RFK JR dated view of Autism

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He has a speech disorder causing him to fumble his words and get visually stressed and shake, its ironic as this happens to autistic people themselves.

Watching him is like myself when i talk, what goes through your head and want to say somehow doesn't always come out the same.

In just two months on the job, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has raised the profile of autism more than any recent public official.

Autism advocacy groups typically welcome more attention to their cause. But many autistic people say Kennedy is exploiting their community — and perpetuating harmful stereotypes — as part of his decadeslong campaign against vaccines, even as the Trump administration threatens to eliminate services that help people with autism reach their full potential.

At an April press conference on autism rates among school-age kids, Kennedy described autism as an epidemic and a “tragedy” that “destroys families.”

“These are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use the toilet unassisted,” Kennedy said.

In response, 15 advocacy groups issued a joint statement calling for autistic people to be treated with respect and support. The groups said they are “deeply concerned by growing public rhetoric and policy decisions” that fail to “reflect the inherent value, rights and diverse needs of autistic people.”

Zoe Gross, director of advocacy for the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, was one of many people to speak out. Gross and her brother have autism.

“It was a challenge for our parents, but our family wasn’t destroyed,” Gross said.

Ari Ne’eman, an assistant professor of health policy and management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said he sees Kennedy’s disparaging remarks as “part of the long and unfortunate history of fearmongering in the autism world.”

“There’s an unscrupulous industry of alternative medicine providers who exploit families by charging them tens of thousands of dollars to ‘recover’ people with autism,” said Ne’eman, who has autism. “The way that industry works is by terrifying families.”

Even among people with intellectual disabilities — a category that includes 40% of people with autism — 1 in 5 held a paid job in the community in 2020.

Kennedy later said he was referring to people with “profound autism,” including those without access to speech. Research suggests 10% to 27% of autistic people are nonverbal or have other significant needs, a rate that has remained relatively consistent since 2000.

Philip Weintraub, 53, didn’t speak a word until he was 5 years old.

But he received speech therapy throughout elementary school. Occupational therapy improved his motor skills, which allowed him to play soccer and basketball in middle school and high school, as well as softball as an adult.

After high school, he began volunteering for the Bill Clinton campaign and later worked for the White House. Weintraub now works at the Universal Services Administrative Company, which connects people to broadband services. When he returned to school to become certified in computer science, his school provided someone to take notes and gave him extra time on a test.

He and his wife, Liz, who has cerebral palsy, live in the Washington, D.C., area. Weintraub noted that they have gone on many dates.

“We are coming up on our 20th anniversary,” he said.

Alison Singer, president of the Autism Science Foundation, said she welcomed Kennedy’s focus on autistic people who need more intensive support. However, she objects to the suggestion that the lives of some autistic people have little worth.

Kennedy “made it sound like these individuals’ lives had no value if they couldn’t pay taxes,” Singer said. “That they couldn’t love and weren’t worthy of love. My daughter has profound autism and so does my older brother. They both live lives of meaning and dignity.”

Although attitudes toward autism have changed significantly in recent decades, Kennedy doesn’t seem to have kept up, said David Mandell, associate director of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Center for Autism Research.

Kennedy’s comments about autism echo the language of some autism organizations from 20 years ago, when advocates often spoke of “curing” the condition, Mandell said.

In a written statement to NBC News, an HHS spokesperson said, “Secretary Kennedy remains committed to working toward a society where people with autism have access to meaningful opportunities, appropriate supports and the full respect and recognition they deserve. His statements emphasized the need for increased research into environmental factors contributing to the rise in autism diagnoses, not to stigmatize individuals with autism or their families. HHS supports ongoing collaboration and research to both identify the causes of autism and provide the best possible care and management strategies for those impacted.”

Where were the autistic people?
When talking about autism, Kennedy refers to children but doesn’t mention of the needs of autistic adults, insisting that he’s never seen an adult his age with symptoms of autism.

Kennedy is “not just excluding the voices of autistic adults from the conversation, but excluding the fact of our existence,” Ne’eman said.

