Earlier this week the Department of Education announced a series of “partnerships” with other U.S. government agencies, as the Trump administration attempts to effectively dismantle the department. Among the many changes, the Education Department announced a plan to shift away the responsibilities of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services.
OSERS helps people with disabilities achieve competitive integrated employment, which is to say jobs that pay at least minimum wage with the same benefits as those for nondisabled employees, and allows them to work with nondisabled employees. Under the Education Department’s plan, its core functions would shift to the Department of Health and Human Services.
Though the announcement didn’t come out of the blue, it nevertheless alarmed many disability rights advocates.
This should not be surprising. The Trump administration — and Republicans writ large, going back to Ronald Reagan — have called for the abolition of the Department of Education, arguing that education should be determined at the state level. And during last year’s government shutdown, the Trump administration fired almost all OSERS employees.
Though the announcement didn’t come out of the blue, it nevertheless alarmed many disability rights advocates. Katy Neas, the CEO of disability rights group the Arc of the United States and a former acting assistant secretary at OSERS, warned in a statement: “A student who is denied services, disciplined for disability-related needs, or blocked from an accessible classroom needs one federal education system that can see the whole picture and act.”
Even the proposal’s legality is dubious. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act’s most recent reauthorization — signed by President George W. Bush in 2004 — says the office must exist within the Department of Education. The Trump administration’s move is reminiscent of the president’s executive order to eliminate the Education Department entirely — which would actually require an act of Congress.
Under any circumstances, this proposal would be terrifying for people with disabilities. But it is especially alarming given that OSERS’ core functions will now be under the purview of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy’s conspiracy-mongering about the false link between autism and vaccines is well known. Having him atop the nation’s health agency has done incalculable damage from his undermining the credibility of vaccines. He holds risible and deeply wrong views of autistic people and people with disabilities.
In April, for instance, Kennedy said, “These are kids who will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.” Of course, many autistic people wind up doing all of these things. But — and I want to underscore this with every molecule of my existence — even if they never do, they deserve to be protected, and they deserve to have the best services possible.
Autism isn’t the only disability where Kennedy has ideas that will put students at risk.
Furthermore, if the head of the department in charge of helping autistic people find services believes that autism destroys their lives, there will be little incentive to provide them with services to find competitive integrated employment.
Autism isn’t even the only disability that Kennedy has ideas about that will put students at risk. When Kennedy ran for president, he said that “every Black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, SSRIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence.” Kennedy continued, “those kids are going to have a chance to go somewhere and get reparented.”
Kennedy was wrong: Black children are less likely to receive a diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder than their white counterparts. A 2017 study found that Black children with ADHD are more likely to go off medication than their white counterparts. If Kennedy has the opportunity to manifest his ideas, these kids will not get the services they need to succeed, but instead will get sent away and treated as a problem.
This is not hypothetical. Earlier this year, HHS released its brief for the Trump administration’s fiscal year 2027 budget. The budget request includes stark cuts, eliminating money for the Voting Access for People with Disabilities program, which protects the right to vote for people with disabilities; University Centers for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities, which provide resource information between disability communities and universities; and the Limb Loss Resource Center.
But when Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J., asked Kennedy about it in April, Kennedy hid behind his uncle, the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., who wrote the Americans with Disabilities Act, and said, “I don’t know every cut; there’s some we’ve made mistakes on.”
Kim rightly pointed out that moving IDEA provisions from the Department of Education to HHS would be “defining these young students by their disability … rather than as students who have the right, as anyone else does, for opportunity.”
That is the heart of the matter. Kennedy’s worldview sees people with disabilities as a group to be treated rather than a group whose rights deserve to be protected and who require services to be accommodated. Scattering the services for students with disabilities would be terrible on its own. Giving power to a man who has such a distorted view of disability would be catastrophic, and would set back a generation of students.
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