DRAFT
IACC Strategic Plan 2026–2028
A New Federal Framework for Autism
WORKING DRAFT — SUBJECT TO ERRORS AND REVISION
IACC Working Draft Strategic Plan 2026–2028 for Public Review and Discussion on July 31, 2026
Executive Summary
The 2026–2028 IACC Strategic Plan builds on the work of prior Strategic Plans, but it is organized to do something those plans were not designed to do. Across successive planning cycles, prior Plans documented community concerns, synthesized the state of the science, identified persistent gaps, broadened attention to co-occurring conditions and transition-age youth, and sustained federal focus on autism. That record defines the priorities on which this Plan depends and to which it remains accountable; it is carried forward, not set aside.
What has changed is the nature of the problem those priorities describe. Autism can no longer be addressed adequately as either a research topic or a single service category. It was identified in approximately 1 in 31 (32.2 per 1,000) children aged 8 years across the 16 communities in the CDC ADDM Network's 2022 surveillance year, up from approximately 1 in 150 in surveillance year 2000, a change that reflects greater awareness, expanded screening and ascertainment, and changes in surveillance sites and methodology as well as any change in underlying occurrence, and it reaches across research, surveillance, diagnosis, clinical care, co-occurring conditions, education, coverage, disability services, housing, employment, safety, aging, and civil rights. A problem of that scope requires a plan that can connect evidence to authority, authority to agency responsibility, and responsibility to measurable deliverables. This Plan is written to make those connections explicit.
Two facts explain why a plan built only on priorities is no longer sufficient. The first concerns how federal responsibility for autism is distributed. The authorities needed to serve individuals with autism or those who provide care for them are divided among agencies that operate largely as separate activities rather than as a coordinated strategy: NIH generates and validates scientific evidence; FDA governs regulatory science; HRSA supports translation and workforce capacity; CMS addresses coverage and implementation within its authority; and CDC, ACL, the Department of Education, the Department of Defense, and others act within their respective jurisdictions. No single agency holds the full set of authorities, and no standing mechanism carries a promising finding from discovery through validation, regulatory review, coverage analysis, and clinical adoption. The result is not too little activity but too little movement from activity to usable products.
The second fact concerns measurement. The 2024 Government Accountability Office review found that federal autism coordination only partially followed leading practices for accountability, that IACC Strategic Plans generally had not translated goals into measurable objectives against which progress could be judged, and that reporting tended to describe activities rather than track outcomes. A plan that only restates priorities cannot answer a finding of that kind.
https://iacc.hhs.gov/meetings/iacc-meetings/2026/full-committee-meeting/july/IACC%20Strategic%20Plan%20Working%20Draft%20July%2017.pdf?ver=5