This article was originally written in May 2025 and has since been updated for September 2025.
This article uses identity-first language to refer to autistic people at the request of the individuals who were interviewed; however, this is not the only way disabled people define themselves. Learn more about the different ways disabled people identify themselves and their disabilities here.
The Feb. 13 confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) was largely cheered by Republicans as a win for American public health and vehemently opposed by Democrats. Opponents cited Kennedy’s repeated amplification of vaccine misinformation and other conspiracy theories as evidence that he is unfit to serve in the role. RFK Jr.’s first seven months as HHS secretary have been highly controversial, including the establishment of the “Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission” to investigate the causes of chronic disease in America. Notably, Kennedy has pushed the NIH to launch new research into the cause of increases in childhood autism diagnoses, drawing harsh criticism from Democrats, much of the medical community, and autism self-advocates.
The study, officially unveiled by NIH director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya on April 22, initially planned to establish both a national “disease registry” of autistic individuals and a national database of patient health data. Only three days later, on April 25, the NIH scrapped its plans for a disease registry amid harsh backlash from the autistic community over privacy concerns.
Many cited the Trump administration’s willingness to give the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), formerly led by Elon Musk, access to private citizen information — including social security numbers — as reason for concern over how information collected in the disease registry could be misused. The NIH will still, however, create a national database of health information, which it announced on May 7 would include patient data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), such as “claims data, electronic medical records, and consumer wearables.”
“In the long term, the partnership will link real-world data, in a manner consistent with applicable privacy laws to protect Americans’ sensitive health information, for research on chronic conditions — a core priority of President Trump and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,” the statement read.
“My reaction wasn’t very emotional,” said Nathan ’28, who chose to be referred to by only their first name for privacy. “But I did start changing my plans. I had been in the early stages of trying to get accommodations for my autism, and so I was looking into trying to get a diagnosis, and now I don’t think I’m going to do that anymore.”
Kennedy, a longtime vaccine skeptic, has continually questioned the safety and efficacy of vaccines, wrongly saying in 2023 that “there is no safe and effective vaccine.” He also suggested in 2021, along with other false race-based claims, that Black people have “better immune systems” than white people and therefore do not require the “same vaccine schedule that’s given to whites.”
Perhaps the most alarming of Kennedy’s vaccine claims to autism advocates and medical professionals is the one that vaccines cause autism. The CDC published a report on April 15 that the incidence of autism had increased in eight-year-olds from 1 in 36 in 2020 to 1 in 31 as of 2022. During an April 16 press conference, Kennedy, referring to this report, claimed that there was an autism “epidemic,” referring to the developmental disability as a “disease” that was “preventable.”
“Genes don’t cause epidemics,” Kennedy said. “You need an environmental toxin,” he added, wrongly referring to the rise in autism incidence as an “epidemic” and falsely suggesting that vaccines could give children autism. According to the CDC, “Studies have shown that there is no link between receiving vaccines and developing [autism spectrum disorder].” And though an individual’s environment could play a role in the development of autism, such environmental factors are still under investigation, and scientists widely regard the major underlying causes of autism as genetic.
“Why are we not seeing [autism] in older people?” RFK Jr. added. “Why is this only happening in young people? Have you ever seen anybody our age — I’m 71 years old — with full-blown autism? Head-banging, non-verbal, non-toilet-trained.”
“Autism is not a disease,” wrote the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN), an autism advocacy organization, in a response to RFK Jr.’s claims. “You cannot ‘catch’ autism. It is genetic. We are born autistic, and are autistic our whole lives.”
Autism advocacy organizations have raised major concerns over the language RFK Jr. has used to describe autistic people, saying it promotes stigmatizing conceptions of autism that negatively impact public perception of the autistic community.
ASAN, in the same April statement, argued, “Claims that we are incapable of working, creating art, or forming relationships all serve as excuses to deny us the very supports we need to thrive in our communities.” The statement continued, “Claims that Autism is ‘preventable’ is [sic] not supported by scientific consensus and perpetuate stigma. Language framing Autism as a ‘chronic disease,’ a ‘childhood disease’ or ‘epidemic’ distorts public understanding and undermines respect for Autistic people.”
