HHS's new 18-member health care panel includes Tony Robbins and a venture capitalist who worked with RFK Jr.'s son

The 18 members of the Department of Health and Human Services' new Healthcare Advisory Committee were drawn from 400 applicants and include motivational coach and author Tony Robbins, and several health care executives. The committee is advisory, not regulatory, and a letter this week from two Senate ranking members, Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden, both Oregon Democrats, asks how those 18 names were vetted.

Merkley, the top Democrat on the Budget Committee, and Wyden, the top Democrat on the Finance Committee, sent the letter to Kennedy and to Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, raising "serious concerns" about the credentials and financial conflicts of some members, according to the senators' letter. The committee held its first public meeting on May 18, 2026, virtually and open to the public, and is chartered under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, the 1972 law that sets conflict-of-interest and public-meeting rules for panels that advise the executive branch.

A federal judge in a separate case this year blocked HHS from replacing members of ACIP, the vaccine advisory committee, for FACA violations. The Healthcare Advisory Committee is a different panel with a different mandate, but the ruling puts every new HHS advisory committee formed in 2026 under a sharper procedural lens, and the senators' letter lands in that context.

The joint HHS-CMS announcement named six focus areas: chronic disease prevention, reducing administrative burden, real-time data, care for vulnerable Medicaid populations, Medicare Advantage sustainability, and fraud, waste, and abuse. The committee's CMS overview page frames it as advice on modernizing U.S. health care, tied to the executive order that established the President's Make America Healthy Again Commission.

The announcement does not say how those 18 names were vetted against the FACA conflict-of-interest standard, or how the panel's output will flow into actual HHS decisions. The August 2025 nominations request described a two-year term and a panel chartered to advise on "modernizing" the system, language broad enough to absorb almost any reform.

What flows down. An advisory committee does not write rules, but its recommendations can seed rule-writing, demonstration projects, and the language that shows up later in agency policy. The HAC's six focus areas map directly onto active CMS priorities, which makes its output more likely to be operational than aspirational. Watch whether meeting minutes, working groups, and final reports are public on the CMS overview page, or whether they have to be requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

Who is in the room. Roster composition is a tell. The HAC includes Tony Robbins, a motivational coach and author, according to the HHS announcement. The committee also includes a venture capitalist whom Wyden and Merkley, in their letter, identify as having previously worked alongside one of Kennedy's sons, according to STAT News. Neither seat is disqualifying on its face, but both are atypical for a Medicare and Medicaid modernization panel, and Wyden and Merkley argue that financial and personal ties, including to the Kennedy and Trump families, raise FACA's conflict standard.

Who vetted whom. The Public Health Service Act authorizes the panel, and FACA sets the procedural floor, including financial disclosure and balanced representation. Wyden and Merkley want to see that paperwork. What they want to know is whether the disclosure process caught the conflicts they allege before the members were seated.

Wyden and Merkley are asking whether HHS treated the FACA process as a check or as a stamp. The May 18 meeting notice, the HHS press release, and the CMS press release describe a roster and a charge, not a vetting record. The senators have asked for the vetting record, and the next move is HHS's.