The Precarity of Disability Rights Historically and in the Trump Administration

Abstract

The United States is experiencing an attack on disability rights unprecedented since the emergence of the modern Disability Rights Movement. This paper examines the various ways in which disability rights have been undercut in 2025. To do so, I provide a theoretical framework based in rights theory to reveal the precarity of disability rights and the strategy behind the actions taken by the Trump administration. I examine four key strategies to undercut disability rights: constructing disabled people as unworthy of the status of rights-bearer, constructing threats and conflicts across rights, dismantling the infrastructure of positive rights, and rejecting the value of disability rights across relational sites. Moreover, I argue that in part the effectiveness of contemporary attacks are deeply related to American history, because disability rights have always been contentious and left vulnerable to attack.

1. Introduction

History will show the first six months of the second Trump administration as an all-out war against disabled people. From executive orders intended to roll back civil rights protections to legislation that cuts key services and support, the disability community has faced structural violence in the form of federal policy.

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Coalescing into a national movement in the 1970s, disabled activists and their allies achieved remarkable successes in establishing disability rights [2,3]. Some highlights of these successes included national legislation such as Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, the 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA); court victories such as Olmstead v. L.C. (1999) [4], which mandated the delivery of services in the community as appropriate; widespread policy changes including the movement towards de-institutionalization and increasing funding via Medicaid for community-based services; and positive changs in attitudes related to disabled people. These achievements, however, were met with resistance. As noted by sociologist David Pettinicchio (2019) [5], disability policy cycles through relatively predictable movements of progress and backlash. For example, despite promised funding for special education in IDEA, federal payments never met the promised amount [6]. Recurrent threats to Medicaid necessitated activism several times, such as in 2017 when the first Trump administration proposed cuts to roll back funding for Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. Grassroots activists in ADAPT organized a “die-in” at the Senate office buildings, leading to 43 arrests [7], and parent groups canvassed Capitol Hill to directly bring stories of the importance of Medicaid [8]. The rights of people with disabilities also have been undercut via a host of “anomalous practices” [9] (p. 5), in which everyday actors like employers resist the intent of disability laws and block progress towards disability inclusion and empowerment.

Disabled activists quickly discovered that passage of a law or policy was only a stage of activism, and they would have to fiercely protect each political success. During the second Trump administration, though, disabled activists and their allies have faced a series of attacks on disability rights unprecedented since the emergence of the modern Disability Rights Movement. The Trump Administration has sought to undercut key civil rights laws, defund and de-staff vital offices and programs, reduce and block access to public healthcare and safety net programs, and de-legitimize efforts to foster inclusion, diversity, and access. The speed, breadth, and depth of proposed cuts and changes have been dramatic, marking a clear shift from past administrations.

This paper examines the various ways in which disability rights were undercut in 2025. To do so, I provide a theoretical framework based in rights theory to reveal the precarity of disability rights and the strategy behind the actions taken by the Trump administration. Moreover, I argue that in part the effectiveness of the attacks were rooted in American history, because disability rights have always been contentious and left open to attack.

2. Re-Constituting Exclusion

Rights constitute a resource, primarily of citizens but not exclusively, which provide a tool to be used to influence others, pursue one’s interests, and mark one as a respected member of the community. As noted by legal philosopher William Edmundson, “rights serve to endow individuals with a kind of “moral armor” protecting them from encroachments by political authority” and bestow the moral “breathing room” in which individuals may pursue their interests [10]. Yet, not all citizens have access to the same package of rights or receive the same utility from them. Disabled people continue to live on the margins of citizenship, experiencing tenuous and ambiguous rights at best [11,12,13]. Why, more than fifty years after the emergence of the Disability Rights Movement, do disability rights remain so precarious? And how has the Trump Administration utilized this precarity to further undercut disability rights? This paper proceeds through four strategies used to undercut disability rights, including constructing disabled people as unworthy of the status of rights-bearer, constructing a sense of threat and conflicts over rights, dismantling the infrastructure for positive rights, and encouraging a culture and relational power structure in which disability rights can be, and should be, invalidated.

2.1. Constructing Disabled People as Unworthy of the Status of Rights-Bearer

Rights are built upon continuously shifting meaning systems that incorporate various, and at times conflicting, norms, values, and relational expectations. In building these meanings related to rights, political actors draw on several narratives or political fictions that offer overarching frameworks describing moral rationales for rights, the required traits of rights bearers, and the expected social relationships among rights-bearers, non-rights-bearers, and the state [12]. Historically and in contemporary times, disabled people are vulnerable to constructions that position them as unworthy of rights and best placed under the control of others [14,15,16].