Kennedy has also said he didn’t know anyone with autism when he was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, before some modern vaccines were available.

There’s a reason why people were autism were rarely seen at that time, Mandell said. Like others with intellectual or physical disabilities, they were often institutionalized, often living in appalling conditions that shortened their lives.

More than a century ago, when doctors first described autism, they saw it as a symptom of childhood schizophrenia. In the 1940s, doctors blamed the condition on “refrigerator mothers” who weren’t warm enough to their children.

Kristyn Roth, chief marketing officer of the Autism Society of America, said Kennedy’s claims about autistic children’s limited potential echo the warnings that doctors used during the mid-20th century to persuade parents to institutionalize their children, rather than raise them at home.

Children with autism weren’t afforded the legal right to a free public education until 1975. Children with developmental delays can receive early intervention services until age 3, then transition into special education, if needed.

Today, advocacy groups say it’s important to tell parents of newly diagnosed children about the many possibilities open to their kids.

“You don’t know what’s possible for your kid,” said Gross. “No one knows what’s possible for your kid when they’re 3 years old,” Gross said.

Cutting support for people with autism
Part of Kennedy’s plan to “Make America Healthy Again” includes “streamlining” and “restructuring” federal health agencies in ways that could hurt people with autism, Roth said.

One of the most significant potential losses is the proposed dismantling of the Administration for Community Living, or ACL, which is best known for the Meals on Wheels program that delivers food to people’s homes. The ACL also protects the civil rights of older adults and people with disabilities — including those with autism — and helps them live independently, rather than in institutions.

According to the Trump administration, the agency’s “critical programs” — but not all programs — will be split across other departments. According to news reports, half of the ACL’s staff has been fired.

Proposals by Republicans in Congress to cut Medicaid by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade to pay for Trump’s budget priorities could deal a devastating blow to people with autism and their families, Roth said.

Many children and adults with autism receive their health care through Medicaid, which covers people with disabilities or low incomes. Health insurance is critical for people with autism, who tend to have more serious medical needs than others. Up to half of those with autism have seizures, which can be life-threatening.

Medicaid also pays for screening, diagnosis, acute medical care, physical therapy, occupational therapy and one-to-one aides for people who need them, among other services, Mandell said.

Some states have received waivers to provide additional services through Medicaid, such as respite care for caregivers, a service that has been shown to reduce institutionalization.

Medicaid is “a literally lifesaving program for so many people in our community,” Roth said.

The Autism Society of America, which co-signed a letter to congressional leaders asking them to save the ACL, said the level of federal cost-cutting is leading to “the decimation of programs that directly serve and support the disability community, including those with autism,” according to a statement from the group.

If the federal government doesn’t fund services that help people with autism live at home, for example, they could end up living in institutions, which are much more expensive, Mandell said.

In an online statement, the Autism Self Advocacy Network said Kennedy has not consulted autism advocacy groups about any of the plans that affect their community.

Although Kennedy has pledged a “massive testing and research effort” to find the causes of autism, Ne’eman said research dollars would be better spent investigating ways to support autistic people in their daily lives, such as addressing barriers to jobs and education.

“The false idea that autism is caused by an ‘injury,’ by something external going wrong, makes people more afraid of autism and of autistics,” the Autistic Self Advocacy Network wrote in a statement in April. “So does the idea that it is better for a child to die of a vaccine-preventable disease than to live as an autistic person.”

Concerns about cutbacks to education
Trump also has vowed to eliminate the Department of Education, which oversees special education services and enforces the law that guarantees children with disabilities — including those with autism — receive a free public education in the least restrictive environment. The White House has promised that services for children with disabilities will be “preserved in full and redistributed to various other agencies and departments,” but many autism advocates worry that key services will be lost in the shuffle, making it harder for students to receive individual education programs and special instruction in school, as well as accommodations that help meet their needs.

Twenty-two percent of families of children with disabilities experience financial hardship, such as difficulty paying a medical bill or going without care due to cost, according to a study published in JAMA on April 24. That rate is nearly twice as high as in families without children with disabilities.

