Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delivered a 40-minute off-the-cuff speech where he nonchalantly dropped the word ‘retarded’.

His unexpected remarks during his visit to the Food and Drug Administration on Friday, which were meant to be a welcome from the new FDA commissioner, Marty Makary, got several staffers to walk out of the room, two anonymous employees told Politico.

This comes a little over a week after Kennedy fired thousands of HHS employees, 3,500 of whom were employed at the FDA. Kennedy’s goal is to reduce the government health workforce from 82,000 down to a total of 62,000. 

Among many other things he said that upset his audience, Kennedy accused FDA employees of being ‘sock puppets’ of the industries they regulated.

However, it was his use of a word now considered to be a slur by some that shocked attendees the most.

‘Because of my family’s commitment to these issues, I spent 200 hours at Wassaic Home for the Retarded when I was in high school,’ Kennedy said, in a reference to the Wassaic State School for the Mentally Retarded in Wassaic, New York. 

The school closed in 2013 and was once an institution that catered to people with developmental disabilities.

Politico reported that several FDA employees misheard Kennedy’s use of the R-word and thought he was making a derogatory remark.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave an unorthodox speech on Friday to employees at Food and Drug Administration, an agency he gutted in early April

Among the most focused-on parts of his remarks was when he said retarded, in reference to a now closed school in New York that catered to people with developmental disabilities

He made the reference while talking about rising autism diagnoses in children, asserting that on his visits to Wassaic he ‘never saw anybody with autism.’ 

Kennedy recently made the bold claim that Americans will know what’s causing the country’s ‘autism epidemic’ by September, after he launched a ‘massive testing and research effort’ involving hundreds of scientists.

DailyMail.com approached the Department of Health and Human Services for comment about Kennedy’s speech to the FDA.

A spokesperson from the department has told other outlets that he wasn’t using the r-word in a derogatory way.

Kennedy’s remarks come as other people in President Donald Trump’s orbit, including Joe Rogan and Elon Musk, are making purposeful attempts to bring it back into the lexicon.

‘The word “retarded” is back, and it’s one of the great culture victories that I think is spurred on, probably, by podcasts,’ Rogan said on a Thursday edition of the Joe Rogan Experience.

Musk called people who were trolling him retards while he was livestreaming himself playing the game Path of Exile 2 earlier this week. He also lobbed the insult at Trump adviser Peter Navarro, calling him ‘Peter Retardo’ because of his affinity for tariffs.

Kennedy also addressed the deep state conspiracy theory. Trump and his closest allies have spent the last eight years talking about how to dismantle this so-called shadowy group of unelected bureaucrats hellbent on sabotaging MAGA policies.

‘President Trump always talks about the Deep State, and the media, you know, disparages him and says that he’s paranoid,’ Kennedy told FDA staffers according to a transcript obtained by Politico.

Kennedy made little mention of his recent layoffs during his FDA speech (Pictured: HHS staffers hugging and shedding tears after receiving notice of dismissal on April 1)

‘But the Deep State is real. And it’s not, you know, just George Soros and Bill Gates and a bunch of nefarious individuals sitting together in a room and plotting the, you know, the destruction of humanity.’

He suggested that FDA employees ought to take advantage of the four-year period ahead where the deep state has been disempowered now that he and Trump are in charge of federal institutions.

‘All of us are subject to those gravities of agency capture,’ he said. ‘We want to break away from this so we can make our kids healthy.’

HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon told Politico that Kennedy was ‘telling the truth that many Americans already know: for too long, the FDA has been captured by the very industries it is supposed to regulate.’

‘Calling this out and encouraging radical transparency is not controversial — it’s leadership,’ Nixon said. ‘The era of rubber-stamping and silence is over.’

He made little mention of the recent DOGE-inspired layoffs at HHS during his speech, instead focusing more on his battle to find the cause of autism.

Kennedy said he’d soon be releasing ‘new data’ from the CDC’s autism monitoring network showing that 1 in 31 children have been diagnosed with the neurological condition.

The agency’s most recent data says 1 in 36 children have Autism Spectrum Disorder. In the early 2000s, this number was closer to one in 142, a four-fold rise. And the US rates are now higher than many peer nations.