President Donald Trump calls Chris Klomp “a real star.” Democrats say he’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s babysitter.
A health tech entrepreneur, Medicare director and Trump drug-price negotiator, Klomp has overseen all Department of Health and Human Services operations since February, part of a shakeup in which he was promoted, while the former deputy secretary, Jim O’Neill, was pushed out.
To Democrats who oversee Kennedy’s Health Department, Klomp seems a White House plant meant to mind Kennedy ahead of the midterm elections. The White House says he’s a top-notch manager helping Kennedy ensure the department delivers. Everyone agrees he’s now Kennedy’s most powerful aide with a say over both personnel and policy. A key role: Motivating demoralized staffers to carry out Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again agenda.
Klomp, 45, has directly overseen personnel moves, such as the nomination of a new director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and has been driving a focus on healthy eating, improving health care affordability and fighting fraud.
White House and HHS officials said Klomp’s role isn’t to run the Health Department — that’s still Kennedy’s job — but to instead handle management tasks that don’t excite Kennedy and to ensure the department focuses on policy issues that will resonate with most Americans during a midterm-election year. Klomp has particularly concentrated on hiring after a year of upheaval that left many top roles unfilled.
“Klomp’s mandate from Kennedy and the White House was to come in and tighten things up,” an administration official granted anonymity to speak candidly told POLITICO. That meant making sure HHS has the right people so that it can run effectively and remain “focused on the right things to improve U.S. health care,” the official said.
Klomp, who worked in private equity and then in health tech startups before joining the Trump administration, declined to comment for this story. He was hired as Medicare director after someone who worked at the Health Department in Trump’s first term recommended him.
“Chris Klomp is a generational talent,” said White House spokesperson Kush Desai. As chief HHS counselor, “Chris is now leveraging his proven managerial chops to help Secretary Kennedy more effectively and efficiently advance his vision for the agency and the MAHA agenda,” Desai said.
Already, Klomp has executed on what the administration official and the White House have said was Kennedy’s decision to oust former FDA Commissioner Marty Makary in May, after Makary alienated HHS officials and interest groups, including anti-abortion activists, tobacco companies and some drug manufacturers.
And Klomp selected Erica Schwartz, a proponent of vaccination, to lead the CDC. Kennedy, a longtime skeptic of vaccine safety, had initially wanted an ex-Florida congressman, Dave Weldon, who shares his vaccine views. The Senate refused to consider him last year.
But some of Klomp’s moves haven’t gone over well.
A former senior HHS official granted anonymity to speak candidly said Klomp was undermining Kennedy and making personnel decisions on his own. The former official said Klomp was “out of control trying to fire people,” claiming Kennedy was not aware of his efforts.
Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, “is mesmerized by Klomp” because his first boss at HHS, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Director Mehmet Oz, “came in with a glowing intro” for him, the former official said. “Oz would say he’s a genius.”
Klomp’s also been a player in the administration’s push to crack down on fraud in health care. HHS has in recent months targeted Democratic states, including California, Hawaii, Minnesota and New York, for allegedly failing to do enough to stop it.
Before and after his February promotion, Klomp has led Trump’s push to negotiate lower prescription drug prices under a most-favored-nation framework that aims to ensure Americans don’t pay more for medicine than Europeans.
Klomp’s work, which has yielded 17 deals with major drugmakers, earned Trump’s trust and appreciation. Consumers can purchase the drugs on a Trump-branded website.
“Chris Klomp has been unbelievable, a real star,” Trump said in April in the Oval Office while announcing the latest pricing deal, with New York-based drugmaker Regeneron.
“You don’t know his name as much as some of the others, but he’s a real star of the group,” Trump added, sitting alongside Klomp, Kennedy and Oz.
Klomp has often appeared with the president at White House events focused on health care affordability, and he sat behind Kennedy when the Health secretary testified in seven congressional hearings in April.