A joint statement signed by sixteen different autism advocacy organizations, including ASAN and Autism Speaks, additionally called for “collaboration with Autistic individuals, families, researchers, clinicians, and disability organizations” in policymaking to ensure the inclusion of autistic voices and perspectives. The collaboration was unexpected, as ASAN has historically positioned itself against Autism Speaks, even ending its partnership with Sesame Street in 2019 after the TV program promoted Autism Speaks’s “100 Day Kit.”
Liam Muro ’28, an autistic student at Swarthmore, expressed similar worries over RFK Jr.’s rhetoric, saying, “It’s very concerning, particularly the usage of language like ‘disease’ and ‘registry’ — things that have connotations that are not at all in line with autism and in general have very negative connotations.”
Muro compared an infamous 2009 ad from Autism Speaks known as “I Am Autism,” which called autism an “embarrassment” that caused “struggle” and “pain” for families (Autism Speaks has since apologized for the ad and taken it down), to the Trump administration’s current rhetoric. “The whole ad is pretty much just trying to paint autism in a very negative light and as a sort of malicious thing, as opposed to just differences that people have. And I think that what the current administration is trying to do is similarly concerning, where they’re targeting certain groups in a pointless and harmful way,” Muro said.
RFK Jr. has also called for the creation of “wellness farms,” places which he said would serve to help drug addicts recover and people with disabilities such as ADHD to “get off of” their medications. Wellness farms and mental institutions, similar to what RFK Jr. has described, have existed in the US in the past. Such places are well-documented as being chronically understaffed and overcrowded, pushing stigmatizing perspectives of disabled individuals, segregating disabled individuals from the public, and promoting eugenics.
“I guess I really couldn’t give less of a shit about the stigma around [language around the creation of wellness farms]. I’m talking about the physical, systemic violence that it could induce,” said Sam Currall ’28. Currall was in the process of being evaluated for autism in April, and was ultimately diagnosed as having OCD and social anxiety, not autism. “Stigma would suck. But I’m scared of actual consequences, impediments to my freedom to exist as a person.”
The disabled community has also expressed fear over a lawsuit brought by seventeen states challenging the constitutionality of Section 504, a 1973 federal law banning discrimination based on disability. The lawsuit was later clarified in February 2025 to specifically challenge the Biden administration’s interpretation of the law’s definition of “disability” to include gender dysphoria, not declare the law itself unconstitutional. “The lawsuit does NOT seek to end Section 504’s disability protection for anyone covered under that statute,” wrote Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin in a statement. “It simply seeks to overturn Biden’s unlawful gender mandate.”
Litigation continues, though, and the implications of narrowing the reach of Section 504 could lead to further changes in the law, troubling advocates of the legislation. “If the court limits what qualifies as a disability under Section 504,” the left-leaning think tank New America wrote in an online article, “it could set a precedent that makes it harder for students to qualify for 504 plans.”
Tobie ’25, who chose to be identified by his first name for privacy, argued, “I feel like this [lawsuit] comes from an ableist perspective of, ‘Well, I don’t need [accommodations], so no one else should, and if I had them, then that means I have an unfair advantage over other people.’ But because it’s not that ‘hypothetical you’ person, that’s not necessarily the case.”
On April 23, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Reinstating Common Sense School Discipline Policies,” which called for the Secretary of Education Linda McMahon and Attorney General Pam Bondi to create and present new school discipline guidance to Trump within 120 days. The order criticized a 2014 “Dear Colleague” letter on “Nondiscriminatory Administration of School Discipline” and guidance on equitable school discipline issued in 2023 by the Biden administration. The letter was rescinded in 2018 by the first Trump administration, and the Biden administration’s guidance has since been removed from the Education Department’s website, referring to both texts as “discriminatory equity ideology.”
Though the order focuses on rescinding protections against racial discrimination in discipline, its implications reach beyond that. Discrimination based on race and disability are closely intertwined, with overwhelming research suggesting that marginalized groups are disproportionately overrepresented in special education. Researchers focusing on DisCrit — which utilizes Critical Race Theory to critically observe the intersection of race and disability — widely agree that school discipline policies must be “equitable” to prevent the implementation of policies that discriminate against the lived experiences of marginalized students, particularly of multiply-marginalized Black and brown disabled students.