“I have not heard Kennedy say one word about supports,” Mandell said. “I would love to change the conversation to talk about what we should be doing to support these individuals.”

Efforts to help autistic people are succeeding
The report from the CDC that triggered Kennedy’s recent briefing shows that increased efforts to screen young children for autism have led to an increase in the number of children diagnosed with the condition.

Kennedy rejects the idea that increased awareness and screening explains the growth in autism diagnoses.

Jemma Bat-Anat Page, 29, said she would not have been diagnosed with autism if she hadn’t sought out testing two years ago.

Page, who works in theater in Cincinnati, paid for the tests using health insurance from her employer. Page said she has been uncomfortable making eye contact since she was a child and she sometimes got in trouble for not being able to control the volume of her voice. She decided to be tested, not for accommodations or services, but simply to better understand herself.

Page and her partner, who has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, consider themselves “neurodiverse.”

She also likes the increasingly popular term “neurospicy.”

Ne’eman believes the actual number of people with autism may not have changed as much as statistics suggest.

“Many people who today get an autism diagnosis would have, in a prior generation, gotten a diagnosis of intellectual disability, mental illness or no diagnosis at all,” Ne’eman said

Article is an overview of objections to RFK Jr.
Many in autism community say Health Secretary Kennedy doesn’t understand their needs

I think it is important every once in a while to take a step back from our own hyperfocus and look at the big picture. The people quoted here are not just the stereotype ND advocates which are people we used to call “shiny aspies”, people who lead semi normal lives who are clueless and heartless towards high support needs/profound autistics. While the people quoted here come from different backgrounds and opinions they have found common cause which is a good thing.

Much of these comments are what’s known as inspiration porn. “ Look autism is not so bad I can show a boy with autism who wrote a book” “got a college degree “ “conquered the world” blah blah blah

Which is obviously hypocritical seeing how much they spend makeup and other gender affirming care!

Republicans love gender-affirming care, but only if it affirms a cisgender identity.

Beard removal and breast augmentation are readily available for MTF transgenders because so many cisgender women under similar services.

“Autism destroys families. . . . Autism is an individual tragedy. . . . These are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date — many of them will never use a toilet unassisted,” said Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS).

These remarks, delivered at Kennedy’s first press conference as HHS secretary, set off a firestorm of criticism. They reveal profound ignorance to the lived experiences of autistic people and to the science that informs our understanding of autism spectrum disorder. But Kennedy’s comments lamenting the “tragedy” of autism, the burden it places on families, and the failure of autistic people to contribute to society are not only insulting. They are dangerous.

Many people rushed to correct the record, sharing stories of autistic people doing the mundane — showing up for work, heading to baseball practice after school — and the remarkable. Missing from the conversation was an affirmation that autistic people are more than what they can do, that there is value in the life of every autistic person, no matter the support they need or what they produce.

Kennedy — a vaccine skeptic whose influence ushered in a wave of vaccine hesitancy, followed by the return of measles, a deadly childhood disease once eliminated in the United States — was a threat to public health before his appointment as HHS Secretary.

Now he’s been elevated to the most powerful public health office in the country. He has the full force of the HHS and National Institutes of Health behind him, and first on his agenda is identifying a cause — and presumably, a cure — for autism. Set against a backdrop of worsening economic conditions, increasing austerity, and the intensifying erosion of the social safety net, Kennedy’s insistence that autism is “catastrophic for our country,” his proposed registry of autistic Americans, a pronatalist administration, and his anti-autism crusade echo the eugenics movements of the past, including the one that Hans Asperger, for whom Asperger’s syndrome was named, facilitated during the Third Reich.

Putting a Price Tag on Disability
Following Kennedy’s press conference, social media and news outlets were flooded with examples of autistic people doing all the things Kennedy suggested they’d never be capable of: writing poetry, playing baseball, being in fulfilling romantic relationships, paying their taxes, and clocking in for work. Parents and siblings of autistic people spoke about their families, made even stronger because of their loved one’s autism. The message is clear: autism is not a tragedy. Autistic people can and do achieve things that are both extraordinary and deeply ordinary.

