This dashboard maps autism grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) to 12 priority domains outlined in the Autism CARES Act of 2024, the primary federal law guiding autism research priorities and funding in the United States. These are the three agencies given direct autism research authorization under the Public Health Service Act as amended by the Act. Data from the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of Education and other agencies will be incorporated in a future update.
It also provides information on how these studies were originally classified using the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) Strategic Plan Portfolio Analysis, a framework that has historically been used to understand federal autism research funding allocation.
We hope that this tool will increase transparency around federal autism research funding and provide policymakers, researchers and advocates with a clearer, data-driven view of how research investments align with national priorities in the Autism CARES Act. The goal is to support more informed decisions about future funding and better alignment with the needs of the autism community.
The most robust analysis is provided below for FY2024, the last complete fiscal year before the CARES Act was reauthorized. Data from FY2025 and FY2026 are also included, with additional interpretation notes provided on each tab. Additional methodological details are available in the Methods tab.
Note: NIH is by far the largest single funder, accounting for about 93% of the dollars shown here (92.8% in FY2024, 93.6% in FY2025 and 92.8% in FY2026). CDC and HRSA are much smaller in dollar terms but carry the statutory lead on surveillance, services and workforce, so adding them changes the shape of the applied domains more than it changes the totals.
Several CARES Act domains are still funded outside these three agencies, including by the Administration for Community Living (ACL), the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Department of Education (ED), the Department of Defense (DOD) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). What you see here is the NIH–CDC–HRSA piece of a larger federal picture.
Only partially. The portfolio invests heavily in foundational science, and adding CDC and HRSA lifts surveillance and services without changing that basic shape.
1. Science dominates the autism research portfolio. Under the IACC framework, where each study is assigned to only one category, Biology and Genetic & Environmental Factors account for 54% of FY2024 funding across NIH, CDC and HRSA. Several other CARES priorities, including services, workforce training, safety, and caregiver support, receive much smaller shares.
2. That pattern holds even under the CARES Act framework. When categorizing studies into CARES Act priority areas, where each study may fall into multiple domains, foundational research receives 74% of funding. The broader framework reveals more overlap with applied areas such as co-occurring conditions, lifespan, and communication, but the majority of funding remains concentrated in basic science.
3. This reflects a long-standing pattern. Prior IACC analyses have shown that research focused on biology and genetics have long received the largest share of research funding compared to other categories. This analysis shows that this trend continues from 2024 to 2026. Adding CDC and HRSA raises the surveillance and services shares, which is what those agencies are funded to do, but does not displace foundational research from the top of the portfolio.
The chart below shows the IACC single-category baseline. The CARES domain bars that follow show how that same portfolio looks under the broader multi-label statutory lens.
The chart below uses the established IACC single-category approach, where each grant is assigned to exactly one of seven categories and the shares sum to 100%. We grouped the two science-focused categories (Biology and Genetic & Environmental Factors) against the five applied and infrastructure categories. FY2024 is the most recent complete fiscal year and captures the portfolio just before Congress signed the CARES Act into law.
The IACC framework predates the Autism CARES Act of 2024. Congress wrote the CARES Act with a broader set of priorities that span foundational science, services, workforce, safety, lifespan, and more. To measure how the portfolio aligns with those priorities, we organized the Act's statutory language into 12 domains, drawing primarily from Section 409C of the PHSA (42 U.S.C. § 284g) and related provisions across Sections 399AA through 399DD (42 U.S.C. §§ 280i through 280i‑3).
The CARES Act domains overlap by design. A grant studying seizures in autistic adults addresses foundational research, co-occurring conditions, and lifespan at the same time. A single-label approach forces a choice among those. The multi-label approach used here tags the grant to all three, giving a fuller picture of what these agencies fund relative to what the Act prioritizes. Because grants can appear in more than one domain, shares sum to more than 100%. Bars are ranked by funding amount.
Multi-label classification matters most where the single-category view is least informative: inside the largest IACC bucket. Under its single-label rules, the IACC framework classified 266 FY2024 grants as Biology. The CARES Act lens applied to those same grants tells a different story. Nearly half also address co-occurring conditions. One in five touches communication. Others span lifespan, screening, and interventions. Most Biology grants touch at least two CARES Act domains. The chart below shows the breakdown.
The stacked bars below show the same 12 CARES domains with color segments showing how grants in each domain were originally classified under the IACC's seven categories. This crosswalk connects the new statutory lens back to the established portfolio analysis and shows where the two frameworks overlap.
The concentration in foundational research reflects NIH's core mission in basic biomedical science, and NIH supplies about 93% of the dollars shown here — and it is not new. This pattern holds across every year shown here, FY2024 through FY2026, and it predates the current administration. The IACC's own published portfolio analyses document the same concentration in earlier years. This is a structural feature of how federal autism research has been funded, not a recent shift.
