As Trump Guts Support for Disabled Students, Their Families Are Fighting Back

If the Trump administration and the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) have their way, the basic educational and human rights of students with disabilities will soon be eviscerated. Due to the planned demolition of the Department of Education, the rights of students with disabilities to “a free, appropriate public education” — guaranteed by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) — are under fire.

For nearly 50 years, the Department of Education (DOE) has been responsible for distributing funds — $14.2 billion in fiscal year 2025 — to state and local school districts to enable them to educate students with a range of disabilities. Among other things, this money goes toward training teachers, service providers, and other staff in best practices for both special and general education classrooms. It also goes toward coordinating research and record keeping; providing technical assistance; and doing outreach to parents and caregivers to make sure they know their rights. The Trump administration is attacking all of these functions with its plan to dismantle the Department of Education.

Moreover, the 12 regional sites of DOE’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) are also being threatened with closure (seven have already been shuttered). These offices have worked to investigate allegations of discrimination or abuse made by students and their families, including the still-common practice of isolating or restraining students in special ed programs. In fiscal year 2024, OCR received 22,687 complaints, all of which were meant to be investigated.

This oversight function apparently rankles the right wing, and groups like the Heritage Foundation claim OCR’s work is an unnecessary expansion of “special rights.” In fact, 17 states (Alabama, Arkansas, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and West Virginia) are currently suing the U.S. government, asking that it declare Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 unconstitutional.

Section 504 prohibits institutions that receive federal funds from discriminating against or excluding people with disabilities from programs or services. Then there’s IDEA, which is also squarely in the right’s crosshairs, since it guarantees every child access to public schooling.

More than 7.5 million K-12th graders — 15 percent of all U.S. students — receive services through IDEA. Each has an Individualized Education Program (IEP) that guides their schooling and stipulates the services they are legally entitled to receive, among them one-on-one or small group tutoring; speech, occupational, or physical therapy; and/or mental health counseling. An additional 1.5 million kids who do not have, or need, an IEP get accommodations through Section 504. For example, students with diabetes may be given permission to eat in class despite a general rule against doing so.

Education advocates and disability justice activists see this as common sense — right-wingers do not. Their educational wish list, delineated in Project 2025, includes overhauling special ed — and not in students’ favor. They also want to freeze OCR, move DOE functions to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and return the bulk of education authority to the states. Already, 1,300 OCR staff have been fired, and on March 20, Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the secretary of education to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” of the DOE.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), has been a vocal critic of the plan since it was announced. “The DOE and the laws it is supposed to execute have one major purpose: to level the playing field and fill opportunity gaps to help every child in America succeed,” she told Truthout by email. “Trying to abolish it and its Office for Civil Rights sends a message that the president doesn’t care about opportunity for all kids.” She calls granting authority to the states “a grave mistake” and pledges that the AFT will “fight them tooth and nail.”

So will many others. A letter to Congress, signed by 15 disability rights groups, made clear that removing federal oversight of critical civil rights laws like IDEA “leaves students vulnerable to the variation in state implementation and threatens to bring us back to a time when many students with disabilities were denied an education.”

Denise Marshall is CEO of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates (COPAA), an organizational signatory of the letter. Marshall told Truthout that COPAA and the National Center for Youth Law have filed a federal lawsuit to restore OCR’s investigative functions. (Another pending lawsuit, filed by the National Education Association, aims to stop the closure of the DOE and asks for the reinstatement of all fired staff.)

“OCR has investigated a lot of egregious situations for kids who’ve been restrained, isolated or forced out of school,” Marshall said. “This administration does not hide its hostility to people of color, people with gender identities that it doesn’t like, and the disabled. In many cases, people who’d filed complaints with OCR have discovered that investigations have been halted. It’s why we filed a lawsuit. OCR had been investigating cases and holding districts accountable.”

Marshall also talked about another potential loss should DOGE and Trump succeed in their efforts. “Congress has spent years working to align disability, education and civil rights laws to support the educational success of all students, but particularly students with disabilities,” she said. “The right seems to be of the mindset that protections like IDEA, Section 504, even the Americans with Disabilities Act, are too expensive and are unfair to everyone else. We loudly disagree.”

Soyoung Park, author of (Re)Imaging Inclusion for Children of Color With Disabilities and director of online programs in early childhood and childhood special education at the Bank Street College of Education, concurs. “The whole reason for IDEA and the Rehabilitation Act was to ensure inclusion and the maintenance of rights,” she told Truthout. “Putting educational functions into HHS perpetuates a medical model and may contribute to increasing the segregation and isolation of people with disabilities. To consider the education of children with a disability only a health issue, rather than an equity issue, is wrong.”

Furthermore, Park is concerned that a move to HHS will limit research and data gathering, especially when it comes to racial inequities. “We know that Black and Brown students in special education experience disproportionate punishments. Stopping the DOE from gathering statistics about this and stopping research to identify best practices will be detrimental to children and their families and teachers,” she said.