Some of us are polyglots, physicists, engineers, artists, ecologists, or educators. We are people who create beautiful art that enriches our culture, build systems that make society function, and invent solutions to our world’s most vexing problems.

But some of us aren’t. Some of us are adults who aren’t able to use the bathroom unassisted. Some of us experience the world so intensely it provokes self-injurious meltdowns. Some of us walk on tiptoes and flap hands and can only communicate with assistive devices or not at all. Some of us will never have a job or pay taxes. The point isn’t what autistic people can contribute to society — we have inherent worth and dignity regardless of the taxes we pay, the jobs we hold, and what we produce.

The value of autistic people to society is being questioned, and in the crosshairs are those who can’t participate in the workplace, integrate into mainstream classrooms, or live independently — those who fail to ‘pull their weight.’
But the Trump administration has put a price on autism and the disability community at large. In the executive order establishing the Make America Healthy Again Commission, the White House stated that the rising number of people diagnosed with chronic health conditions “poses a dire threat to the American people and our way of life.” Trends like the “staggering” rate of autism diagnoses, “harm us, our economy, and our security.” They even assigned a dollar amount to the damage: “Ninety percent of the [n]ation’s $4.5 trillion in annual healthcare expenditures is for people with chronic and mental health conditions.”

A $4 trillion price tag makes justifying cuts to services easier. And the public, already battered by inflation, tariffs, and rising costs of living, is less likely to object to slashing programs if their recipients are characterized as burdens and threats to the country’s way of life. The value of autistic people to society is being questioned, and in the crosshairs are those who can’t participate in the workplace, integrate into mainstream classrooms, or live independently — those who fail to “pull their weight.” Within the autistic community, a collective of vastly different lived experiences and abilities, it will be the most vulnerable who will suffer worst and feel the first impacts of regressive policies and funding cuts.

This is a precarious moment for all people with disabilities. The US government is putting a price on keeping disabled and chronically ill people alive: here, in 2025, it’s $4 trillion; in 1939, in Germany, 100 million reichsmarks.

5000 Idiots and Useless Eaters
In 1920, Alfred Hoche and Karl Binding, a psychiatrist and lawyer, respectively, published Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life. In it, they argued that people with disabilities and the mentally ill are nothing more than “empty human husks” who are so greatly burdened society that to end their lives was not only a compassionate choice but a social good. “Their life is absolutely pointless, but they do not regard it as being unbearable,” Hoche and Binding wrote. “They are a terrible, heavy burden upon their relatives and society as a whole. Their death would not create even the smallest gap — except perhaps in the feelings of their mothers or loyal nurses.”

In their views, society owed nothing, not even food, to those who could not contribute and be productive. These people were nothing but mouths to feed, mouths that consumed food that rightfully belonged to those who worked for it.

When Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life was published it was met with controversy, soon overcome by propaganda. Germany was two years out from the resounding loss of World War I. The Weimar Republic was experiencing a worsening economic depression, hyperinflation, and high unemployment. The concept of Lebensunwertes Leben — “life unworthy of life” — found favor with Adolf Hitler, who would gain notoriety in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 and rise to power ten years later.

As economic conditions worsened, a sophisticated campaign of propaganda made the politics of racial purity palatable to a desperate German public. A doctor in Hitler’s inner circle calculated the cost of subsidizing “5,000 idiots” for a year: 100 million reichsmarks. In a few years, mathematics textbooks would pose questions like, “The construction of a lunatic asylum costs 6 million marks. How many houses at 15,000 marks each could have been built for that amount?”

Eugenics was on the rise elsewhere, discussed openly and enthusiastically in the United States and other Western countries. Leading thinkers of the so-called Progressive Era promoted eugenics. New York hosted delegates from around the world, invited by the US State Department, at the Second International Eugenics Conference in 1921. Cities passed “ugly laws” that made it illegal for people with visible disabilities or disfigurements to be seen in public. They remained on the books for over a century (Chicago, the last holdout, repealed their law in 1974). Restrictions on immigration, anti-miscegenation laws, and forced sterilization campaigns kept the “defective” from proliferating. Americans did eugenics exceptionally well, so much so that Nazi Germany looked westward for inspiration. But the Nazis didn’t stop at preventing the creation of more unfit elements of society. Hitler sought to eliminate those already there.

