President Donald Trump falsely suggested Thursday that autism may be caused by a “shot,” parroting his anti-vax health secretary. 

During a Cabinet meeting, the president discussed an increase in the rate of autism diagnoses, but seemed to invent some statistics to do it. 

“It was one in 10,000 children had autism, and now it’s one in 31. Not 31,000, 31,” Trump said. 

In reality, about one in 36 children aged 8 years old have been identified with autism spectrum disorder, according to the CDC. That’s an increase from 2000, when only one in 150 children born in 1992 were diagnosed with autism.

Sitting only a few seats away from the president was Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent figure in the anti-vaccine movement, who used the one-in-10,000 statistic during his Senate confirmation hearings. It’s entirely unclear where he got this number, but Trump has since repeated it multiple times. 

“That is horrible—that’s a horrible statistic, isn’t it? And there’s gotta be something artificial out there that’s doing it,” Trump continued, turning to Kennedy. 

“So you think you’re gonna have a pretty good idea, huh?” Trump asked. 

“We will know by September,” Kennedy replied. 

“There will be no bigger news conference than that, so that’s it. If you can come up with that answer: where you stop taking something, you stop eating something, or maybe it’s a shot. But something’s causing it,” Trump said. 

Kennedy has previously claimed that autism comes from vaccines, and it seems that the president has officially bought in—or is at least open to the possibility. Trump’s newest comment comes months after a leaked phone call with Kennedy in July, where the president could be heard tying vaccines to autism. 

Meanwhile, experts have attributed some of the rise in autism diagnoses to a widening definition of autism spectrum disorder, which encapsulates a broader range of symptoms, as well as people being more aware of and willing to get diagnostic testing, according to ABC News.  

While Kennedy claimed he has “never been anti-vaxx,” he has spent his first two months in office pushing alternative, unproven medicines amid a deadly national measles outbreak. Last month, Kennedy suggested that contracting measles had more long-term health benefits than getting the measles vaccine, which he falsely claimed could cause all the same illnesses associated with measles. 

House Republicans approved a budget Thursday, pushing Donald Trump’s dream bill closer to reality.

With the budget framework in the rearview, conservatives in both chambers are now squaring away how they can slice trillions of dollars from the details of the federal budget in order to extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for corporations and billionaires, and make an estimated $6.8 trillion addition to the deficit more palatable to their base.

One much-discussed solution includes taking a metaphorical chain saw to indirectly strip $880 billion from Medicaid, but House Speaker Mike Johnson still wasn’t ready to admit the reality of that proposal Thursday—despite the fact that his colleagues have already publicly acknowledged the party’s intention to gut the low-income insurance program.

“No one has talked about cutting one benefit in Medicaid,” Johnson insisted, instead offering another solution to afford Trump’s tax cuts. “What we’ve talked about is returning work requirements, so for example you don’t have able-bodied young men on a program that’s designed for single mothers and the elderly and disabled.”

The eyebrow-raising pitch also came packaged with an insult for young American men, who Johnson argued were wasting their lives playing video games.

“They’re draining resources from people who actually do that,” the speaker continued. “So if you clean that up and shore it up you save a lot of money and you return the dignity of work to young men who need to be at work instead of playing video games all day.”

But Republican proposals to introduce a work requirement to Medicaid have thus far asked recipients to navigate work-reporting and verification systems on a monthly basis—a detail that would require significant federal funding. The plans would also negate coverage for individuals who find themselves temporarily unemployed, such as those who were recently fired or laid off.

A February report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that introducing work requirements to the insurance program could strip upward of 36 million Americans of their health coverage—half of Medicaid’s 72 million enrollees.

And, at the end of the day, if work requirements for Medicaid are actually intended to encourage employment—rather than punish the poor—then the whole effort is founded on a dud philosophy.

“Research shows that work requirements do not increase employment,” the think tank’s report said.

Republicans, and apparently some Democrats, are still obsessed with limiting noncitizen voting, which is already illegal and exceedingly rare.

The House on Wednesday passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, which would require people to present a passport, birth certificate, or other documentation proving citizenship in person in order to vote in elections. The legislation is so extreme that many have warned that it could even make it harder for married women to vote.

The SAVE Act........

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