Autism Services Are at Risk
- The Autistic Lens
- Sep 24
- 2 min read
They’re not curing autism. They’re trying to erase it.
The Trump administration just took a dangerous step: they’ve officially endorsed the false claim that prenatal Tylenol causes autism—and they’re pushing an unproven supplement, folinic acid, as a treatment. They're changing FDA labels. Reopening vaccine conspiracies. Misrepresenting studies. And rolling it all out through Medicaid and CHIP.
But this isn’t care. This is propaganda dressed as medicine. And the consequences could be devastating.
Right now, autistic people in New Jersey—and across the country—qualify for services through Medicaid and the Division of Developmental Disabilities because autism is legally defined as a developmental disability. That classification is what protects our access to:
Therapy and communication supports
In-home care
Group homes and 24/7 staffing
Day programs and supported employment
But if the government starts redefining autism as an injury? If they call it damage instead of difference? That entire structure collapses.
The laws don’t protect injured people the way they protect disabled people. You can’t get DDD support for an injury. You can’t get a group home. You can’t even stay in many of the programs autistic people currently rely on. And there’s no safety net waiting to catch us—just a supplement being pushed by people with conflicts of interest and no scientific basis.
Instead of real clinical trials, they’re using unblinded observational data based on parent reports to claim that this supplement works. That’s not science. That’s spin.
The strongest real study we have—2.5 million children, sibling-controlled—found no causal link between Tylenol and autism. And folinic acid? It only showed potential benefit in a very small subset of children with a rare antibody profile. It is not a cure. It is not a solution. But it’s being sold to the public as hope.
Every time someone in power says “we’re going to solve the autism problem,” what we hear is, “we’re going to solve you.”
This kind of rhetoric is not harmless. It leads to policies that look like help but act like harm. It opens the door to eugenics, encourages parents to blame themselves, and teaches autistic people to see themselves as broken.
We deserve better than this. We deserve science, not snake oil. Services, not surveillance. Respect, not erasure.
If you care about autistic people, ask who benefits. Ask who profits. Ask who disappears.
Because if they succeed in rewriting what autism is, they won’t just take away services.
They’ll take away our right to exist.
