By Robin Respaut, Jaimi Dowdell
NEW YORK, NY (Reuters) -Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr has vowed to address rising U.S. autism rates as a top health priority for the Trump administration.
Last month, he pledged $50 million to help identify environmental causes of autism, to be issued as grants by the National Institutes of Health, and has announced plans to create a national “autism registry.”
Yet during the first four months of 2025, the NIH has reduced funding for autism-related research by an estimated $31 million to $116 million from $147 million in the same period in 2024, according to a Reuters analysis of NIH data. The spending is 26% lower than the prior four-year average for that period, the analysis found.
In some cases, the NIH has canceled projects because they involved diverse populations, studied differences in gender or took place at research universities currently under scrutiny by the Trump Administration. For others, funding for autism projects has simply halted or money for new projects has not been approved.
Among the eliminated or defunded annual grant programs identified by Reuters:
Reuters analyzed nearly 300,000 projects funded by the NIH since 2021 to identify autism research for its review. The agency has funded about 4,600 autism-related projects since 2021, with an annual average of $525 million over the past four years.
Reuters calculated its funding estimates for autism-related research by counting NIH grants awarded between 2021 and 2025 for projects with the terms “autism” or “autistic” in the titles or abstracts. Seven autism researchers and one former NIH employee said the analysis provides a fair assessment of funding trends.
Among the autism-related grants reviewed by Reuters, five totalling more than $10 million were listed as “Terminated” by “Department Authority” on the NIH’s website. The grants, which described research into “sexual and gender minority autistic adults,” auditory hearing, and genetic risks among people with autism, were all canceled within two weeks of each other in March.
The NIH’s site did not provide a reason for the terminations. The Reuters analysis could not determine the reason for the reduction in funding, whether an existing project was halted pending review or if money for a new grant was being held back.
More autism research could also be impacted by the Trump administration’s withholding of federal funding from research universities, such as Harvard University or Columbia University’s Autism Center for Excellence, which receives funding from the NIH.
Taken together, autism researchers fear funding cuts will delay progress in discovering the possible causes and best treatments for autism.
“A cut of that magnitude would devastate efforts to understand autism and develop novel therapies aimed at improving the lives of individuals on the spectrum,” said Dr. Josh Gordon, former director of the NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health and former chair of the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said some programs identified by Reuters were canceled due to President Trump’s executive orders on diversity, equity, and inclusion or for promoting “gender ideology.”
The spokesperson denied that the Trump administration had “reduced its overall commitment to autism research.”
“HHS remains fully committed to advancing our understanding of Autism Spectrum Disorder, a complex and heterogeneous condition now estimated to affect 1 in 31 children, according to the CDC’s 2025 data,” the spokesman said in a statement.
VITAL GOVERNMENT FUNDING
Autism rates in the U.S. have climbed steadily in the last two decades, and since 2006, over $5 billion in funding has been authorized by Congress under the Autism CARES Act to support research, services, training and monitoring at the NIH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Health Resources and Services Administration.
Researchers say government funding plays a vital role in the study of autism because it is so widespread and not well understood.
“It’s one of those areas that private funding cannot get the job done, because the task is so large,” said Andrea Roberts, a principal research scientist at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, who studies autism. Reducing funding, she added, will slow the pace of important discoveries about the cause and treatment of the disease.
Dr. Laura Anthony, a psychologist and autism researcher at Children’s Hospital Colorado, said an NIH-funded project that she’s a part of had been abruptly canceled.
The project had followed hundreds of children with autism for more than a decade to better understand their experiences and needs. One of its aims was to clarify the reasons why some children are diagnosed later in life, leading to delayed intervention, to help prevent similar delays in the future.
“Losing the progress with those kids is not only about the kids in this study. It’s also about every new child or family who comes into the clinic and asks for help,” Anthony said.
Others have seen their funding delayed.
Dr. Helen Tager-Flusberg, director of Boston University’s Center for Autism Research Excellence, is co-leading a study at Boston Children’s Hospital following 450 babies from infancy through age two to track developmental and language delays.
Earlier this year, her team had applied for additional funding to follow the same children, who are from diverse demographic backgrounds, through age three, but she has not received an update from the NIH since February. “If studies like these lose funding, it’s a huge loss,” she said.
Some projects that lost funding had focused on specific groups with autism, such as girls, who are diagnosed less often, said Alycia Halladay, chief scientific officer of the Autism Science Foundation, a non-profit organization that funds autism research. “We need to do a better job understanding them,” she said.
Researchers say both genetic and environmental factors likely contribute to autism, and that much of the increased prevalence is largely due to an expanded definition of the condition and more widespread screening.
Kennedy, however, has that environmental toxins are to blame and has launched a study into already debunked claims that vaccines may contribute to autism. He has suggested new research initiatives investigating mold, pesticides, food additives, ultrasounds and medicines.
In testimony before Congress on Wednesday, Kennedy denied autism was linked to genetic causes alone, and accused the NIH of deliberately avoiding research on environmental causes. “So I don’t think we should be funding that genetic work anymore,” he said.
Some advocates within the autism community have expressed hope that Kennedy would draw more attention to the condition, while wary that the health secretary may direct new research based on unproven assumptions about its causes.
Jill Escher, president of the National Council on Severe Autism, said Kennedy’s push for autism research is “an incredible opportunity for science and understanding autism.”
“Kennedy has been pretty emphatic about trying to identify the causes of autism,” she said. “But I’m not at all convinced that they will spend that money wisely. If they spend it on mold, vaccines or similar exposures unlikely to pose any autism risk, that’s not a good expenditure of research dollars.”
(Reporting by Robin Respaut in San Francisco and Jaimi Dowdell in Los Angeles. Editing by Michelle Gershberg, Janet O. Roberts and Michael Learmonth)
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