In 1933, the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring called for the sterilization of “imbeciles” and those with conditions like schizophrenia, epilepsy, and Huntington’s disease in Nazi Germany. The benefits of the new policy were twofold. It would protect the strong, healthy, Aryan Volk from the unpleasant experience of encountering the disabled, now more numerous in public as the depression forced the state to close mental hospitals. And, it would mean healthy Aryans, unburdened of the responsibility of subsidizing the disabled, would themselves be able to breed more strong, racially pure stock.

In 1939, Hitler signed Aktion T-4, transforming medical facilities into death camps for the “useless eaters” who burdened society and threatened the strength of the Volk. As the Third Reich’s war ramped up, so did the murder of people with disabilities. As the head of the state hospital near Munich said after the Reich invaded Poland, “It is unbearable to me that the flower of our youth must lose their lives at the front, so that that feeble-minded and asocial element can have a secure existence in the asylum.” Removing defectives from the gene pool became an imperative.

Three hundred thousand “useless eaters” were murdered between 1939 and 1945. The first victims were children. Clinicians were required to register their disabled patients with Nazi officials. Buses, their windows blacked out, rounded up these patients from their homes and institutions and transported them to hospitals. There, the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses would review their records. Those whose files were marked with a plus sign were assigned to die. Many parents, told their child was taken for special treatment, would later receive a notice that their child had died of “pneumonia.”

As economic conditions worsened, a sophisticated campaign of propaganda made the politics of racial purity palatable to a desperate German public.

Their deaths were, from an administrative standpoint, efficient. Aktion T-4 was paperwork-intensive and developed its own clinical language, giving it an air of legitimacy, affording a degree of separation from their work to those carrying out orders. They were providing “final medical assistance” in the service of enforcing “negative population policies.” Their actions were for the good of the Reich, alleviating the Volk of a weary burden that was both financial and existential.

Nearly 800 children, including 336 infants, died in Austria’s Am Spiegelgrund hospital, injected with barbiturates or carbolic acid, or left outside in the elements. As Steve Silberman writes in NeuroTribes, Most of these children had been diagnosed with feeble-mindedness, epilepsy, or schizophrenia — the three diagnoses that autistic children were most likely to receive in the days before autism was an accepted diagnostic category.” At other “hospitals,” children were subjected to medical experimentation before they died: electroconvulsive shock, spinal taps. Children wasted away, receiving ever-smaller portions of food until they starved to death.

Hans Asperger, who studied what he called “autistic psychopathy” at the Vienna University Pediatric Clinic, himself condemned some of these children to death. First hailed as a quiet resistor to Nazism, who, through his focus on the stunning intelligence of the “little professors” in his clinic and their value to the Reich, saved the lives of children who would have perished. But more recent research has complicated that picture. Though he did not join the Nazi party, Asperger undoubtedly signed a loyalty oath to Hitler to retain his position after the Anschluss. He served on the Reich committee that evaluated the cases of disabled children. He signed the paperwork necessary to send uneducable children to die.

Asperger’s writings have been scrutinized for insight into his true feelings about the Nazis. At best, he appears to have been ambivalent. Regardless, Asperger was a cog in a machine seeking the racial purity of the Volk through the destruction of the lives unworthy of life in its midst. In his ambivalence, he served that mission dutifully.

Legacy of Eugenics
Without creating overt programs of extermination, the United States has found ways to isolate and minimize the existence of autistic and other people with disabilities in society. It is important to note that our concept of “disability” is essentially an assessment of the individual’s fitness for work that emerged in tandem with capitalism and industrialization. To be “disabled” is to be excluded from earning a wage. People with disabilities in past cultures were not always so othered, but under capitalism, “disability” is a problem to be managed. Eugenic policies were used to segregate races during Progressive Era fears of “race suicide,” but also prevented other inferior elements — the disabled, criminals, the poor, immigrants — from impeding society’s march toward progress.

