Slashing Programs That Help People with Disabilities Is a Nod to Eugenics

Making America Ableist Again

By Megha Satyanarayana

When I was a teenager, I took voice lessons from a musician who was blind. I drove over to her apartment to sight-read music, sing scales and work on vocal exercises, and I wondered how the heck she managed with our wretched bus system, how she got to the store, to campus, or just out for a walk. I was too afraid to ask.

One summer, I spent a lot of time with a genetics doctor who worked in a clinic that was part of what the state then called the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation. I learned about dozens of genetic diseases that left children with permanent intellectual disabilities. I learned about the history of institutionalization in our state. It wasn’t pretty. No state’s is. We talked about her caseload each week, what caused the diseases, and how she handled each kid’s medical needs. It was eye-opening, to say the least.

Then, in my last year of high school, I worked with a child with developmental delays in motor skills. We played ball, games, anything to help him move his body, because his parents could see that it helped him regulate, helped him gain dexterity.

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My teenage brain began to put it all together— the ways we tuck people with disabilities out of sight and out of mind. Special education at different schools, few extracurricular activities, the complex and coordinated steps needed to carry out day-to-day life—all hidden. A lot has changed since then; children with disabilities go to mainstream schools, extracurriculars are more inclusive, other transportation options exist, and we adjust our infrastructure and workplaces (by law, if not desire) to make it easier for anyone who is differently abled to manage, if not succeed.

But now our president and his administration are waging war on people with disabilities in the name of government efficiency. Yet, it’s about more than that. Whether through rhetoric about normalizing institutionalization again or by making Social Security benefits harder to get, this is nothing other than ableism, eugenics doctrine at work in the highest level of government, and it’s already making life much harder for the 70 million adults in our country who have a disability, the 7.5 million children who get help at school for one, and the millions of able-bodied people who care for them. Let’s be clear about how egregious this is; the Trump administration is targeting services and protections that affect nearly 25 percent of the U.S. population, saying it isn’t the federal government’s responsibility to set standards of care and consideration for these Americans, to ensure they are being treated equally.

Whether the endgame is the privatization of more services, or, shifting the responsibility of caring for people with disabilities to charities and private donations, or leaving it up to states to decide who is worthy of assistance and who is not, the message is crystal clear: To have “good genes” in Trump’s world, it’s not just being white that matters—as the administration has tried to eliminate racial diversity in government and elsewhere with a McCarthyesque zeal—but being able-bodied and of sound mind. Everyone else can just rot.

That Trump and his administration are doing this shouldn’t surprise anyone. This is a president who, while campaigning for his first term in office, imitated the arm motions of a New York Times reporter who is differently abled. He was telling us then that he scorned disability. And recently, only 10 days into his second term, as part of an antidiversity rant, he baselessly blamed a mid-air collision in Washington D.C. on air traffic controllers with “severe intellectual disabilities” and “psychiatric problems,” saying people with that job needed to be “naturally talented geniuses.”

On top of the cuts to the Social Security Administration, which helps some 67 million people of all ages with disability insurance, Trump’s appointees are slashing the Department of Veterans Affairs and dismantling the Department of Education, both of which serve people with disabilities. As well, his Department of Justice is removing guidance documents that help businesses better serve people with disabilities. One of the documents is about making new hotels ADA-compliant. Another is about communicating with clients or customers with disabilities. The Republican budget plan in Congress calls for cuts that are certain to impact Medicaid, which provides health care to both children and adults with disabilities.

Of the 16 million veterans in the U.S., about one third get disability benefits. Many seek help with mental health after trauma, injury and much more, and are already dealing with the fallout of changes to the VA. About 15 million people with disabilities use Medicaid.

Of course all this will play out in court. And there is the chance that the administration won’t take all these steps, given that much of what they are doing requires an act of Congress to legally happen. And there are those who think it’s fine to shrink the federal government and push all decision-making to states. But then what happens when states decide to stop caring for people with disabilities?

Texas and 16 other states recently challenged the constitutionality of Section 504, an antidiscrimination statute that is perhaps better known to parents as the law that makes possible educational accommodations for children with ADHD, autism and epilepsy, not to mention children with mobility issues or diabetes. Why? Those states objected to the Biden administration adding “gender dysphoria” to its protections. The suit has been paused, but not withdrawn, and some legal analyses see this case as a preview to efforts to overturn Olmstead v. L.C., the Supreme Court case that made it discriminatory to institutionalize people with disabilities when they can live in the community. Out of sight, out of mind might soon be back on the table for some of our most vulnerable people.

Meanwhile, the president might do to states what he’s doing to universities—try to withhold federal funding to get what he wants in terms of disability protections—as a note, many of the states that get the most funding for educating children with disabilities tend to vote Republican. And it’s not just race-based diversity research the administration is trying to pull the plug on. Social security–funded research into disability was just canned last month. The Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the Department of Education that studies, among other things, special education, has been devastated.

In 2020, one poll indicated 51 percent of people with disabilities in the U.S. voted for Trump. This president, his administration, and his supporters have made it abundantly clear through his words and their actions that their vision of the U.S. does not serve people who are not perfect physical and emotional specimens of whiteness. And the last time our country went down that path, the results were catastrophic for Americans and the world.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.