Politics
Amid Tension Around H.H.S. Cuts, Kennedy Meets With Tribal Leader
At the very moment that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was set to take the stage, the governor of Gila River Indian Community was still standing at the podium, articulating his uneasiness around recent Trump administration moves.
“Let me repeat that: We have spent a good part of this year providing education on why tribes have a political status that is not D.E.I.,” Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis said to a room of 1,200 people, who clapped and cheered.
When it comes to cuts sought by what has been called the Department of Government Efficiency, “we need a scalpel and not a chain saw approach to making these changes,” he said.
The Gila River Wild Horse Pass Resort and Casino in Chandler, Ariz., owned and operated by two tribes, was the latest stop on Mr. Kennedy’s Make American Healthy Again tour through three Southwestern states. Mr. Kennedy was set to host a “fireside chat” at the Tribal Self-Governance Conference, an event celebrating 50 years of tribal sovereignty under the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act.
The act, passed by Congress in 1975, marked a shift away from federal government control, so that Native communities could run their own programs based on their unique cultural needs.
Mr. Kennedy has long expressed a particular zeal for improving tribal health, citing his family’s long history of advocacy, his childhood trips to American Indian reservations, and parts of his own environmental career.
But the encounter came at an awkward moment. Mr. Kennedy’s agency has laid off senior advisers for tribal issues at the federal Administration for Children and Families, terminated employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Healthy Tribes initiative and shut down five regional offices that served large swaths of the Indigenous population.
Mr. Kennedy’s recent decision to reassign high-ranking officials to remote Indian Health Service locations seemed to many more like a sort of political banishment than a serious attempt at supporting Native groups.
When Mr. Kennedy was welcomed onstage for the chat — pink and yellow lights swirling through the auditorium — he took care to shake hands with every tribal leader at the table. He opened the discussion by announcing that parts of the Indian Health Service would be exempt from several recent executive orders.
The tone was collegial as officials discussed strategies for improving the health of tribal communities, often with consensus. Mr. Kennedy described his worries over the high rates of obesity among Native groups. “If we’re really going to change public health on the reservations and end this crisis, we need to address what’s causing the crisis, which is food systems,” he told the tribal officials. His words were met with applause.
Still, there were moments of disconnect. Mr. Kennedy veered into stories about his childhood, citing powwows on Martha’s Vineyard where his father took him to taste “some of the best oysters.”
And then there was the announcement that Mr. Kennedy had planned to have Indigenous groups test out “robotic nurses” — A.I. voices that could serve as substitutes for human health care providers, by calling patients as a way to circumvent challenges with health care delivery.
“We are going to try to roll out systems like that in Indian Country — we’d like to make Indian Country pilot programs for these kinds of systems,” he said, triggering boos from the crowd.
“Well,” he added, “there are some places that don’t have access to doctors. These are remote places, for example, in Alaska.”
Mr. Kennedy’s work on behalf of Indigenous communities dates back to the 1990s, when he represented various groups in negotiations to halt dam construction projects, oil development and industrial logging in several countries. He was also one of the first editors of North America’s largest Native American newspaper, Indian Country Today.
At his confirmation hearing, Mr. Kennedy pointed to a multigenerational frustration with health care for tribal groups. He testified that his father, Robert F. Kennedy, and uncle, President John F. Kennedy, had been “deeply, deeply critical of the function of the Indian Health Service back in 1968 to 1980, and nothing’s changed. Nothing’s gotten better,” he said.
In an exchange with Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, at the hearing, Mr. Kennedy vowed to install a Native leader at the assistant secretary level of the department and to tackle unique cultural and logistical challenges of providing high-quality health care to tribes using tools like telemedicine.
But Ms. Murkowski ticked aloud through an array of health issues on which Native Americans have fallen far behind other ethnic groups, including depression, substance use, hypertension and stroke. She also rattled off infectious diseases that the groups have proven vulnerable to — hepatitis A, hepatitis B, meningitis, whooping cough and measles — and asked Mr. Kennedy to use his influence to build confidence in vaccines.
