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In 1959, a teenage Kitty Cone was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy. The daughter of a well-off military family, she discovered that her disability often worked against her family’s wealth and political connections. She attended five different high schools, including the posh Holton-Arms School where her cousins had to carry her up the stairs so she could attend classes. At the Mount Vernon Seminary in Washington, D.C., the headmistress imposed certain rules on Cone: She had to bathe in her housemother’s bathroom under the supervision of an adult even though she couldn’t get out of the unwieldy tub. She improvised and began taking baths in her dorm suite on her own power, but “that was considered disobedience,” she would later say. She also walked down to the hockey field, another infraction. The school expelled her, a decision that humiliated her even though she didn’t think of it as discrimination — and neither did the law.
The world outside the Mount Vernon Seminary was hardly more progressive. Public schools could, and often did, force students with disabilities into separate classes regardless of their abilities. Businesses were not usually accessible to them, and employers could refuse to hire them. Many were forced into institutions where some were sterilized against their will. Cone came of age in a society that preferred not to think of her at all or, when it did, sought to wipe her out altogether. But Cone, a gay woman in a wheelchair, never surrendered her expectations, or her humanity, to anyone. By the time President Richard Nixon signed the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 into law after vetoing it twice, she had become a professional organizer, and she would soon join the fight for disability rights.
Section 504 of the act barred publicly-funded entities from discriminating against people with disabilities. Yet by 1977, the federal government had not developed the regulations that would allow it to fully implement the law, which forced activists to take dramatic measures. That April, they launched nationwide sit-ins at the offices of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Cone and roughly 100 other demonstrators occupied HEW’s regional office in San Francisco for nearly a month, an effort that may have failed were it not for the participation of Brad Lomax, a member of the Black Panther Party who had multiple sclerosis. The Panthers kept the demonstrators fed, covered the protest in their official newspaper, and paid for Lomax and his attendant to join Cone and others in Washington, D.C., where they confronted top HEW officials. “We will no longer allow the government to oppress disabled individuals. We want the law enforced,” the prominent disability-rights activist Judith Heumann told one representative. HEW secretary Joseph Califano Jr. signed the regulations in the following weeks.
Lomax died a few years later, and as one contemporary would later tell the New York Times, “I don’t think that all of his aspirations were fulfilled, even after the demonstration. He really wanted more.” So did the disability-rights movement. In 1990, more than 1,000 activists descended upon Washington to demand passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act, which banned discrimination in employment on the basis of disability and expanded protections for the disabled in most areas of public life. After a speech, many climbed out of their wheelchairs or cast aside their assistive devices to pull themselves up the steps of the Capitol. The Capitol Crawl was strenuous, and activist Jennifer Keelan-Chaffins remembered years later that she had to stop several times so she could ask for water. Her mother, Cynthia, was arrested the next day as part of a mass demonstration in the Capitol Rotunda. The ADA passed shortly thereafter and President George H.W. Bush signed it into law that July. In a speech, he cited the Civil Rights Act of 1964, adding, “Today’s legislation brings us closer to that day when no Americans will ever again be deprived of their basic guarantee of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Thirty-five years later, the Trump administration has disability rights in its sights. The eradication of so-called “DEI” programs has already reduced accessibility for people with disabilities, as the White House itself made clear in an announcement earlier this month. Trump, it said, had signed a memo removing the “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” precept concerning tenure and promotion within the U.S. Foreign Service. Last week, the Department of Justice removed 11 guidelines that helped businesses comply with the ADA’s public-accommodations requirements. Though the requirements are still in effect, and Trump cannot overturn the ADA by fiat, the news is a warning. The president doesn’t have the constitutional authority to dismantle the Department of Education, either, but he’s ordered the firings of thousands of workers. “I don’t think most Americans recognize how much the Department of Education does for disabled students,” Jess Davidson of the American Association for People With Disabilities tells me. Many of the fired workers handled civil-rights investigations and, Davidson says, without them, disabled students “will fall through the cracks” and potentially suffer abuse.
