President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have pledged that the department would release a report explaining the rise in diagnoses for autism spectrum disorder in September – but the scientists research the cause and treatment say Trump’s policies are hampering their efforts.
Kennedy and Trump have long espoused the idea that an artificial external factor, such as vaccines or the environment, has played a role in the increase in autism diagnoses since the 1990s. The two repeated the idea during the most recent cabinet meeting.
But autism researchers at many of the nation’s top universities have noted that the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the federal budget while pushing vaccine skepticism have led to the freezing of federal grants that researchers hoped to use to better understand the developmental disability, a condition that still carries stigma.
“To see decades of high quality, excellent research, just being ignored is as concerning to say the least,” said Molly Losh, a professor at the Northwestern University School of Communication. “And and the people who are the the individuals with the strongest voices are, seem to be the those who are the least informed of the science.”
Massive cuts, largely initiated by the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, saw the elimination of federal grants, including research focused on autism. Kennedy has sought to characterize the increase in cases of autism as signs of an epidemic, even though the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, which also falls under his jurisdiction, has found that much of the increase in diagnoses stems from improved detection.
The Trump administration has also targeted numerous universities, including Harvard University, Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University and Northwestern, for funding cuts for its actions during the pro-Palestine movement on many campuses at the start of the Israel-Gaza conflict. The president has also targeted universities for enrolling foreign or migrant students.
Losh said the Trump administration’s agenda has made it harder to conduct research on many conditions, including autism.
In May, the National Institutes of Health, which falls under the Department of Health and Human Services jurisdiction, announced that it would not issue awards to domestic or foreign entities “that include a subaward to a foreign entity.” For Losh, it was a death blow for a project that would have studied “social language abilities” as well as neural and behavioral markers in autism across English and Cantonese speakers.
“This would have been the first of its kind in the world to study critical questions about environmental and biological or genetic influences on the traits of autism in really, really fascinating, fascinating scientific and clinical questions, but in unique populations and In such a unique collaboration that it just is now disallowed,” Losh told The Independent.
“We have students who are still working on papers with existing data, but our ability to test new subjects, to recruit new participants, we can’t hire anyone new,” she said.
Losh and other researchers emphasized that approval for NIH grants is often a lengthy and arduous process.
“Typically, researchers will apply once and expect that they won’t get that grant, but they’ll get maybe some comments to then resubmit the grant in order to get a better chance of funding next time,” Rebecca Muhle, an assistant professor at Columbia University, told The Independent.
One grant where Muhle was not the principal investigator was terminated when the Trump administration first canceled $400 million worth of federal grants at the Ivy League university before Columbia reached an agreement with the White House.
Another project, where Muhle served as the principal investigator and was not impacted by the freeze, focuses on the loss of a particular gene that is known to better understand the underpinnings of autism, which would help shape future studies. But the situation of her research is still uncertain.
“I don’t know if the university is asking for reimbursement of funds, is actually getting reimbursement,” Muhle told The Independent. “But in the meantime, that was March until August. It’s like half a year. I couldn’t hire anybody because they didn’t know if the funding was going to come through.”
But it’s not just funding cuts that create roadblocks for researching autism and other subjects. RFK Jr.’s vaccine skepticism has put research under the microscope.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. , a member of the vaunted U.S. Camelot clan that produced one president and his namesake father, first began his campaign for president in 2023 as a Democrat primary challenger running against Joe Biden before he ran as an independent.
In August of last year, he dropped out and endorsed Trump. Every Democratic senator opposed his confirmation while all but one Republican senator supported his confirmation.
Researchers fear that Kennedy’s time as HHS Secretary will cause a regression in years of progress. During his cabinet meeting with Trump, the president called autism a “horror show.”
Losh said that she fears the administration’s position will undo years of work and compared it to the initial study by Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced British physician who put out the first study tying autism to the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. The study was later retracted and Wakefield lost his medical license. That still hasn’t stopped vaccine critics from citing it when making their case that vaccines are dangerous.
Kennedy and Trump’s crusade against autism might create another domino effect: it could lead to parents of autistic children not seeking out a diagnosis.
Muhle cited how Kennedy and NIH director Jay Bhattacharya have floated the idea of collecting data for a potential registry of autistic people. HHS denied that such a registry would be created, but Kennedy later announced a plan in May to build a data system to research autism from information compiled by Medicare and Medicaid.
“It’s very concerning to me that people are choosing to hide that, and I totally understand their reasons for it,” Muhle told The Independent. “Parents have expressed concern to other researchers, ‘well, if I participate in your study, where’s my data going to go?’ And we can’t say for certainty right now, with the people that are running NIH, exactly what will happen.”
