RFK Jr.'s Autism Registry Is a Civil Liberties Catastrophe in the Making

He’s treating autistic people like a disease to be monitored, starting with their medical records.

I wasn’t planning to write this today. I thought I could make it through the week without feeling like we’d slipped into a dystopian screenplay written by a conspiracy theorist with a vendetta. But then I read about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s plan to build a national registry of autistic people using private medical records. And I saw red.

According to NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, Kennedy’s Health and Human Services Department is collecting private prescription histories, genomics data, lab results, and even fitness tracker information from government agencies and commercial providers alike. The Department of Veterans Affairs. Indian Health Services. Medicaid and Medicare. Pharmacies. Smartwatches. All of it.

This is mass surveillance of a vulnerable population, built on the same rotten foundation of anti-vaccine pseudoscience that Kennedy has peddled for years.

And it hits me in the gut because my oldest grandchild is autistic.

She is not broken. She is not a mistake. She is not a statistic to be mined or a threat to be tracked. She’s a human being. Brilliant, sensitive, intuitive, and worthy of respect. But under Kennedy’s regime, she’s being reduced to a datapoint in a grotesque experiment rooted in discredited science and authoritarian ambition.

Kennedy has publicly claimed that autism is “preventable” and promised, yes, promised, a cure by September. This is not the language of inclusion. It’s the rhetoric of eugenics. This is not about support or services. It’s about control.

And the scariest part? This registry is being built with your data, possibly without your knowledge or consent.

We’ve already seen thousands of employees purged from the CDC, NIH, and other HHS divisions under Kennedy and Bhattacharya, many of them scientists, ethicists, and civil rights lawyers who might’ve objected. In their place: compliant ideologues willing to rubber-stamp whatever comes next. If you were trying to pull off something morally indefensible without pushback, that’s exactly how you’d start.

Kennedy’s campaign against vaccines has already helped trigger a nationwide measles outbreak. Now he’s using that same mix of fear, misinformation, and misplaced moral authority to weaponize federal data collection, this time against autistic Americans. He’s not curing anything. He’s creating a panopticon of ableist control, where being different makes you suspect.

So we need to ask:

• Who is protecting our kids’ data?

• Who decides what research questions get asked?

• And who benefits from a system that treats autism as a thing to be tracked, studied, and potentially eliminated?

This is personal. It’s about the future we want to live in, and whether we believe that people with autism deserve to be celebrated, not surveilled.

I will not sit quietly while a government agency builds a database on my granddaughter. I will not pretend this is normal. And neither should you.