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Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Wednesday declared that autism is a rapidly growing "epidemic" in the U.S. and vowed to identify the "environmental toxin" he says is to blame.

He noted that autism incidence in the U.S. has increased from 1 in 36 children in 2025 to 1 in 31 in 2025, according to a report released Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the prevalence of autism.

"This is part of an unrelenting upward trend," Kennedy told reporters during a news conference Wednesday at HHS. "Overall autism is increasing in prevalence at an alarming rate."

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Citing much lower rates in earlier decades, Kennedy pushed back against the idea that the increases "are simply artifacts of better diagnoses, better recognition or changing diagnostic criteria," adding "the epidemic is real." He said HHS is committed to investigating environmental causes of autism, calling it "a preventable disease."

Within two to three weeks, the agency will announce a series of new studies "to identify precisely what the environmental toxins are that are causing" autism, he said, adding "we're going to get back to it with an answer to the American people very, very quickly." On Tuesday HHS announced it expects to begin to have answers by September.

Some independent experts and advocates say that's not nearly enough time to design and conduct a good-quality study that could produce a reliable answer.

Kennedy drew a stark contrast between his proposed approach and earlier research. "The amount of money and resources put into studying genetic causes, which is a dead end, has been historically 10 to 20 times the amount spent by [federal agencies] to study environmental factors…. And that's where we're going to find the answer."

In the past, Kennedy has made statements linking autism with vaccines, an idea that has been thoroughly refuted.

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Kennedy's comments drew pushback from researchers who study autism as well as patient advocates. They say rising rates have to with improved screening and that years of research point to a wide variety of causes for the condition, including genetic, biological and environmental factors.

It's very unlikely that autism is caused by "one thing," said Catherine Lord, a professor of human development and psychology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA via email.

Zachary Warren, a pediatric psychiatrist and autism researcher at Vanderbilt University agrees. "We may have hundreds, if not thousands, of different neurogenetic factors that in combination with complicated environmental interactions influence presentations of autism," he said via email.