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.

Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs will lead to a “significant slowdown” in global growth, the International Monetary Fund said Tuesday.

The fund said that Trump’s “reciprocal tariff” policy, announced earlier this month—which placed at least a 10 percent tariff on nearly every import to the United States—would hurt everybody, the U.S. and its trading partners alike. “This on its own is a major negative shock to growth,” the IMF said of Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, in the executive summary of its April 2025 World Economic Outlook.

The U.S. now faces a depressed growth forecast in 2025, down to 1.8 percent from 2.7 percent in January, according to the fund. The IMF’s chief economist, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, told reporters that the odds of a recession in the U.S. had increased from 25 percent in October 2024 to 40 percent. He said that the tariffs are a “negative supply shock for the economy imposing them.” Efforts to stymie inflation would also be undermined, the fund said.

The fund warned that the president’s radical reshaping of the U.S. economy would sink global economic expansion to an annual rate of 2.8 percent, a whopping half percentage point below what was projected in January. That rate is likely to rebound to 3 percent in 2026, but it would still be well below its average of 3.7 percent.

“The landscape has quickly changed,” said Gourinchas. “We are entering a new era as the global economic system that has operated for the last 80 years is being reset.”

The IMF serves as a lender of last resort for poorer governments, and has been the subject of some criticism over the terms of its debt-restructuring agreements, which demand austerity and privatization from borrower countries.

This newest economic outlook projection flies in the face of Trump’s repeated claims that his flurry of tariff announcements would make everyone rich, boosting the U.S. economy by crippling global supply chains to somehow promote domestic manufacturing.

Already, the effects on U.S. assets are pronounced. The stock market dropped yet again on Monday, the yield on a 10-year Treasury note rose to 4.89 percent, and the ICE U.S. dollar index—which measures the dollar against foreign currencies—sank more than 1 percent to its lowest level since March 2022. Trump has continued to level attacks on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, who last week predicted that the president’s tariffs would cause inflation to rise, and refused to cut interest rates.

“THE BUSINESSMEN WHO CRITICIZE TARIFFS ARE BAD AT BUSINESS, BUT REALLY BAD AT POLITICS,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Sunday. “THEY DON’T UNDERSTAND OR REALIZE THAT I AM THE GREATEST FRIEND THAT AMERICAN CAPITALISM HAS EVER HAD!”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is weathering calls for his resignation thanks to the support of President Trump. But he may not be able to hold on for long.

Politico reports that some of Trump’s allies doubt whether Hegseth will be able to keep his job, with two anonymous sources telling the publication that he is still in hot water. One of them said that Hegseth may “implode on his own,” while the other said that Trump could get tired of the distractions from the former Fox News host’s tenure at the Department of Defense.

Three top Pentagon staffers were fired on Friday over leak concerns, one of them being Hegseth’s former chief of staff from his time at a veterans charity.

“Central Casting can become problematic if all they’re doing is generating questions of instability,” the second source said. “What’s so troubling about it is—it’s not like these were people that were forced upon Pete. They were his own guys he had to get rid of.”

According to Politico, Trump and Hegseth met privately on Sunday, where the president reportedly offered his support to the DOD chief, as he has done publicly. At the White House’s Easter Egg Roll Monday, Trump criticized Hegseth’s detractors.

“They just bring up stories. I guess it sounds like disgruntled employees. You know, he was put there to get rid of a lot of bad people, and that’s what he’s doing, so you don’t always have friends when you do that,” Trump told reporters.

But NPR also reported Monday that Trump has begun the search for a new secretary of defense, following this weekend’s report that Hegseth shared details about U.S. airstrikes in Yemen in a private Signal chat last month that included his wife and brother while also sharing the war plans in another group chat containing The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg.

If NPR’s report is true, it suggests that Trump is so frustrated that he doesn’t care if Hegseth’s firing validates his administration’s critics. It also suggests that Trump would be willing to deal with another confirmation battle in the Senate.

“Trump goes to bat for people until the moment he flips on them,” said one of Politico’s sources. “That’s always a possibility.”

Republican Representative Byron Donalds was met with boos and jeers at his town hall on Monday, after refusing to answer a basic question about Elon Musk and DOGE.

“As a member of the Oversight Committee, what oversight are you imposing on Elon Musk and DOGE?” a constituent asked. The question was followed by over 10 seconds of cheering and applause. 

Donalds proceeded to explain how DOGE works rather than answer the question directly, insisting that Musk’s anti-woke, government-slashing operation was in the same vein as what former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama did with “special employees” in their own administrations.  

