President Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. got things rolling on a marathon three-hour-plus Cabinet meeting Tuesday by appearing to fearmonger about autism — before the Health and Human Services secretary vowed to find a cause of what he characterized as an “epidemic” by September.
The grandstanding came even as HHS data sheets show that the Trump administration has actually cut grants to researchers focused on autism.
“I don’t want to go too long, because we have a lot of people, but the autism is such a tremendous horror show,” Trump said to Kennedy, who he has tasked with reviewing the cause of the “epidemic.” During an April Cabinet meeting, Kennedy had also said he would “know what has caused the autism epidemic” by September.
Most researchers, including those at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which falls under HHS, agree that autism diagnoses have increased because of broadened diagnostic criteria and an improved availability of diagnoses for autism spectrum disorder.
Kennedy, previously an environmental lawyer, has long espoused the idea that vaccines cause autism spectrum disorder, a notion that has repeatedly been debunked.
“We’re finding interventions, certain interventions now that are clearly almost certainly causing autism,” Kennedy told the president Tuesday. “And we’re going to be able to address those in September.”
Trump spoke about the fact that in the past, one in 10,000 children received a diagnosis, but now, he said, the latest numbers show as many as 1 in 31 children between the ages of 4 and 8 years old have a diagnosis of ASD.
But HHS’s list shows that it terminated grants for research projects worth $6.9 million in total.
Some of the grants terminated included those where money was already spent while withholding money for future disbursement, labeled “ Unliquidated Obligations (As of Termination).” As of Tuesday, $5.4 million of grant money related to autism had already been spent, essentially rendering the grants wasted.
One the grants terminated that was listed was entitled “High-throughput modeling of autism risk genes using zebrafish.”
The grant’s public health relevance statement said that it would use zebrafish as a model to “to study the effects of a large number of recently-identified ASD risk genes on brain development and behavior” with the goal of “understanding of why mutations in specific genes result in ASD and may ultimately lead to novel therapies.”
But contacted for comment, David Aaron Prober, the principal investigator and a professor of biology at the California Institute of Technology, told The Independent that was not true. When asked why the department would say that, he said he did not know why.
In addition, two terminated grants would have focused on the brain development of autistic children. The Independent reached out to James Christopher Edgar, a professor of radiology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
He repeated the notion when he ran for president in 2024, first as a Democrat challenging Joe Biden, then as an independent before he endorsed Trump a year ago this month.
Trump for his part has also espoused the idea that vaccines play a role in autism.
These are not the first grants related to autism that the department terminated. Earlier this year, The Independent reported how it terminated a grant for a program to suicide interventions for sexual and gender minority autistic people.
