Life Unworthy of Funding: The Right’s War on Disabled Americans Is a Warning to Everyone

Trump’s war on disability rights echoes eugenics and Nazi history. Cutting protections like ADA and 504 threatens democracy itself. Fight back now.

SOURCE: The Guardian

The right-wing project to unravel the social contract is no longer whispered behind think tank doors – it’s shouted through megaphones, dressed in MAGA caps, and signed into law with pens that shake no more from shame. What they did to immigrants, women, trans people, and teachers, they are now doing to disabled Americans, with a cruel efficiency that is equal parts eugenics and budget-slashing cosplay. And make no mistake: this isn’t about fiscal responsibility. It’s about ideological purity – a purification ritual that seeks to wash away empathy, care, and any recognition of shared humanity.

The current Republican administration under Trump, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, is laying siege to disability rights. This is not rhetorical exaggeration. In just the first three months of 2025:

• The accessibility page and all ASL content were removed from the White House website.

• Real-life ASL interpreters were removed from federal agencies.

• Key guidance for the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) began to be rescinded.

• The Department of Education was partially dismantled, gutting special education and civil rights enforcement.

• The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) is being folded, slashed, and eviscerated.

• A major lawsuit seeks to declare Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act unconstitutional – the very legal backbone of disability protections in federally funded programs.

The result? Disabled Americans are being pushed out of classrooms, jobs, hospitals, government buildings, and public life. Again.

History Doesn’t Repeat, It Reloads

We’ve seen this script before.

In 1907, Indiana passed the world’s first eugenics-based sterilization law. By 1931, 30 U.S. states had followed suit. These laws targeted disabled people, the poor, and the incarcerated. The logic was simple: prevent "undesirable" people from reproducing. That same year, Virginia forcibly sterilized a young woman named Carrie Buck. She had been institutionalized for being "feebleminded," a diagnosis manufactured by the state to justify her sterilization. The Supreme Court upheld the law in Buck v. Bell (1927). Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes infamously wrote, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

That ruling has never been overturned. Today, forced sterilization of disabled people remains legal in at least 31 states and the District of Columbia.

Nazi Germany took copious notes. Hitler himself praised American eugenics laws. German eugenicists studied our legal codes, our rhetoric, our propaganda. In 1933, the Nazis enacted their own compulsory sterilization law, targeting people with "hereditary illnesses" including deafness, blindness, schizophrenia, and epilepsy. In 1939, the Aktion T4 program began: a mass extermination campaign targeting disabled children and adults.

More than 250,000 disabled people were murdered. The Nazi gas chambers were not first built for Jews. They were perfected on disabled Germans. The cover story was mercy. The truth was genocide.

From Hashtags to Handshakes: The Culture War Is Policy

Back in the U.S., the Trump-Kennedy administration isn’t gassing disabled people. But they are laying the legal groundwork to erase them. It starts, as always, with mockery.

Charlie Kirk, Richard Hanania, Christopher Rufo, and Elon Musk have all targeted American Sign Language. They deride interpreters as "absurd," "a farce," and "wild gesticulators." Musk actively campaigned to bring back the R-word, which tripled in usage on his platform afterward.

This isn’t just trolling. It’s prelude.

Dehumanization isn’t an accident; it’s an essential mechanism. Once a group is mocked, it can be ignored. Once ignored, it can be erased. The far-right strategy is always the same:

1. Mock the marginalized.

2. Manufacture outrage.

3. Mainstream the hate.

4. Codify it into law.

In this case, they started with jokes about ASL interpreters. They moved to removing accessibility offices. Now they’re arguing that accessibility itself is the cause of inflation.

Disabled Kids Are the First to Go

The Trump administration has now dismantled large parts of the Department of Education, laying off more than 1,300 staff, and eliminating regional offices that enforce civil rights law. This includes cutting critical portions of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services. The position of director for special education is now vacant.

For disabled children, this is catastrophic.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) mandates a "free and appropriate public education" for children with disabilities. It guarantees support services: speech therapy, occupational therapy, assistive devices, specialized curriculum. These supports are documented in legally binding Individualized Education Programs (IEPs).

Without these supports, kids may be in classrooms – but they aren’t being educated. And if Section 504 is struck down in court, these legal protections disappear altogether.

The Myth of the Disability Grift

The right-wing narrative paints disabled people as burdens. Grifters. Moochers.

And yet, the average wage for disabled workers in "sheltered workshops" is $3.34 per hour. The government allows this under special certification. Meanwhile, Social Security Disability Insurance can be revoked if a disabled person marries someone with a higher income. You want love? That'll cost you your insulin.

This isn’t about fraud. It’s about gatekeeping survival.

Authoritarianism Has Always Targeted the Disabled

Disability isn’t just a human condition. It’s a political one. And historically, when governments tip toward fascism, the first people attacked are the most vulnerable.

It happened in Nazi Germany. It happened in the United States with sterilization, segregation, institutionalization, and mass neglect.

It is happening again now.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claims to be anti-establishment. Yet under his leadership, the Department of Health and Human Services is:

• Slashing 25% of its workforce.

• Folding SAMHSA into a vague new "Administration for a Healthy America."

• Destroying regional capacity for local addiction and mental health support.

• Undermining the data infrastructure we rely on to even know what public health issues exist.

This is not just bureaucracy. This is life and death. Disabled Americans already experience worse outcomes in natural disasters, mass shootings, pandemics, and everyday policing. Cutting ASL from emergency briefings is not an inconvenience; it is a death sentence.

Ableism Is the Acid That Melts All Rights

Ableism is tolerated because it is unrecognized. It hides in plain sight. But here’s the truth:

• One in four Americans lives with a disability.

• If you live long enough, you will too.

Ableism isn’t just discrimination against "others." It is a system that denies help, dignity, and survival to anyone whose body or mind does not conform to capitalist productivity.

And that system eventually backfires.

If Section 504 falls, the precedent could ripple outward to other "spending clause" statutes – including Title IX and the Civil Rights Act. In their rush to eliminate accommodations for disabled people, the right is laying legal dynamite beneath the entire civil rights framework.

Disabled People Are Already Fighting Back

This is not the first time the government has tried to erase disabled people. And it won’t be the last.

In 1977, after officials had delayed signing Section 504 regulations, disabled activists occupied federal buildings across the country. The San Francisco sit-in lasted 26 days – the longest occupation of a government building in U.S. history. They won.

In 1990, after the Americans with Disabilities Act stalled in Congress, activists crawled up the Capitol steps. They won.

They’re still fighting: filing lawsuits, organizing online, and lobbying Congress. They will not go quietly.

But they shouldn’t have to do it alone.

If You Care About Freedom, You Must Care About Accessibility

The Trump administration's attack on disabled Americans is a test not just of our laws, but of our values.

Do we believe that all people deserve the right to participate in society? Do we believe that education, healthcare, and survival should be rationed based on ability? Do we believe in democracy if it only serves the able-bodied?

The warning signs are here. We can see them clearly if we choose to look. But if we wait until the targeting expands – to LGBTQ people, to immigrants, to journalists, to you – it may be too late.

It always starts with the people they think no one will fight for.

Be the people who fight.