He did not directly address that request.
On Tuesday Mr. Kennedy also visited Native Health, a federally qualified health center that serves Native Americans in the Phoenix area through four primary care clinics and a food pantry to help patients with diabetes prepare Indigenous recipes.
The secretary’s staff said his tour would bring more outreach to tribal groups, including a Wednesday visit to a charter school in New Mexico that serves mostly Native students, and a hike with leaders of Navajo Nation.
Mr. Kennedy ended the day with a news conference at the Arizona State Capitol, where he defended his agency’s response to the ongoing measles outbreak in West Texas by calling it “a model for the rest of the world.”
When a reporter approached the microphone and began asking about his views on the MMR vaccine, the reporter was booed away by parents and other attendees, several of them calling for the journalist to be removed from the room.
By Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Gilad Thaler, Jon Miller, Stephanie Swart, Rafaela Balster, Whitney Shefte and Nikolay Nikolov
May 29, 2026
Politics
Federal judge orders Trump’s name removed from Kennedy Center, says only Congress can rename it
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A federal judge on Friday ordered that President Donald Trump’s name be removed from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, an Obama appointee, said the iconic venue cannot be renamed without an act of Congress, ruling that the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees overstepped its “statutory bounds by unilaterally renaming” the building.
As part of his ruling, the Trump administration will be required to take down all physical signage bearing Trump’s name and eliminate any references to a “Trump-Kennedy Center” from official materials.
TRUMP KENNEDY CENTER’S BOARD VOTES UNANIMOUSLY TO APPROVE $257M RENOVATIONS AND TWO-YEAR CLOSURE
A sign is displayed on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts building. (Getty Images)
“The Kennedy Center’s organic statute makes crystal clear that the Center is to be named for President Kennedy, and it cannot bear any other formal name or public memorial based on the Board’s unilateral say-so,” Cooper wrote. “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.”
Roma Daravi, the Trump Kennedy Center vice president of public relations, said the board plans to appeal the decision.
“We will review the decision carefully though the reality remains — the Center requires an urgent and significant restoration – a truth that even the plaintiff acknowledges,” Daravi said. “With $257 million secured by President Trump and approved by Congress, the resources are in place and we remain committed to pursuing every lawful avenue to ensure the Trump Kennedy Center is restored as a national cultural landmark for all Americans to enjoy.”
The ruling was part of a lawsuit filed by U.S. Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
BOARD VOTES KENNEDY CENTER TO BE RENAMED ‘TRUMP-KENNEDY CENTER,’ LEAVITT SAYS
President Donald Trump stands in the presidential box during a tour of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., on March 17, 2025. On Friday, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s name must be removed from he iconic venue. (Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)
Cooper previously denied a request for a preliminary injunction filed by a preservation group to block the planned two-year closure of the Kennedy Center for a rehabilitation project.
Trump secured $257 million from Congress as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to address disrepair and deferred maintenance of the Kennedy Center, which critics say has been neglected and mismanaged before Trump intervened.
The funds appropriated by Congress are spent on maintenance, repairs, security, and capital projects related to the building and site.
Beatty, who serves as an ex officio member of the board, praised Friday’s ruling.
“Today’s ruling rightly affirms that this administration’s efforts to rename and close the Center have no basis in law,” Beatty said in a statement provided to Fox News Digital. “The Kennedy Center is an institution that belongs to the American people, not to Donald Trump. He has desecrated this sacred memorial for his own vanity. I am proud to have fought for the rule of law and to protect this sacred institution.”
Workers install Donald J. Trump signage above the existing Kennedy Center sign in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 19, 2025. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
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Trump’s name was added to the venue last December following a unanimous decision by the board. In February 2025, Trump was elected chairman of the Kennedy Center board after removing 18 trustees appointed by former President Joe Biden.
