During a Senate hearing in Washington, D.C., HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. backed President Trump’s claim that the TrumpRx drug discount program slashed prescription prices by 600%. RFK Jr. did this by telling Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren that the president calculates percentages differently than everyone else.
This all unfolded on April 22, 2026, at a Senate Finance Committee hearing in Washington, D.C. The session was focused on the Trump administration’s 2027 budget proposal for the Department of Health and Human Services.
Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat, pressed Kennedy about Trump’s habit of claiming TrumpRx brought down drug prices by “300, 400, 500, even 600 percent.”
Warren and several fact-checkers have pointed out how these numbers don’t make sense. Anything over 100% would mean drug companies were literally paying people to take their medicine.
Kennedy’s reply instantly caught people’s attention. He told Warren, “President Trump has a different way of calculating. There’s two ways of calculating percentages. If you have a $600 drug and you reduce it to $10, that’s a 600% reduction.”
In reality, standard math says a drop from $600 to $10 is about a 98.3% reduction. You just take the difference and divide by the original price. A true 100% reduction gets the price to zero. Anything more, and the price sinks into the negatives, which isn’t really possible.
Kennedy seems to have arrived at his 600% number by dividing the original price by the new price, instead of measuring the drop compared to where it started. That’s just not how percentages work in any math class.
Internet Reacts to RFK Jr.’s Math at Washington, D.C. Hearing
The clip spread quickly, and the reactions ranged from disbelief to dark humor. “First we had ‘alternative facts’. Now we have ‘alternative math’. The movie ‘Idiocracy’ was not intended to be an instruction manual,” one person wrote.
Others tried to find common ground with the substance. “Sounds like reducing a drug from $600 to $10 is much more substantial than how the reduction is measured. Get lost in the rhetoric because of TDS, or celebrate the savings? Logically, what seems to be more important?” a user commented.
Some kept it blunt. “We are at a point where even percentages are a contentious political issue,” one person wrote. Others leaned into the absurdity. “Trump lives in his own reality. It’s only natural he has his own math,” a user commented.
One person summed up the collective mood with a simple: “I have no idea what happened to common sense.”
The moment has fired up plenty of debate online. Some see Kennedy just trying to defend Trump’s style of talking up policy wins. Others think it’s just hand-waving to dodge simple arithmetic. As the White House continues to tout TrumpRx, Capitol Hill isn’t about to stop arguing over what “cutting prices” means, or how those numbers get shared with the public.
