How Autism Became a Political Battlefield

A diagnosis became a campaign issue. Here is what the record shows.

In September 2025, the President stood in the Roosevelt Room and told American families that a cause of autism spectrum disorder had been identified and a treatment was at hand. The FDA would update labels on acetaminophen and fast-track approval of leucovorin as a treatment for autism-related speech deficits. The FDA Commissioner called it “opening the door to the first FDA-recognized treatment for autism.” Within weeks, pediatricians were fielding floods of parent calls about a drug that, six months later, the FDA would approve only for an ultra-rare genetic condition affecting fewer than one in a million people; explicitly declining to extend that approval to autism spectrum disorder at all. That sequence confident promise, agency action, walk-back is the shape of how ASD has moved through American politics in the past year. The story is worth telling carefully, because skepticism toward confident “cause of autism” announcements is not partisan. The historical record itself recommends it.

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