Liberal political philosophy is the dominant narrative guiding American law on rights. In this narrative, rationality and autonomy (i.e., freedom from dependence) are presented as essential criteria for the exercise of rights [17]; only a free and rational person can make truly independent decisions in pursuit of their own interests and understand the implications and consequences of their decisions. The law, therefore, developed distinct legal tracks, one for persons deemed rational and autonomous who became legal equals and gained a host of civil rights, and another for persons deemed irrational and dependent who received care and protection rather than rights [18,19]. Historically, people with intellectual and mental disabilities, people with other disabilities that limited their economic and social self-sufficiency, and people associated via ideology with inferior intellectual capacity and dependence such as women, indigenous peoples, and slaves, were deemed unworthy of rights.

For example, one of the earliest American poor laws, the 1693 Act for the Relief of Ideots and Distracted Person, passed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony, enabled town authorities to identify incompetent persons, designate them as a ward of the colony, remove their rights, place them under a system of care, and use their assets towards their care [20,21]. Alongside the possibility of protecting people with disabilities, though, guardianship exposed them to potential abuse, neglect, and financial exploitation. Massachusetts legislators later, in 1821, excluded people under guardianship from voting [22]. Deemed incompetent, without rights or a political voice, people under guardianship had little power to challenge their own exclusion or abuse. Thus, the removal of rights on the basis of perceived deficits in intelligence and rationality was established early in American history as normative. Furthermore, as ableism intertwines with other systems of oppression [23], charges of incompetence paired with guardianship could be used to disempower vulnerable populations, such as in 1921 when the U.S. Congress placed “any individual who was more than half “Indian blood” or an Osage minor” under guardianship until they could prove their financial competency, while granting white people control of Osage wealth and thereby their lives [24].

In their fight for civil rights, disabled activists fought to be seen as rational and intelligent. College educated activists such as Ed Roberts and Judy Huemann were among the early leaders of the disability rights movement. Their exclusion was more easily framed as discrimination because they were so clearly intellectually capable. Ed Roberts, for example, recalled the injustice when high school administrators attempted to deny him a diploma due to his failure to complete the driver’s education requirement, stating, “I was the number two student in school, and I’d done all my academic requirements” [25]. Leaders demanded that their capacities be recognized and that disabled people be given control over their lives [26,27]. These arguments were powerful, yet largely retained the criteria of intelligence and rationality. Those who could be productive were granted civil rights, while many others, particularly those with intellectual and mental disabilities and those who failed to meet ableist expectations of production, continued to be cast as dependent burdens, unworthy of civil rights and best placed in paternalistic systems [28].

Since the Disability Rights Movement, images of both the competence and incompetence of disabled people have been bandied about by various parties for political gain. Since 2025, however, the Trump administration has sounded dire warnings of the incompetence, and associated social burden, of disability, issuing some of the most negative rhetoric about disability since eugenics was in full bloom. For example, in his first press conference as Secretary of Health and Human Services on the 16^th of April 2025, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. focused the entire press conference exclusively on the incompetence and social burden associated with the “epidemic” of autism and the need to cure it. Describing people with autism, he stated, “And most cases now are severe. So about 25% of the kids who are diagnosed with autism are nonverbal, non-toilet trained, and have other stereotypical features, headbanging, tactile and light sensitivities, stimming, toe-locking, et cetera.” Describing the social impact, he said, “Autism destroys families. More importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which are our children. These are children who should not be suffering like this. These are kids who, many of them, were fully functional and regressed because of some environmental exposure into autism when they were two years old, and these are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted, and we have to recognize we are doing this to our children, and we need to put an end to it” [29].

Raising awareness of the significant challenges faced by people with disabilities could be useful in fostering empathy and advocating supports and rights. Instead, Kennedy’s remarks do the opposite. First, he fails to acknowledge that, using his own figures, 75% of people with autism may hold jobs, toilet themselves, and are, to use his wording, “fully functional.” As he discusses the burden of autism, he erases the contributions of autistic people and their potential contributions if given support and accommodations. Second, he offers no acknowledgement of the potential skills and contributions of people with significant support needs, such as people who are nonverbal, who stim, or who need assistance with toileting. DJ Savarese, for example, is a nonspeaking autistic writer, scholar, and activist who graduated from Oberlin College and has won writing awards [30]. Third, Kennedy’s focus on those who need significant support is not a call for support at all. Rather, he and the Trump administration tout weak scientific claims about vaccines, Tylenol, and the hope of B9, combined with massive spending on testing and research, to prioritize the goals of prevention, cure, and eradication while undercutting the IDEA, Medicaid funding for community supports, and disability rights. This rhetoric of medicalization positions people with autism as a burden to society best eradicated, increasing the fear of and stigma against autism [31]. It channels money towards researchers and medical professionals in the hopes of some future cure, rather than funding the supports and rights needed by people with autism in their lives now. It proposes cure as a solution, rather than rights and inclusion. Medical research and the provision of social support do not need to be mutually exclusive, but they often exist in tension. The medical model tends to value, and indeed demand, normative bodies, leading too often to the perception of people with disabilities as deficient, the imposition of compulsory able-bodiedness, and the exclusion of those deemed incurable and deficient [32]. In Kennedy’s rhetoric, we see not just a tension, but the clear preference of a medical approach alongside the cutting of supports and rights (I will more clearly show the cuts in later sections of the paper).

