Maxwell Kennedy Accuses RFK Jr. of Undermining Their Father’s Anti-Poverty Mission, Calling Him a Partner in Trump-Era Cuts

As Robert F. Kennedy’s centennial approached this week, his son Maxwell Taylor Kennedy marked the moment with a pointed op-ed in the Boston Globe — honoring his father’s lifelong crusade against poverty while condemning the actions of his brother, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now serving as President Donald Trump’s secretary of health and human services.

Maxwell, the ninth of RFK and Ethel Kennedy’s 11 children, wrote that if his father were alive today, he would be taking stock of a country he “loved and served,” and would be horrified by what Maxwell described as the administration’s harsh treatment of low-income Americans.

Maxwell argued that his father was driven above all by a belief that no child in the United States should go hungry. While RFK did not experience hunger himself growing up in a wealthy and influential family, Maxwell noted that both RFK and his brother John F. Kennedy were shaken by the poverty they witnessed while campaigning across the country — an experience that helped shape their political priorities.

President John F. Kennedy, Maxwell recalled, launched a pilot version of the food stamp program, which President Lyndon B. Johnson later expanded after JFK’s assassination in 1963. But Maxwell emphasized that RFK’s work went further, helping lay the groundwork for federal nutrition and anti-poverty programs that still serve millions.

After becoming a U.S. senator from New York in 1964, RFK was deeply influenced by Marian Wright, a young Black attorney who had risen out of poverty in Mississippi to graduate from Yale Law School. Maxwell wrote that Wright’s testimony and their subsequent trip together to Jackson, Mississippi — alongside three other senators — became a turning point for his father.

In the op-ed, Maxwell described RFK’s approach as rooted in direct connection with struggling communities: listening, showing up, and treating empathy as essential to political wisdom. That outlook, he said, is what separated RFK from leaders who “mistake cruelty for strength.”

Maxwell acknowledged that the Vietnam War helped push RFK toward a presidential run, but said poverty was the issue that most consistently animated his conscience. Even after RFK’s assassination, Maxwell wrote, others carried the fight forward: Senator George McGovern supported expansions of SNAP, WIC, and the National School Lunch Program; President Richard Nixon helped extend food stamps to every state; and legislation signed by President Jimmy Carter removed a requirement that beneficiaries pay into the program.

Maxwell warned that those same programs are now being weakened. He pointed to disruptions during the recent government shutdown that froze benefits for many families, and to provisions in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” signed in July, that tightened eligibility rules and could push millions off assistance.

“Hunger remains an acute problem in America,” Maxwell wrote, arguing that the programs his father championed are being steadily dismantled. He accused the administration of stripping aid from the poor while rewarding the wealthy, and said the moral cost is staggering.

A central target of Maxwell’s criticism was his brother. He said RFK Jr., by standing beside Trump while nutrition programs — especially SNAP — are scaled back, is abandoning the core duty of public health leadership. In Maxwell’s view, a government cannot claim to promote national health while denying food to the most vulnerable.

He closed by invoking his father’s warning that if a nation cannot prevent its citizens from starving, it must question what kind of country it has become — a challenge Maxwell said is just as urgent now as it was in RFK’s time.

Maxwell is not alone within the family in criticizing RFK Jr.’s role in the administration. Several relatives have publicly questioned his judgment and called for him to step aside, most recently after controversy over vaccine-policy decisions tied to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.