Trump claimed earlier this month that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who heads the Department of Health and Human Services and who incorrectly believes that vaccines cause autism, would now oversee “special needs and all of the nutrition programs and everything else.” Nobody knows what exactly that means, and Trump may not, either, but students, parents, and activists all fear cuts to services and the erosion of basic protections that are guaranteed by laws like the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. As the ACLU warned in a recent explainer on its website, “Without the department to enforce these protections, millions of students who rely on IDEA for necessary accommodations, such as specialized instruction and assistive technology, are at risk of losing access to the education they are legally entitled to receive.”
Millions of Americans who cannot work due to their disabilities receive Social Security benefits and they, too, are under threat. Cuts to the Social Security Administration have already led to crashing websites and long wait times as seniors and people with disabilities struggle to reach workers about their benefits. Some field offices have closed, and workers told the Washington Post that they often don’t have the time or the staffing necessary to process complicated benefit cases with any efficiency. Millions of people with disabilities also rely on Medicaid for health-care coverage and in-home care, but proposed spending cuts by Republican lawmakers would jeopardize that lifeline.
Even Section 504 may be in danger. Seventeen Republican-led states sued the Biden administration last year, arguing that updated Section 504 guidelines distorted federal law in order to define gender dysphoria as a disability. The truth is more complicated, says Alison Barkoff, a law professor at George Washington University who helped update the policy. Although the preamble to the new regulations say that gender dysphoria may be considered a disability based on a 2022 ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, the updated rule itself does not mention the condition, a fact that Republican states have ignored in favor of a sweeping demand. “They went on and said, ‘Declare Section 504 unconstitutional,’” Barkoff says. “It’s really breathtaking.” The lawsuit is on pause for now, she adds, but the states have not dropped it, either.
Though the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act had bipartisan support and were signed by Republican presidents, it’s hard to imagine Trump signing either piece of legislation. A more ruthless strain of conservatism always percolated within the party, and now it dominates and threatens the protections that Cone, and Lomax, and so many others once fought to win. At risk is the concept of civil rights itself.
By the time I was born in 1988, Section 504 had been in place for over a decade and the ADA wasn’t far away. When I began suffering from severe depression at the age of 15, it occurred to me, dimly, that my Christian high school should help me. My parents are conservative, but they sent me to a real psychiatrist. The school was less amenable. When teachers or classmates talked about depression at all, it was to say that any teenager thus afflicted should depend on prayer and preaching, not medication or psychology. The school later expelled me despite my clean disciplinary record, and I could hardly believe my bad luck; I thought my brothers and sisters in Christ would care for me no matter what was going on in my brain. I had never heard of Cone or the disability-rights movement, but the expulsion radicalized me in its own way. This, I thought, was discrimination.
After my expulsion, I ended up at a public high school. There, I had something called a “504 plan,” or a set of accommodations undergirded by the Rehabilitation Act, which gave me extra time on assignments and the ability to leave the classroom for short breaks. I was able to graduate and go to college, but I chose a Christian university, and when I was diagnosed with a genetic blood disease during my junior year, I realized that I didn’t want to tell anyone on campus. I’d grown up hearing about Joni Eareckson Tada, a popular Evangelical author and speaker who became a quadriplegic after a diving accident and who campaigns against abortion rights, embryonic-stem-cell research, and IVF. If she was the model, my prospects were limited; I could only be a mascot, not a person. It is a truism to say that the anti-abortion movement wants people like me to be born and will not care for us after the fact, but the argument lingers because it is mostly accurate. I could not pray my way out of a genetic disease — I found no spiritual meaning in it whatsoever. Instead, I had material needs, and the conservative world I lived in told me I had no right to need anything at all. Not health care, not paid sick leave, not even a high-school education.
Some conservative Christians profess what they call a “consistent ethic of life,” which calls for a more robust welfare state in addition to bans on abortion. But they have always been outliers, often within their own churches. Religious schools like the one I attended can discriminate against disabled students because Evangelicals lobbied for an exemption from the ADA. They wanted — and won — the right to bar children and adults with HIV or AIDS from their day cares, schools, and sanctuaries, a carve-out that applies to anyone with a disability. Then there was the matter of finances. Evangelicals, sounding much like secular business owners, said it was simply too expensive to make churches and religious schools accessible to people with disabilities.