In contrast with Kennedy’s approach, autistic activists argue that the best strategy, especially for people with significant support needs, relies on a combination of civil rights and community-based services. Writing in response to Kennedy’s press conference, the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network (ASAN) wrote:

RFK Jr. works for a government that makes choices that hurt autistic people. The government is trying to cut Medicaid and get rid of the Department of Education. Medicaid is what makes home and community-based services possible for most people. The Department of Education is what makes sure accommodations are followed in school. They are supposed to be who steps in if someone reports discrimination against disabled students. RFK Jr. also fired many people who worked at HHS. Now, he is also trying to change the structure of HHS to cut many important projects. This would make it so important health programs get shut down. The work to help more people get an autism diagnosis would get shut down. If less people get diagnosed because of this, it is not because fewer autistic people exist. It is because the government took away the money to help make better diagnosis tools. Fewer autistic people exist on paper when you take away the tools that let us be seen”.

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People with autism are by no means the only population dehumanized. Kennedy claimed autism “dwarfs the COVID epidemic and the impacts on our country because COVID killed old people” [34]. Here he diminishes the harm of COVID—an actual epidemic—by describing the bulk of deaths of older—and disproportionately disabled—people as acceptable losses to our nation. This echoes eugenic ideals of survival of the fittest.

The political right also blatantly mocks and insults disabled people and has reclaimed the term “retarded” as a slur, despite the work of self-advocates to End the “R-Word” [35]. On the podcast The Joe Rogan Experience in April 2025, Rogan joked, “The word ‘retarded’ is back, and it’s one of the great culture victories” [36]. In November 2025, President Trump criticized Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, referring to him as “seriously retarded.” Using the term “retarded” escalated his tendency to refer to the low IQ of his critics, especially black women, such as his 25 June 2018 tweet referring to Congresswoman Maxine Waters, a Black Democrat from California, as “an extraordinarily low IQ person”, “crazy” and “unhinged” [37] and a range of 2024 tweets and events where he called Vice President Kamala Harris “slow,” “low IQ” and “mentally impaired” [38]. The use of these words to denigrate reinforces disability as a symbol of ineptitude, deficiency, and burden while simultaneously declaring this administration’s intent to demonize those seen as weak, unproductive, or deviant without fear of harming them. In this ideology, those who are ‘other’ must be identified, controlled, and removed/fixed, not supported or valued. The ‘other’ is a source of threat—which leads to the next point.

2.2. Constructing Threats and Rights Conflicts

Although we might imagine rights as possessions enacted by individuals, rights are necessarily practiced in relationship with other people, and the process of exercising rights is socially mediated for all people [12,39,40]. The relationality of rights is most clearly seen when conflicts arise. Because rights are relational, the exercise of “individual” rights influences other people and may be perceived as conflicting with their rights.

The perception of conflict is particularly common when people within marginalized populations attempt to exercise rights. Because people with disabilities historically faced tremendous marginalization and segregation, their demands for access and basic civil rights appear to conflict with the rights of nondisabled citizens who are accustomed to life—to educational settings, employment, parks, places of worship, etc.,…—that operate without regard for disability [11,39]. Disability rights demand changes in culture, physical environment, behavior, and attitudes, a demand that some nondisabled people view as unreasonable and unjust. This sense of conflict is heightened when disabled people are constructed as not just a burden or a bother, but as a threat—as sources of violence, moral degradation, and public health risk.

American politicians and others have long dramatized the threat of disability, magnifying conflicts between disabled and nondisabled people and denying the rights of disabled people on those bases. For instance, in 1881 Chicago passed the first “Ugly Law,” which proclaimed, “Any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, or an improper person to be allowed in or on the streets, highways, thoroughfares, or public places in this city, shall not therein or thereon expose himself to public view, under the penalty of a fine…” [41] (p. 2). A string of cities adopted similar laws. These laws targeted the poor and homeless, who were disproportionately disabled, presenting their very presence in public spaces as conflicting with the right of the middle and upper-classes to enjoy “public” spaces. Women were said to experience particular risk from the monstrosity of disability due to their delicate sensibilities. In 1855, when an organ grinder and disabled Native American were arrested under an ugly law for soliciting money, they were accused of “affrighting the women and children of Henry Street into ‘conniption fits’ by exhibiting a monster in the shape of a deformed Indian. The sight was truly disgusting” (cited in [41] (p. 153)).

