In The Politics of Autism, I write about social services, special education, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education 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 turning it into a block grant, they have tried firing most of the staff who enforce it. More recently, they have shifted OSERS to HHS and OCR to the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, headed by a political hack who uses the r-word as a slur.
Jerell Hill, dean of student services at Los Angeles City College, at Education Week:
On June 16, the U.S. Department of Education announced agreements moving special education oversight to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and shifting civil rights enforcement to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Education Department officials moved quickly to reassure families: The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act still stands. Individualized education programs will continue. The right to a free, appropriate public education remains intact.
I spent years as a regional director of special education. I know what oversight actually does and I know why “nothing will change” is the wrong thing to celebrate.
Oversight is the bridge between a right written on paper and a child’s ordinary Tuesday. The monitoring visits, the annual performance determinations, the technical assistance, the accountability no parent ever sees: That machinery is how a federal guarantee first enshrined in 1975 becomes an education for a real student today. When it works, a family never has to think about it. When it fails, a child loses a year they do not get back.
So, the question is not whether the law survives this reorganization. The question is what happens to the meaning underneath the law when the file moves between federal agencies and the complaint routes through a courtroom.
Here is my worry, and it is not a partisan one. Housing special education inside HHS invites a subtle reframing. It nudges us toward seeing a child as a diagnosis to manage rather than a learner whose potential the system exists to develop. Special education was won as an educational right. We can’t allow it to be redefined as a medical service.
“The DOJ Civil Rights Division’s [Educational Opportunities] Section has lost most of its attorneys under this administration because the department made it clear that it was not interested in doing the traditional work the section had done combating discrimination in education,” said Stacey Young, a former DOJ Civil Division senior attorney who leads Justice Connection, a group of former department employees advocating against the Trump administration’s changes to the agency.
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Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights, has said her agency will no longer be just the endpoint for the process.
“We’re taking it all in-house for the Department of Education, and doing that work for them, from soup to nuts,” she told “The Glenn Beck Program.”“Of course, they have the ultimate authority at the end of the day by statute, but 99 percent of the work is going to be done here.”
But advocates have expressed concerns that the DOJ has typically been very selective about what cases it takes up and that many complaints could fall through the cracks.
“OCR receives thousands of complaints of discrimination a year and they have the resources to better handle that volume of incoming complaints,” Young said. “DOJ just doesn’t have the same capacity. They don’t have enough lawyers and investigators, and that’s not what the lawyers and investigators they do have are trained to do.”
