your preconceived case for my disengagement, you quote anonymous employees, some of whom I fired or who quit to avoid being fired. You also deceptively quote HHS employees without identifying whether they were among those I fired, thereby depriving your readers of the opportunity to make an independent judgment about their credibility.
I came into this job to change the culture of a broken agency that has presided over the worst decline in public health in American history. Of course I fired people—lots of them! It's an easy task for even the laziest journalist, to comb that flotsam and jetsam for malevolence toward the Trump administration. And of course, this species of journalist will always be able to find disgruntled individuals among the 70,000 employees of the Department from whom to cherry pick "facts" to flesh out a preordained hit piece. All that is required for this brand of journalism is the ethical elasticity that you seem to have in spades. You had a preconceived thesis, and you set out to prove it. This is a widely accepted technique in journalism today, but I grew up in an era when it would not have been tolerated by the New York Times.
Ultimately, God puts us all on this earth to search for existential truths. I've tried to instill this mission at HHS by implementing gold standard research to end the regime of politicized science that COVID exposed to the American public. There was a time that journalists were proud to be the fearless and uncompromising champions of truth. Standards have devolved, and journalism is dead. The Times now employs propagandists. Your capitulation to partisanship further compounds your journalistic challenges; since we all are aware of your predictable bias, we at HHS are unwilling to talk to you about the topics that are important. The fact that you have minimal access to decision makers leaves you covering trivia and relying on your own capacity for invention.
Btw. When I took this job, the building was empty. About 90% of the employees were not coming to work. I changed that, but your newspaper never covers my reforms. Nor did you cover the fact that my predecessor almost never showed up for work here during his four years in office. When we came in, there were still artifacts from the first Trump administration in many of our office drawers because no one showed up for work during the Biden years. Just as Rochelle Walensky spent her entire term as CDC Director in Cambridge, Xavier Becerra reportedly spent most of his term as HHS Secretary in California. (I live in California, but I’ve only been there once in fifteen months).
His only notable accomplishments here were losing 300,000 children, referred to HHS for custody and care, to human traffickers and drug runners, encouraging transgender surgeries, and disabling the entire program-integrity apparatus, allowing hundreds of billions of dollars of theft from my agency. I have set out to find the children Becerra lost. He is now the front-runner for the governor of California. These are not invented stories; they are genuine scandals that the Times will never cover, presumably, because the malefactors are Democrats.
Finally, you criticize me for spending time with the Indian tribes in Alaska. I consider that part of my job. I run the Indian Health Services, and I’ve had unprecedented success in transforming IHS from a backwater to a top priority for this department. I’ve made more trips to Indian country and to Indian health clinics and hospitals than any HHS secretary in history, and I’ve brought Indians into high positions on the sixth floor for the first time in agency history. This is another success story that the Times will never cover.
I keep getting asked why I'm so angry and so focused about repeat-offender crime.
This photo right here… this is why.
I grew up in a country where childhood felt free.
Not perfect, but free.
We hopped on our bikes after breakfast and didn't come home until the streetlights flicked on.
No phones.
Just a bunch of kids pedaling through the neighborhood... cutting through yards, racing down hills, stopping at a friend's house because you saw their bike was in the grass out front and knew they were home so you knocked on the door and got hit with a water-balloon.
That's the start of a life-long friendship.
We went to public pools with a diving board and a high dive (they tore those down)
We played soccer in the front yard with whoever happened to be outside... sometimes they were kids you knew from school, but often times they were kids you only knew because you saw them every summer riding past your house.
It was normal for my parents to assume their kids would ALWAYS come home in one piece and my parents NEVER knew where we were growing up.
That's the America I knew, and the one I grew up in.
My kids are not growing up in that America.
I don't get to just be the parent yelling, "Be home by dinner!" I have to be the parent running risk calculations in my head. Because all of us parents know the public spaces aren't safe anymore.
There's no headline for "OH LOOK AT THAT! Another neighborhood kept their kids indoors today and gave them iPads!"
But go ahead and talk to ANY parent you know… it’s happening.
We all know it's happening.
It's the slow, quiet theft of my kids' childhood... and your kids childhood.
A childhood we ALL once had and one they will never know.
It wrecks me just thinking about it... I hate it for them.
So when I talk about repeat offenders... when I post the screenshots of their 50+ arrests every single day…
Please understand something…
It's because I want my kids, and your kids, to have what we had.