Segregation grew far more expansive than the ugly laws. The vast system of institutionalization was fueled by the desire to remove people with disabilities from community spaces and to manage perceived problems of dependency and deviance [42]. To do so, people with intellectual and mental disabilities were presented as dangers to society. For example, the Training School at Vineland, New Jersey, held as an early principle that “every feebleminded child is a potential criminal” [43]. Mary Wolfe [44] (p. 132), superintendent of the Laurelton State School in PA, stated “The presence of these defectives in the electorate is a danger to our country.” Programs of compulsory sterilization, which sterilized more than 60,000 disabled Americans without their consent in the early to mid-20th century, warned reproduction by disabled people constituted a public health threat to the nation which would potentially drown the nation in a sea of hereditary incompetence. In his infamous decision for Buck v. Bell (1927) [45], Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes argued, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. […] Three generations of imbeciles are enough”.

Disabled activists worked to challenge the eugenic agenda which positioned disabled people as a threat to the nation. Instead, they represented disabled people as a potential workforce, an untapped market of consumers, good neighbors, and law-abiding citizens. Laws like IDEA and ADA affirmed a political vision in which civil rights and inclusion would open pathways for disabled people to move out of systems of dependency and function as tax-paying citizens contributing to their own self-sufficiency and national prosperity [28]. De-institutionalization, the provision of community services, and court cases including O’Connor v. Donaldson (1975) [46] and Olmstead v. LC (1999) [4] affirmed the “constitutionally protected liberty interests” of disabled people to live and receive services in the community [47]. The pathway to involuntary institutionalization was narrowed, justified only in cases of imminent danger to oneself or others. Eugenics and the threat of disability certainly remained in the national consciousness, but the acceptance of disability rights and the notion of disability as a valued form of diversity proposed a viable challenge and alternative vision [16].

The Trump administration, though, repeatedly positions disability as a threat to the nation. Following in the footsteps of the ugly laws, the Executive Order Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets Executive [48] seeks to remove homeless people, who are disproportionately disabled, from the streets and to vastly expand access to involuntary institutionalization by depicting their presence in public spaces as a danger to good citizens, a threat to public health, and the burden to the nation. It states: “Endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks have made our cities unsafe…. The number of individuals living on the streets in the United States on a single night during the last year of the previous administration—274,224—was the highest ever recorded. The overwhelming majority of these individuals are addicted to drugs, have a mental health condition, or both. Nearly two-thirds of homeless individuals report having regularly used hard drugs like methamphetamines, cocaine, or opioids in their lifetimes. An equally large share of homeless individuals reported suffering from mental health conditions. The Federal Government and the States have spent tens of billions of dollars on failed programs that address homelessness but not its root causes, leaving other citizens vulnerable to public safety threats. Shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment will restore public order.” This order encourages “…civil commitment of individuals with mental illness who pose risks to themselves or the public or are living on the streets and cannot care for themselves in appropriate facilities for appropriate periods of time.”

This order vastly expands the bases for involuntary commitment. Rather than requiring evidence of imminent danger to oneself or others, this executive order uses much looser criteria of posing risks to themselves or the public or the inability to care for themselves. Homeless people, almost by definition, can be said to be unable to care for themselves. The challenges of self-care are not solely individual or medical; rather homelessness and the inability to provide self-care while homeless are driven by key social factors including, but not limited to, the lack of the following: affordable and accessible housing, employment opportunities with appropriate accommodations that pay a living wage, affordable and accessible mental health services offered in the community that provide an appropriate continuum of support, and affordable medications. Rather than addressing the social roots of homelessness, Secretary Kennedy touts the virtue of “wellness drug rehabilitation farms” where he claims people with addiction can be cured as they reconnect with America’s soil [49]. Utah’s homeless services agency has now acquired sixteen acres of rural land for a “a first-of-its-kind in Utah, comprehensive, transformative homeless services campus” slated to have 1300 beds, more than 300 of which will be for involuntary commitment [50]. Proposed as “work-conditioned housing,” resident labor will be forced and contribute to the economic sustainability of the facility [51]. This is not a first-of-its-kind. It directly replicates America’s institutional history, whether it be for people with intellectual and mental disabilities, people with addiction, indigenous people, or juvenile delinquents, in which large facilities are built in rural areas where there is cheap land and little oversight under the premise of the therapeutic benefits of fresh air and farm work, using a campus or colony model to increase the size of the facility and segregate its residents, and relying on inmate labor as an integral part of the institutional labor force [52,53,54]. Despite the rhetorical promises, throughout history, large-scale, involuntary facilities have dramatically failed in their rehabilitative mission due to the tendency towards abuse and neglect, low funding, dehumanization, and the fact that long-term institutionalization does not confer the skills and opportunities required for meaningful community participation and rehabilitation. Rather than being a solution, modern institutionalization hides America’s failing infrastructure of disability support, removes civil rights, and claims to be benevolent where history shows long-term and coerced institutionalization too often produce neglect, abuse, and stigma [55,56].

A sense of conflict and threat has also been used to undercut Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act and the American with Disabilities Act. We will discuss this first in reference to the trans community and then more broadly in reference to disabled people. Trans identities potentially could be protected via rights to free speech (e.g., in choosing one’s name, pronouns, and clothing as a means of expression) and to privacy to control one’s own body and thereby defined as a free choice. However, trans identity and the medical options enabling physical changes have been pathologized, tied to the psychological diagnosis of gender dysphoria. Via this diagnosis, people who are trans potentially may gain access to gender affirming care. This diagnosis also potentially places the needs of the trans community within the realm of disability rights and accommodations.