Kennedy pointed to Klomp several times during those hearings when lawmakers questioned him about the drug-pricing deals. The Health secretary also told lawmakers that Klomp, not him, spoke to Trump about nominating Schwartz, who was a deputy surgeon general during Trump’s first term, for CDC director. The agency remains without a leader 10 months after Kennedy pushed out Susan Monarez, his second pick for the job after Weldon, over disagreements on vaccine recommendations.
A Democratic Senate aide granted anonymity to speak candidly said several senators suspect Klomp was promoted “to babysit RFK because the White House doesn’t trust him” and because the secretary’s vaccine policies are unpopular.
“Klomp’s speaking role at White House events and his presence behind the secretary at every hearing would seem to bear that out,” the aide said.
Klomp was instrumental in finding other people to fill key CDC roles: Sean Slovenski, former president of Walmart Health, as CDC deputy director and chief operating officer; Jennifer Shuford, commissioner of the Texas Department of State Health Services, as CDC deputy director and chief medical officer; and Sara Brenner, previously FDA principal deputy commissioner, as senior counselor for public health to Kennedy.
Kennedy interviewed them before recommending them to Trump, the administration official said.
During public appearances, Klomp has discussed personnel changes, noting at a May conference in Washington that the changes will continue as “we focus more, we get more precise in our execution.”
Klomp, who didn’t elaborate on any past or upcoming changes, said the personnel moves were made “for good reasons” and were part of a broader administration push to improve the affordability and accessibility of health care.
His rapid rise to Kennedy’s second-in-command and his involvement in personnel decisions prompted one Kennedy ally, granted anonymity to talk candidly, to say that Kennedy “is more of a figurehead,” while Klomp is the chief operating officer.
But the Health secretary has continued to travel the country, pushing his agenda about healthy food, and recently started a debate about psychiatric medication when he announced a push to incentivize doctors to help patients who want to quit taking antidepressants.
Kennedy hasn’t made significant changes to vaccine recommendations in recent months, following polls that found those measures are less popular with voters than his agenda to improve Americans’ nutrition. But Trump signed an executive order last month directing the CDC to consider another overhaul of the vaccine schedule.
During his travels earlier this month, Kennedy expressed his love for milk in the district of embattled GOP Rep. Derrick Van Orden, whose Wisconsin seat is one Republicans especially want to hold this November.
The administration official and an HHS official granted anonymity to discuss internal department dynamics said Kennedy ultimately remains in charge, adding that Klomp doesn’t make decisions without the secretary’s sign-off.
“Secretary Kennedy came to Washington to challenge the status quo, confront the chronic disease epidemic, and deliver on President Trump's Make America Healthy Again agenda,” HHS said in an emailed statement, noting that the department “is advancing the most significant public health reforms in a generation.”
The statement called the suggestion that Kennedy is a figurehead “demonstrably false.” Those familiar with the department's “operations, policy initiatives, or leadership structure know that Secretary Kennedy is actively engaged in the decisions shaping HHS and the administration's health agenda,” the statement said.
Klomp has sought to motivate career aides, while Kennedy has blamed some of them for the poor state of Americans’ health.
At the May conference, organized by the Duke Margolis Institute for Health Policy, Klomp talked about how he motivated a career official at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — who he said likely didn’t vote for Trump — to become engaged in Medicare policy changes. He argued that change in health care will outlast the Trump administration if career officials take ownership and push reforms forward.
Klomp said he was focused on building trust, adding that trust is what high-performing teams operate on.
By contrast, Kennedy told supporters at an event in Austin, Texas, in February, that he initially didn’t want to be Trump’s HHS secretary because he didn’t want to manage CMS, which he called a huge bureaucracy.
The secretary has often chastised career health officials, telling lawmakers in April that the nearly 20,000 HHS employees fired last year failed at their jobs because they didn’t combat the chronic disease epidemic plaguing America. But Kennedy offered no evidence that job performance played a role in the agency’s mass layoffs.
Andy Slavitt, who worked on health issues for then-Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, advised Klomp in 2024 when Klomp was starting to work for Trump running Medicare. Slavitt told POLITICO that Klomp “is focused on things that I think are really important, like morale, quality, effective decision-making.”
Sophia Cai contributed reporting to this article.
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