Try to Make Sense of RFK Jr.’s Employee Screening Questions

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s pick to run the Department of Health and Human Services, is already taking applications for people to work for him—and they include some bizarre questions. 

Puck News reported Friday that the anti-vaccine activist has a form on his “Make America Healthy Again” website where applicants can respond to a series of questions by selecting some odd pre-written responses.

Job hunters have to fill out a 90-minute questionnaire that recommends one be “well rested, have recently eaten, and will not be disturbed” before beginning. The questions themselves seem to concern personality traits, with applicants having to choose responses such as “Modesty doesn’t become me,” “I get upset when people don’t notice how I look when I go out in public,” and “I can usually talk my way out of anything.”

Kennedy has some unusual views, including believing that the Covid-19 pandemic was planned, AIDS isn’t caused by HIV,  and that WiFi causes cancer, so it’s not a big surprise that he would have an unusual application process. However, at this point, Kennedy has not even begun his Senate confirmation hearings, let alone been sworn into Trump’s Cabinet, so these applications don’t meet federal hiring standards and laws.

If Kennedy is confirmed, it will be interesting to see if his application process faces legal challenges, especially since many federal agencies are unionized. Trump has pledged to purge the civil service of his opponents and is putting Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of “government efficiency,” which effectively means massive cuts to government programs and the firing of civil servants in large numbers. 

Kennedy’s strange hiring standards may not initially hold up, but if Trump and his new friends get their way on overhauling the civil service, these kinds of unusual applications could become the norm in the federal bureaucracy, to the detriment of the government actually functioning well.