RFK Jr’s advisory panel overhaul stalled update on helping kids quit tobacco

The health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s overhaul of an influential federal advisory group has stalled an update that would have highlighted “encouraging” new evidence on helping children quit tobacco, according to a recently departed member of the group.

The Trump administration has postponed or canceled all meetings of the US preventive services taskforce since March 2025, effectively preventing taskforce members from issuing binding recommendations for more than a year. As a result, 14 topics under consideration have been stalled – including on cervical cancer screening, perinatal depression and autism screening.

The taskforce was created by the Reagan administration; the Affordable Care Act (ACA) tied the taskforce’s recommendations to insurance coverage for preventive services.

“There was a lot of new, very encouraging evidence on tobacco cessation for kids,” said Dr Michael Silverstein, who served on the task force from 2016 to March 2025, when he rotated off the committee. “We’re talking about children and tobacco – I can’t imagine there’s anything controversial about that.”

As the taskforce was prevented from voting as a group, it is unclear what its recommendation on the new evidence would have been.

Kennedy also fired two taskforce leaders in May, and called members, “lackadaisical and negligent for 20 years” at a congressional hearing in April.

The Guardian sent HHS a list of questions related to the taskforce, regarding new appointments, lobbying of the agency that supports the taskforce and criticism of the administration’s actions.

“Due to an unprecedented number of nominations received for Task Force membership, the forecasted July US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) meeting has been postponed until late August to allow additional time for selection and onboarding of new task force members,” said Emily Hilliard, senior press secretary for HHS, in a statement.

The taskforce most recently considered childhood tobacco cessation in 2020. Then, it made formal recommendations for preventing children from taking up smoking, but found insufficient research to recommend tobacco cessation for children. The topic of childhood tobacco cessation was revisited in 2025, with the hopes of publishing an updated recommendation.

Silverstein said the issue moved through taskforce subcommittees even as the broader group was prevented from meeting, but without the ability to convene and meet formally, a draft recommendation was never reached.

Since Trump took office for a second term, the administration has dismantled several anti-smoking health programs across government. The CDC’s office on smoking and health has been shut down for more than a year, and a 14-year-old ad campaign called “Tips from Former Smokers,” which featured a former smoker whose teeth and jaw were removed due to oral cancer, went off the air last year. The Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) lead tobacco regulator was also removed in April 2025.

Dr Marty Makary, a former Trump FDA commissioner, resigned in protest to a new FDA policy that allowed sale of flavored vapes by tobacco companies. The new policy decision came shortly after a Reynolds American subsidiary donated $5m to a Trump-backed Super Pac, according to reporting from the New York Times.

Silverstein said the taskforce’s inability to meet has also caused recommendations on perinatal depression and cervical cancer screening to be delayed, issues with “very, very important public health implications”.

The changes come after the supreme court clarified, in 2025, that Kennedy has the power to appoint and fire members of the taskforce. The court case itself came after the taskforce recommendation, which required insurance to pay for pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV, or PrEP. In briefs to the court, hard-right medical organizations such as the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) argued PrEP was a medication “for risky lifestyles”.

Outside groups concerned about the changes to the taskforce said they have also been left in the dark about what is happening with it.

“Republican and Democratic administrations, including the previous Trump administration, were not like this,” said Dr Aaron E Carroll, president and CEO of non-partisan health services and policy research group AcademyHealth. “The fact we can’t get answers to the most basic of questions after a full year is staggering.”

Kennedy has made few statements about his priorities for the taskforce. In April, in the same congressional testimony, Kennedy called for more screening for Alzheimer’s. Hilliard did not respond to a question about the secretary’s priorities, in an email. In that vacuum, some test and device makers have begun lobbying, according to Politico.

In one example from lobbying reports, Guardant Health, which makes a blood test for colorectal cancer, spent $241,000 in the first three months of 2026 lobbying the Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research (AHRQ), which supports the taskforce. Guardant Health also launched a public petition urging Kennedy to update guidelines on colon cancer screening blood tests.

“It’s somewhat humorous, but also sad, that we have to keep guessing what is going on in our government instead of actually knowing,” said Carroll.