Republicans in Congress want to spend taxpayer money to research the repeatedly debunked link between vaccines and autism — all as they continue to cheer on the Trump administration’s cuts to what they consider excessive spending.
So far in his presidency, Donald Trump has aggressively talked up government efficiency, giving Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency aides unprecedented power to review, and cut, federal spending wherever they see fit — including medical research funding. But lawmakers who told NOTUS they’d support more research into whether vaccines cause autism didn’t see it as wasteful or redundant.
“Having more research into what vaccines do at certain ages, I think that’s not waste, fraud and abuse, that’s protection of our youth,” Rep. Cory Mills told NOTUS. “A lot of the waste, fraud and abuse that we’re talking about are unrelated to medical science.”
He added that Trump’s cuts to the United States Agency for International Development could pay for these studies.
Rep. Nancy Mace told NOTUS she’d support more research into the topic, and also pointed to cuts she thought the Trump administration has already made to justify the spending.
Like Mills, she didn’t think funding research to explore something that has been studied extensively was wasteful: “Anything to help our kids is a worthwhile endeavor.”
Republicans largely told NOTUS they shared the same concerns as Trump, who has repeatedly said he wants his administration to look into this disproven link. Just last week, Trump pointed again to the increase in autism diagnoses in children.
“Something’s really wrong,” Trump, who included misleading figures in his post on Truth Social, said. He then pivoted to boosting Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was confirmed on Thursday to be health secretary: “We need BOBBY!!!”
Though Kennedy has tried to distance himself from his previous anti-vaccine activism, he told senators during his confirmation hearings that he’d like to see more “data” before he would definitively say whether vaccines cause autism.
“Where does autism come from? Why do we see spikes in it? I have three young kids, and we see it in their classes, and it’s a phenomenon that we didn’t deal with when I was that age,” Sen. Jim Banks, a member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, told NOTUS.
Banks said spending federal money researching whether vaccines cause autism would be “a very worthy cause.”
Sen. Ron Johnson said he’d support federally funded research into the link, adding that the prevalence of “chronic illnesses” in general “is a crisis, and it’s not being adequately addressed.”
The relationship between autism and vaccines has been studied — and repeatedly debunked. Many peer-reviewed studies and analyses spanning decades have refuted that vaccines can cause autism. Meanwhile, the 1998 study that first tried to causatively link the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine to autism was retracted 12 years later, after the study’s author was found to have altered medical records to support his conclusions.
Medical experts say the “spike” in autism is most likely due to increased awareness about the disorder and improved diagnostic criteria.
But that evidence hasn’t convinced some Republicans in Congress, who told NOTUS they would support even more research into whether there’s causation.
“I would disagree with my friends across the aisle when they say, ‘Science is settled.’ I’m a physician. Science is never settled. That’s what makes us scientists,” Sen. Roger Marshall, another HELP committee member, told NOTUS. “If you look at the incidence of autism, it just has a huge spike all of the sudden.”
Republicans in the House tended to agree that researching the debunked link would be worth the expenditure.
“There seems to be a correlation pretty clearly between the prevalence of vaccines, many, and the manifestation of a very clearly documented, steep increase in autism and other disorders,” Rep. Clay Higgins told NOTUS.
He acknowledged there’s already been plenty of research, but said it should be investigated even more.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna said “autism is at an all-time high” and that studying anything given to children would be a “well-spent, taxpayer-funded study.”
“Absolutely there needs to be an investigation,” Rep. Lauren Boebert told NOTUS, adding that was another reason Kennedy should be confirmed. Nearby, her colleague Mills listened on and then jumped into the conversation.
He suggested NOTUS should take a look at anti-vaccine activist Jenny McCarthy’s work because she’s “actually done extensive studies on how vaccines at a younger age have actually led to further medical conditions.”
Only one Republican that NOTUS spoke to — Rep. Cliff Bentz — was outwardly skeptical of whether funding more research on the topic would be worth it.
“You mean, to determine if there is — after all the data indicating there is not [a link] — we do another study?” Bentz, who’s on the Energy and Commerce Committee’s subcommittee on health, asked. “I’d probably want to talk to some doctors about it, to see what they think, to see if that would be a wise expenditure of money.”
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Emily Kennard is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.