Meet Stefanie Spear, RFK Jr.'s "Attached at the Hip" HHS Deputy

Once a radical environmental activist, Spear has transformed herself into a powerful gatekeeper at the center of MAHA.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/meet-stefanie-spear

https://archive.ph/l5Iil


Robert F. Kennedy Jr., listens as Stefanie Spear speaks to him during a hearing the Senate Finance Committee, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025. AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein.

It took relentless fervor and no-holds-barred tactics to save the northern spotted owl, and the giant redwoods it called home. Activists disabled bulldozers, chained themselves to trees, drove spikes into the redwood trunks to thwart saws, and used bike locks to handcuff themselves to logging access gates. For symbolic effect, they also dressed as owls while issuing Native American–inspired war cries. After a three-month blaze of publicity, the Redwood Summer campaign of 1990 helped lead to the protection of California’s old-growth forests, safeguarding the owls’ habitat, and contributed in casting the Pacific Lumber Company, a subsidiary in the portfolio of a Texas hedge fund magnate, into ignominy.

Stefanie Penn Spear, now 57, was once a young activist involved in the protests, and has brought a seemingly similar mission to the headquarters of the US Department of Health and Human Services: guarding her boss, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., against internal and external attack with the same man-the-barricades zeal that worked so well in the Pacific Northwest. From the suite of offices on the sixth floor of the Hubert H. Humphrey Building, Kennedy, a longtime vaccine antagonist, is on a stated mission to Make America Healthy Again.

But now, seven months into his tenure, many physicians and scientists view him as an existential threat to public health, degrading the nation’s vaccine infrastructure, slashing investments in critical scientific research, promoting treatments that have little proven efficacy, and maligning expert staff within US health agencies. To his many MAHA adherents, Kennedy, the perennially tanned descendant of Democratic royalty, is a self-avowed warrior in the fight against corporate corruption and a would-be progressive change agent in the right-wing Trump ecosystem—a mission that’s made him an endangered species, of sorts.

As his principal deputy chief of staff and senior counselor, Spear works from an office that connects to Kennedy’s suite through a door behind his desk. Spear has created, says a former HHS staffer, “this huge wall around him.” She is on seemingly constant watch to protect and shield him from disloyalty. In Kennedy’s seven months at the agency, heads have rolled—including even some brought in to further the MAHA agenda. Spear has remained a constant. Spear now sits at the liminal center of the current MAHA movement: a marriage of convenience that has yoked together the lefty wellness fringe, the vaccine-mandate-rejecting flank on the right, and the more mainstream MAGA GOP, happy to remove petroleum-based food dye from Froot Loops if it helps Republicans retain control of statehouses.

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