Note: This article will use the identity-first term “disabled people,” which is preferred by many in the disability justice community, instead of the people-first term “people with disabilities.” A nuanced discussion of these terms is beyond the scope of this article, but there is excellent information linked above.

As we enter the seventh month of Donald Trump’s second term as president, his contempt for disabled peoplehas come into sharp focus. Of course, no one paying a bit of attention for the last decade would mistake Trump for an ally of the disabled. Going back to his 2016 presidential campaign—when he mocked reporter Serge Kovaleski by performing a burlesque of Kovaleski’s arthrogryposis (a condition limiting range of motion and control of the body’s joints)—Trump has often used the idea of disability itself as an insult, or a disqualifying feature of an opponent. One only has to scratch the surface of Trump’s recorded behavior and comments over the years to demonstrate this incredibly callous attitude, whether it’s calling Kamala Harris “mentally impaired” or “mentally disabled,” or reportedly remarking to one of his family members that “maybe those kinds of people should just die,” referring to a group of disability advocates.

There is, however, a marked difference between loathsome and ignorant values held as an individual and the weaponizing of the federal government against the disability community. In the months since Trump again took office, the federal government has mounted arguably the largest assault on disability rights, and disabled people in general, since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990. 

It is estimated that at least one in four American adults is living with one or more disabilities, and what’s more, disability is the one protected class that anyone can join at any time. Even the non-disabled are always a hair’s breadth away from becoming disabled—ask anyone who’s been in a bad motor vehicle accident. We are currently subject to a government made up of people who paint themselves as non-disabled (even though RFK Jr.—about whom more later—has a neurological condition called spasmodic dysphonia, which affects speech, so he really ought to know better than to discard disabled people). For the most part, those who currently lead our government don’t expect to become disabled (and they expect that if they do, their expensive private insurance will provide for them, and maybe they’ll still try to downplay it or keep it a secret). 

This administration is advancing a vision of humanity divided into immovable castes. We see evidence of this in its attitude towards immigrants, where entire swaths of humanity are painted as inherently “less than” white, cis-het, U.S. citizens, and are treated like criminals despite there being no supporting evidence. Similarly, the administration’s attitude towards disabled people is rooted in a vision of the disabled as inherently “less than” the non-disabled.

There are three major fronts of the current assault on disabled people under the second Trump administration: the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services; the creation of the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE); and the passage of the “Big Beautiful Bill.” Each of these actions is already harming the disabled community, and the assault has only just begun.

First, let’s examine the tenure thus far of our new Secretary of Health and Human Services. I would love to be able to write that RFK’s famous parasitic brain worm infection marked the beginning of his ill-informed public health crusades, because that’s a narrative that at least might suggest an orderly universe, but that would be far from the truth. RFK first rose to political prominence 20 years ago with the publication (simultaneously in both Salon and Rolling Stone) of the article “Deadly Immunity.” The article has long since been retracted by both publications and scrubbed from a wide variety of websites, even ones that still share its general anti-vaccine attitude.

Anti-vax attitudes and behaviors are a source of existential concern among the disability community. Disabled people are more likely to have preexisting conditions that may be exacerbated by the acquisition of a new illness, such as COVID-19, and are more likely to suffer adverse effects of such new illnesses. Studies show that the prevalence of Long COVID among disabled people is more than double that among non-disabled people, and disabled people are more likely to have difficulty acquiring vaccines themselves, even if they want to. As a result, disabled folks are among the most prominent pro-vaccine and pro-masking advocates. 

In “Deadly Immunity”, RFK argued that autism was likely being “caused” by thimerosal-based vaccines, and specifically the MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella) vaccine, recommended for children at the age of 12-15 months. He posed this article as a shocking exposé, describing government coverups at the highest level. This “discovery” was based on research from the late 1990s, by the now-discredited Andrew Wakefield, a man who has since lost his medical license and had the study in question retracted by the Lancet. Decades of subsequent research have indicated not only that there is no connection between any vaccine and the rise of autism diagnoses, but that the rise in autism diagnoses is likely due, in fact, to a combination of factors: the widening of diagnostic criteria to identify people who were previously missed in the count (but were no less autistic for being missed); the increasing late-life diagnoses of adults and particularly adult women, in whom symptoms present differently than the young male stereotype; and better training for medical professionals to help identify autism.

