Since 2006 $1.7 billion dollars has been spent on the Combating Autism Act and we can’t think of anything it has produced that has improved the lives of people with autism or their families.
    
And while almost $2 billion is a lot of money, it is paltry compared to the spending directed to other health disorders. According to the CDC about 1 million Americans are infected with HIV and about 1 million Americans have ASD. Yet annual research spending on HIV/AIDS is 25 times autism spending. In the next federal budget for 2015 $3 billion will be spent on HIV/AIDS research, which is about the annual sum devoted to AIDS research for the past 20 years for a total of more than $60 billion. This investment led to finding the cause of AIDS, effective prevention methods, and treatments that allow people infected with HIV to lead productive lives. Yet with autism we do not officially know the causes, we have no prevention methods, no treatments, and no officially recognized cures.  The case of HIV/AIDS proves that major advances can happen as the result of federal research investment if the will to do so is there, and if the money is spent wisely.
    
The little money devoted on autism research so far has been misspent. A Government Accountability Office report of 2013 concluded that 84% of autism research spending so far could be duplicative.  And for every dollar spent on looking for environmental causes of autism, $8 has been spent of the endless search for the hypothetical autism gene or genes.
    
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