Although disabled activists often reject the dominance of the medical model in disability rights, and many people who are trans reject rights premised on pathology and a disability identity, access to disability rights still requires medical diagnosis. That said, diagnosis alone does not guarantee eligibility for disability rights. For instance, specific conditions like drug addiction, pedophilia, and gender identity disorders were excluded from the ADA as passed in 1990. In 2024, the Biden Administration issued a ruling that categorized gender dysphoria as potentially rising to the standard of disability under Section 504 and ADA. This decision was met with quick opposition. In the case Texas v. Becerra [57], seventeen states sued, arguing that gender dysmorphia should not count as disability—their state laws prohibited gender affirming care and/or restroom access, and the states argued that they should be allowed to do so and refuse to accommodate [58]. On 20 January 2025, the Trump Administration issued Executive Order 14168 “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” which opens with “Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers. This is wrong. Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being” [59]. This order both constructs the trans community as unworthy of rights—erasing their very existence by recognizing only two genders as defined by biology at birth (while simultaneously erasing infants born intersex)—and emphasizes the conflict between trans individuals and women. Women, in particular, are portrayed (like women in the justifications for the Ugly Laws) as vulnerable to violation by the trans community, and their perceived right to women-only spaces is positioned as superseding trans rights.

Although the executive order emphasizes the protection of women, the perceived conflict is broader than that. Trans rights challenge widely held social norms rooted in the gender binary, norms which are not clearly rights per se but to which many people feel deeply attached. A 2025 New York Times OpEd piece describes this sense of conflict well, arguing gay marriage achieved greater support than inclusive trans policies in part due to the fact that gay marriage did not impinge on other people’s world, whereas trans rights demand extensive changes by nontrans people. Sullivan argues, “The gay rights movement, especially in the marriage years, had long asked for simple liberal equality and mutual respect—live and let live. Reform, not revolution. No one’s straight marriage would change if gay marriage arrived, we pledged…” In contrast, trans rights “demanded that the entire society change in a fundamental way so that the sex binary no longer counted” [60]. Sullivan describes that everyone needed to announce pronouns, trans activists entered schools and libraries to influence children’s views of gender, youth were offered gender affirming action without parents’ knowledge, and the world of sports long organized by the gender dichotomy was challenged as was the potential distribution of resources and benefits from sports. Thus, trans rights are presented as conflicting with long-held norms, norms which the Trump administration seeks to enshrine, not only removing trans rights via freedom of speech, privacy and bodily integrity, and disability rights, but erasing trans individuals altogether.

Not only are homeless people with mental illness and/or addiction and the trans community deemed dangerous, so too are disabled people in everyday workplaces. Trump focuses on and manufactures conflicts between the employment of people with disabilities, employers, and the public. For example, the presidential action “Keeping Americans Safe in Aviation” specifically blamed the hiring of people with disabilities for reducing air safety: “For example, prior to my Inauguration, the FAA Diversity and Inclusion website revealed that the prior administration sought to specifically recruit and hire individuals with serious infirmities that could impact the execution of their essential life-saving duties [61]. President Trump soon after reiterated this accusation, this time to blame, without evidence, disabled workers for the 2025 mid-air collision between a passenger jet and helicopter in Washington, DC, USA. In a press conference he stated, “…the FAA’s diversity push includes focus on hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities. It’s amazing… and they can be air traffic controllers. I don’t think so” [62]. Contrary to Trump’s assertion, the Federal Aviation Administration does not hire disabled people regardless of qualification, and the position of air traffic controller requires very specific training and qualifications. Here Trump is using a tragedy to manufacture conflict, positioning the ADA and diversity, equity, inclusion, and access (DEIA) programs as threats to the very safety of Americans.

The construction of conflict legally enables courts to prioritize one set of rights over another. More broadly, the perception of threat undercuts support for disability rights and encourages the rejection of their value and legitimacy. Therefore, even if the rights stand firm on paper, as cultural attitudes shift, rights become harder to claim and exercise in practice.