Though it is still unclear how current school discipline policies will change, the inclusion of language that categorizes unwanted behavior as “dangerous” and “disruptive” in Trump’s executive order could indicate a return to policies similar to “zero-tolerance” policies implemented in the mid-1990s. These policies are widely regarded as having disproportionately disciplined marginalized students, including students of color and disabled students.
Tobie, who is Black and autistic, highlighted this executive order as particularly troubling to him, noting how it would “disproportionately affect Black and brown students and also disabled students.” In first grade, he explained, “I actually wasn’t in class, I sat in the hallway because the teacher said I was ‘too disruptive’ when I was trying to help the other students learn their letters.” Tobie continued, “I also spent a lot of time in the principal’s office, and of course, being my autistic literal self, I thought that meant that in first grade, I was just a bad kid.”
Diagnoses and Swarthmore Disability Policies
Swarthmore College offers two main programs, free of charge, to support disabled students: Student Disability Services (SDS), which mainly processes and implements accommodations for students with documented disabilities, and Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS), which offers “individual and group counseling, assessment, consultation, and referral services” to all enrolled students.
In email correspondence with The Phoenix, Director of Student Disability Services Andrea Vassar commented, “Our mission is to support all students with disabilities by providing individualized support through an interactive process to determine and implement reasonable accommodations.”
She continued, “We continually evaluate and adapt our processes to serve our students better and align with evolving standards, technologies, and legal guidance. This includes maintaining accessible communication channels, promoting equitable access across campus, and engaging in collaborative problem-solving when barriers arise.”
Though CAPS is often regarded by the community as a therapy or crisis service, it also plays a major role in helping disabled students obtain a formal diagnosis, which is required by law for disabled students to receive accommodations. According to the SDS webpage, some examples of “acceptable disability documentation” are formal evaluations or letters from a medical professional, previous accommodation plans from other educational institutions, or, notably, a “consultation between the Student Disability Services staff member and Swarthmore CAPS counselor (with student’s signed waiver).”
CAPS also offers “off-campus referral” services, which help students receive “affordable, off-campus therapy, psychiatry, and other health services,” including professional diagnoses that CAPS staff are not able to provide on campus.
Currall, who received an off-campus evaluation for an autism diagnosis, offered insight into the referrals by sharing his experience. “I only seriously considered the idea of having autism in the past few months, when my therapist brought it up to me. I was having this conversation with my therapist, and he ended up bringing up a bunch of things that I was like, ‘Huh, I’ve always been kind of different from other people in this way, but I’ve never really thought about it.’ And, he kept naming them, and I was like, ‘Huh, this is weird.’ And then he mentioned eye contact, and I was like, ‘Oh. I know he’s talking about autism.’”
After these therapy sessions, at the recommendation of his therapist, Currall said he scheduled a meeting with a CAPS care manager, whose job, according to the SDS website, is to “help you identify what you are looking for in off-campus care, understand your health insurance coverage, and connect you with a good fit.” At the meeting, Currall said the care manager discussed with him what getting a diagnosis would mean, including contextualizing it within the current actions of the Trump administration, and connected him to people who could give him a formal diagnosis. Currall says he was ultimately referred to a social worker to be evaluated for a diagnosis and had already had a few appointments with them at the time of being interviewed. He didn’t have a copay with the school health insurance, but potential subsidizing was never mentioned. However, it is important to note that the CAPS care manager explicitly takes into account student health care coverage for scheduling off-campus referrals. According to Currall, everything in the college’s process “has been fine.”
Ultimately, Currall was diagnosed as not autistic. “The person diagnosing me … said, ‘You have a lot of symptoms that line up, but ultimately it matches more with OCD and social anxiety [which Curall had previously been diagnosed with], not autism.’”
