US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has filled an autism committee with friends, associates, and former colleagues who believe that autism is caused by vaccines. Autism advocates are now worried the group could pave the way for dangerous pseudoscientific treatments going mainstream.

Last week, Kennedy announced an entirely new lineup for the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC), a group that recommends what types of autism research the government should fund and provides guidance on the services the autism community requires. The group is typically composed of experts in the area of autism research, along with policy experts and autistic people advocating for their own community.

In a statement announcing the new panel, which includes no previous members, Kennedy claimed that he has appointed “the most qualified experts—leaders with decades of experience studying, researching, and treating autism.” But health experts and autism advocates strongly disagree, and a review of the new members of the group suggests that Kennedy appointed members of the anti-vaccine community who claim vaccines cause autism—despite there being no evidence to prove such a claim.

Among those appointed last week was Daniel Rossignol, a doctor who was sued for alleged fraud after prescribing a 7-year-old autistic child a debunked and dangerous treatment. Tracy Slepcevic, an appointee who Kennedy calls a “dear friend,” offers exposure to a wide range of bogus autism cures at her annual Autism Health Summit, including one that involves the injection of animal stem cells into children. Another appointee, Toby Rogers, has claimed that “no thinking person vaccinates” and that vaccine makers are “poisoning children.” Rogers is a fellow at the Brownstone Institute for Social and Economic Research and has also called vaccines “one of the greatest crimes in human history.” He has written articles for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), the anti-vaccine group founded by Kennedy that has linked autism to vaccines.

Other appointees are no different: John Gilmore founded the Autism Action Network and has said that his autistic son is “vaccine injured.” Gilmore is also the founder of the New York chapter of Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense group. Ginger Taylor, the former director of the Maine Coalition for Vaccine Choice, has publicly claimed that many autism cases involve “vaccine causation.” Elizabeth Mumper has written for Children’s Health Defense and is a senior fellow with the Independent Medical Alliance, a group formerly known as the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance that has promoted ivermectin as a treatment for Covid.

Mumper tells WIRED that her decades of work as a pediatrician and in the field of autism qualified her to be a member of the IACC. She also denied being anti-vaccine, pointing out that she has “given thousands of vaccinations in my career.”

None of the other new members of the IACC contacted by WIRED responded to requests for comment.

Just a few years ago, this may have sounded like the all-star lineup of a conspiracy conference. Today, these appointments appear routine, and just the latest example of how Kennedy has sought to remake America’s public health administration.

Kennedy’s decision, according to public health experts and autism advocates, will lead to fewer resources for people with autism and their families, and also embolden those promoting pseudoscientific treatments that can threaten the lives of autistic people.

“Once again, [Kennedy] proves that he is one of the world’s most extreme and dangerous conspiracy theorists who loves stacking his committees with anti-science, anti-public-health kooks,” Gavin Yamey, professor of global health and public policy at Duke University, tells WIRED. “The research evidence is clear that vaccines do not cause autism.” To Yamey, “it looks like RFK Jr.’s new committee has been tasked to muddy the waters and cast doubt on that evidence. RFK Jr. has spent the past year doing all he can to dismantle public health and roll back vaccination, and this new committee is more of the same.”

Lawmakers in at least five other states—Georgia, Maryland, Oklahoma, Vermont, and Virginia—have also introduced bills this year that would impose various forms of temporary pauses on data center development. While Georgia, Vermont, and Virginia’s efforts are being led by Democrats, Oklahoma and Maryland’s bills were largely sponsored by Republicans. These bills mirror several moratoriums that have already passed locally: At the end of December, at least 14 states had towns or counties that have paused data center permitting and construction, Tech Policy Press reported.

There are some signs that the data center industry is beginning to respond to the backlash. Last month, Microsoft, with a boost from the White House, rolled out a set of commitments to be a “good neighbor” in communities where it builds data centers. In response to questions on how the industry is responding to the slew of state-level legislation, Dan Diorio, the vice president of state policy at the Data Center Coalition, an industry group, tells WIRED in a statement that it “recognizes the importance of continued efforts to better educate and inform the public about the industry, through community engagement and stakeholder education, which includes factual information about the industry’s responsible usage of water and our commitment to paying for the energy we use.”