2.3. Dismantling the Infrastructure for Positive Rights

When rights impose an obligation, there is a higher likelihood of perceived conflict. Moreover, rights that impose an obligation are easier to undercut. To differentiate two types of rights, negative rights are those which secure a field of freedom from the state and other people in making individual choice and action, such as the rights to speech, assembly, and religion. For example, the right to free speech does not obligate the state or other citizens to ensure that one has something intelligent to say, a platform to disseminate one’s opinion, nor people who will listen; it merely assures that one can say most things without restraint by the state. Positive rights, on the contrary, obligate that state or other people to do something to enable the exercise of one’s right. The right to an education, for example, is not simply a freedom; the state must spend money, build buildings, and hire teachers to deliver a public education. Whereas the Bill of Rights delivers mostly negative rights, disability rights typically involve positive rights which require the state and others to engage in action. In promising a free and appropriate education, IDEA demands schools provide additional services and support tailored to the needs of children with disabilities. The ADA requires that the government, public services, and private companies provide particular forms of access and accommodations. The right to be in the community requires services provided in the community rather than in institutions and nursing homes. Activist Ari Ne’eman explained, “Ultimately, for many people with disabilities to survive and thrive on their own terms, there is a need for some very costly, ongoing assistance. For people with developmental disabilities—things like Down syndrome, autism, cerebral palsy—it’s common for home- and community-based services to cost $40,000 or $50,000 a year. So having a service system that is adequately financed and responsive to people’s desires about how they want to live is absolutely crucial” (quoted in [63]). The requirements established in positive rights are often controversial, positioned as “special” rights, treated as goals rather than rights, and may be expensive and burdensome for employers, school districts, and communities broadly. The obligations increase the perception of conflict as well as the power of nondisabled people to deny rights in practice, via strategies such as cutting funding, staff, and programs. Whereas removing the laws that establish rights may be challenging, opportunities to dismantle the infrastructure for rights are frequent, less visible, and have less democratic oversight.

The infrastructure for disability rights has always been insufficient. Whereas IDEA promised federal funding for 40% of the cost of special education, funding has never reached that target, leaving schools with tough choices about funding priorities [6]. The ADA claimed to prohibit discrimination, but it lacked pro-active enforcement and relied instead on disabled people to sue, despite the fact that they are disproportionately represented among low-income households and among those with a high school education or less. The ADA also provided no funding to businesses or service providers to make necessary changes, potentially leading again to tough choices. Even when suits were brought, ten years after the passage of the ADA 93% of cases had been won by employers [64]. The right to be in the community is limited by both medical authority to determine who can benefit from community services as well as the continued lack of community services. Despite the lofty rhetoric of de-institutionalization, it proceeded too often as a cost-saving measure without adequate development of community services or affordable housing [55]. Scholar Marta Russell [28] argued that anti-discrimination legislation, combined with an absence of state support for those rights or more broadly for the well-being of disabled people, primarily served a neo-liberal agenda to perpetuate only an illusion of equality, encouraging inclusion for the most productive and least costly disabled people while leaving most in poverty and positions of social marginality.

While the disability community has long criticized the meager infrastructure provided for rights, the cuts proposed and implemented in 2025 have been dramatic and diverse. People with disabilities rely on a network of services and systems to live in the community, much of which is funded via Medicaid. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), passed 1 July 2025, is expected to reduce Medicaid federal spending by a trillion dollars over a ten-year period and “lead to 4.8 million people losing health insurance coverage in FY2034” [65]. With less federal funding, states will likely prioritize required health costs and decrease spending on home and community-based services which are considered discretionary. OBBBA also cuts spending on essential supports such as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs, Meals on Wheels, and the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program intended for low-income households, which disproportionately have disabled members. Budget cuts threaten funding for Protection and Advocacy organizations, University Centers for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities, and Developmental Disabilities Councils, which collectively protect rights, investigate abuse, conduct research, and support projects to support disabled people in the community. Staffing has also been cut. In April 2025, Secretary Kennedy laid off nearly half the staff of the Administration for Community Living (ACL), which coordinates disability policy and funds protection and advocacy organizations and independent living services for disabled people [66]. The programs overseen by ACL were divided among three different HHS offices.

Education, as noted, is a positive right, and the Trump administration has worked to dismantle the Department of Education. In March 2025, the Department of Education announced a nearly 50% reduction in its workforce, including its Office of Civil Rights [67]. During the October 2025 government shut-down, the Trump administration cut nearly all staff in the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, which coordinates programs that support students with disabilities and monitors state compliance with IDEA [68]. 2025 marked the 50th anniversary of IDEA, but, rather than celebrate, hundreds of disability organizations joined together to condemn the cuts, stating the following:

These wholesale terminations place fundamental education laws in peril and place millions of children with disabilities at risk who receive services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, and Title IV of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. These layoffs circumvent the will of Congress and dismantle 50 years of precedent upholding rights for students with disabilities. Without personnel to oversee these laws, the Department cannot provide essential leadership, oversight, guidance, or support to states and schools—jeopardizing students’ access to a free, appropriate public education and hampering the ability of states and localities to serve all students. In addition, the terminations also threaten the vocational rehabilitation system that helps youth and adults with disabilities become employed.

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The offices which protect civil rights have been targeted for funding and staff cuts beyond the Department of Education. The Office of Civil Rights for the Social Security Administration addresses the agency’s civil rights issues including equal opportunity, preventing harassment, and providing disability services. In February 2025, this office closed [70], leading to a lawsuit led by several disability organizations charging that the cuts block the SSA from fulfilling its legal responsibilities [71]. Furthermore, the White House has removed some guidelines for the ADA and reduced access to interpretation of White House press briefings, reducing the capacity of Americans to understand and follow the ADA and of deaf Americans and other ASL users to engage in the politics that deeply affect them.