Following the “ugly laws” of 1867, the 1882 Immigration Act prevented “any lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge” from entering the country. The Act was amended to restrict immigration by anyone likely to become a public charge. Later laws imposed literacy requirements, and eventually a medical inspector was placed at Ellis Island to turn away any immigrants who showed signs of defects. Economists of the time argued these policies would benefit meritorious (white, Protestant) workers by weeding out undesirables who would compete for wages.

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, colonies for people with epilepsy and the “feeble-minded” sprang up across the United States. The colony model was seen as more humane than the institutions: Colony residents lived and worked communally and benefited from fresh air and sunshine. Colonies were intended to “cure” residents but rarely were successful. In reality, many were crowded and squalid workhouses, useful only in so far as they relieved society of the horror of encountering the disabled in public. The colony model’s modern equivalent may well be the “wellness farms” Kennedy has proposed for the rehabilitation of people with mental health conditions.

Later, the colonies became epicenters of sterilization campaigns intended to prevent “defective genes” from being passed down, part of a wider movement to “breed out” undesirable traits. Some 70,000 people — including disabled people, racial minorities, poor people, and “promiscuous” women — were sterilized by force in the United States throughout the twentieth century. Today more than thirty states still have laws allowing sterilization of people with disabilities.

Invisible Elders
The mistreatment of autistic people and other people with disabilities didn’t stop with the repeal of “ugly laws” or the decline of the colony model by the end of World War II. In the mid-century, children with what would today be diagnosed as autism spectrum disorder were spirited away to the locked corridors of institutions or confined to their family home. Conditions could be wretched, like those at the infamous Willowbrook State School, where children lived in filth, were subjected to medical experimentation, and endured physical and sexual abuse.

For most of US history, people with autism and other disabilities were not intended to be seen — one explanation for Kennedy never seeing older adults with “full-blown autism” walking around the mall. Only in the very recent past has society opened up to the inclusion of people with disabilities. Another reason Kennedy encounters so few autistic elders: they may have had the traits that would visibly mark them as autistic — hand flapping, for example — beaten out of them, quite literally.

In the 1960s, parents seeking to “cure” their autistic children began turning to applied behavior analysis (ABA), a therapy that often involved intensive, repetitive sessions for as many as forty hours per week, intended to discourage “problem” behaviors through reward and punishment, which sometimes entailed slapping and electric shocks. ABA is considered abusive and harmful by some autistic people, likened to LGBTQ conversion therapy.

As the Trump administration moves to shutter the Department of Education, the president has promised that programs serving students with disabilities will be moved to HHS and overseen by Kennedy.

Many older adults with autism may simply no longer be alive. Autistic adults are twenty-five times more likely to attempt suicide than non-autistic adults. Elderly autistic people report higher rates of loneliness and depression and are more likely to experience comorbid health concerns of all kinds, from diabetes to Parkinson’s. The services that could support their emotional, mental, and physical health have not caught up with the needs of this population that has largely been intentionally invisibilized.

It’s likely to get worse. As Kennedy’s fixation on autism takes center stage, the Trump administration is simultaneously cutting autism research funding across the NIH, Department of Education, Department of Defense, and National Science Foundation, and blacklisting “autism,” “disabled,” and “vulnerable populations” in federal grant proposals. Autistic people will suffer real, material consequences, as will those performing a severely undervalued form of labor: caregivers.

Kennedy also represents another, more existential threat. By casting autistic people, particularly those with high support needs, as leading lives devoid of meaning, value, and output, he implicitly asks: Are autistic lives worthy of life?

Systemic Failures, Not Individual Tragedies
Autistic people are not a tragedy. We can — all of us, regardless of our support needs — live meaningful lives. Despite what Kennedy believes, when autistic people are supported, and when caregivers have the resources they need, they and their families flourish. It’s when the systems that we rely on are underfunded or wholly absent that we are robbed of our potential and ability to live well.

