Helen Pearson at Nature:
On 16 April, Robert F. Kennedy Jr held a press conference about rising diagnoses of autism. The US Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary pointed to new data showing that autism prevalence in the United States had risen steeply from one in 150 eight-year-olds in 2000 to one in 31 in 2022. He called it an “epidemic” caused by “an environmental toxin” — and said he would soon be announcing a study to find the responsible agent.
The next month, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), part of the department that Kennedy leads, announced the Autism Data Science Initiative (ADSI). The initiative offered up to US$50 million to fund studies on the causes of autism. The winning applications are expected to be announced in September.
Usually, big investments in research are welcomed by scientists — but not this time. Many were dismayed that these developments seemed to ignore decades of work on the well-documented rise in autism diagnoses and on causes of the developmental condition. Although Kennedy said that environmental factors are the main cause of autism, research has shown that genetics plays a bigger part. Population studies1 have linked a handful of environmental factors — mostly encountered during pregnancy — to increased chances of autism, but their precise role has been hard to pin down. More than anything, research has shown that the drivers of autism are fiendishly complicated. “There will never be a sound-bite answer to what causes autism,” says Helen Tager-Flusberg, a psychologist who studies neurodevelopmental conditions at Boston University, Massachusetts.
...
And researchers and autism groups are concerned that funding cuts and policies introduced by the Trump administration will ultimately set back autism research and support much more than the ADSI could further it. A Nature analysis of NIH-funded research projects using the RePORTER tool shows that autism research received $62 million less funding in the first half of 2025 than in the same period in 2024 ($212 million compared with $274 million).
Investment in the ADSI “cannot offset the broader erosion of support” caused by cuts to research grants and to Medicaid (the US public-health insurance system for people with low incomes), education funding and other services, a spokesperson at the Autism Society of America in Rockville, Maryland, said in a statement to Nature. “These cuts threaten the infrastructure that supports both scientific progress and quality of life for Autistic individuals and their families.”