These cuts, and more, leave rights legislation intact but hinder implementation by gutting the infrastructure of programs, funding, and staff which make the exercise of rights by disabled people possible while also dismantling the agencies that monitor rights and address rights abuses.

2.4. Rejecting the Value of Disability Rights Across Relational Sites

As noted, rights are relational. One’s exercise of rights is tied to one’s position in the stratification system amid a broader relational configuration of the stratification system. People try to claim and exercise rights across a variety of settings, and the relational dynamics of power and inequality within each setting shape one’s likely success (or indeed if one even needs to claim a right rather than being assumed to have it). Sociologist Bryan Turner refers to this perspective as a practice approach to rights, which “places the concept [of citizenship] squarely in the debate about inequality, power differences and social class, because citizenship is inevitably and necessarily bound up with the problem of the unequal distribution of resources in a society [72] (p. 2).

Because people with disabilities historically experienced disempowerment across settings, they face difficulties in claiming rights. For instance, historically parents had tremendous leeway to make decisions regarding familial “dependents”. Some parents may offer considerable support to their adult offspring in exercising rights, while others may prohibit dating, marriage, freedom to assemble with friends, or privacy for example. The passage of the ADA did little to alter this situation, as it does not regulate “private” familial decision-making. Furthermore, because accessible and affordable housing and community services are limited and because offspring may prefer family caregivers to paid ones, many adults with disabilities heavily depend on their families. Thus, they may forfeit typical adults rights in order to receive care [8].

The ADA does regulate the workplace, but here too rights are negotiated interpersonally. Some workplaces have helpful policies designed to enhance inclusion [73], while others have corporate cultures that informally discourage accommodation requests and formally restrict access as much as possible [74,75]. Because people rely on employment for their very survival and because disabled people face considerable workplace discrimination, disabled employees may feel hesitant to disclose disability in their workplace or deviate from corporate culture; instead, the norms of compulsory able-bodiedness often dominate [76]. Rather than claim rights under ADA, disabled employees instead may engage in strategies to avoid conflict and disability shame, such as masking, working additional hours without pay to complete work, and purchasing their own assistive technology.

Although disabled people continued to struggle, even after the passage of the ADA, to exercise rights, it is also true that the ADA fostered accessibility, DEIA programs, and cultural awareness in the workplace and in the broader cultural mainstream [73]. The Trump administration has taken aim at these positive changes, seeking to reverse them. One of the first actions President Trump took in 2025 was to define DEIA as illegal discrimination and attempt to prohibit these programs. Executive Order 14173 Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity states the following:

These illegal DEI and DEIA policies also threaten the safety of American men, women, and children across the Nation by diminishing the importance of individual merit, aptitude, hard work, and determination when selecting people for jobs and services in key sectors of American society, including all levels of government, and the medical, aviation, and law-enforcement communities. Yet in case after tragic case, the American people have witnessed first-hand the disastrous consequences of illegal, pernicious discrimination that has prioritized how people were born instead of what they were capable of doing. The Federal Government is charged with enforcing our civil-rights laws. The purpose of this order is to ensure that it does so by ending illegal preferences and discrimination.

[77]

Thus, although ADA is still law of the land, the Trump administration has encouraged and even required the ending of many DEIA programs, removing the staff, guidance, and programs that ensure disabled people are welcomed and able to participate, fundamentally re-setting the relational power structure and denying disabled people relational power across sites to claim rights.

Whereas in 2021, “90% of companies said they placed a high priority on diversity and inclusion,” in 2025, many large companies scaled back DEIA programs, such as removing DEIA offices and positions; ending diversity goals in recruitment, hiring, and suppliers; ending targeted leadership programs; ending or curtailing celebrations such as Pride month and Juneteenth; ending targeted merchandise and campaigns; removing material highlighting the achievements of people in communities defined as “diverse”; and removing a host of words related to diversity from materials [78]. Activist Alycia Anderson [79] explained the impact for disabled people:

This rhetoric stigmatizes people with disabilities and perpetuates the misconception that inclusivity undermines merit…. Additionally, by repealing DEI and DEIA initiatives, the administration weakens enforcement mechanisms designed to promote accessibility and equal opportunities under laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Without intentional policies to address systemic inequities, progress in areas such as workplace accommodations, accessible infrastructure, and representation of people with disabilities in leadership is likely to stall or regress.

Moreover, since the federal government is the largest employer of disabled people and, further, many disabled people work in offices or federally funded initiatives focused on equity, the imposed decline of DEIA may have a particularly negative effect for the employment of people with disabilities [80].