WASHINGTON — A framework agreement to end the U.S. war with Iran is all but settled, pending sign-off from the presidents of the two warring sides, President Trump said Friday, projecting optimism that a deal could finally be at hand.
Yet doubt cast a shadow over the diplomatic process entering the weekend as Trump faced a politically fraught decision to enter an agreement that would invariably require significant concessions to Tehran.
The negotiations have faced severe headwinds in recent days, with both sides accusing the other of violating a fragile ceasefire that has largely stopped the fighting since April.
On his Truth Social site, Trump said he had summoned his top aides to the White House Situation Room to decide on the deal.
The agreement would see an end to the U.S. naval blockade on Iranian ports and the removal of Iranian mines from the Strait of Hormuz, an international waterway through which 20% of the world’s energy supply passes each day. The strait, Trump wrote, will reopen with “no tolls” for “unrestricted shipping traffic, in both directions.”
And “Iran must agree that they will never have a Nuclear Weapon or Bomb,” Trump wrote, noting that Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium, the key ingredient for nuclear weapons, “will be unearthed by the United States (which, it is agreed, is the only Country, along with China, with the mechanical capability of doing so!), in close coordination and conjunction with the Islamic Republic of Iran, plus the International Atomic Energy Agency, and DESTROYED.”
“No money will be exchanged, until further notice,” he added.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also said the deal would require Iran to disavow the continuation of its domestic nuclear program — a diplomatic feat never before achieved throughout a quarter-century of international negotiations over Iran’s nuclear work.
It is unclear whether Tehran would go that far. And Iran’s negotiators expressed defiance on Friday, stating that there was “no trust in guarantees or words” from the American side.
“No step will be taken before the other side acts first,” said Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s Parliament. “We do not gain concessions through dialogue, but through missiles.”
It remains unclear when the Trump administration would ease sanctions on Iran, how extensive that relief would be, or what form it would take — questions that fueled Republican criticism of the Obama-era nuclear deal more than a decade ago.
The working diplomatic document would formally extend the existing ceasefire for 60 days, allowing for a more detailed negotiation to take place over Iran’s nuclear program. But the truce as it currently stands is on perilous ground. Iran launched a ballistic missile on Thursday at Kuwait, a close U.S. ally, after American forces took “defensive” actions against Iranian missile launchers and mine-laying boats it had launched in the strait.
The war has proved historically unpopular with the American public, and has seen oil prices soar since the U.S. military, in partnership with Israel, launched its first strikes against Iran in February.
Bessent said he is hopeful that oil prices would drop quickly once an agreement is signed. But industry analysts say the effects of the war on the oil market could last for months, if not years, with the stability of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz now in question for commercial shippers.
While oil has dropped to under $100 a barrel, markets appeared skittish on Friday over the prospects for a deal, with mixed messages appearing to emerge out of the region.
It is also unclear whether a U.S. agreement with Iran would in any way bind Israel’s hands in its military operations, either in Iran or in Lebanon, where an Iranian proxy militia, Hezbollah, has vowed to keep up the fight.
Israel has ramped up strikes against Hezbollah targets in recent days, jeopardizing a delicate ceasefire negotiated with the Lebanese government, a deal encouraged by the Trump administration in order to grease the wheels for its talks with Tehran.
Trump has been uncharacteristically silent on the prospects of an agreement in recent days, expressing cautious optimism in limited exchanges with reporters.
“It’s hard to say exactly when or if the president’s going to sign,” Vice President JD Vance, who has led the U.S. diplomatic team, told reporters, noting that “the nuclear stuff” is still subject to negotiation. “We’re going back and forth on a couple of language points.”
“I do think that we’ve made a lot of progress here,” Vance added. “Hopefully we’ll continue to make progress, and the president will be in a position where he can endorse the agreement. But obviously, that’s still TBD.”
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