The Trump administration is preparing to announce on Monday a link between using Tylenol during pregnancy and the risk of children developing autism.

The health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., along with several other senior officials, is expected to participate in the announcement that the use of the pain reliever during pregnancy could contribute to the risk of autism. He will advise that women only use it, or generic acetaminophen, for high fevers.

President Trump is also expected to announce that a cancer and anemia drug, leucovorin, is a potential therapy treatment for autism, two senior administration officials said to Politico.

The president foreshadowed the announcement on Friday while speaking with reporters.

“Autism is totally out of control,” he said. “I think we, maybe, have a reason why.”

Finding a definitive cause for autism has become Mr. Kennedy’s flagship mission. Earlier this year he made a bold promise to deliver concrete answers within months. 

Center for Disease Control data released this spring disclosed a staggering surge in autism diagnoses, finding a more than four-fold increase in just two decades. In 2022 one of with every 31 eight-year-olds being diagnosed in 2022, up from one out of every 150 children in 2000. 

Monday’s announcement would break new ground as the federal government’s first official acknowledgment of a potential acetaminophen-autism connection.

Meanwhile, a wide-ranging autism investigation is taking shape behind the scenes, with the Trump administration assembling about a dozen specialized working groups tasked with dissecting 30 distinct theories about what might trigger the condition.

The Department of Health and Human Services’s plans to link autism to Tylenol was first reported earlier this month along with the theory that folate deficiencies may also be a cause. The administration had planned to publish these claims along with leucovorin therapy in an unspecified “report” that does not yet exist, the officials told Politico.