The Autism CARES Act of 2024 sets a broader mandate. Its priorities — services, lifespan, caregiver support, safety, workforce, and more — have received comparatively thin NIH investment across this entire period. Addressing that gap requires action on two fronts. First, NIH institutes beyond NIMH — including those focused on aging, diabetes, stroke, and other conditions that co-occur with autism — could substantially increase their autism-relevant funding without displacing existing priorities. Second, several CARES Act domains are more naturally addressed by other federal agencies: CDC for surveillance, HRSA for workforce training, ACL for adult services, and DOD for applied research. CDC and HRSA are now included, and their effect is visible: CDC concentrates almost entirely in surveillance and HRSA in services, lifespan and training. The remainder — DOD, ACL, DOJ, ED and NSF — is still not captured here and matters for whether the Act's full range of priorities is being met.
This analysis covers NIH, CDC and HRSA. It does not yet capture DOD, ACL, DOJ, ED or NSF, which also fund services, safety and workforce activity. A full picture of federal alignment with the CARES Act requires expanding this analysis further, which future iterations of this dashboard will do.
We reconstructed the classification approach from the most recent published IACC Portfolio Analysis using NIH RePORTER data and AI-assisted coding. Using the same seven Strategic Plan questions, we classified each grant to a single IACC category. The reconstruction was benchmarked against the published IACC analysis during development and tracked within a few percentage points of it, with the intervention boundary being the main source of deviation. That benchmark comparison covers fiscal years outside the range shown in this dashboard and is reported in the companion issue brief (Exhibit 1) rather than here. It demonstrates directional similarity between the two portfolio structures; it is not a like-for-like validation of classifier accuracy.
The Autism CARES Act of 2024 (P.L. 118-180) identifies priority domains but does not provide a grant-level coding scheme. We created a 12-domain multi-label framework drawn from the statutory language across multiple sections of the Public Health Service Act as amended by P.L. 118‑180, primarily Section 409C (42 U.S.C. § 284g) governing NIH research activities, along with Sections 399AA through 399DD (42 U.S.C. §§ 280i through 280i‑3) governing surveillance, education, the IACC, and reporting. Unlike the IACC single-label approach, where each grant goes into one category, the CARES framework tags a single grant for multiple domains when the text supports it. A grant studying seizures in autistic adults, for example, counts under both Co-occurring Conditions and Lifespan.
Basic science research on the biological and genetic basis of autism
42 U.S.C. § 284g(a)(1)(A): “expand, intensify, and coordinate...research on autism spectrum disorder, including basic and clinical research...in fields, such as pathology, developmental neurobiology, genetics, epigenetics, pharmacology, nutrition, immunology, neuroimmunology, neurobehavioral development, endocrinology, gastroenterology, toxicology”
Research on medical and psychiatric conditions that frequently co-occur with autism
42 U.S.C. § 284g(a)(1)(B): “treatment of autism spectrum disorder and co-occurring conditions...including those individuals with co-occurring conditions”
Behavioral, medical, and therapeutic interventions for autistic individuals
42 U.S.C. § 284g(a)(1): “interventions to maximize outcomes for individuals with autism spectrum disorder...intervention, and treatment of autism spectrum disorder and co-occurring conditions, including dissemination and implementation of clinical care, supports, interventions, and treatments”
Speech, language, and alternative communication methods
42 U.S.C. § 284g(a)(1); see also P.L. 118‑180, Sec. 4: “fields...such as...neurobehavioral development...supports, interventions, and treatments”; Sec. 4 provides for “access to evidence-based services, tools, and technologies that support communication needs”
Early identification tools and diagnostic methods
42 U.S.C. § 284g(a)(1)(B)(i): “investigates the causes...diagnosis or ruling out, early and ongoing detection”
Research across childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and aging
42 U.S.C. § 284g(a)(1): “services and supports across the lifespan...reflects the entire population of individuals with autism spectrum disorder...fields...such as...gerontology”
Population-level monitoring and epidemiological research
42 U.S.C. § 280i(a) (PHSA § 399AA): surveillance and research on “the number, incidence, correlates, and causes of autism spectrum disorder”; see also 42 U.S.C. § 284g(a)(1)(B)(i): “early and ongoing detection, prevention”
Educational, vocational, residential, and support services
42 U.S.C. § 284g(a)(1)(B)(i): “services and supports across the lifespan...dissemination and implementation of clinical care, supports, interventions, and treatments”
Research and services for underrepresented and linguistically diverse communities
42 U.S.C. § 284g(a)(1)(B)(iii): “reflects the entire population of individuals with autism spectrum disorder, including those individuals with co-occurring conditions and the full range of needs for supports and services”
Support, training, and resources for family members and caregivers
42 U.S.C. § 284g(a)(1)(B)(ii): “examines supports for caregivers”
Crisis intervention, suicide prevention, and well-being research
42 U.S.C. § 284g(a)(1)(B)(iii): “supports and services...to ensure the safety, and promote the well-being, of such individuals”
Professional training and workforce development in autism services
42 U.S.C. § 280i‑1 (PHSA § 399BB): training professionals to “utilize valid and reliable screening tools...and provide evidence-based interventions”; see also 42 U.S.C. § 284g(a)(1)(B)(i): “dissemination and implementation of clinical care, supports, interventions, and treatments”
The stacked bars on the Overview and fiscal year tabs show how grants in each CARES domain map back to the original IACC categories. The CARES classification builds on the established IACC framework rather than replacing it. The overlap also surfaces new information: many grants classified as Biology under the IACC framework carry relevance to CARES domains like co-occurring conditions, communication, and lifespan that the single-label view misses.
