Measles, Vaccines, and RFK Jr.

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the myth that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.    Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio.  A top antivaxxer is HHS Secretary RFK Jr. He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen." He helped cause a deadly 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa.

From CDC:

As of June 25, 2026, 2,134 confirmed* measles cases were reported in the United States in 2026. Among these, 2,122 measles cases were reported by 41 jurisdictions: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York City, New York State, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. A total of 12 measles cases were reported among international visitors to the United States.

There have been 30 new outbreaks** reported in 2026, and 93% of confirmed cases (1,982 of 2,134) are outbreak-associated (629 from outbreaks starting in 2026 and 1,353 from outbreaks that started in 2025).

 For the full year of 2025, a total of 2,288 confirmed* measles cases were reported in the United States. 

Sheryl Gay Stolberg at NYT: 

[E]xchanges over the flu vaccine campaign are in a cache of internal C.D.C. emails obtained last week by The New York Times, and published online this week. The messages provide a detailed look at a period of transition in which the leaders of the nation’s public health agency frequently found themselves buffeted and dismayed by the agenda imposed by Mr. Kennedy and the new Trump administration.

...

The emails begin in January, before Mr. Kennedy was confirmed, and end in mid-August, about a week before the White House fired Dr. Monarez as C.D.C. director at the secretary’s request, just 29 days after her Senate confirmation. While Mr. Kennedy’s fraught relationship with the health agency is well known, the messages, coupled with interviews, shed light on how C.D.C. employees scrambled to meet his demands — often on matters regarding vaccines and autism — as the administration gutted the agency’s ranks.

...

C.D.C. political leaders went to great lengths to install Mr. Kennedy’s allies in key positions, even if they did not have crucial professional qualifications for the job, the documents show. The agency tried to use Title 42, a federal code that permits scientific experts to be hired without going through the regular civil service process, to put a businessman who was a longtime activist on behalf of parents of children with autism in charge of its National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities.

The activist, Mark Blaxill, a Harvard Business School graduate and founder of the group SafeMinds, has written books and medical journal articles on autism; one was retracted in 2023. C.D.C. human resources officials concluded that he lacked the scientific qualifications to be considered a “distinguished consultant” under the law. He now works at the agency in another capacity, and does not run the birth defects center.

The emails confirm, as The Times has previously reported, that Mr. Kennedy was deeply involved in efforts to gain control over the Vaccine Safety Datalink, or VSD, a database of millions of confidential medical records that, he believes, has the potential to prove a link between vaccines and autism, a theory that has been debunked in numerous studies. His own top aides were under pressure, too.

 ... 

While the secretary steered clear of most career scientists, at least in his early days in office, he was giving direct instructions to one of them, William Thompson, who has challenged a 2004 C.D.C. study that concluded the measles vaccine was not linked to autism, and works under government whistle-blower protections.

 Dr. Thompson was working to compile data sources for future autism studies; he called it a “high priority for Secretary Kennedy.” A note from the secretary appears just once in the email collection. He weighed in with a one-sentence message during a conversation with Dr. Thompson about a two-decade old data set used by a former C.D.C. researcher, Thomas Verstraeten.

“Bill. I’m assuming this is the verstratten original data,” Mr. Kennedy wrote.

SEE THE HELP COMMITTEE SUMMARY OF THE EMAILS.

Stephen Miller Behind the Snake Pit Memo

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss court cases involving the civil rights of people with autism and other disabilities. 

Last week, the Department of Justice quietly released a memo pertaining to the landmark 1999 disability civil rights case Olmstead v. L.C.  That precedent, the  memo claimed without evidence, increases homelessness.

Ben Penn and Celine Castronuovo at Bloomberg Law:

White House adviser Stephen Miller was the driving force behind the Justice Department’s recent memo authorizing states to institutionalize people with disabilities rather than fund community-based care, said people briefed on the situation.

Miller, the president’s powerful deputy chief of staff, was frustrated that the department’s Civil Rights Division was still reaching settlements compelling states to transfer those experiencing mental illness out of institutions, added the individuals, who spoke anonymously out of fear of retaliation.

