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 shifting it to a block grant, they have tried firing most of the staff who enforce it.
A clear pathway for addressing these challenges can be seen in the Science of Reading Act, which seeks to align federal literacy funding with evidence-based practices “to ensure state literacy plans reflect these evidence-based approaches.” However, there is no “Science of Special Education” movement generating bipartisan legislation. There is no House committee unanimously passing a bill to strengthen IDEA’s core protections. Instead, there is silence — or worse, erosion.
States, meanwhile, are left holding the bag. Some have stepped up, investing state dollars to fill the federal gap. Others have not. The result is a patchwork of protections that varies wildly depending on where a child with a disability happens to live. This is precisely the inequity IDEA was designed to prevent. The staffing crisis compounds the challenge. Across the country, districts report critical shortages of special education teachers, school psychologists, speech-language pathologists, and related service providers. Caseloads have ballooned. Timelines for evaluations are missed. Individualized Education Programs are written but not implemented with fidelity. And in too many cases, the procedural protections that remain on paper have become aspirational rather than operational.
For families, the lived experience of special education in 2026 often feels like navigating a system designed to say no. Due process remains available in theory, but in practice, it is expensive, adversarial, and inaccessible to the families who need it most. The asymmetry of power between school districts and individual families has only grown as federal oversight has receded.