While the journal retracted the study (having found that Wakefield manipulated the data), the damage was done, and RFK amplified these specious claims to a much wider audience than Wakefield’s initial study was able to reach. He continued his crusade against the wildly effective MMR vaccine until March of this year, when he publicly changed his tune and endorsed the vaccine. This was essentially a panic response to the death of the first of two children in Texas in February, and one adult in New Mexico in early March—all unvaccinated. While belatedly endorsing the vaccine was the right thing to do, it doesn’t offset the impact of decades of Kennedy’s opposition to this lifesaving tool. Let’s compare the tone of his April statement endorsing the MMR vaccine (TL;DR corporate neutral) to the tone of his foreword to an anti-vaccine book published by Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit where he served as chair from 2015 to 2023:

The readers[…] will learn that they have been misled by the pharmaceutical industry and their captured government agency allies into believing that measles is a deadly disease and that measles vaccines are necessary, safe, and effective[…] Measles outbreaks have been fabricated to create fear that in turn forces government officials to ‘do something’.” [author’s emphasis]

(2021, The Measles Book: Thirty-Five Secrets the Government and the Media Aren’t Telling You About Measles and the Measles Vaccine, Children’s Health Defense)

The obvious: people are clearly killed by the measles, and the measles vaccine has been found to be approximately 97 percent effective at prevention with both doses. 

The bluntly obvious: The idea of outbreaks themselves being fabricated is being proven false all around us right now as measles continues to spread. 

RFK exploits the public’s reasonable assumption that the pharmaceutical industry is captive to profit and preciously secrets away proprietary data, and uses it to sow doubt about one of the greatest innovations in the history of Western medicine—the vaccine. He is absurdly voluble when he is wrong (the rest of that foreword is truly exhausting). But when he suggests science may be on to something, he speaks in press release form.

Autism remains a bugbear of RFK’s. On April 16 of this year, he held a press conference in which he described autistic children as “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.” He has referred to autism as both an “epidemic” and a “tragedy.” There are many things RFK gets wrong about this conversation, but the first is framing autism as an epidemic disease that needs “curing.”

No one argues that there is a percentage of autistic people who have profound difficulties with communication and normative social interaction, but the pathologizing of autism as a disease is itself a misunderstanding of what autistic activists have for many years been referring to as a difference. One of the reasons that autism is referred to as a “spectrum” is that the experience of autism is extremely different for different people. 

Beginning in the mid-1990s, Autism Network International, along with other autistic advocates, began to insist that autism not be seen as negative or a disease, but rather a difference that is turned into disability by society’s lack of understanding of how to interact with and support neurodiverse people. This eventually led to the rise of the neurodiversity movement, a political and social organizing strategy that includes people on the autism spectrum, with ADHD, with dyslexia/dyscalculia, and others whose brains function differently from the so-called “neurotypical.” What they and others have asserted is that there is nothing inherently wrong with them, but that their perceived disability—as is the case with physical disabilities—arises from lack of accommodation and understanding, not from their condition itself. 

RFK’s framing of autism as an epidemic takes a complex and diverse body of people and tells them that they are a problem to be “solved.” RFK has, in fact, claimed he will have studies that find the “cause of autism” by September of this year.

The facts tell a different story. As part of the Trump administration’s crusade against so-called “government waste,” historically large cuts have been made to the Department of Health and Human Services, which RFK oversees. Included among these cuts (which have been detailed at agonizing length here) are at least eight separate grants for research into the causes of autism. These grants included funding for a longitudinal study of brain development in autistic children, investigation into potential biomarkers for autism in women and nonbinary individuals (who historically have been under-diagnosed due to differences in presentation), and a study into potential environmental factors that may contribute to the formation of autism. That last one is especially rich: RFK is now championing environmental causes of autism as his bold new focus in finding a “cure,” after cutting funding for scientists already studying that very thing.

RFK would also like to create a database of all the nation’s autistic people—an act which has undeniable eugenic overtones. His statement of intent to create such a database has prevented many people I know personally from seeking a medical diagnosis for their autism, because—despite the fact that such a diagnosis might open up a range of insurance-covered supports—the idea of being on a government list of people that the state sees as a burden seems like a larger risk than remaining untreated.

We can easily disprove Kennedy’s assessment of the autistic population as perennially benighted. I have many “high functioning” autistic family and friends, as they were once termed, and I am neurodivergent (or “neurospicy” as many of us prefer). Aside from my personal experience, there are neurospicies everywhere—throughout the arts, entertainment, business, science, sports, and even politics. Even the self-proclaimed “DOGEfather”, Elon Musk, is neurodivergent (though I refuse to allocate neurospicy to Musk, since he is far too mundane an oligarch to be described with our word). RFK’s claims of trying to pin down the real origins of this “epidemic” are also demonstrably false. His narrative is predicated on the assumption that no one will have time to dig through the 75 dense pages of canceled grants at the CDC, NIH, and elsewhere—where you’d quickly find that both he and Musk have gutted funding for the very research they now pretend to champion. 

