RFK Jr. Set to Launch Disease Registry Tracking Autistic People

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is using private medical records to create a registry of people with autism in the United States.

The National Institutes of Health is helping to collect private medical records from government and commercial databases to give to the secretary of health and human services, NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said Monday. The records include prescription records from pharmacies, lab testing, and genomics records from the Department of Veterans Affairs and Indian Health Service, private insurance claims, and data from smartwatches and fitness trackers.

The NIH is also working on an agreement to secure Medicare and Medicaid data, according to Bhattacharya, who said that select outside researchers will be able to access and study, but not download, the collected data from the registry.

Kennedy, a longtime critic of vaccination, has made the study of autism one of HHS’s primary goals under his tenure. The department’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has launched a study to examine links between autism and vaccines, even though medical experts have long debunked any such connection.

The news that HHS is putting together a registry and accessing Americans’ private medical records raises all kinds of privacy concerns. HHS and its departments, including the NIH and CDC, have laid off thousands of employees in the past few months, possibly giving Kennedy and Bhattacharya, also an anti-vaxxer, more compliant employees to push their agenda.

Kennedy has drawn criticism from mainstream medical researchers by calling autism “preventable” and made the outlandish claim that he can find a cure for the condition by September. On top of that, his vaccination stance has led to a haphazard effort to combat a growing measles outbreak across the country, as he gives conflicting recommendations on vaccinations versus quack treatments. What kind of conclusion will such an approach yield in his autism crusade?

House Republicans are trying to drastically cut Medicaid coverage and blame it all on the states.

When Democrats expanded Medicaid coverage under President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act to include adults with incomes of up to 138 percent of the poverty level, states that implemented the expansion received a 90 percent federal medical assistance percentage, or FMAP, from the federal government. That means the federal government covers 90 percent of the costs for those enrolled in the ACA expansion, and the state covers 10 percent.

The GOP wants to drastically decrease the federal match rate for the ACA expansion and shift more financial responsibility to states, Republican Representative Austin Scott told Fox Business Tuesday.

“What we have talked about is moving that 90 percent level of the expansion back towards the more traditional levels of 50 to approximately 80 percent instead of the 90/10,” Scott said.

“Nobody would be kicked off of Medicaid as long as the governors decided that they wanted to continue to fund the program. And so we are going to ask the states to pick up and pay,” Scott said.

The cut would be devastating to the 20 million Americans who currently rely on the expansion for health insurance coverage—many of whom reside in red states—and would leave some 40 states that have adopted the ACA expansion to fend for themselves with their limited budgets. Research shows that states with the expansion have lower uninsured rates and those covered by the program have gotten healthier and more financially stable.

According to an analysis from the health nonprofit KFF, if states had to pay a higher match-rate percentage, many would likely abandon the ACA program altogether, resulting in millions of lost coverage for low-income Americans. Twelve states currently have laws in place that would end the expansion immediately or require immediate changes if the federal match rate were to drop, KFF pointed out.

“Eliminating the enhanced FMAP for adults in the Medicaid expansion could reduce Medicaid spending by nearly one-fifth ($1.9 trillion) over a 10-year period and up to nearly a quarter of all Medicaid enrollees (20 million people) could lose coverage,” the analysis found.

Led by House Speaker Mike Johnson, Republicans have long tried to slash the ACA expansion to help pay for Donald Trump’s tax cuts. Now the GOP is doing everything it can to avoid taking responsibility for putting the health of millions of Americans at risk.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday revealed a proposal for the largest State Department employment overhaul “in decades,” which would eliminate and restructuring entire offices in the department. Lost in the shake-up: Rubio wants to killed the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, or CSO—the agency responsible for documenting Russian war crimes in Ukraine

The CSO also focuses on “conflict prevention, crisis response, and stabilization activities … driving integrated, civilian-led efforts to prevent, respond to, and stabilize crises in priority states, setting conditions for long-term peace.”*

A report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office notes that the CSO received $336 million between 2016 and 2023.

“Nobody is really sure what they do,” a senior State Department official told The Free Press in defense of Rubio’s decision to kill the CSO. “When I ask them, they seem to not really be sure what they’re supposed to be doing. It’s an office that was created several years ago to look at Afghanistan [issues] and to avoid conflict areas. But we already have other offices within the department that do that.”

Others, like former State Department official Brett Bruen, see the move as a politically motivated cash grab.

“It is essentially the demolishing of our international influence instruments.… The administration is trying to essentially have more discretionary funds available,” Bruen told The Washington Post last week. “They are reducing the capacity for oversight at a time when they are saying efficacy is the priority.”

* This piece has been corrected to note the State Department’s reorganization is still a proposal.

Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Justice Department have given DOGE access to a system that contains sensitive data on millions of legal and undocumented immigrants, including their addresses and detailed case histories, according to The Washington Post.

The Executive Office for Immigration Review’s Courts and Appeals System, or ECAS, keeps records of everyone who’s been in the U.S. immigration system. Now six DOGE employees have permission to stick their hands in it.

DOGE has meddled in multiple different federal databases in an effort to carry out Trump’s immigration crackdown. ICE is using a Medicare database to locate undocumented immigrants. The Social Security Administration is trying to force immigrants to self-deport by falsely labeling 6,000 as dead. The Department of Housing and Urban Development is trying to prevent immigrants in mixed-status households from receiving government benefits, and the IRS is sharing migrant tax information with the Department of Homeland Security.

“It really hearkens to what we’re seeing with Social Security, with the IRS, with data that was shared with an expectation of privacy, “ National Immigration Law Center senior staff attorney Lynn Damiano Pearson told the Post. She went on to note that DOGE’s access to ECAS would have “very concerning impacts for immigrants, even ones who have specifically tried to comply with government policies and do everything right, so to speak.”

As Pete Hegseth faces a growing number of calls for his resignation post-Signalgate 2.0, the defense secretary has turned to blaming an age-old far-right enemy: the deep state.

In an interview with Fox & Friends Tuesday, the 44-year-old was asked whether there are some “deep-state forces” that want Hegseth booted from the Pentagon.

“They’ve come after me from day one,” Hegseth responded, repeating the excuse that any exposure of his own wrongdoing is just some kind of smear campaign from the left.

Chaos at the Pentagon ensued Sunday after The New York Times reported that Hegseth shared sensitive U.S. military plans about bombing the Houthis in Yemen in an unsecured Signal group chat—again. This time, the chat included his wife, brother, lawyer, and others in his personal circles.

Just hours after the Times’ report, Politico published an opinion essay by former Pentagon spokesman John Ullyot detailing the department’s “full-blown meltdown” spurred by Hegseth over the last month. The frenzy has led both Democrats and Republicans to call for Hegseth’s ousting.

But Hegseth and Donald Trump are refusing to admit he did anything wrong, instead painting the defense secretary as MAGA’s latest victim in the left’s tirade against progress. “This is what happens when the entire Pentagon is working against you,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News Monday.

Hegseth too doubled down while speaking to his former news network. “I’m here because the president asked me to bring war fighting back to the Pentagon. Every single day, that is our focus,” he said.

“If people don’t like it, they can come after me. No worries. I’m standing right here. The war fighters are behind us. Our enemies know they’re on notice, our allies know we’re behind them, and that, in this dangerous world, for the American people, is what it’s all about.” It would be a much stronger rallying cry if the administration behind him wasn’t single-handedly betraying every ally the United States has.