The idea that disabled people might need too much, cost too much, and drain resources better allocated elsewhere is much older than the fight over the ADA, and it has not always been limited to the right wing. Years on, the bipartisan popularity of that basic concern gives it staying power. When Nixon signed the Rehabilitation Act in 1973, he spoke of the need for “fiscal discipline” and “self-sufficiency.” In 1977, Cone and her fellow activists learned that Carter officials had not yet implemented Section 504 in part because they feared the expense. They believed the regulations “just went too far,” she said in an oral history collected in the late 1990s.
Evangelicals would thrill, later, to the “compassionate conservatism” of George W. Bush, who said that the government should have an active role in American life while cutting the very taxes that helped fund it. To Bush and his allies, economic efficiency and benevolent social policy were not inherently at odds, but even their limited vision of charity would soon fall decidedly out of fashion within the GOP. The Tea Party gunslingers had no interest in compassion at all. In 2015, the year Cone died, Trump was taking over the GOP and a decade later, the efforts of conservatives like Eareckson Tada, who lobbied for the ADA, almost look quaint. The day belongs to Trump, who reportedly once said of the disabled, “The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.”
A commitment to laissez-faire economics does not make a person a social Darwinist by default, and the term has been popularized by critics to discredit various economic and social theories over the years of its popular use, as the scholar Robert Bannister observed. No one calls themselves a social Darwinist, either, not even Trump’s lieutenant Elon Musk, but the latter’s obsession with efficient public spending and the heritability of IQ provoke bleak comparisons. The historian Richard Hofstadter argued in 1944 that American businessmen saw in Darwin’s theory an opportunity to justify the widespread inequality that enriched them: They had wealth not because of exploitation or greed but because they deserved it. “If the fittest are to be allowed to survive, if the benefits of efficient management are to be available to society, the captains of industry must be paid for their unique organizing talent,” Hofstadter wrote. Those attitudes persist into the 21st century.
After Trump first took office, House Republicans introduced a bill that would have made it more difficult to sue businesses for violating the ADA. It failed, but the party wasn’t finished. Later the same year, Republicans attempted to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act with a bill that would have provided weaker benefits to people with “preexisting conditions,” which sparked dramatic protests from members of ADAPT, a disability-rights group. That bill failed, too, but it belonged to a trend. Keelan-Chaffins, who participated in the Capitol Crawl, said in 2020 that “I kind of feel like we’ve stepped backward a bit,” and her mother added that people “just kind of feel like they don’t have to comply” with the ADA anymore. During the height of COVID, Republican politicians and conservative billionaires like Tim Dunn of Texas urged the Trump administration to prioritize the economy while, in Dunn’s words, allowing the “at-risk population” to “take extreme precautions with support from their communities,” not the government. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce complains that “abusive” ADA lawsuits unfairly penalize small-business owners. In most states, it’s still legal for businesses to pay disabled workers a subminimum wage.
The reelection of Trump brought us DOGE, and as Elon Musk and his young engineers search for fraud, they spin a familiar tale: Where there is need, there must be waste. Musk has claimed, falsely, that “millions” of dead people are receiving Social Security benefits. Kathleen Romig, the director of Social Security and disability policy at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, tells me that the Social Security Administration’s payment accuracy rate is over 99 percent, and when errors do happen, they’re often caused by paperwork delays. Disabled people who receive benefits aren’t living in luxury, either. Many fall into the “poverty trap,” which happens when “the rules of a program inhibit a person’s opportunities either to work or to otherwise get out of poverty,” Romig explains. To qualify for Supplemental Security Income, an individual with disabilities is subject to an asset limit of $2,000. “And the moment you go over $2,000, if you have $2,500 in your account or something, you lose access to your whole benefit,” she adds. The asset limit has not been updated since 1989. “I think it is very much a poverty threat because there’s a lot of research now on how having at least some kind of financial cushion, or an emergency fund, can really help your situation from spiraling out of control and keep you at a subsistence level of existence,” she says.
Social Security and Medicaid are popular with voters, but the disabled among them remain vulnerable to the GOP’s social Darwinists. Zoe Gross, director of advocacy for the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, says that Medicaid cuts could threaten the program’s home- and community-based services, which often covers personal and home care for people with disabilities, depending on the state. Most people don’t want to live in a residential or institutional setting, Gross explains. “They’ll be cut off from their communities,” she says. “There’s more abuse in those settings than in community settings, and you just lose a lot of autonomy and choice in your life if you’re put in a residential setting.” That independence is now at risk. “So if states get a big Medicaid cut, like a cut to how much the federal government is giving them to spend on Medicaid, the first place states will cut their own Medicaid spending is HCBS,” she adds, which would jeopardize “one of the most important services the government provides autistic people.”