They said Miller felt DOJ’s agreements—including one reached with South Carolina in December—would increase homelessness and didn’t adhere to President Donald Trump’s July executive order pressuring cities and states to move homeless people into treatment centers.

The June 18 DOJ Office of Legal Counsel opinion concluded states may disregard decades of Supreme Court precedent and ensuing regulations mandating integration of individuals with disabilities into home or community settings.

Spokespeople for both the White House and DOJ denied Miller played a role in the memo.
...
There is no evidence cited in the opinion demonstrating the rise in homelessness was caused by the Supreme Court’s 1999 decision in Olmstead v. L.C. holding that the Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits unjustified segregation of individuals with disabilities. In a recent case study, Brandeis University researchers highlighted how states have used their Olmstead settlements to reduce housing costs for low-income people with disabilities.

RFK: Still Antivax

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the myth that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.    Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio.  A top antivaxxer is HHS Secretary RFK Jr. He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen." He helped cause a deadly 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa.

Washington Post editorial:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his allies at the Department of Health and Human Services have quieted their efforts to restrict access to immunizations after realizing they were politically disastrous. But that doesn’t mean they stopped trying to undermine these lifesaving tools.

 In April, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention halted the publication of a study showing that last year’s covid-19 shot cut the risk of emergency department visits and hospitalizations in half among healthy adults, even though the findings cleared the agency’s scientific review process. That’s because Jay Bhattacharya, the agency’s interim director, objected to the study’s methodology, which he called “crap” and “logistically ridiculous.”

One of the nation’s top medical journals disagrees with his assessment. This week, JAMA Network Open published the rejected study, which was peer-reviewed. The journal also published commentary by Natalie Dean, a public health professor at Emory University, who explained that the study’s design, which involved comparing the test results of vaccinated and unvaccinated people who seek medical care at hospitals, had been used for decades to measure the effectiveness of shots.

The point here is not that the methodology is flawless; Dean and other vaccine researchers readily admit that it’s imperfect. The problem is that the administration tried to bury scientific evidence that contradicted Kennedy’s criticisms of covid vaccines.

The drama is playing out just as Kennedy is actively defending anti-vaccine research that was retracted in April over concerns of “serious methodological flaws.” The paper, published in Toxicology Reports, purported to find that 75 percent of sudden infant death syndrome cases occurred within seven days of vaccination, but critics found potential research errors and argued that its author misused data to suggest causality, leading its publisher to take it down.

Last week, Kennedy sent a letter to the journal’s editor in chief, demanding a “full explanation” for that retraction. This, Kennedy claimed in a social media post, would help “restore trust in public health by insisting on transparency, accountability, and open scientific inquiry — not by asking the public to accept decisions behind closed doors.”

That’s ironic, given that Kennedy and his underlings are attempting to reshape federal vaccine guidelines behind the scenes. The Post’s Rachel Roubein and Lena H. Sun report that researchers at the National Institutes of Health are being pushed to conduct research on vaccine injuries and alternative vaccine schedules, as well as toying with a plan to create a new science office at the CDC that would report to political staff.

Despite these efforts, most Americans remain solidly in favor of vaccines. But the growing case numbers of vaccine-preventable diseases show it doesn’t take many skeptics to weaken their effectiveness

Joshua Alerts in Ohio

 The Politics of Autism discusses the problems of wandering and day-to-day safety.

Kevin Accettulla at WCMH-TV:

Gov. Mike DeWine signed a bill that will create an alert system for missing children with autism.

House Bill 359 was sponsored by Rep. Cecil Thomas (D-Cincinnati) and Rep. Jennifer Gross (R-West Chester). The bill creates the Joshua Alert for cases of missing children who have autism or other developmental disabilities. Watch previous coverage in the player above.

The alert is named after Joshua Al-Lateef, a 6-year-old boy with autism who went missing in 2024 in West Chester, a suburb of Cincinnati. When his mother, Jonisa Cook, called 911, she was told there was no immediate alert that could be sent out to the community.

Hours later, Joshua was found dead in a nearby pond.

