In January, Annie’s food stamps suddenly dropped down to $56 a month, roughly one-quarter of what she had been receiving for the past six years. Unable to work or drive due to her Crohn’s disease and a predisposition to seizures, she relies on services like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and FlexRide, a Medicaid program that provides transportation for people with disabilities.
But around the same time her benefits decreased, FlexRide started to become harder to access, too, she told Salon in a phone interview. She is concerned that cuts being debated at the federal government could make these services even less accessible.
“It’s very, very difficult to reach anybody,” Annie, who is using her first name only for privacy reasons, said about FlexRide. “The apps aren’t working a lot of the time, so I have to ask my folks to pay for Lyft, which is expensive.”
As the Trump administration continues to make sweeping cuts to federal agencies, people with disabilities are concerned that programs they need to survive will be caught in the crosshairs. Advocates are concerned that terminating diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives will make “disability” a word like “gender” or “race” that can make grants ineligible for government funding. They also emphasize that closing the Department of Education could remove protections for students with disabilities. Many say dismantling the Administration for Community Living (ACL), which provides support for people with disabilities and aging populations, will make it harder for people to stay in their communities.
Although the administration said cutting ACL would not impact Medicaid, many are concerned that Medicaid cuts being proposed by Congressional Republicans will take away their health care, leaving them unable to pay for expensive services. Annie said she is already stockpiling some of her medications because she is afraid that she won’t be able to afford them if Medicaid is cut. One of her primary medications for Crohn’s costs roughly $4,000, she said.
"Without urgent court intervention, the harm will only grow.”"
“A lot of times with disabilities come chronic health issues, and so this can even be a life and death kind of thing,” said Dr. Joseph Stramondo, a philosophy professor at San Diego State University who specializes in bioethics and disabilities. “If we start cutting Medicaid … and defunding all these programs, that is a recipe for disaster when it comes to disabled people being able to access this sort of basic health care.”
Advocacy by people with disabilities is largely responsible for many of the laws designed to increase accessibility and equity that are currently in place. When people gathered across more than 1,400 "Hands Off" protests this weekend to resist some of the changes proposed by the Trump administration, advocates in the disability community who couldn’t attend met online. Then this week, hundreds of disability advocates protested the proposed cuts to Medicaid outside of the Capitol building.
A coalition of disability rights organizations including the American Association of People with Disabilities filed a lawsuit last week against the Social Security Administration, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE, which is not a government agency), and other government agencies alleging that these cuts unlawfully harm Americans with disabilities.
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“Americans with disabilities deserve a functioning Social Security system, not arbitrary shutdowns and inaccessible service,” said AAPD president and CEO Maria Town in a statement. “We filed this lawsuit because disabled Americans are already suffering — and without urgent court intervention, the harm will only grow.”
Last month, President Donald Trump said the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will handle “special needs” moving forward. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a social media post that the agency is “fully prepared to take on the responsibility of supporting individuals with special needs” and would “make the care of our most vulnerable citizens our highest national priority.”
During his last term, Trump invested millions of dollars in services for people with disabilities and launched a task force focused on creating more employment for people with disabilities. However, sources say this term is different.
According to Trump, the goal of DOGE is to "slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies." Yet disability advocates say some of the decisions made to reduce spending are being made at the expense of some of the country’s most vulnerable.
"I feel like this is going to hurt a lot of other children who are in the position I was in."
“It’s about shifting priorities and moving away from social support and things that people need to live their lives toward other priorities,” said Dr. Michael Rembis, a history professor and director of the Center for Disability Studies at the University at Buffalo. “The rhetoric is all in the name of cost-savings and efficiency, but it hasn't really been shown through any studies that I'm aware of that this is a more efficient or cost effective way to manage care.”
Before his last term even began, Trump mocked a reporter with disabilities. In January, he cast blame on people with disabilities employed at the Federal Aviation Administration after a plane crash in Washington D.C. killed 67 people. Kennedy has repeatedly touted misinformation linking autism to vaccines, and many fear his proposed plan to bring back mental health farms would lead many people with disabilities to be reinstitutionalized.
“[Kennedy’s] idea about creating these sort of mental health care farms is really a retrograde idea,” Rembis told Salon in a phone interview. “If we start … removing people from the community and sending them to institutions, that is a real concern for disabled people and for people with mental health conditions.”
