In The Politics of Autism, I write about social services, special education and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 7.5 million children 3 to 21 years old received services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in AY 2022-23.
About 980,000 of them were autistic, up from 498,000 in 2012-13.
Buried deep inside Project 2025 is a bombshell that has gotten little attention: a radical proposal that threatens the education and future of millions of students with disabilities.
Right now, a kid with a disability such as autism can get an individualized, school-based set of services, including speech therapy, physical therapy, and occupational therapy. But under Project 2025 this set of services could go away.
You can find the proposal on page 326 of the Project 2025 transition playbook. It lays out an extreme change to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA): “Most IDEA funding should be converted into a no-strings formula block grant targeted at students with disabilities and distributed directly to local education agencies by Health and Human Service’s [sic] Administration for Community Living.”
That one sentence could upend lives and send students with disabilities backward a half-century.
To understand why it is so dangerous, consider the background of IDEA. This law provides federal funding for the education of children with disabilities; states that receive the funds must offer a free, appropriate public education to each eligible child. Before IDEA, public schools excluded about 1.8 million children with disabilities and gave only negligible help to millions more.
In the 49 years since the law’s passage, parents have fought for regulations and judicial rulings that shore up IDEA’s protections for their children. For instance, when a school district said that it only had to offer minimal services to an autistic student, his parents fought back. The Supreme Court agreed with them, ruling that IDEA required the district to do better than rock bottom.
Because of such advocacy, some 7.5 million students today receive individualized services. The system is far from perfect, but for many Americans, it has opened the door to fulfilling lives and productive careers. It’s good for students with disabilities, their families, and nearly every community.
Unlike the Americans with Disabilities Act, however, IDEA is not a civil rights law that applies across the board. Its requirements are conditions of federal aid — also known as “strings.”
When you cut the strings, you gut the law.
That is why the Project 2025 proposal is so reckless. This proposal doesn’t just threaten special education; it signals a broader assault on the federal protections that have safeguarded the rights of millions of vulnerable Americans for generations.
Parents have learned the hard way that they can seldom get the services their kids need unless they can cite a legal requirement — and even then, they’ve learned that relentless pressure is necessary to get their kids a fair shake.
Since 1980, the US Department of Education has overseen the implementation of IDEA. Project 2025 would shift that job to another department because it also proposes to eliminate the Department of Education. Let that sink in.
Trumpists insist the former president has nothing to do with this risky scheme. And now that people have started raising alarms about other aspects of Project 2025, he is denying any connection to it — which rings hollow with recent reporting on Trump’s embrace of Project 2025 before it was in the media spotlight.
In his denials, Trump sounds like a guilty defendant on Paternity Court.
No matter what he says about Project 2025 now, his political DNA is all over it: at least 140 people who worked in his administration also took part in drafting the document, and Trump himself was happy to rub elbows with the man behind it on at least one private jet.
Trump has not proposed any other IDEA agenda. His skimpy platform does not even mention the word disability. If Trump wins the 2024 election, Project 2025 will fill in the blanks.
Does Trump care that this proposal would endanger special education? Not likely. Trump has always despised people with disabilities. In talk show interviews, he repeatedly used the r-word — and Lordy, there are tapes. His former chief of staff confirmed last year that he did not want photographs with military amputees, complaining, “It doesn’t look good for me.” His cruel imitation of a disabled reporter became infamous during the 2016 campaign. And according to a recent account by his nephew, he has said that severely disabled people should “just die.”
Trump may dodge, deflect, and deny, but one truth is clear: his agenda lacks any compassion for the millions of students with disabilities for whom IDEA is a key contributor to supporting their education and their future.