...

 Kyle Erdeljac, who testified in favor of the bill on behalf of the Ohio Fraternal Order of Police, said the bill addresses a problem for law enforcement.

“These are not our typical runaway cases,” Erdeljac said. “Many children with autism are non-verbal and unable to communicate. They may not appreciate danger the same way as you or I. Tragically, some are drawn to water, and drownings happen.”

Erdeljac said children with autism need help fast and law enforcement needs a clear way to spread the word.

The bill passed both the Ohio House and Senate unanimously.

 In recent years, five states – including Florida, Maryland, Kansas, Mississippi and Connecticut – have established emergency alerts for all individuals with disabilities. 

Blue Envelopes in Florida

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss interactions between first responders and autistic people. Some jurisdictions allow autistic drivers to ask for a blue envelope to disclose the driver's diagnosis in case of an accident or traffic stop. Others have ID cards.

 Claire O'Neil at WEAR-TV:

Starting July 1, a new law will take effect in Florida. It's focused on improving communication between law enforcement and people with autism.

The bill helps officers better identify those people before situations escalate. Law enforcement officers across the state are getting new training to help them interact with people with autism.

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed Senate Bill 418 this week.

"This bill is going to be great for citizens with autism in the state of Florida, in that it's a quick disclosure for the law enforcement officer to understand that they are dealing with someone with autism, which is crucial," retired Police Lt. Jimmy Donohoe, founder of First Responder Autism Training.

That quick disclosure is a blue envelope or a blue card. The envelope will hold important information, like a person's drivers license, registration and proof of insurance.
The blue color lets officers know the individual has autism.

"This is not something that is not going to stigmatize someone," said Sherry A. White, president and CEO of Capstone Adaptive Learning and Therapy Centers. "It is just moving forward with dignity, respect, safety, better solutions, and outcomes. And being in the disability field, I for one, see this as a positivity move."

Donohoe, who fathers a son with autism, says this can help those who are nonverbal or have difficulty communicating.

"People with autism often have delayed responses," Donohoe said. "And law enforcement, we are not used to delayed responses that might indicate someone is lying to us because they have a warrant, so this bill will change the officers perspective of the person they've stopped."

"And that's so that they're not digging in and getting more upset as they go along," he said. "And the blue envelope discloses right away."

Another key component of this new law required training for officers.

"De-escalation techniques and understanding what's going on with people with autism, how they think differently than we do, and so we have to adapt to them and not them adapt to us," Donohoe said.

RFK Jr. Taking Over Special Ed: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid

 In The Politics of Autism, I write about social services, special education, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. 

Project 2025 proposed to turn IDEA into a "no strings" block grant, effectively gutting the law and destroying protections that disability families have long relied upon. During the 2024 race, Trump denied any connection to the project, but now he proclaims it, praising OMB director Russ Vought "of Project 2025 fame."

Trump and Vought are now accomplishing their goal of ravaging the law. Instead of shifting it to a block grant, they have tried firing most of the staff who enforce it.   More recently, they have shifted OSERS to HHS and OCR to the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, headed by a political hack who uses the r-word as a slur.

Michael C. Bender and Sheryl Gay Stolberg at NYT:

The Trump administration’s decision this week to put Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in charge of special education programs has sparked a sharp backlash from advocates for students with disabilities, who say the move will hurt children and that his views on autism make him unfit for the job.

Mr. Kennedy said earlier this year that children with autism would never hold a job, play baseball or go on a date. He quickly walked back the remarks, saying he was only speaking about the most severe cases — only to insist the next day that special education should be moved into his department. “They’re health-related programs rather than particularly educated programs,” Mr. Kennedy said.

Advocates for students with disabilities said that Mr. Kennedy’s comments show how the change puts disabled students at risk of being viewed as medical conditions to be treated instead of as boys and girls to be educated.

“It shows a fundamental lack of understanding of who kids with disabilities are, how they can be successful in school and how their futures can be very bright,” said Katy Neas, chief executive officer of The Arc, a national support group for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

...

