Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is cleaning house at the nation’s top preventive care panel, sidelining the same experts who dragged their feet on Alzheimer’s screening and leaving the establishment press in a panic over lost control.
Kennedy has blocked the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) from meeting for over a year, fired its leadership, and refused to fill vacancies—all while demanding better screening for a disease affecting more than seven million Americans. The stakes are real: the task force’s A-to-D ratings dictate what preventive screenings insurers must cover at no cost. But the institutional outcry says more about who’s losing power than it does about science.
The USPSTF, which usually meets three times a year, hasn’t convened since March 2025. In May, a political appointee fired the panel’s two chairs. With at least eight vacancies on the 16-member board, the task force is not scheduled to meet again until late August.
Kennedy told Congress the panel has been "lackadaisical and negligent for 20 years." He has previously called the lack of early Alzheimer’s screening "regulatory malpractice" and insisted the absence of a cure is the result of "corruption" at the National Institutes of Health.
The Daily Beast framed the shakeup as a threat to "evidence-based" science, quoting AcademyHealth CEO Aaron Carroll, who warned Kennedy could remake the panel to force insurers to cover things that "might cause more harm than good." The Beast also linked the move to Kennedy’s overhaul of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, where he fired all 17 members over conflicts of interest and replaced them with vaccine skeptics.
Yet the actual science on Alzheimer’s screening is hardly settled. The Guardian reported that the panel itself found the evidence for widespread cognitive screening lacking. "You get 10 neurologists, you get 10 approaches... The evidence is mixed at best," said John Ruiz, a former task force member. The panel’s answer was to call for more funding to build evidence—a typical bureaucratic stall.
Meanwhile, even as Kennedy demands results, the bureaucratic gears are grinding. Fourteen of the nation's 35 Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centers faced funding delays in March after NIH grant approvals stalled. Ann D. Cohen, co-director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Alzheimer’s center, told The Guardian that "science has been slowed down."
Kennedy is tearing down a panel that admits it doesn’t have the answers to replace it with one that might actually push for action. The question is whether shaking up the captured system will accelerate a cure, or just leave Americans paying for screenings the old guard insists aren’t ready.