Validation note: We validated the classification through three checks: IACC benchmark comparison, cross-platform validation across two independent AI systems, and manual spot-checking of boundary cases. The companion Excel file contains the full grant-level coding.
We designed this analysis to be extended, not just read. Any reviewer can inspect how individual grants were classified, conduct independent spot-checks, or reclassify boundary cases using their own judgment.
Future analyses can build directly from this work. The process is: (1) download a fresh extract from federal agencies using the same search parameters documented in the policy brief, (2) apply the classification rules outlined in the methodology to the new grants, and (3) merge the results with the existing coded dataset. Because the rules are explicit and the prior grant-level coding is preserved, the framework is cumulative. New fiscal years can be added without reclassifying the full historical portfolio.
The classification rules themselves are documented in the policy brief's methodology section and appendix. The IACC rules follow the seven Strategic Plan questions used in the published IACC Portfolio Analysis. The CARES Act rules are derived from the statutory language of multiple sections of the Public Health Service Act as amended by the Autism CARES Act of 2024, primarily 42 U.S.C. § 284g (PHSA § 409C) and 42 U.S.C. §§ 280i through 280i‑3 (PHSA §§ 399AA through 399DD), with signal terms and domain definitions listed in the appendix crosswalk table (Exhibit A-2).
This analysis provides a directionally sound, policy-relevant view of NIH, CDC and HRSA autism funding. Keep the following assumptions and limitations in mind when interpreting the results.
The CARES Act framework tags a single grant for multiple domains when the research spans more than one priority area. A grant studying seizure management in autistic adults, for example, counts under both Co-occurring Conditions and Lifespan and Aging. As a result, the domain percentages on the CARES tabs add up to more than 100%. This is by design and reflects how policy-relevant research often cuts across categories. The IACC framework, by contrast, assigns each grant to exactly one category, so those percentages sum to 100%.
This version includes NIH grants (RCDC & RePORTER) and CDC and HRSA awards (HHS TAGGS) for FY2024 through FY2026. Earlier fiscal years are held in the companion workbook and issue brief and are deliberately not presented here, because the extracts behind them were not built on the same basis as FY2024 onward; see Appendix A.2 of the brief for that comparability analysis. Other agencies — DOD, ACL, DOJ, ED and NSF — fund several CARES Act domains substantially and are not yet included, so low investment in a domain here does not necessarily indicate low federal investment overall. Department of Defense (CDMRP) data is being held pending review and will be incorporated in a future update.
CDC and HRSA records carry a weaker evidence base than NIH records. TAGGS publishes no abstract or project-terms field, so CDC and HRSA awards were classified from the award title plus the Assistance Listing title alone, while NIH grants were classified from title, abstract and public health relevance statement. CDC/HRSA records therefore average about 1.8 CARES domain tags each versus 2.6 for NIH, and an empty CDC/HRSA bar in a domain such as Caregiver Support or Communication means the title was silent, not that the work is absent. All CDC and HRSA records were hand-reviewed at the distinct-title level. We classified NIH grants using the title, abstract, and keywords available in NIH RePORTER. Some grants involve activities not fully captured in their public text descriptions. The classification reflects what the available grant record shows, not the totality of what a research team is doing. This same constraint applies to the IACC Portfolio Analysis and other text-based classification approaches.
CDC and HRSA awards were drawn from the HHS Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) using the search term "autism" (exported October 2026). TAGGS returns one row per award action, so the 569 CDC and HRSA rows were aggregated to 289 records, one per award number per fiscal year, summing the obligated amounts so that negative deobligation actions net out. NIH amounts are annual fiscal-year costs; CDC and HRSA amounts are obligations by issue-date fiscal year. Both are annual-flow measures, which makes them broadly comparable, but they are not produced by the same accounting process.