Edward M. Kennedy Jr., a civil rights advocate for people with disabilities and cousin of Secretary Kennedy, said in an email that he shared concerns about shifting special education programs to the Health and Human Services Department.

His biggest worry, he said, was “the policy and philosophical shift away from viewing children with disabilities as having strengths, potential and a right to be integrated into classrooms.

“This shift to HHS reverts toward an antiquated, ‘medical model’ of disability policy that views disabled children as ‘sick’ and in need of health care, not an education,” Mr. Kennedy, a health care regulatory lawyer, said.

...

 Maria Town, the president of the American Association of People With Disabilities, said Mr. Kennedy’s views on autism, ADHD and mental illness, and his embrace of unconventional treatments, worry her. Ms. Town has cerebral palsy and said she benefited from federal protections as a student.

“Are children with autism going to be forced to engage in practices that we know don’t work?” Ms. Town said. “Kids with disabilities already get medical care from their doctors and health care practitioners. They deserve a chance to be students and to engage in the classroom like any other kid.”

Trump Wants to Bring Back Snake Pits

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss court cases involving the civil rights of people with autism and other disabilities. 

Julia Metraux at Mother Jones:

On Thursday, the Department of Justice quietly released a memo pertaining to the landmark 1999 disability civil rights case Olmstead v. L.C., which curtailed states’ power to institutionalize people diagnosed with mental illnesses, and related federal civil rights laws. That precedent, the Trump administration memo argues—in conjunction with federal civil rights and disability rights statutes—increases homelessness, a claim that likely signals a push to expand institutionalization in restrictive psychiatric facilities.

The administration’s claims, according to University of Michigan law professor Sam Bagenstos, are not rooted in fact.

“It’s just absurd,” says Bagenstos, general counsel for the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of Management and Budget during the Biden administration, calling the Olmstead decision “one of the most effective tools in combating homelessness” by encouraging states to augment mental health and housing services outside institutions.

More concerning is the fact that the White House instructed the Justice Department to produce the document, which Bagenstos says “suggests we might potentially be seeing an executive order” directing DOJ and the Department of Health and Human Services to roll back rules meant to avoid institutionalization. The memo, however, does not change laws itself.

Last year at The Daily Caller, Reagan Reese reported an interview with Trump:

 REESE: It’s horrible. I want to get to Russia. I want to ask you another question about D.C. crackdown. Would you be open to the government reopening insane asylums for people with serious mental illness?

TRUMP: Yeah I would.

REESE: You would?

TRUMP: Well, they used to have them, and you never saw people like we had, you know, they used to have them. And what happened is states like New York and California that had them, New York had a lot of them. They released them all into society because they couldn’t afford it. You know, it’s massively expensive. But we had, they were all over New York. I remember when I was growing up, Creedmoor. They had a place, Creedmoor, they had a lot of them, Bellevue, and they were closed by a certain governor. And I remember when they did, it was a long time ago, and I said they didn’t release these people? And they did. They released them into society, and that’s what you have. It’s a rough, it’s a rough situation.

Creedmoor was a notorious snake pit.  See a 2012 piece in AbandonedNYC:

Creedmoor State Hospital was habitually under scrutiny during this period, beginning in the 1940s with an outbreak of dysentery that resulted from unsanitary living conditions in the wards.

The hospital had spiraled completely out of control by 1974 when the state ordered an inquiry into an outbreak of crime on the Creedmoor campus. Within 20 months, three rapes were reported, 22 assaults, 52 fires, 130 burglaries, six instances of suicide, a shooting, a riot, and an attempted murder, prompting an investigation into all downstate mental hospitals. As late as 1984, the violent ward of Creedmoor Psychiatric Center was rocked with scandal following the death of a patient, who had been struck in the throat by a staff member while restrained in a straitjacket.

In the late 20th Century, the development of antipsychotic medications and new standards of treatment for the mentally ill accelerated a trend toward deinstitutionalization.  A series of dramatic budget cuts and dwindling patient populations led to the closing of farm colonies across the United States, and a marked decline at Creedmoor.  The campus continues to operate today, housing only a few hundred patients and providing outpatient services, leaving its turbulent past behind.  Many of the buildings have been sold off to new tenants.  Others, like Building 25, lie fallow.