By and large, the way our schools and workplaces are set up is fundamentally opposed to what many autistic people need to thrive. In a culture with a punishing insistence on productivity, autistic people, who often need quiet, rest, and time, can flounder. Around 10 percent of autistic people in the United States don’t finish high school. Only about 34 percent of us graduate with college degrees within six years. We fare even worse in the working world: an estimated 40 percent of adults with autism in the United States are unemployed.

These statistics don’t reflect failures of autistic people. Rather, they point to a systemic failure to meet autistic people’s needs. Flawed as they are, however, the programs and services we do have remove barriers and enable millions to live decently. In the name of cutting waste, fraud, and abuse, the administration is dismantling these systems and policies.

Since 1975, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act or IDEA) has guaranteed the right to an equal education to students with disabilities in public schools. The Act is imperfect — it fails to provide the federal funding necessary to fulfill this promise, shifting the financial obligation to states and local school districts — but it has nonetheless been revolutionary. Prior to IDEA, students with disabilities were simply turned away at the doors to their public school or, if admitted, left to sink or swim with no accommodations. States had free reign to prohibit children with certain disabilities from attending public schools. Children were warehoused in institutions with no mandate to provide an education.

For the seven million children with disabilities in US public schools today, IDEA opens up access to learning that was denied to children of previous generations. Students with disabilities learn in classrooms alongside their peers. They have access to special education classes, support staff, and assistive technologies. This investment in a free and appropriate public education is not intended to simply move children through the education system. It is a means to an end, enumerated in the Act: “Improving educational results for children with disabilities is an essential element of our national policy of ensuring equality of opportunity, full participation, independent living, and economic self-sufficiency for individuals with disabilities.”

As the Trump administration moves to shutter the Department of Education, the president has promised that programs serving students with disabilities will be moved to HHS and overseen by Kennedy. But the administration has shared no plans for the move, and the expertise that was lost with the firing of some 1,300 workers from the Department of Education means that these programs, if they still exist, will not be administered by the people who know how best to serve the educational needs of students with disabilities.

Already, the Department of Government Efficiency has severed lifelines for young autistic people.

Caregivers are not immune. Low-income parents and caregivers of autistic children with high support needs can turn to Supplemental Security Income (SSI), and some children with autism and other disabilities receive SSI. This represents one of the few ways parents, who sometimes leave their careers to assume roles as full-time caregivers in the absence of accessible services for their children, can be paid for their labor. Despite campaign promises, SSI is also at risk.

Taken as a whole, these and other policy moves coming from Kennedy and the Trump administration limit the participation of people with disabilities in public, strip them of their dignity, and relegate them to second-class citizens. We need only look a few decades into the past to see what our country looks like without the inclusion of autistic people in society. Losing these gains in education, health care, and labor will transport us back to a time of institutionalization, marginalization, and immiseration for autistic people.

”Maybe Those People Should Just Die”
In times of economic uncertainty, ruling powers have found convenient scapegoats in the vulnerable and marginalized, who, they say, contribute little to society and are subsidized by those who work for a living. They provoke pity that escalates to contempt and eventually to disgust: Their lives are tragedies, absolutely pointless. They destroy families. And we are paying to keep them alive.

Consciously or not, by trafficking in pseudoscience, and framing autism as a disease to be cured and a cataclysm that rips families apart and wastes tax dollars, Kennedy’s crusade against autism is a reminder of a past in which people with disabilities were placed on registries, sterilized against their will, denied the rights to learn and work, held hostage in abusive institutions, and even murdered. Denying the innate worth of autistic lives threatens to drag that past into the present.

Autistic people and those who love and care for us have no reason to believe the efforts by the Trump administration and Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s HHS are anything less than a campaign of eugenics. After all, Trump allegedly told his nephew, whose own son has a rare seizure disorder, that, when it comes to disabled people, “The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.

I'm not a fan of his anymore. He's just like the goons who work for Auti$m $peaks.