On Big Pharma, Food and Agriculture, These Are Kennedy’s Unexpected Bedfellows

When it comes to weeding out corporate influence, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ideas often align best with some of Trump’s loudest critics.

There is no denying the bromance between President-elect Donald J. Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., two men with famously big egos and a desire to expose what they view as a corrupt federal bureaucracy.

But if Mr. Kennedy is confirmed to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, several of his key priorities may run counter to those of an administration with a game plan bent on deregulation. Mr. Trump’s choice for White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, comes from a lobbying firm that represented the very industries that Mr. Kennedy hopes to disrupt.

Over the past two decades, Mr. Kennedy, a lawyer and longtime environmentalist, has turned his passion toward health issues, many of which — apart from his questioning of vaccine safety — traditionally align better with the Democratic Party he left behind. When it comes to tearing down corporate capture among the giants — Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Food, among others — Mr. Kennedy’s ideas echo those of some of the incoming Trump administration’s loudest critics.

Mr. Kennedy, who recently criticized Mr. Trump’s penchant for fast food, has been clear about his plans to go after ultra-processed foods that contribute to the growing rates of diabetes and obesity in the United States. Those goals sound familiar to anyone who lived through the Obama administration, when Michelle Obama started the Let’s Move! campaign as first lady to encourage healthier diets and lifestyles among children.

Ms. Obama was a driving force behind former President Barack Obama’s creation of a task force on childhood obesity. Under his administration, federal agencies released updated nutrition labels and the ubiquitous “MyPlate” icon that replaced the food pyramid. Most consequentially, she championed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, which increased funding and raised nutritional standards for school lunches. The vegetable requirements and rules for sodium and flavored drink products under that law, signed in 2010, were dialed back under the first Trump administration.

The week before the election, Mr. Kennedy declared the “first thing” he would do as part of the Trump administration would be: “Tell the cereal companies, ‘Take all the dyes out of their food.’” But in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has already beaten him to it.