 Snake pits like Creedmoor housed many autistic people.

 

The Antivaxxers Leave Their Mark

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the myth that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.    Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio.  A top antivaxxer is HHS Secretary RFK Jr. He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen." He helped cause a deadly 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa.

From CDC:

As of June 18, 2026, 2,104 confirmed* measles cases were reported in the United States in 2026. Among these, 2,093 measles cases were reported by 41 jurisdictions: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York City, New York State, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. A total of 11 measles cases were reported among international visitors to the United States.

After polls showed the political downsides of antivax policy, the administration took a lower profile on the issue.  But at WP,  Rachel Roubein  and Lena H, Sun report:

But outside the public eye, a small circle of Kennedy’s allies has kept working to reshape the federal apparatus that guides vaccines. This account of the behind-the-scenes effort is based on interviews with more than 15 people familiar with the matter, in addition to medical experts and Kennedy allies, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail private conversations or internal deliberations, or out of fear of retaliation.

Federal health officials are exploring re-creating an influential vaccine advisory panel that was blocked by a federal judge, including discussions around adding new members, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

There is also an effort to create a new Office of Science at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that reports to the office of CDC’s chief of staff, even though the agency already has a science office.

Earlier this month, the National Institutes of Health urged scientists to take part in vaccine injury research and encouraged new research into vaccine schedules, vaccines’ long-term health effects and other issues that Kennedy has long wanted reexamined.

These moves, the extent of which have not been previously reported, suggest that political warnings and legal challenges from medical groups have not fully stopped Kennedy’s vaccine agenda, but shifted it largely out of public view. Kennedy’s allies are embedding his agenda in institutions that decide what gets studied, who does vaccine research and how these findings are translated into policy. This could keep the Trump administration’s questioning of vaccines’ safety alive for years to come.

Greg Jaffe and Maggie Haberman at NYT:

A major flu outbreak has sickened nearly 160 troops at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas less than two months after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that U.S. troops would no longer be required to be vaccinated for the flu, defense officials said.

The outbreak at the base in San Antonio raced through an Air Force Basic Military Training wing, where new recruits sleep on bunk beds in open bays and share meals at large communal tables.

A trainee in his sixth week of basic training died after falling ill on Friday and being taken to Brooke Army Medical Center, the Air Force said in a news release. It was not immediately clear whether the death of the trainee, Keon McDaniel, was related to the flu outbreak.

A comprehensive medical review into his death is underway to determine the cause, according to the Air Force.

In the weeks since Mr. Hegseth’s vaccine policy took effect on April 21, only about 40 percent of Air Force trainees have opted to take the vaccine, which had long been mandatory, an Air Force official said.

In the aftermath of the outbreak, the Air Force issued an exception to the voluntary vaccine policy, requiring that all recruits at Lackland get flu shots — part of a broader effort to stem the virus’s spread.

 

Autism Speaks and ASAN Against the Education Offload

 In The Politics of Autism, I write about social services, special education, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. 

Project 2025 proposed to turn IDEA into a "no strings" block grant, effectively gutting the law and destroying protections that disability families have long relied upon. During the 2024 race, Trump denied any connection to the project, but now he proclaims it, praising OMB director Russ Vought "of Project 2025 fame."

Trump and Vought are now accomplishing their goal of ravaging the law. Instead of shifting it to a block grant, they have tried firing most of the staff who enforce it. 

From Autism Speaks:

Autism Speaks opposes the decision to move responsibilities of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS) to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) to the Department of Justice. This restructuring reverses decades of bipartisan consensus about where special education oversight belongs.

For families, it’s important to know that students’ rights under IDEA and other federal disability laws have not changed. However, moving the federal offices that help make sure schools follow through on those rights to agencies that have not done this work before could affect how families get support when problems arise. This administrative change risks weakening how special education is safeguarded, coordinated, and enforced across our education system.

