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.
Coordination has always been a problem for disability programs. These changes will make it worse.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon has already launched plans to transfer her department’s elementary, technical and international programs to other agencies. So far, she hasn’t moved to offload the special education programs, which are required by a 50-year-old federal law. But officials have declined to rule out transferring them in the future. That worries advocates who say the move could undermine the federal government’s ability to guarantee children with disabilities get the education they are legally entitled to receive.
“While everything isn’t perfect, and many families still struggle to obtain what their children need, we’ve made huge progress in the last 50 years, and we can’t allow the clock to be turned back,” said Stephanie Smith Lee, who served as director of the Office of Special Education Programs under former President George W. Bush.
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But states would still be responsible for following the law even if they can’t get as much help from a special education office that moves to another agency that lacks expertise or has to operate with fewer employees.
“Individualized education plans aren’t going away, so the impact on students and local schools is not going to be felt today or tomorrow, but this is going to be a definite eroding of our entire system of special education,” said Smith Lee, policy and advocacy co-director at the National Down Syndrome Congress.
And siloing off the special education office from the Office of Civil Rights, which investigates discrimination complaints, and from the agency’s K-12 offices, whose administration was moved to the Labor Department as part of the new plans, could dampen coordination. Smith Lee said it’s taken years to get the department’s K-12 offices focused on general education and the department’s special education offices to work together.
“This is breaking up the collaboration that has taken decades to achieve,” Smith Lee said.
