Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Health and Human Services secretary, is buying a house in Georgetown, a tony neighborhood in Washington, D.C., according to sources familiar with the sale.
He was scheduled to close on the property on Friday.
The 4,800-square-foot property was initially listed for $4.85 million, according to the multiple listing service database. The price was recently reduced to $4.695 million.
Kennedy, who was spotted doing a walk-through at the home this week with his security detail’s vehicles parked outside, will live in the same neighborhood as the woman whose mother sold Mar-a-Lago to Donald Trump in 1985.
“We do not discuss his personal living arrangements,” said HHS spokesperson Andrew G. Nixon.
One of Kennedy’s new neighbors will be Dr. Peter Marks, the federal vaccine official who resigned recently and was publicly critical of Kennedy for seeking “confirmation of his misinformation and lies” in vaccination safety research. Marks was director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.
Kennedy’s home purchase comes amid his major restructuring of the department that laid off 10,000 workers on Tuesday across the nation’s public health agencies, including laboratory scientists, support staff for food safety inspectors and worker safety researchers.
The timing of the layoff notifications, early in the morning on April Fool’s Day — and his remarks suggesting that he had taken into account that some 20% of the cuts would be mistakes that would need to be rescinded — have sparked frustration among many federal employees whose teams were purged.
Agencies have also been grappling with the brain drain from a chaotic return-to-office mandate that forced many workers into overcrowded offices and long commutes, undoing past efforts to recruit scientists otherwise unwilling to relocate to D.C.
Kennedy’s predecessor under the Biden administration, Xavier Becerra, had faced criticism by Republicans for sometimes working remotely from California while leading the department.
Kennedys have lived in Georgetown previously. After John F. Kennedy and wife Jackie were married in 1953, they lived on Dent Place NW.
Jackie resided in Georgetown after the 1963 assassination of her husband, which is now home to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Jackie Kennedy’s mother, Janet Auchincloss, also lived nearby.
Senior Trump administration officials have deeply invested in D.C. real estate. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently purchased a $12.5 million mansion blocks from Secretary Kennedy’s new Georgetown home.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick bought the chateau-like D.C. mansion that belonged to Fox News’ Bret Baier in the Foxhall neighborhood, the Washingtonian reported. And Mr. Trump’s AI and crypto czar, David Sacks, bought a residence in Northwest D.C., Axios reported.
Other wealthy influencers have taken up residence not far from the White House, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who purchased in the Woodland Normanstone neighborhood, Politico reported.
Alexander Tin and
contributed to this report.