It creates uncertainty for states and school districts, as decades of work that defined roles, oversight, and implementation of special education programs are redistributed to departments without experience in meeting the school-based needs of students with disabilities. It weakens accountability, by separating responsibility for special education and civil rights enforcement from the Department of Education, where expertise resides and enforcement is closely coordinated alongside general education policy. And it fragments the administration of the services and protections that students and families rely on by dividing special education oversight among multiple departments, making coordination more difficult and increasing the risk of inconsistent support.

From the Autistic Self Advocacy Network:

Moving OSERS and OCR to different parts of the government makes it harder for schools to get the funding that they need. Disabled students might not get the resources they need. Many students with disabilities will not be included because of this. All of the offices that have moved to other departments should be moved back to the Department of Education.

The Department of Education said that moving these offices will not hurt parents and students. This is not true. Moving these offices will make it much harder for disabled students and parents to get the help that they need. If a disabled student is not allowed their accommodations, it will be harder for them or their family to get help.

ASAN’s Policy Director, Greg Robinson, said, “Students with disabilities deserve protection. Students with disabilities deserve civil rights. Students with disabilities deserve a government that helps them and cares about them.”

The Department of Education made a bad decision. This decision will hurt students with disabilities. ASAN wants the government to keep OCR and OSERS in the Department of Education.

 

FWIW, Dhillon is deputy assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division is in charge of enforcing the Americans with Disabilities Act. And here she is using the word "retarded." https://t.co/qB6R7aX18e

— Eric Michael Garcia (@EricMGarcia) December 30, 2025

Shifting OCR and OSERS

In The Politics of Autism, I write about social services, special education, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. 

Project 2025 proposed to turn IDEA into a "no strings" block grant, effectively gutting the law and destroying protections that disability families have long relied upon. During the 2024 race, Trump denied any connection to the project, but now he proclaims it, praising OMB director Russ Vought "of Project 2025 fame."

Trump and Vought are now accomplishing their goal of ravaging the law. Instead of shifting it to a block grant, they have tried firing most of the staff who enforce it. 

Mark Lieberman at Education Week:

The U.S. Department of Education has begun outsourcing responsibility for overseeing the nation’s sprawling special education system and enforcing civil rights law in schools to other federal agencies, after months of previewing dramatic efforts to restructure both core functions.

Department officials announced the moves—made possible by four new interagency agreements—on Tuesday morning to advocacy group representatives, and on Tuesday afternoon to reporters and the general public.

The Education Department office that oversees special education and employment programs for adults with disabilities will move to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The U.S. Department of Justice will take on the Education Department’s office for civil rights, student privacy enforcement, and a quartet of equity assistance centers that help K-12 schools with desegregation efforts.

Department officials have teased many of these moves for more than a year. The conservative policy agenda Project 2025, which has guided many Trump administration actions, recommended moving both special education and civil rights enforcement to their respective new agencies....

The Education Department’s office for civil rights will move to the Justice Department’s civil rights division, currently led by Trump appointee Harmeet Dhillon, who has upended the agency’s approach to anti-discrimination enforcement.

During a call with reporters on Tuesday afternoon, senior Education Department officials said the agency hasn’t yet determined whether current Department of Justice staffers will work on Education Department civil right cases.
...

During Trump’s second administration, the Education Department has closed more than half of OCR’s regional offices and attempted to lay off more than half its staff, only to be thwarted by courts and forced to keep more than 200 OCR staffers on paid administrative leave for much of last year.
...
The Department of Education’s office of special education programs and its Rehabilitation Services Administration, which funds services to help adults with disabilities transition to the workforce, will move to the Administration on Disabilities, a sub-agency of HHS.

The AOD is currently led by Rebecca Hines, a former associate professor of special education at the University of Central Florida. Hines’ sister, Cheryl Hines, is married to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Hines’ second-in-command at AOD is Principal Deputy Commissioner Diana Diaz-Harrison, who joined in January after serving as Trump’s appointee overseeing special education and RSA in the Education Department. Diaz-Harrison previously founded a system of Arizona charter schools for students with autism; HHS in February named her the Trump administration’s National Autism Coordinator.