Some of the states with moratorium bills have relatively few data centers: Vermont has just two, according to Data Center Map. But Georgia and Virginia are two of the national hubs for data center development and have found themselves at the center of much of the resistance, in both public reaction to data centers and legislative pushback. More than 60 data center-related bills have already been proposed in the Virginia legislature this year, according to Data Center Dynamics, an industry news site.

Josh Thomas is a state delegate in Virginia who has been at the forefront of leading the legislative charge to put limits on the expansion of data centers. During his first legislative session, in 2024, the caucus of self-identified data center “reformers” in both the House and Senate was just three politicians. That number grew to eight in 2025, “and now, it’s 12 or 13,” he says, with many more politicians willing to vote on reform bills. His fellow lawmakers, he says, now “understand that we need to negotiate where these things go.”

Last year, a proposal introduced by Thomas which would have required data centers to perform more in-depth environmental, noise, and community impact site assessments passed the legislature, but was vetoed by then-governor Glenn Youngkin. Newly-elected Governor Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat who talked about making data centers “pay their own way” on the campaign trail, seems much more likely to reconsider this year’s version of the bill, which has already passed the House.

“I’m much more optimistic that [Spanberger] will sign,” Thomas says.

Thomas, who was not involved in shaping the moratorium in the Virginia house, thinks that a moratorium on data centers is much more likely to pass in states where the industry has less of a foothold than Virginia. Still, he says, “it’s not a bad idea.”

More Than 800 employees and contractors working for Google signed a petition this week calling on the company to disclose and cancel any contracts it may have with US immigration authorities. In a statement, the workers said they are “vehemently opposed” to Google’s dealings with the Department of Homeland Security, which includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

“We consider it our leadership’s ethical and policy-bound responsibility to disclose all contracts and collaboration with CBP and ICE, and to divest from these partnerships,” the petition published on Friday states. Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

US immigration authorities have been under intense public scrutiny this year as the Trump administration ramped up its mass deportation campaign, sparking nationwide protests. In Minneapolis, confrontations between protesters and federal agents culminated in the fatal shooting of two US citizens by immigration officers. Both incidents were captured in widely disseminated videos and became a focal point of the backlash. In the wake of the uproar, the Trump administration and Congress say they are negotiating changes to ICE’s tactics.

Some of the Department of Homeland Security’s most lucrative contracts are for software and tech gear from a variety of different vendors. A small share of workers at some of those suppliers, including Google, Amazon, and Palantir, have raised concerns for years about whether the technology they are developing is being used for surveillance or to carry out violence.

In 2019, nearly 1,500 workers at Google signed a petition demanding that the tech giant suspend its work with Customs and Border Protection until the agency stopped engaging in what they said were human rights abuses. More recently, staff at Google’s AI unit asked executives to explain how they would prevent ICE from raiding their offices. (No answers were immediately provided to the workers.)

Employees at Palantir have also recently raised questions internally about the company’s work with ICE, WIRED reported. And over 1,000 people across the tech industry signed a letter last month urging businesses to dump the agency.

The tech companies have largely either defended their work for the federal government or pushed back on the idea that they are assisting it in concerning ways. Some government contracts run through intermediaries, making it challenging for workers to identify which tools an agency is using and for what purposes.

The new petition inside Google aims to renew pressure on the company to, at the very least, acknowledge recent events and any work it may be doing with immigration authorities. It was organized by No Tech for Apartheid, a group of Google and Amazon workers who oppose what they describe as tech militarism, or the integration of corporate tech platforms, cloud services, and AI into military and surveillance systems.

The petition specifically asks Google’s leadership to publicly call for the US government to make urgent changes to its immigration enforcement tactics and to hold an internal discussion with workers about the principles they consider when deciding to sell technology to state authorities. It also demands Google take additional steps to keep its own workforce safe, noting that immigration agents recently targeted an area near a Meta data center under construction.