Nathan, who is undiagnosed, started looking into getting an official autism diagnosis this past semester; however, he chose not to pursue one due to the announcement and eventual retraction of a federal autism disease registry. “I came here, and it was like, ‘I’m doing pretty bad, so maybe I think accommodations would help,’” they recalled. “But now, I’m not doing quite as bad, and now that the autism registry is a concept that exists in our modern political climate, I am no longer interested, given the possibility of it [the registry].” He was in the early stages of reaching out about a diagnosis before they chose to remain undiagnosed, describing email communication with SDS, meetings with CAPS, and discussions with members of the Swarthmore Disability Association (SDA), a student-run community organization that offers student support, advocacy, and discussion “centered around various disabled experiences,” according to their club description.
In the parts of the accommodations process he experienced, Nathan highlighted their difficulty with finding information on precisely what steps to take: “How to get new documentation from a doctor isn’t readily available on the [SDS and CAPS] website. You have to try pretty, pretty hard to find it, and email people sometimes, it just depends on what specifically you’re looking for.”
Tobie and Muro, both of whom had official autism diagnoses before coming to campus, described different levels of success working with on-campus accommodations resources.
“From anecdotal evidence from other disabled students, the experiences they’ve had with SDS have not always been positive,” Tobie said. “When [former Director of Student Disability Services] Monica Vance was here, I had ‘executive functioning coachings’ once a week for my first semester that were kind of useless for me, except for using an hour of my time.”
Since Tobie already had documentation of his autism diagnosis, he explained that he did not interact with SDS much to set up his accommodations. In contrast, Muro, a first year, said his experience with SDS “has been really, really positive.” At the end of their senior year of high school, they reached out to SDS and scheduled a meeting with the office. “I just started with my documentation, and they did a really good job of talking about what sort of accommodations they were able to do,” Muro said, “and I found that they’ve done a really good job of implementing them.”
Both Tobie and Muro strongly agreed, though, that the professors at Swarthmore have been excellent at providing accommodations to disabled students. “With professors, there are some — probably a lot — that I’ve had who are like, ‘You don’t need to have official accommodations, just talk with me and we’ll figure something out.’ I respect that,” Tobie said. Muro echoed those points, saying, “I’ve tended to work really closely with [my professors], so I get to know them, and if I need something, I’m just able to ask.”
Finding Community Support
All four students interviewed highlighted the role that community played in discovering and positioning their identities as autistic people. Tobie recalled that in his high school, there was not a widespread stigma against students with accommodations, but “[he didn’t think he] really met any other openly autistic people.” For Tobie, “It wasn’t really until [he] came here that [he] saw other people and [was] like, ‘Wait’ … [At Swarthmore] there’s a lot more people that you can find and feel like, ‘Okay, you’re not the only one here,’ and commiserate or bond with them.” That change in community atmosphere benefitted Tobie, who said that it removed “this extra kind of weight hanging over you — fighting in a way.”
Muro reflected similar positivity over his experience in the Swarthmore community: “I’ve been very pleasantly surprised and impressed by how at Swarthmore … people don’t care if you have accommodations. I think that the closest thing to that was like, ‘Wow, that’s so cool that you’re able to test in a different environment.’ Or, ‘How are you able to do that?’” He said his Swarthmore experience was similar to his childhood experience. “I was fortunate to have my primary education be in a very diverse environment where I didn’t grow up with a lot of the stigmas that I think a lot of other people have.” They added that “having other people who know what the process is like and having someone looking over your shoulder who is not you is really, really nice,” saying that such support allows students to continue to push for accommodations they need, even if the task is daunting.
For Nathan, community played an important role in his understanding of autism as an aspect of his identity. In high school, they participated in an extracurricular program that introduced them to a “disproportionately large [number] of neurodivergent people,” allowing them to find community.
“I had some friends that had diagnoses, and they had pointed out to me, ‘Hey, a lot of the things you talk about struggling with are things that I struggle with as well as it directly relates to my autism. And the more I talked with my friends with autism, I was like, ‘Okay, so most of this definitely applies to me.’ And the more I thought about it, the more it made a bunch of things in my life make sense.”
According to Nathan, the community he found in high school was replicated again at Swarthmore: “The people that I’ve happened to make friends with have been largely neurodivergent as well. And so it’s been a continuation of that camaraderie.”