Advocates for students with disabilities have been decrying the prospect of the HHS move ever since McMahon floated it during her Senate confirmation hearing in February 2025.
...

“IDEA is fundamentally an education law—not a healthcare law—and should continue to be administered by education policy experts who understand schools, teaching, learning, and accountability,” Phyllis Wolfram, executive director for the Council of Special Education Administrators (CASE), wrote in a statement on Tuesday.

In January, Dan Barry and Sonia A. Rao reported at NYT:

Late last month, a woman posted a photograph on social media of a purple hat she had knitted, while a black-and-white dog lounged on the carpet a few feet away. The cozy scene was accompanied by a single sentence: “This hat is an hour behind schedule thanks to influencer retards.”

The proud knitter, Harmeet K. Dhillon, is also the assistant attorney general overseeing the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Her purview includes protecting the rights of people with intellectual disabilities by ensuring compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act.

For decades now, the “R-word” has been regarded as a slur against people with intellectual disabilities — a word to be avoided. Yet it has had a striking resurgence, in part because people in high-profile positions of power and influence have chosen to resurrect it, often with an air of defiance.

“The word ‘retarded’ is back,” the popular podcaster Joe Rogan declared in April, describing its return as “one of the great culture victories.” He did not respond to requests for elaboration, but there is abundant evidence to support his muscular declaration.

Lawsuit Against the Administration

In The Politics of Autism, I write about social services, special education, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. 

Project 2025 proposed to turn IDEA into a "no strings" block grant, effectively gutting the law and destroying protections that disability families have long relied upon. During the 2024 race, Trump denied any connection to the project, but now he proclaims it, praising OMB director Russ Vought "of Project 2025 fame."

Trump and Vought are now accomplishing their goal of ravaging the law. Instead of shifting it to a block grant, they have tried firing most of the staff who enforce it. 

A June 9 release from California Attorney General Ron Bonta:

California Attorney General Rob Bonta today led a multistate lawsuit challenging the U.S. Department of Education’s (Department) discontinuation of awarded grants under the State Personnel Development Grant (SPDG) program. These competitive grants provide critical funding for the professional development of special education staff and support services for children with disabilities. In California, more than 880,000 students are eligible for special education services. Although the California Department of Education (CDE) had been awarded a five-year SPDG grant in 2022, the Department discontinued the grant in September 2025 because of conclusory, baseless concerns about equity-related initiatives. In the lawsuit, Attorney General Bonta and the coalition urge the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to find the discontinuation of funds unlawful and emphasize the harmful impact of the discontinuation on essential resources for schools, educators, and parents that support students with disabilities.

“It is disgraceful that President Trump has disregarded the needs of students with disabilities, claiming that supporting their needs is not in the best interest of the federal government. The Trump Administration discontinued critical grants designed to improve outcomes for students with disabilities by building the capacity of educators, administrators, and systems to ensure timely appropriate services and navigate early intervention,” said Attorney General Bonta. “This harmful and unlawful action denies vulnerable students the resources they need to learn and succeed. California is fighting to ensure the continuation of the grant that supports these necessary initiatives for special education.”

The SPDG program was established in 2004 through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) to improve long-term outcomes for vulnerable populations. For decades, the Department administered the SPDG program in a routine and predictable manner by publishing a notice inviting applications and identifying relevant priorities that had been subject to notice and comment. After providing an initial award, the Department determines whether the grant should continue for the following year based on enumerated performance and financial metrics. In 2022, CDE applied for and received a five-year SPDG award to implement critical reforms to California’s personnel development in early intervention, early education, and transitional services to improve results for young children with disabilities or at risk for developmental delays. In total, the grant would have provided CDE with $2.1 million per year, a total of $10.5 million over the five-year term, of which it only received funding for three budget periods. During the funded period, California successfully met all program goals and performance requirements and timely submitted all required performance and financial reports.

Nevertheless, in January 2025, President Trump abruptly departed from this settled practice and called for the review and termination of federal grants that funded equity-related initiatives. In September 2025, the Department sent CDE a notice that stated it was discontinuing the funding in its entirety based on vague claims that the programs were not “in the best interest of the Federal Government.” After the discontinuation, CDE’s Request for Reconsideration was summarily denied.