Stephanie Flynt McEben, public policy analyst at the National Disability Rights Network, agrees and told Truthout that, in addition, she is afraid that moving DOE to HHS will perpetuate low expectations for children with disabilities. Instead, she says that she and her organization favor a “social model” that “focuses on each individual and works to ensure that they can contribute and compete with their nondisabled peers.” She also fears that returning education to the states will mean vast disparities in what’s offered. “Already half of the OCR staff have been laid off, so we’re already seeing a backlog of complaints build up,” Flynt McEben said. “The reason DOE was created in the first place was because states could not do what was needed to support students with disabilities, and the government recognized that federal oversight was necessary.”

This potential lack of oversight terrifies parent William Fertman, whose 7-year-old son attends the California School for the Deaf (CSD), a state-funded program in Fremont. “Once the DOE is gone, there may be no one to oversee the disbursement of funds for a school like CSD,” he told Truthout. “Before DOGE and this administration, if we had complaints or concerns, we could go to the OCR to make sure the money was going to the appropriate places and services were being delivered. I see what’s being done as incredibly disruptive and dangerous. I fear that it will allow states to pass legislation that violates or undermines IDEA, and there will be no one at the federal level to stop it from happening.”

As for his son, Fertman says that because the school uses American Sign Language for classroom instruction and also teaches students to read and write in English, his son “has full access to everything. He’s not the Deaf kid with an interpreter, or the kid who gets pulled out of class a few times a week for services.”

Fertman then addressed the broader issues facing education. “If the right succeeds, the money that is supposed to come to California for special education services could be disrupted. Kids with all kinds of disabilities deserve equal access to schooling, but they could be thrown into the darkness and left there because there will be no money for the state to disburse.”

Heather Dailey, a parent of a son who has autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), has similar concerns. Her son is now in a mainstream 7th-grade class but meets in a small group with a tutor for five 30-minute sessions each week. Like Fertman, she is worried about money.

“There have always been funding difficulties for special education,” she told Truthout. “If the funding stream changes, federal cuts will mean less money coming in, and more competition for scarce resources. I worry that the idea that children with disabilities can’t learn and are a waste of resources will again get traction and will impact how people look at the disabled. Hateful rhetoric can impact policy and the way IDEA is implemented and overseen.”

“We live in a country with high income inequality,” parent Jessica Hardin added. “My daughter is 4, in pre-K. She gets speech, occupational, physical and music therapies in school. These are services my husband and I could not pay for out of pocket. Government support makes it possible for my daughter to have some semblance of an independent child’s life, but I’m living with the devastating fear that this could all go away. If it does, we don’t know what we’ll do.” Hardin said that her daughter, who does not speak or use the bathroom independently, has to be supervised at all times. “She can be a danger to herself,” she explains, “so we need extra support to maintain our careers and also take care of our 9-year-old son. My daughter is making slow, steady progress, but while she needs special care, she is also really sweet and funny.”

Parent Jennifer Bukowski feels similarly. Her son has autism and Type 1 diabetes and relies on a one-on-one mentor in his 8th-grade classroom. “My son would be lost without his paraprofessional,” she told Truthout. “My son gets distracted easily and needs to be redirected back to the subject. He’s come a very long way, but he doesn’t have friends and needs to learn social skills. People don’t realize this about special ed. It’s not just about academics. The behavioral part is as important as math, science, history and English. In the long run, if my son gets what he needs to be independent and find a job, he’ll be contributing to the community. Shouldn’t everyone want this for every person with a disability who is able to work?”

All agree that early intervention matters. Tricia, who asked that her surname not be used, is the mother of two neurodivergent children, a 19-year-old son and a 14-year-old daughter. Now living in New Hampshire, she said that her son, who excelled in school despite clear signs that he was struggling socially, did not get diagnosed until late middle school, by which point he was experiencing severe anxiety and depression. “He went into such autistic burnout that my goal became keeping him alive,” she said. He is now attending Landmark College, a private program for students with learning disabilities, ADHD and autism. Tricia said that while he is now doing well, the late diagnosis complicated his progress. Her daughter’s experience was different. “My daughter has a language-based learning disability that was discovered when she was 7. After getting her services at a specialized private school that the district paid for, she’s done well socially and academically.”

Still, like other parents interviewed, Tricia is enraged by what’s happening in Washington. “The Trump administration seems to want people to be less educated. Maybe he thinks that this will lead to less pushback. The administration also seems to want to shove disability into a closet again. They see the disability justice movement as ‘wokeness’ and they want the power to extinguish it.”

Nonetheless, despite being heartened by the resistance she’s seen – in the courts, in the streets and in public gatherings — Tricia, like many others across the country, remains scared about what the future holds for herself and her family.