One signal term was removed from the CARES coding because it matched a federal program name rather than grant content: "developmental disabilities" matched the ADDM network’s own title ("Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring") and had wrongly tagged 103 CDC and HRSA records as Co-occurring Conditions. ADDM records now carry Surveillance only. Two related terms, "secondary data analysis" and "data project", are retained as Surveillance signals: they name HRSA data-infrastructure mechanisms (SDAR and the Autism Longitudinal Data Project) that feed population-level autism data work. A stricter population-surveillance definition would exclude those 88 records.
Four HRSA awards under Assistance Listing 93.493 (Congressional Directives) fund facilities, equipment and transitional housing rather than research, totalling about $4.0M. They are retained here and classified under Services; a research-only denominator would exclude them.
Some grants sit at the boundary between domains, particularly between Interventions and Services, between Foundational Research and Co-occurring Conditions, and between Screening and Surveillance. We designed the classification rules to be consistent and replicable, but reasonable reviewers could assign some boundary cases differently. We manually spot-checked selected boundary cases, and the companion Excel file contains the full grant-level coding for independent review.
The Autism CARES Act was signed in December 2024, and NIH's grant planning cycle typically spans two or more years. FY2025 grants therefore largely reflect pre-CARES Act planning decisions rather than a response to the new law. FY2025 was also an atypical funding year given broader changes in federal funding and administration. FY2025 reflects grant records before NIH has completed its final spending-category review, so counts may change. CDC and HRSA FY2025 obligations from TAGGS are also subject to later action adjustments.
The FY2026 NIH extract (June 2026) and the CDC/HRSA TAGGS extract (October 2026) capture only the awards processed and posted at those points. Do not interpret this as a full-year decrease in autism funding. Many grants are posted later in the fiscal year, and the final FY2026 portfolio will look substantially different from what is shown here.
We derived age group coding (e.g., children, adolescents, adults) from the grant text. Treat these assignments as exploratory. Many grants, particularly those in basic science, genetics, and neuroscience, do not specify a target age group. The "Unspecified" category does not indicate vague or unfocused research; it includes cellular, molecular, genetic, and animal model studies that are foundational to understanding autism but are not directed at a single age group.
The Foundational Research domain includes genetics, neuroscience, brain function and circuits, molecular pathways, immune and metabolic pathways, biosignatures, neuropathology, sensory and motor function, cognition and communication, co-occurring conditions, developmental trajectories, biomarkers, environmental factors, longitudinal studies, animal models, and preclinical work. Much of this research simultaneously addresses other CARES Act domains. The large share of funding in this domain reflects NIH's core mission in basic biomedical research; CDC and HRSA awards rarely carry this tag.
FY2024 is the anchor year for this analysis. It is the most recent complete fiscal year and captures the autism research portfolio just before the CARES Act became law. Click any domain bar to filter the grant table below.
Bars are scaled by funding, and the color segments within each bar are funding-weighted by IACC classification, so bar length and segment widths use the same measure. Domains are listed in the statutory sequence of the Autism CARES Act (Exhibit A-2 of the companion brief), not in order of size, so bar length is the only indication of share. IACC segments run Q1 to Q7 in every bar.
| Agency | Award / Project No. | PI or Recipient | Title | Funding | IACC Q. | CARES Domains | Age |
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FY2025 is the first full fiscal year after the CARES Act became law, but federal agencies planned and committed most of these grants before the legislation was signed. Federal grant planning cycles span two or more years, so FY2025 should not be read as a response to the Act. It was also an atypical funding year given broader changes in federal funding and administration. Click any domain bar to filter the grant table below.
Bars are scaled by funding with funding-weighted IACC classification segments. Domains are listed in the statutory sequence of the Autism CARES Act (Exhibit A-2 of the companion brief), not in order of size, so bar length is the only indication of share. IACC segments run Q1 to Q7 in every bar.
| Agency | Award / Project No. | PI or Recipient | Title | Funding | IACC Q. | CARES Domains | Age |
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The fiscal year is complete, the extract covers it, and every record is classified. FY2026 rests on a different inclusion basis than FY2025, which was reconciled against the official RCDC export; read the year-over-year change with that in mind. Click any domain bar to filter the grant table below.
Bars are scaled by funding with funding-weighted IACC classification segments, computed over the full FY2026 classified set. Domains are listed in the statutory sequence of the Autism CARES Act (Exhibit A-2 of the companion brief), not in order of size, so bar length is the only indication of share. IACC segments run Q1 to Q7 in every bar.
| Agency | Award / Project No. | PI or Recipient | Title | Funding | IACC Q. | CARES Domains | Age |
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