In the lawsuit, Attorney General Bonta and the coalition argue that the Department’s discontinuation of funding violated the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) because it was contrary to law, without observance of procedure required by law, and arbitrary and capricious. The discontinuations also violated the Spending Clause of the United States Constitution. More specifically, the Department acted unlawfully because, among other reasons:

• It relied on unpublished new priorities that had not been subject to the notice-and-comment procedures required by the General Education Provisions Act, the Department’s own regulations, and the APA.
• It misapplied the continuation regulation by treating the “best interest” provision as allowing them to have unlimited discretion to discontinue grants based on new priorities.
• It changed its position and misled the states by first requiring their applications to highlight equity initiatives and then penalizing them for the very same initiatives, and by failing to consider extensive reliance interests.
• It failed to provide the kind of “reasoned explanation” required by the APA and instead relied on conclusory language.

In filing the lawsuit, Attorney General Bonta is leading the attorneys general of Rhode Island and Wisconsin.

Autism and South Asian Families

In The Politics of Autism, I write about the experiences of different economic, ethnic and racial groups.  

Ritu Goel at STAT:

I am a child and adolescent psychiatrist. I am also a South Asian woman and a mother. For years, I worked with families navigating complex childhood diagnoses at institutions like Johns Hopkins, Kennedy Krieger, and Kaiser Permanente. The pattern I saw in the clinic is the same one the research now confirms: South Asian children are diagnosed with developmental disabilities later than white peers. (On average, minority children are diagnosed roughly a year to a year and a half later than their white peers.) Their families access fewer services. And the primary barrier is not language, insurance, or geography. It is stigma.

In South Asian households, a child’s disability triggers a specific kind of family crisis that most American clinicians are not trained to recognize. The concept of izzat, or family honor, means a diagnosis does not stay with the child. It attaches to the entire family. Grandparents deny it. Aunties suggest prayers or herbal remedies instead of therapy. The question that should be simple (“How do we get our child the right help?”) becomes a painful negotiation with shame.

Then there is the karma narrative. In many South Asian spiritual frameworks, disability is framed as punishment for past wrongdoing and is internalized as personal moral failure. Mothers carry the blame: her diet during pregnancy, her stress, her genetics, and her parenting. Research on South Asian and broader Asian caregivers documents the result: emotional exhaustion that does not respond to rest, chronic physical symptoms, and a shrinking social world as families withdraw to avoid judgment.

Retraction Update

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the myth that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.    Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio.  A top antivaxxer is HHS Secretary RFK Jr. He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen." He helped cause a deadly 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa.

 Judy George at MedPage Today:

A 2010 paper that linked hepatitis B vaccines in infant boys to an increased risk of autism diagnosis was retracted and another study by the same authors is under investigation.

The study, published in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part A, claimed that boys vaccinated as neonates had a three times higher odds of an autism diagnosis compared with boys vaccinated after their first month of life or not at all.

The paper was included in a safety review of hepatitis B birth vaccination alongside work from David Geier and presented to the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices at their meeting on December 4, the day before the committee voted to drop the agency's long-standing recommendation that every newborn receive a hepatitis B vaccine at birth.
...
The neonate paper was retracted because "concerns were raised regarding the methodology of the study and the reported conclusions," according to a notice from the journal's editor and publisher.

The journal contacted Gallagher and Goodman for an explanation and engaged an independent reviewer for a post-publication statistical review. The reviewer concluded that the study's conclusions were unsound "due to fundamental methodological flaws," leading the journal to retract the article. Gallagher and Goodman did not agree with the retraction.

The study had multiple flaws, noted David Mandell, ScD, of the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia, who was not involved in either the research or the journal's retraction decision.

These shortcomings led to "spurious findings based on a tiny group of children," said Mandell, a member of the Coalition of Autism Scientists, a group of autism researchers. "They speak to the need to radically reform the peer review process so that all science is reviewed with a keener eye."