A federal autism advisory committee overhauled by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. canceled its first public meeting just days before it was scheduled to take place, as a rival group of scientists held their own session in its place. The cancellation, which was announced on March 7, with no explanation from HHS, was the latest flashpoint in a months-long fight over Kennedy’s push to redirect federal autism research toward the long-debunked claim that vaccines cause autism.
The Department of Health and Human Services announced on Tuesday, January 28, 2026, that 21 new members were appointed to the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, a federal panel that advises on how to allocate roughly $2 billion in annual autism research and services funding. The sweeping changes eliminated all previous public members who were eligible for reappointment.
“These public servants will pursue rigorous science and deliver the answers Americans deserve,” Kennedy said of the new members.
The new roster includes several figures with histories of promoting vaccine skepticism, among them the founder of the Autism Action Network and a fellow at the Brownstone Institute for Social and Economic Research.
Conspicuously absent from the reconstituted panel were representatives from established research and advocacy organizations like the Simons Foundation and Autism Speaks, groups that have driven much of the scientific progress in understanding autism over the past two decades.
The exclusion of those groups prompted a direct response. On March 3, 2026, a coalition of prominent scientists — many of them former federal committee members dismissed by Kennedy — launched the Independent Autism Coordinating Committee to develop its own evidence-based research agenda. The group scheduled its inaugural meeting for March 19, the same date the federal IACC was supposed to hold its first public session under the new lineup. When the government panel abruptly canceled that meeting on March 7, citing no reason, the independent group proceeded anyway.
David Mandell, a professor of psychiatry and autism researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who has served on the committee, warned that the bulk of new appointees “appear to be people who adhere to untested, disproven, and sometimes dangerous ideas about what causes autism and the best ways to care for autistic people.”
The panel’s overhaul came as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicated it planned to fund a study examining the long-discredited link between vaccines and autism.
Kennedy’s push had gone further in November 2025, when the CDC’s autism webpage was rewritten to declare that the claim that vaccines do not cause autism “is not an evidence-based claim.” Career scientists were not consulted. Infectious disease experts and pediatricians widely condemned the update.
Alison Singer, president of the Autism Science Foundation, who served three terms on the committee, called the new panel “a complete and unprecedented overhaul, with no continuity from prior committees and a striking absence of scientific expertise.” Joshua Gordon, former director of the National Institute of Mental Health who chaired the committee from 2016 to 2024, was equally blunt, telling The New York Times that not a single scientist he recognized as an expert in autism research made the list.
The appointments also reduced representation for autistic self-advocates. The new committee includes only three self-advocates, the minimum required by law, down from seven on the previous panel. Sam Crane, a self-advocate and disability law expert who served two terms on the committee, criticized the lack of transparency in how the selections were made. Kennedy’s choice to lead the overhauled committee nonetheless surprised some critics.
Dr. Sylvia Fogel, an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, was selected to chair the new committee. She acknowledged that large-scale studies have not demonstrated a causal link between vaccines and autism.
The controversy divided Congressional Republicans. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Chair Bill Cassidy, who cast a deciding vote to confirm Kennedy, warned that pursuing debunked theories “creates anxiety and a lot of self-recrimination.” Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, whose husband has a severely autistic son, said she did not think it was “helpful in any way to link it to vaccines, because the scientific evidence does not support such a link.”
A one-year assessment in February 2026 found Kennedy had broken multiple confirmation promises — cutting vaccine research funding, pulling NIH grants, and canceling roughly $500 million in mRNA research, all of which he had vowed not to do.
One in 31 children aged eight received an autism diagnosis in 2022, according to CDC data. Experts attribute much of the rising rate to improved screening and broader diagnostic criteria.
The controversy escalated further in mid-March 2026, when a federal judge in Boston blocked Kennedy’s broader vaccine policy changes, ruling that the administration had made arbitrary and capricious decisions that ignored a long-established scientific process for developing vaccine recommendations. The administration said it planned to appeal. The federal IACC has yet to reschedule its canceled meeting. In the meantime, the independent group formed by ousted scientists continues its work, with members warning that without a course correction, federal autism research policy risks being steered away from decades of evidence and toward long-discredited theories.