“In terms of oversight from Congress, that’s much more of an Appropriations [Committee] aspect,” Donalds said. “What DOGE is doing right now, is they’re going through every agency and they’re examining any contracts or any lack of efficiency in spending federal dollars. This is something that—”

The crowd began to groan and boo, but Donalds continued. 

“Like I said, what they are doing is under the direction of the president of the United States. If you’re gonna talk about what oversight is doing, we actually have to let the DOGE uh, uh, Committee, the DOGE Department, actually finish its work,” Donalds explained. “What they are examining right now is inefficiency in the federal system. This is something that President Obama wanted to do when President Obama was elected—”

This nonanswer was met with even more frustration from the town hall crowd. 

“You can boo if you want to, but those are the facts,” Donalds replied.

Donalds essentially admitted that he’d be doing absolutely nothing to monitor DOGE as an Oversight Committee member. Trump already gave DOGE permission to fire thousands of people and start cuts to Social Security, so everything must be fine. 

Donald Trump blew his top at the Supreme Court Monday, complaining that the high court, along with the rest of the judicial system, is getting in the way of his removing “criminals from our Country.”

The president took to Truth Social to vent after the nine justices voted 7–2 over the weekend to block Trump’s deportation of Venezuelan immigrants under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act without due process.

“My team is fantastic, doing an incredible job, however, they are being stymied at every turn by even the U.S. Supreme Court, which I have such great respect for, but which seemingly doesn’t want me to send violent criminals and terrorists back to Venezuela, or any other Country, for that matterPeople that came here illegally!” Trump posted.

The president scoffed at the notion of every immigrant receiving due process before deportation.

“We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years. We would need hundreds of thousands of trials for the hundreds of thousands of Illegals we are sending out of the Country. Such a thing is not possible to do,” Trump added.

Trump is upset that his mass deportation efforts are running into legal hurdles. The self-proclaimed “law and order” president, however, seems to think that people he doesn’t like don’t deserve the right to due process but only the punitive measures of the law.

If Trump is concerned that there are too many people to stand trial, perhaps he should have increased funding for immigration courts and judges rather than divert so many government agencies and resources to arresting and detaining immigrants. But again, due process is something he doesn’t quite understand. After all, he refused to face accountability for his own criminal charges, and he pardoned some particularly violent criminals who rioted on his behalf.

Fox News host Will Cain inexplicably claimed Monday that he had never heard Donald Trump say he wanted to deport U.S. citizens—even though the president has now floated the idea several times.

During an interview, Florida Representative Maxwell Frost spoke about the stakes of the Trump administration’s removal of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man with no criminal record who was deported to El Salvador due to an “administrative error,” on thin allegations of gang membership. 

“It’s not just about him, it’s about the fact that in the Oval Office, Donald Trump brought up that he wants to do the same thing to ‘homegrowns,’ homegrowns being U.S. citizens,” Frost said. The Florida Democrat was referring to a disturbing remark Trump made last week during a press conference with El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele. 

But Cain said he couldn’t remember, insisting he had never heard Trump say any such thing. 

“Donald Trump’s made a statement about wanting to deport American citizens? Do you have that in front of you? I’ve not seen that statement,” Cain said. “Can you please quote where that comes from, that he’d like to deport American citizens?”

“He said it in the Oval Office; he said he wants to go for homegrowns next, people born and raised in the United States—” Frost said, before Cain interrupted him. 

“Do you have anything? Do you have anything beside your word on that?” Cain said. “I’ve not seen, I’ve not seen that, so. Beyond your word, do you have a source of that? I would love to see that clip or that transcript of him saying he wants to deport American citizens.”

“There is a clip online; I encourage people to just google ‘Donald Trump homegrown,’” Frost said.

Crucially, the instance Frost cited wasn’t the first time Trump made a remark about deporting U.S. citizens to foreign prisons: The president had said in March that he loved the idea, and in February, he said he’d deport U.S. citizens to El Salvador “in a heartbeat.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that the president was enthusiastic about the idea and was looking into “legal pathways.” Spoiler alert: There are none.  

During his meeting with Bukele, Trump had flat-out said that he’d asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to look into the legality. So it’s a little less than plausible that Cain, who hosts his own show on Fox News every weekday, hasn’t heard about the president’s pitch to deport U.S. citizens. 

Online, some theorized that Cain was simply attempting to demonstrate his aptitude for Defense, as the Pentagon may be preparing to undergo some reshuffling …

… while others pointed out how ridiculous it was to pretend not to know about a story his own news agency covered.