Elon himself is part of this push to culturally restigmatize disabled people. Musk is noted for his desire to “bring back” the use of the word “re—ded,” a slur which had fallen out of favor in recent years. A study showed that after Musk used the hurtful word one time in an X post this past January, its use tripled across the platform immediately. 

Musk is not just a man out to rage-bait disabled people, he’s also actively working against them. Many of the DOGE-related cuts to grants under RFK’s watch affect a range of disabled people. HHS has terminated funding for mRNA vaccine research, including research into new vaccines against the COVID-19 virus, the avian flu, and promising potential treatment for prostate cancer. These treatments, including some of the COVID-19 vaccines that have allowed many to return to a semblance of pre-pandemic normalcy (though the pandemic is still not really over), are some of the most promising medical developments of the last 40 years. Yet our government has seemingly directed researchers to remove all reference to mRNA vaccines from funding applications. Alongside this purge, RFK has also removed women and children from the COVID-19 vaccine schedule, an action which has (alongside many of the actions described in this article) sparked a lawsuit. Of course, the Supreme Court keepsblockinglower courts’ efforts to rein in the madness, so who knows what will come of this latest.

Beyond vaccines, Trump has made no secret of his desire to shutter the Department of Education and end all federal education funding. As part of this push, his administration has terminated a host of research grants centered on educational support for students with disabilities (and particularly learning disabilities). An executive order dated March 20 directs Linda McMahon, Secretary of Education, to “facilitate the closure of the Department of Education” and return sole control to the states. 

This bodes poorly for children with disabilities of any kind. States do not provision educational support for disabled children equally, and depending on where you live, you may soon find yourself far less able to access “special education.” A lot of support for disabled students has historically come from the federal government, but the “Big Beautiful Bill” calls for $677 million in cuts to special education, money which was allocated to personnel training and development, technology assistance, parental support, and more. This is around one-tenth of 1 percent of the annual federal budget: a drop in the bucket for the United States. The cuts will make no difference to federal budget balancing efforts, but will drastically impede the ability of disabled students to access education.

DOGE’s drive for “efficiency” has also resulted in the removal of several guidance documents hosted on government websites designed to help businesses achieve ADA compliance. Supporters of this takedown have argued that guidance is not law, and the ADA legal requirements have not been altered, but this means that in a climate where enforcing the ADA is already met with a host of challenges, it will now be even more difficult to ensure that buildings provide the bare minimum of access to disabled people. While the ADA has been a critically important piece of legislation, and has improved the lives of millions, it is undoubtedly a product of its time. In fact, many activists have long argued that the ADA is not enough. 

Consider the NYC subways, where only 113 of the 472 stations are accessible by wheelchair users (and people with other, less frequently considered mobility devices/needs). Add the fact that at any given time, nearly 10 percent of the elevators are out of service, and we can see that equitable access is a long way off. By contrast, consider Oslo, Norway, where all but one of the 105 Oslo Metro stations are wheelchair accessible, and where the Oslo Opera House was awarded a Council of Europe Accessibility Award in 2014. I spoke with the architects behind the Opera House design (Snøhetta), and asked what their approach to access was. They said “we simply followed the guide provided by our government, which is quite robust.”

Congress has recently passed, and President Trump has signed into law, the “Big Beautiful Bill.” This document is a massive tome, nearly 1,000 pages, and it contains a multitude of anti-disability efforts. We know that laws are often too long and convoluted for the average citizen to understand, and that at least some of the Republican lawmakers who voted in this garbage scow of a bill didn’t even read it. This certainly seems to be by design, but that issue aside, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities clearly lays out how damaging this bill will be for disabled people. Cuts to Social Security Administration staffing will impact timely payment of disability benefits, a life-threatening issue for people who depend on those funds for survival. Increased work requirements for both SNAP food benefits and Medicaid benefits pose particular threats for disabled people, who often cannot meet the work requirements—which is why they are on disability in the first place! Analysis varies, but a frequently cited CBO estimate projects that 11.8 million people may lose their Medicaid coverage, leaving them uninsured.