In addition to employment, many colleges ended or reduced DEIA programs. For example, the Ohio State University announced the closure of its Office of Diversity and Inclusion and the discontinuation of services through its Center for Belonging and Social Change, the University Iowa ended committees and many staff positions focused on diversity, and University of Pennsylvania removed references to DEI on its website. State laws, such as those passed in Ohio and Iowa, further reinforced the illegality of diversity initiatives in higher education [81]. While schools maintain disability accommodation services as per Section 504 and ADA, the loss of DEI programming eliminates key strategies that foster student’s sense of inclusion and empowerment. The Trump administration has ended many research and demonstration projects that served students with disabilities and removed diversity from the curriculum across levels of education. Even Head Start, which is mandated to serve disadvantaged children and to create inclusive educational environments for children with disabilities, was told by HHS to avoid using the worlds “disability,” “disabilities” and “inclusion” in a funding application [82]. How can families and students fight for or attain inclusion when the very words disability and inclusion are banned from use?

Roll backs of other hard-fought-for regulations further diminish the power of disabled people across other settings. The U.S. Department of Transportation announced in September 2025 that it would not enforce a Biden-era rule offering greater consumer protections to disabled customers of the airline industry including enhanced airline liability for damaged disability equipment [83]. HHS also rescinded Biden-era regulations for nursing homes which established minimum staffing requirements and guaranteed a minimum amount of time caring for each resident [84]. High staff to resident ratios directly correlate with abuse, neglect, and injuries, and reduce residents’ ability to enjoy lives rooted in their own personal choices and values.

Because people with disabilities tend to hold a position on the lower rungs of the social stratification system, they face particular vulnerabilities in exerting influence within their social context. Black disabled scholar D’Arcee Neal states, “People mistakenly seem to believe that general human nature will allow for inclusive practices to occur naturally but they do not, without a form of action attached.” Action needs to be structured by “ideas like that of reciprocal engagement, culture, and recognized roles of power among others which help to define inclusion in active ways over passive ones” [85] (p. 9). It is these very ideas and associated structures which the Trump administration seeks to de-legitimize.

3. Conclusions

For people with less economic or cultural power, rights can be a particularly valuable tool to demand inclusion, the recognition of needs, a voice in decision-making, and empowerment broadly. Moreover, disability rights impose relational obligations and expectations, encouraging a vision of the social world which values and enables participation by disabled people. But that relational vision is only one vision of the world. Other relational visions exist, such as a world of individualism with little communal or state responsibility for each other; a world in which money enables the elite to pursue their interests while others struggle to survive without rights to economic security or human dignity; a eugenic world where the strong impose their will on others with little constraint or responsibility; a world in which some identities (e.g., nationalities, religions, races, sexualities, abilities) are affirmed and others rejected, etc., …

The current administration has largely rejected the value of disability rights, as well as a broader set of rights and programs that pursue active pathways to enable opportunities and participation by a range of groups. To undercut disability rights, they define disabled people as unworthy, emphasize and even manufacture conflicts to justify the denial of disability rights, dismantle the infrastructure required for disability rights, and reconfigure power relations across settings to disempower disabled people in claiming rights. Meanwhile, they assert instead the value of competition and negative rights, although the opportunity to compete and the “freedoms” of negative rights are not actually possible for people with disabilities without a communal commitment to access and support. They center a medical model in which cure is imposed on some, and left unaffordable for others, in which one’s ability to meet the standards of normalization and productivity determines inclusion and one’s failure to meet these standards justifies exclusion. Most of American history had been characterized by policies and practices that defined disability as a personal tragedy and left disabled people disempowered, and now this relational view has surged back into political prominence. The fragile infrastructure of disability rights is indeed easily subverted. As relational claims, rights quickly fall apart if these claims are no longer recognized as legitimate, if the rights holders are again constructed as unworthy, and if the infrastructure for participation and empowerment is decimated. In this context, even rights on paper do little to empower disabled people.

That said, disabled activists and their allies continue to fight. One message of hope in Pettinicchio’s analysis [5] of the political cycles of progress and backlash is that, while successes can be undercut, so too do backlash movements ebb, some forms of progress endure, and the political will for inclusion may re-assert itself, often leading to new initiatives and opportunities. The law remains a tool of resistance, as evidenced by the many lawsuits brought against the Trump administration. The drive for profit, efficiency, and perhaps even corporate responsibility has led some companies to re-commit to DEIA efforts despite the Trump administration, and many companies and schools simply altered their language while retaining their commitment to DEIA, in effect bureaucratically side-stepping administrative mandates. Cultural shifts may be hard to erase; expectations for access are now held not only by disabled people but also by bicyclists who enjoy curb cuts, Gen Zers who enjoy watching programming with captioning, drivers who rely on speech to text, etc., … Finally, threats create new opportunities for building disability community and reinvigorate activism. Thus, while the damage to disability rights and the lives of disabled people certainly has been devastating, the vigilance always required of the disability community to safeguard disability rights means that they are prepared to continue the fight.