I want the biggest concern at a park to be a skinned knee.
Not a st*bbing.
I want streets where the sound of bicycles and laughter is louder than that of sirens.
This is why I won't shut up about it.
I'm not asking for a perfect world.
I'm asking for the radical idea that childhood should be safe enough to look like this picture again.
And honestly, I just don’t think it’s all that radical of an ask…
There’s a reason “Dog” is just “God”, backwards; they share an unconditional love for mankind. Both Nithya and Karen Bass ignore these poor animals being killed on Skid Row and in their city shelters. They don’t care. I will put an end to this horror. VOTE to save these animals.
🚨 WOW! LA mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt says he's going to FIRE the police chief after he gets into office if the criminals and drug addicts aren't arrested
"If my LAPD chief that I put in doesn't do that, we'll get a new LAPD chief. And if anybody at LAPD doesn't want to enforce law, we'll get new officers!" 🔥
"I'm just going to be the mayor that comes in and says, 'Hey, everybody, the laws back, the laws that all exist! These incredible laws that are incredible DEMOCRATS voted for!' I'm going to enforce them for everybody as mayor."
"We are going to make sure that moms feel safe in Los Angeles. That is my number one priority of eight years of being mayor is to make LA the safest city in the country."
"Nobody's safe really in LA unless you're the drug dealer the drug dealers and the people giving them the needles the city our taxpayer money those the needle givers. They're safe. The meth pipe givers. They're safe."
"Everyone else is not safe in Los Angeles. So moms are getting me elected because I'm saying, as mayor, I'm going to enforce the law and make sure moms and kids can use their parks again."
"They can go to school without encampments with drug dealing and naked drug addicts having s*x in front of these schools on the sidewalk."
"I'm stopping this because it's illegal."
@SatAmericaFNC@kayleighmcenany@spencerpratt
It’s actually possible California can be saved. It’s not a matter of whether Steve can win. He can, and he will. The real question is will he win by a large enough margin to beat the cheat. Democrats are going to cheat like never before, and Californians must VOTE to beat them.
This is my parents’ house. This is why I’m running. This is coming for your home. It’s coming for your industry. If not by fire, then by blight, addicts, fraud, and the slow rot created by corrupt politicians like Karen Bass. Wake up and VOTE.
On this day 13 years ago, my only son was sworn in to the US Army. In ten days, it will be 12 years since he was killed in Afghanistan 2 weeks before he was due to come home. He was just 21. This week is also Memorial Day. My greatest fear now is that he will be forgotten. Please help me remember my boy during this tough week of special dates (share if you feel inspired. It never gets easier but the love and support always helps. ♥️🇺🇸
Jacob H Wykstra
KIA May 28th, 2014
Maruf, Afghanistan
Jake was a Christian, an athlete, a patriot, an artist, dog lover, a friend to all and the funniest, happiest guy in the platoon. Jake, you’ve left a huge void in our lives, but we will see you one day and there will no more heartache and no more goodbyes ♥️🇺🇸
🚨 BREAKING: Georgia election watchdog Garland Favorito is sounding the alarm over what he calls a “secret bunker” where @GaSecofState allegedly plans to aggregate Georgia’s 2026 election results - away from public oversight.
According to Favorito, the facility is off-limits not only to the public and candidates, but even to members of Georgia’s State Election Board tasked with overseeing elections.
“The secret aggregation of election results is a clear violation of state election transparency law.”
@VoterGa says multiple candidates have now filed lawsuits seeking emergency action to force Raffensperger to comply with Georgia transparency laws ahead of the 2026 election cycle.
Why are statewide election results being handled in a secured emergency operations center hidden from public view?
Make sure you’re sitting down for this…
The organizer of the ��Muslims only” waterpark event in Texas…
Also runs a LEARING CENTER
You literally cannot make this stuff up
Trump on Ilhan Omar: "I believe she married her brother… lovely couple… darling I love you very much. Goodnight, brother. Let’s go to bed.”
“Get the hell out! What a phony!”
Funniest president in history 🤣🤣🤣
A defining moment in history.
A clear mandate from the American people.
365 days later, President Donald J. Trump is delivering, patriotism is rising, America is BACK, and the story is just getting started. 🇺🇸
“History will record your name @realDonaldTrump alongside the greatest defenders of liberty, and future Americans will look back on this era and marvel at the man who refused to let the light of freedom be extinguished.”
My latest: https://t.co/x5vHwOgKOF