For Currall, though, the role community played in his process of being diagnosed was different. While in discussion with his CAPS therapist about potentially receiving an autism diagnosis, he recalled that he asked his friends if they thought he had autism, to which they would often reply something along the lines of, “Oh, you definitely do. Like, 100%, totally, 100% you do.” Currall continued to explain, saying that these interactions led him to question his identity, personality, and actions.
“The idea that, ‘Oh, everyone else knew this about me and I didn’t know this at all’ — that’s scary, I think,” Curall said. “And then if I do get diagnosed, I just have to reevaluate a lot of the things that have happened to me, like reevaluating, ‘Is this just me being quirky, or is this autism?’”
Currall said what ultimately motivated him to pursue a potential autism diagnosis was not only for “rationalizing my own experiences as a person,” but also because of his OCD. Currall says he was diagnosed with OCD two years ago. “If I’m going to be telling people, ‘Oh yeah, I might be autistic,’” he explained, “I want to know the error bars on that number.”
In a follow-up interview in September, Currall expanded on this sentiment. He said that the diagnostic process allowed him to understand himself more fully than before, despite not being diagnosed as autistic. “It allowed me to stop seeing the things that are different about me as flaws.”
However, he noted that “the biggest source of tension for me … is that I haven’t gotten anyone who thought I had autism to accept that I don’t.” Currall identifies himself as neurodivergent due to his OCD. “I’ve been thinking about the term ‘neurodivergent’ because I always hear the term used as ‘woke for autism.’ But I have OCD, and that ostensibly makes me neurodivergent, but nobody ever treats that as the same.”
Currall expressed his frustration with the way people may often view his identity. Instead of understanding neurodiversity as a broad category, they tend to reduce the term to just meaning ‘autistic.’ “I’m not autistic,” Currall said, “I’m not rejecting the label out of spite; I just don’t want to use a label that’s not for me.”
Looking to the Future
When asked what the college could do to ensure that autistic students could remain safe from attacks from the Trump administration, Nathan, building on their own experiences, suggested, “I think opening up alternative avenues to getting accommodations that don’t require a diagnosis would be a good thing.” According to the SDS website, “Consultation between the Student Disability Services staff member and Swarthmore CAPS counselor” is an acceptable form of documentation for a disability, though the same webpage requires official diagnoses in documentation for ADHD, physical disabilities, and psychological disabilities.
For Muro, the most important thing the college could focus on would be increasing community awareness of accommodation resources. “I have a lot of experience advocating for myself, and I think that a lot of people who haven’t grown up doing that process … they don’t have that skill built up, so it’s a lot harder for them to go and … push repeatedly, sometimes, to get things [accommodations].” They continued, “I think that in the same way that during orientation, [the college emphasizes] mental health, they review Title IX, they have training for mental health, and they have sexual harassment training, I think that adding to that list accommodations and the resources on campus would be excellent.”
“I think it would start people’s college career with the mindset of being able to go to resources when they need help, and being able to know that those resources are there for them.”
According to Tobie, the college has not yet released a formal statement condemning the Trump administration’s attacks on disability rights. “But I also feel like the college has been pretty ‘bleh’ about most of the issues that are happening right now, so I don’t expect them to [release a statement],” he said. “And I don’t know if I would believe that they were acting in the best interests of the students.”
A formal statement from the college could be unlikely, as President Val Smith stated in a Feb. 12 campus-wide email that “I generally refrain from commenting on national and international affairs unless they directly affect the Swarthmore community.”
In April, RFK Jr. promised to release a report that determined “what has caused the autism epidemic” by this month. It is very unlikely such a report will be released soon, as Kennedy has not announced the start of any studies on the causes of autism, and even the government’s own call for research proposals has stated that studies may require two to three years to generate any results.
On Sept. 9, the MAHA Commission released a document known as “The MAHA Strategy,” which only briefly mentions autism: “The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), through NIH and in collaboration with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), will study the root causes of autism.”
The report, among other high-priority Trump Administration health objectives, also briefly restates that HHS will be reorganized to downsize the department from 28 divisions to 15, an enactment of previous HHS budget cuts announced in March. One proposed division is the Administration for a Healthy America, which would “coordinate and lead the Federal government’s response to the chronic disease crisis through integrated prevention-focused programs and streamlined accountability for related programs.”