While our current government loves gutting the parts of our federal enterprise that collect accurate data, the data we do have are cause for alarm. Over one in five Medicaid recipients have at least one disability, and the percentage rises with age. 53 percent of Medicaid recipients above the age of 65 are disabled. More than one in three disabled people in the U.S. have Medicaid coverage (compared with 19 percent of the adult non-disabled population). Even at the conservative end, this means that an estimated 2.36 million disabled people are about to lose their medical insurance. Though Medicaid is a state program, a vast majority of the funding for most states comes from the federal government. Disabled people are already twice as likely to live in poverty as non-disabled people, and the removal of this Medicaid and SNAP funding “will kill poor people [and] disabled people,” in the words of activist Julie Farrar of ADAPT (American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today).

This all adds up to a picture of a heartless administration eager to throw disabled people under the short busin order to fund tax breaks for the richest Americans. Yet even if you support casting the marginalized aside, because you see them as firmly “other,” disability is the category of marginalized people that you are most likely to join. According to a study conducted by Pew Research, although at any given time roughly 13 percent of noninstitutionalized American adults report having a disability, the numbers increase steadily by age bracket, and those over 75 report disability at a rate of 46 percent. American Indians and Native Alaskans are the most likely racial demographics to be disabled, pointing to the intersection of disability and race—racism has typically resulted in health, wealth and access disparities more generally.

Further, statistics almost certainly under-report the quantity of disabled people, as some people will not self-identify as disabled. This may be for a variety of reasons, such as avoiding the related stigma or not wanting to be counted in a government database—but this is internalized ableism and it hurts us all. Many of us humans are disabled in one or more ways, many more will become so with age or injury, yet we are living through a vast and multi-tentacled dismantling of support for disabled people. This is an unconscionable abandonment of the most vulnerable among us, and it must be opposed at every avenue, with every strategy we can identify.

So, what do we do now? This assault on disabled people—and the arguably minimal provisions that provide them social supports for participation in the workplace, in schools, and in society more broadly—is ongoing. By the time this is published, there may well be more reductions in disability services that are soon to be announced, and I am certain there are reductions in service and research ongoing that I haven’t captured in this article. This has never been an easy nation to live in as a disabled person, but it has seldom been this aggressively antagonistic all at once. Even George W. Bush, no paragon of inclusion, pushed his administration to increase some disability access funding, and to more strictly enforce the ADA. 

As a disabled person(with a range of so-called “hidden disabilities” which are no less disabling for not being externally obvious), an active participant in disability justice circles, and a human being with a conscience, I find this moment to be deeply unjust, deeply sad, and ultimately dangerous for disabled people anywhere in the U.S. I am hardly alone—since Trump’s inauguration in January, the mood among the disability activists I know, work with, and read has been terrible, and the passage of the massive spending bill has only made things worse. 

That said, the disability justice community is used to being ignored, dismissed, and pushed aside. Still, we have continued to fight for equity and inclusion across social institutions. It famously took activists casting aside their wheelchairs and crawling up the Capitol steps to demonstrate the need for the ADA before George H.W. Bush signed it into law. We’ve had setbacks before, and we’ve continued fighting. 

We must avoid giving in to pessimism and despair. There is not one easy “fix” for disability access, just as there is no “cure” for autism. We are losing the federal battle right now, but that doesn’t mean other battles aren’t worth continuing to fight. There are a wide range of tangible approaches to increasing disability access, and we can keep working individually for them—in our communities, our school districts, our workplaces. There are extensive writings and tools available on disability access for web use, for building design, for educational practice, and for just about any area of contemporary life. It is beyond the scope of this article to go into detail about any of them, but the point is that by engaging with the vital task of providing access, of redesigning our systems and structures, we can help millions of people live fully-engaged lives within our society. We must do so with the famous disability activist phrase in mind: “nothing about us without us.” Otherwise, we risk the RFKs of the world taking up all the air in the room while they frame our existence as their “tragedy.” It has recently become measurably more challenging to fight these fights, but that’s why this is the time to rally more folks to our side and redouble our efforts.

The only other option is to follow the current administration’s lead and kick disabled people to the curb. It makes sense if your worldview sorts people into castes—with those who are not white, cisgender, heterosexual, non-disabled, and ideally biologically male at the top, and everyone else below—that you would decide to hurt millions of people who are just trying to live. After all, those people are “less-than.” Those people “should just die,” right? 

It is a heartless group of oligarchs that could consider any of these cuts in services, research, and support as anything other than what they are: an attack on disabled people. And if those oligarchs explicitly understand this as such an attack (and let’s be realistic, at least some of the people who voted for this monstrosity knew exactly what they were doing), then those are cruel, villainous people, who must be removed from positions of power as soon as possible.