In The Politics of Autism, I write about social services, special education, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). The original name of the legislation was the Education for All Handicapped Children Act.
Project 2025 proposed to turn IDEA into a "no strings" block grant, effectively gutting the law and destroying protections that disability families have long relied upon. During the 2024 race, Trump denied any connection to the project, but now he proclaims it, praising OMB director Russ Vought "of Project 2025 fame."
Trump and Vought are now accomplishing their goal of ravaging the law. Instead of shifting it to a block grant, they have tried firing most of the staff who enforce it.
President Gerald Ford signed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act into law on November 29, 1975. It mandated that all children with any form of disability must be provided a free public education and that they be educated alongside children without disabilities “to the maximum extent appropriate.” This landmark legislation has improved the lives of generations of children with disabilities. In 1970, only one in five children with disabilities was educated in America’s public schools. Some states had laws explicitly excluding those whom schools deemed “uneducable.” Many of those children spent their lives in institutions. Others were homeschooled or received very little formal education at all. Today, 15 percent of public-school students are served by the law, which was reauthorized and renamed the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act in 1990.
Although a right to an education is not explicitly guaranteed in the Constitution, the Fourteenth Amendment established that no state can “deny to any person within its jurisdiction equal protection of the laws.” IDEA is an effort to uphold that guarantee. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 called for the racial integration of public schools and other institutions, but it left disability discrimination unaddressed. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 did not require states to educate students with disabilities; it did, however, establish funding grants to states that provided services. The Education of the Handicapped Act of 1970 solidified the core grant program that provides funding to states and school districts and is still part of IDEA today. What is remarkable about IDEA is that it combined tenets from all these precedents. IDEA isn’t just a declaration of the right of students with disabilities to an education. It’s also a funding policy—a shared financial partnership among federal, state, and local governments—to provide an appropriate public education to all students with disabilities.