The Medicaid cuts as proposed may fund tax breaks for corporations and wealthy households, which the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute recently described as “the clearest legislative priority of the Trump administration and the Republican congressional majority.” There are moral implications to any economic policy, and the abrogation of basic rights and care would plunge millions into uncertainty.
ASAN, in a bid to prevent that possibility from coming to pass, is lobbying members of Congress against Medicaid cuts and the Trump administration’s mass layoffs of government workers. “We’re also doing a lot of work to try to empower our community to get more involved in policy,” Gross says. The organization is creating plain-language guides that explain complex policy topics and offers guidelines and scripts that help autistic people contact their representatives. “A lot of autistic people struggle with speaking on the phone or may not be able to speak at all,” she says, so ASAN provides proxy calling where a person will craft the message they want to deliver, and a volunteer places the call for them. “Phone calls are really prioritized over emails and text-based communications in terms of just how Congress works,” she explains. “That’s the way that we’re trying to make sure that all of our grassroots can have their voices heard.”
Hours before I spoke to Gross, the Washington Post reported that RFK Jr. had hired David Geier to lead a new government study into the debunked link between vaccines and autism. Geier was disciplined by Maryland regulators in 2011 for practicing medicine without a license, which has not stopped Kennedy from citing his dubious research as part of a crusade against vaccines. But Geier’s problems are far more extensive than his retracted studies. He and his father, Mark, who lost his Maryland medical license in 2012, built a laboratory in their basement and injected autistic children with a prostate cancer drug for years, a treatment they falsely billed as a cure. “The fact that this person has been appointed to run this study just shows that they’re going to really put their thumb on the scale in terms of the results of this study, and that’s going to be terrible for vaccine hesitancy in this country, and people will die as a result,” Gross tells me.
Yet the Trump administration and its supporters deny the stakes of their policies. By eliminating “DEI,” they are defending merit; by elevating Geier, or Kennedy himself, they make America healthy again. When they use slurs, they simply exercise their free speech, and anyone who objects is a snowflake. Musk said he is autistic, but he likes to call his critics “retards,” and he is not alone. As one anonymous banker told the Financial Times last year, “I feel liberated. We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting canceled.”
Slurs are more than hot air, and Musk uses them to reinforce a revanchist strategy that is as material as it is semantic. Disabled Americans already had to worry about the poverty trap, and now a far-right billionaire wants to kick millions off the socioeconomic ladder into darkness. That he does so while complaining of anti-white bias is no coincidence. Black Americans are likelier than white Americans to have a disability, owing to structural inequalities that Musk and the Trump administration are poised to exacerbate — by design. Lomax, a Black disabled man, spent much of his short life fighting a version of America that is not so distant. To the right wing, “DEI is less ‘white fragility’ and silly posters about ‘white-supremacy culture’ than it is the mere presence of a woman or nonwhite person or disabled or transgender person in any high-skilled, high-status position,” Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times wrote. “And their alternative isn’t some heretofore unknown standard of merit; it is the reintroduction of something like segregation.” Today’s war on disabled people is part of a much older campaign against civil rights for all minorities.
The integration of people with disabilities into American life only became possible through the restructuring of a hostile society. Autonomy, for the disabled, is not defined by the absence of need but the pursuit of liberation, which means it is about power. It is, as Davidson of the AAPD tells me, “about treating us like human beings.” She adds that we “deserve to be able to speak for ourselves in whatever way we can, for our essential human nature and human desire, to have control over our lives as much as possible to be recognized by the world around us.” Her comment reminded me of a speech by Cone, who, after the 504 sit-in, said that activists had “written a new page in American history.”
“We showed strength and courage and power and commitment,” Cone recalled, adding “that we the shut-ins, or the shut-outs, we the hidden, supposedly the frail and the weak, that we can wage a struggle at the highest level of government and win.” Perhaps it’s time to write another page.
