Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. health secretary, arrived at the Make America Healthy Again summit at the Waldorf Astoria in Washington just after noon on Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026, though he was not slated to speak until 5 p.m., alongside Vice President JD Vance.
Kennedy walked in under mounting questions about his finances. A report published Wednesday, Sept. 23, found that allies inside the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement have paid him $4 million in book advances over the past year. The payments flowed to him after he had assured federal ethics officials he would stay out of publishing while serving in government, the article states.
In a 2024 ethics filing, Kennedy pledged: “I will not engage in writing, editing, marketing or promotional services for any of these books during government service.”
Advances From an Allied Publisher
The advances are tied to forthcoming titles from Skyhorse Publishing, owned by Tony Lyons, a friend of Kennedy. The MAHA Center, a nonprofit Lyons also runs, describes its mission as taking on the country’s health crisis.
Kennedy has written several books with Skyhorse, among them “The Real Anthony Fauci” and “The Wuhan Cover-Up.” The article says both pressed anti-establishment health arguments that later became organizing themes of the MAHA movement. Kennedy leads that movement from the top of the federal health bureaucracy, and the article describes Lyons’ publishing operation and the movement as close cousins.
MAHA Action, another nonprofit advocacy group headed by Lyons, paid $210,000 in consultation fees to Kennedy’s wife, Cheryl Hines.
Kathleen Clark, a government ethics specialist at Washington University in St. Louis, told NPR: “It seems very weird that RFK Jr. has accepted $4 million in book advances for two books that he has promised not to write or edit during the time that he’s HHS Secretary.”
Kennedy “complies with all applicable federal ethics laws, regulations and financial disclosure requirements,” a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said in a statement to the New York Times. Career ethics officials at the department work with the secretary, the spokesperson added, to ensure his financial interests, gifts, outside activities and other reportable matters get disclosed and handled according to those rules.
Gifts From a Longtime Friend
Gavin de Becker, a security consultant and Kennedy ally, owns the vacation home in Washington where Kennedy accepted $126,500 worth of housing, his 2026 financial disclosure forms show. De Becker also gave him nearly $45,000 in round-trip airfare to Greece, according to the disclosures, plus nearly $97,000 in round-trip airfare to Fiji, where de Becker owns a compound.
Kennedy’s super political action committee took in at least $10 million from de Becker in 2024, and $9.65 million of that sum was returned. He is also a Skyhorse author, with a book titled “Forbidden Facts: Government Deceit & Suppression About Brain Damage From Childhood Vaccines.”
For many years Kennedy has been one of his closest friends, de Becker told the New York Times, and he is glad to host him at any time. Kennedy has hosted his family in turn, he said, and he has stayed at Kennedy’s homes; the two families vacation together annually, a habit he said predates Kennedy’s current job.
Dinner from a former classmate earns a benefit of the doubt that lavish gifts to an official from major political donors do not, Kedric Payne, a vice president and senior ethics counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, told the New York Times. The public, he said, is entitled to know exactly what those gifts are and whether the donor has any interests pending before the government.
A Late and Revised Filing
An extension still left Kennedy’s disclosure filed 90 days late, and September brought four revisions to it. A federal ethics filing cited in a report published Sept. 24 shows Children’s Health Defense paid Kennedy $326,056 in salary and bonuses in the year before he left his role as chairman of the board and chief legal counsel to lead HHS.
That report said Kennedy “has also taken cash for book advances, defied his ethics agreement by promoting one of his books on social media and accepted expensive gifts,” an alleged breach of the ethics pledge going beyond the advances themselves.
Summit and Conference Remarks
Kennedy spoke last Thursday, as of that Sept. 24 report, at a Washington, D.C., conference of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group he co-founded. “Let me be clear. You have a strong and steadfast friend at the White House,” he told the crowd. Speaking minutes earlier, MAHA Institute President Mark Gorton called vaccines “a public health disaster.”
At Tuesday’s summit, described as industry-backed, senior Kennedy adviser Calley Means and acting FDA commissioner Kyle Diamantas were slated to speak on a midafternoon panel titled “Modernizing MAHA regulation.” Organizers denied media credentials to many major outlets, including The Washington Sun and The New York Times. According to a New York Times headline, Kennedy said artificial intelligence is “better informed” than doctors.