It remains unclear how HHS will handle the additional responsibility of providing services for people with disabilities, especially considering the 10,000 jobs that were recently cut.
Since it was created in 1979, the Department of Education has been responsible for making sure states are compliant with educational standards. It also handles civil rights complaints that families with children with disabilities may file against local school districts, said Michael Gilberg, a special education attorney in New York and Connecticut. Abolishing the DOE could remove those federal protections, he said.
“As somebody who grew up with undiagnosed autism, I feel like this is going to hurt a lot of other children who are in the position I was in, who aren't going to get the chance to go to get services and get what they need to graduate,” Gilberg told Salon in a phone interview.
Before the DOE was established, many children with disabilities did not receive an education and were institutionalized and siloed from the community. In 1975, Congress passed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) that requires children with disabilities to be given educational opportunities tailored to their needs. The DOE plays a critical role in ensuring IDEA funding for children with disabilities is delivered to schools.
“Part of the reason the DOE was created was to uphold the mainstreaming of disabled kids after the passage of the [IDEA] in 1975,” Rembis said. “If they move all education concerns related to disabled people under HHS, then they're medicalizing kids in school, rather than treating them like other students and that is problematic as well.”
The responsibilities of ACL, the agency that distributes funding to more than 2,500 programs designed to help older Americans and people with disabilities live in the community, will be divvied up between the Administration for Children and Families, the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, according to HHS.
Jill Jacobs, the executive director of the National Association of Councils on Developmental Disabilities and a Biden-era commissioner of ACL's Administration on Disabilities, said she is concerned that there won’t be enough staff and resources available after the funding cuts to deliver funding to these programs.
These include services like Meals on Wheels, which serves 260 million meals to 2 million people each year. ACL also distributes funding to over 400 Centers for Independent Living across the country that help people with disabilities get jobs through employment training and similar programs. Meals on Wheels fate is still uncertain.
Laws like IDEA that require services to be delivered to people with disabilities have not been changed by these decisions announced by the Trump administration, but the question that remains is: How are those mandatory services going to be delivered without the agencies and staff that have been put in place to handle them?
“What I’m struggling with and what people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families … are struggling with and want to understand is: What is the plan?” Jacobs told Salon in a phone interview. “People with disabilities and their families and the folks that support them need to be a part of that plan because we cannot have people make decisions about the lives of disabled people without consulting them.”
It is unclear how exactly many of the changes announced by the Trump administration will be implemented. Trump can propose plans to reorganize federal agencies, but changes need to go through Congress. On the other hand, Trump has repeatedly bypassed Congress with little pushback.
In some cases a lawsuit can reach federal court and effectively block President Donald Trump’s orders. However, the Supreme Court can still side with the Republican administration if one of these cases reaches them, which is what happened this week with a case involving the reinstatement of thousands of federal workers who were fired.
Nevertheless, people with disabilities say the actions that have been taken, including the massive staff layoffs in federal offices, are already impacting them. Daniel Davis, a policy analyst at ACL, was terminated from his position this week after working there for 15 years, he said.
Although he is concerned about losing his health insurance with his employment, as Davis has disabilities that require medical treatment, he said he is more concerned that the restructuring of the ACL will disrupt services for the Americans with disabilities and older adults that it serves.
"It feels like we're just not a priority," Davis told Salon in a phone interview. "Like they didn't even bother to come up with a reason for pushing us aside."
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Annie can feel a flare-up coming on and has some new neurological symptoms she is getting checked out this week. The last thing she needs is more stress on her system, yet she doesn’t have the luxury of tuning out the news when programs she needs to live are on the chopping block.
“How do you balance staying informed and not eating away at your own mental health?” she said. “I get told by my doctors that I have to manage my stress levels if I want to prevent a flare-up, so things are already super stressful and they’re just pouring gasoline on it.”
Yet she emphasized that she felt privileged compared to many other people with disabilities who do not have family there to help them care for themselves and navigate these administrative changes.
“I know that it is a million times worse for a lot of other people, and I think about that every day to put things in perspective,” she said. “It’s crazy to think that somebody in my situation is sleeping out on the street. That’s not okay.”
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