FROM CARE TO CRUELTY: ATTACKING THE RIGHTS OF PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES

Emily K. Abel

Type “whitehouse.gov/accessibility” into a search engine on your computer and you will find an outline of the White House and the words “Error 404/PAGE NOT FOUND/ GO TO HOME PAGE.” If you obey that directive, you will see a very determined-looking Trump, pointing his finger and promising that “every single day I will be fighting for you with every breath in my body…This will truly be the golden age of America.” The page you hoped to find provided guidance to hotels, stores, and other enterprises about how to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Enacted in 1990, that civil rights law prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in jobs, schools, transportation, and many other places that are open to the public. But “accessibility,” “inclusion,” “discrimination,” “disability,” and “disabilities” are among the hundreds of words federal agencies have banned since Trump’s inauguration.

Many words used by the Trump regime demean people with disabilities. Elon Musk repeatedly calls anyone he dislikes “retarded,” a derogatory term for those with intellectual disabilities. Trump himself is one of the worst offenders. According to his nephew Fred Trump, he suggested that “maybe” people with disabilities “should just die.” In his first term, Trump mocked a journalist with disabilities and insisted on excluding wounded veterans from military parades because “Nobody wants to see that.” In September 2023, he questioned the choice of Luis Avila to sing “God Bless America” at General Mark Milley’s retirement party. Avila lost a leg, experienced brain damage, and had two heart attacks and two strokes during five combat tours. When Avila’s wheelchair seemed about to topple over, several people helped him maintain his balance. Trump was not among them. Instead, he asked Milley “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded.”

During the 2024 campaign, Trump often referred to both Biden and Harris as “mentally disabled” and on at least one occasion parodied Biden’s slow walk. As president, he blamed the Reagan National Airport collision (without any evidence) on diversity policies which had encouraged the Federal Aviation Administration to recruit air traffic controllers “who suffer severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems, and other mental and physical disabilities.” He then listed a number of other conditions that should disqualify people from air traffic control jobs including “partial paralysis” and “dwarfism.” He labeled the opponents of his tariffs “weak and stupid.” Soon afterwards, he condemned environmentally-correct shower heads by describing them, too, as “weak.” (By contrast, the “manosphere” that receives Trump’s endorsement exalts strength, power, and even brutality. Rebuffing the suggestion of his aides that he use his bout with Covid as an occasion to express empathy, he instead portrayed himself as a strongman who could vanquish all disease.)

Language reminiscent of eugenic rhetoric is especially terrifying. Eugenics flourished in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century when medical experts, politicians, and pundits argued that the only people who should have children are those with “desirable traits.” Later, Nazis praised that pseudoscience, using it as justification for the mass murder of Jews, people with disabilities, homosexuals, and other groups they considered undesirable. Both Musk and Trump tout their genetic superiority. Musk promises to save humanity by fathering many children. Citing a “great, super-genius uncle” who taught at MIT, Trump suggested that good brains run in his family. After touring the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention early in the Covid pandemic, he told reporters that “people are really surprised I understand this stuff. Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability.” Later in the pandemic he claimed that his unique mental acuity enabled him to countermand medical experts’ recommendations. In one of his many rants about immigrants, he said, “How about allowing people to come through an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers. You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

The Trump administration attacks people with disabilities by deed as well as word. Trump is determined to close the Department of Education, a move that would have drastic consequences for the nation’s 7.5 million students with disabilities. The Department provides more than $15 billion through the 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) to guarantee that children with disabilities have the right to a “free and appropriate public education.”

One option Trump has considered is shifting responsibilities for children with disabilities to the states. In an executive order instructing Linda McMahon, the Secretary of Education, to “take all necessary steps” to dismantle her department, he explained that “the experiment of controlling American education through Federal programs and dollars—and the unaccountable bureaucracy those programs and dollars support—has plainly failed our children, our teachers, and our families.”

The other option being considered is to place special education programs under the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. wrote on social media that his department “is fully prepared to take on the responsibility of supporting individuals with special needs” and that it would “make the care of our most vulnerable citizens our highest national priority.” But disability advocates argue that the Department of Education has the expertise for enforcing laws relating to children with disabilities and that HHS is not an appropriate home for managing their educational needs. Michael Yudin, who served as assistant secretary of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services under Obama, explained, “This is not a health issue, this is not a medical issue, this is about educating kids with disabilities. We’re talking about making sure kids get a free, appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment. What about health does that?” Moreover, DOGE has gutted many HHS agencies that deal explicitly with disabilities. The Administration for Community Living, which serves adults with disabilities, has often been cited as an appropriate place for programs for children. That agency, however, has sustained especially severe layoffs. Approximately half of the staff are gone.

Other policy changes similarly threaten the services and funds on which people with disabilities depend. Because Medicaid is the only source of federal funding for long-term care, the prospect of reducing the program alarms the many people with disabilities who cannot purchase services on their own. At a rally organized by disability advocates to protest potential Medicaid cuts, Representative Danny Davis of Illinois asked, “Who would ever think you’d cut Medicaid, the lifeline for individuals who need assistance for health care and for disability care and disability rights?” Staff firings at the Veterans’ Administration have degraded services for wounded veterans.

