HUGE: RFK Jr. Unveils Plan for Nationwide Alert System to Find…

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. traveled to Rochester, Minnesota, on Friday to announce a first-of-its-kind federal initiative aimed at protecting one of the country’s most vulnerable populations: autistic children and adults who go missing. The announcement marks the launch of the National Autism Missing and Endangered Person Alert Initiative, a joint effort between HHS, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“When an autistic child or adult goes missing, every minute matters,” Kennedy said during the announcement. “President Trump has made improving the lives of Americans with autism and their families a priority. We are bringing federal, state, and local partners together to improve prevention, speed the response, and help bring autistic children and adults home safely.”

The initiative addresses a problem that has quietly devastated families for years but has never received the kind of coordinated federal attention now being promised. According to HHS, roughly half of all autistic children engage in wandering behavior, sometimes called elopement, at some point in their lives. Wandering can place these individuals in serious danger, particularly around bodies of water. HHS estimates that autism-related wandering incidents claim the lives of an average of eight people nationwide every single month, with drowning accounting for the overwhelming majority of those deaths.

The scale of the crisis becomes even starker when looking at recent data. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, at least 98 children and young adults with autism were recovered deceased after wandering or eloping in 2025 alone. A staggering 88 percent of those deaths were caused by drowning. These are not abstract statistics. They represent children who slipped away from a caregiver’s watch for a matter of minutes and never made it home.

Kennedy was careful to be transparent about where the program currently stands, avoiding the temptation to overpromise before the infrastructure is actually built. “A new nationwide autism-specific alert is not yet active,” he told reporters. “We are developing the framework, working with our federal, local, and state partners to turn it into an effective national capability.” In other words, Friday’s announcement marked the beginning of a serious federal buildout, not the flip of a switch.

The eventual goal, according to Kennedy, is an alert system modeled loosely on the widely successful Amber Alert program, which has helped recover countless abducted children since its creation. “Our goal is an autism-specific alert capability that gets critical information to authorities and the public quickly and helps bring missing persons home safely,” Kennedy said. The new system would build on FEMA’s existing Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, known as IPAWS, rather than starting entirely from scratch, allowing federal officials to move more quickly toward full implementation.

Kennedy chose Rochester for the announcement for a specific reason. The city has spent more than 15 years perfecting a model program for locating missing autistic residents, one that the federal government now wants to replicate nationwide. The Rochester Police Department and the Olmsted County Sheriff’s Office both use a system called Project Lifesaver, which equips at-risk individuals with wearable radio-frequency trackers that allow deputies to pinpoint a missing person’s location using handheld receivers.

That local partnership has produced remarkable results. Officials in Rochester say their joint program has maintained a 100 percent success rate in safely locating children and adults who wander from home. Kennedy toured the Olmsted County Public Safety Training Center and met with local sheriff’s deputies and community members to study exactly how that success has been achieved, with an eye toward scaling similar practices to communities across the country that currently lack any formalized response protocol.

Attorney General Todd Blanche joined Kennedy in touting the new initiative, emphasizing that the Department of Justice would play a central role in developing procedures for law enforcement. “Protecting vulnerable Americans is a core responsibility of the Department of Justice, and we are proud to join HHS and FEMA in launching this first-ever National Autism Missing Person Alert initiative,” Blanche said. “This effort will help law enforcement and emergency responders act quickly and effectively when an autistic individual goes missing, strengthening coordination and saving lives.”

The initiative will not simply focus on the moment a person goes missing. HHS officials say it will also establish a broader national framework of best practices aimed at preventing dangerous situations before they start. That includes training first responders on how to recognize and safely approach autistic individuals, many of whom may not respond to verbal commands in the way officers are typically trained to expect, and educating families on early warning signs and prevention strategies such as home security measures and GPS tracking devices.

Diana Diaz-Harrison, HHS’s national autism coordinator, offered additional context on just how widespread this danger is. She told reporters that wandering affects roughly half of all children on the autism spectrum, and that the country loses about eight autistic individuals per month because they are not located in time. She noted that most communities already maintain some version of a missing and endangered persons protocol, but that these existing systems are often never activated for autistic children or adults, leaving a dangerous gap in the emergency response chain that the new initiative is specifically designed to close.

The announcement fits into a broader pattern from Kennedy’s tenure at HHS, where autism has emerged as a signature policy focus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which falls under HHS, now estimates that autism affects roughly one in 31 children in the United States, a figure that has climbed steadily over recent years and helped drive renewed political urgency around the condition. Earlier this year, an interagency autism committee convened under Kennedy’s direction approved a slate of recommendations, including enhanced screening for co-occurring medical conditions and, notably, the development of federal guidance specifically addressing wandering behavior, laying the policy groundwork for Friday’s announcement months in advance.

For families raising autistic children, the announcement is likely to be met with a mixture of relief and cautious optimism. Parents of children prone to wandering often describe living in a state of constant vigilance, installing door alarms, fencing off pools, and never fully relaxing even inside their own homes. A coordinated federal alert system, if built out effectively, could provide these families with a critical safety net that currently does not exist in most of the country.