The removal of two Democratic commissioners at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) undermines the ability of people with disabilities to file anti-discrimination claims. Jocelyn Samuels, one of the fired commissioners, sued. “This abrupt and unlawful termination before my term’s completion not only violates federal law,” Samuels argued, “but fundamentally eviscerates the EEOC’s independent structure.” Many people with disabilities are eligible for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) in addition to Social Security under certain circumstances. The overhaul of the Social Security Administration (SSA) has thrown the agency into chaos. Although it was under-staffed even before Trump’s inauguration, 12 percent of the workforce has been fired since he took office the second time. A federal lawsuit filed by a coalition of advocacy groups against SSA, Acting Commissioner Leland Dudek, and Elon Musk charges that “in just nine weeks, the new administration has upended the agency with sweeping and destabilizing policy changes—shifting critical agency functions onto overburdened local offices, slashing telephone-based services, and debilitating the agency’s ability to meet beneficiaries’ needs.”

These various cutbacks erase the achievements of the disability movement. Although disabilities take many different forms, advocates share the belief that the difficulties encountered by disabled people stem from social conditions (including stigma and discrimination), not only from physical impairments. That’s why activists have fought hard for the passage of laws providing equal access and protections for people with disabilities. Congress passed the ADA in 1975 only after people with disabilities shed their assistive devices and crawled on their hands up the Capitol Building stairs. Two years later Judith Heumann, a pioneering disability activist, led a 26-day sit-in at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) headquarters in San Francisco, demanding that the government issue regulations implementing Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in public schools, institutions of higher education and other federally funded programs. HEW had delayed approving the regulations for four years but finally acted as the protest dragged on. Since then, numerous advocacy organizations have worked to improve the lives of everyone with disabilities.

The renowned disability advocate and scholar Paul K. Longmore titled his most famous essay “Why I Burned My Book.” Despite living with extremely serious sequelae of polio, Longmore earned a Ph.D. in American history and then turned his dissertation into a book to qualify to teach at a college. He did eventually enjoy a long, distinguished career at San Francisco State University. But at the time he first tried to obtain a college teaching job, he could retain eligibility for SSI and SSDI only if he refrained from paid employment. Although both programs provided meager cash benefits, they enabled him to qualify for essential services. California’s In-Home Support Services paid for personal assistants. Medicaid (or Medi-Cal as the program is called in California) paid for his ventilator. Both allowed him to remain in the community rather than enter a nursing home. When he learned that any income he received from research fellowships and book royalties could adversely affect his eligibility for SSI, he decided to organize a demonstration at which he would burn his book to protest the “work disincentives” in federal welfare policies. Another disability advocate helped him understand why his friends and colleagues wept as they watched flames consume the book: “They too felt thwarted by a government that stymies their efforts to work and make a life. They too felt dehumanized by a society that devalues them.”

If Longmore and other disability advocates sought to promote self-sufficiency, they also reminded us that dependency is an inescapable feature of the human condition. As psychiatrist and bioethicist Willard Gaylin wrote, “All of us…inevitably spend our lives evolving from an initial to a final stage of dependency. If we are fortunate enough to achieve power and relative independence along the way it is a transient and passing glory.” The feminist philosopher Eva Feder Kittay adds that “the long maturation process of humans, combined with the decidedly human experience for moral feeling and attachment, make caring for dependents a mark of our humanity.”

As widespread sickness and suffering during the COVID pandemic heightened awareness of our common fragility and interdependence, caring received new respect. A number of groups and individuals, both nationally and internationally, prepared statements explaining why care deserves a more prominent place on the policy agenda. “If COVID-19 has taught us nothing else,” declared Canadian academics and advocates, “it is that we need a new approach to caring for each other.”

Substituting cruelty for care, the Trump administration cancels the pandemic’s most critical lesson.

Emily K. Abel is professor emerita at the UCLA-Fielding School of Public Health.

Sources:

Willard Gaylin, “In the Beginning: Helpless and Dependent,” in Doing Good: The Limits of Benevolence , ed. Willard Gaylin et al. (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

Eva Feder Kittay, Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency (New York: Routledge, 1999).

Paul K. Longmore, Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003).

Arthur Caplan and James Tabery, “Donald Trump Wants to Make Eugenics Great Again. Let’s Not,” Scientific American, October 17, 2024.

Jenny Jarvie and Nathan Solis, “’It’s a Shambles’: DOGE Cuts Bring Chaos, Long Waits at Social Security for Seniors,” Los Angeles Times, April 9, 2023.

Nicquel Terry Ellis, “Dismantling the Department of Education Will Strip Resources from Disabled Children, Parents and Advocates Say,” CNN, March 22, 2025.

Karen Yourish et al., “These Words Are Disappearing in the New Trump Administration,” New York Times, March 7, 2025.

Jenny Jarvie and Nathan Solis, “’It’s a Shambles’: DOGE Cuts Bring Chaos, Long Waits at Social Security,” L. A. Times, April 9, 2025.

Ari Natter and Stephanie Lai, “Trump Targets ‘Weak’ Shower Heads He’s Long Complained About,” Bloomberg, April 9, 2025.

O. Rose Broderick, “HHS Firings Undermine Federal Government’s Ability to Care for Vulnerable,” Statnews, April 1, 2025.

Matthew Borus, “Cutting Medicaid and Federal Programs Are among 4 Key Trump Administration Policy Changes that Could Make Life Harder for Disabled People,” The Conversation, February 26, 2025.