What a Second Trump Term Might Mean for Disability Policy

Project 2025 Wants to Make it Harder for the Disabled Community to Get Education, Housing and Health Care

Ioulex for The New York Times

This summer, policy experts seeking to understand what a second Trump administration would look like turned their attention to Project 2025.  Analysts have raised alarm bells around the plan’s approach to issues ranging from labor rights to the federal role in weather forecasting, including hurricane tracking. But surprisingly little attention has been given to Project 2025’s approach to disability policy.  Somewhere between 20-25% of Americans live with a disability of some kind, making such policies relevant to tens of millions.  And so, as a professor who studies disability policy in the US, I decided to sit down with Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership and see what I could find.

 Trump himself has said little about disability policy, but his behavior offers little reason for reassurance. He infamously mocked Serge Kovaleski, a disabled New York Times reporter. Trump’s nephew recalled him saying “The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.” A recent article recounts him describing President Biden using a slur for people with intellectual disabilities, a term hurtful enough that I won’t write it here, but which his staffers had to convince him not to use publicly.

Still, support for more generous disability policies has historically had a more bipartisan record, so one might be tempted to hope that Project 2025 might continue that tradition. At first glance, the plan seems to overlook disability issues.  The Americans with Disabilities Act is mentioned only once, sitting incongruously on page 585 in a discussion of abortion restrictions.  But careful reading reveals that Project 2025 threatens policies that provide crucial support to disabled people in areas like education, housing, and health care.

The Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA), first passed in 1975, is a cornerstone of disability rights in education.  It guarantees all students the right to a free appropriate public education, including services that many of us take for granted. But the Heritage Foundation’s plan introduces IDEA in the context of bemoaning how “Congress has continued to layer on dozens of new laws and programs as federal ‘solutions’ to myriad education problems.” Rather than a landmark law that protects the rights of millions of families, Project 2025 casts IDEA as unnecessary and unwelcome federal overreach.

Instead, the plan calls for federal education policy to be cut back, and the Department of Education to be eliminated.  It goes on to say that IDEA funds “should be converted into a no-strings formula block grant.”  While the plan does not elaborate on what this block grant would look like, the choice to describe it as “no-strings” is worthy of note.  Local school districts would presumably be subject to less oversight to ensure that they provide every student with an adequate education. No strings attached block grants provide no guarantee that the money would be used for its stated purpose. Just look at TANF block grants. Only about one fifth of TANF funds now provide direct cash assistance to families in needs, and much is spent on programs only tangentially related to the original goal of the program. Families who already must fight to ensure that their children receive the schooling they deserve will be put on weaker footing if the federal government signals that states can redirect the money as they wish.

Many disabled people also face housing insecurity.  With so much of the nation’s housing stock built before the Americans with Disabilities Act became law in 1990, there is a severe lack of accessible properties for both rent and purchase.  Disabled prospective tenants can face discrimination, which is one of several equity issues addressed by a recent regulation in the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) known as Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.  But in a chapter authored by former Trump cabinet secretary and current campaign surrogate Ben Carson, Project 2025 calls on HUD leadership to repeal this regulation.  It offers no alternate plan to combat housing discrimination or increase the stock of disability-accessible homes.

Finally, health care is a major concern for many disabled people.  Before the Affordable Care Act (ACA) passed in 2010, many lived with the fear that an insurer could regard a disability as a pre-existing condition, and thereby deny coverage or charge more.  The ACA put an end to this practice. But the ACA has long been a target of Republicans, with House Speaker Mike Johnson promising in the past few days to pursue an agenda of “No Obamacare.”  In the pages of Project 2025, we find a proposal to create a separate insurance market without ACA regulations.  Analysis from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities points out that this would likely draw healthier people into the unregulated market, driving up costs for those with pre-existing conditions, including many disabled people. 

Millions of disabled people without private health insurance are covered under Medicaid. But this program is also a target of Project 2025, which describes the essential safety net program as a “burden” on states.  The plan calls for a restriction of eligibility that could end coverage to many people with disabilities, as well as a shifting of costs onto beneficiaries who already face dire financial straits.  Project 2025 also bemoans the fact that Medicaid can cover allegedly “nonmedical” services. For many disabled beneficiaries, Medicaid covers home-based personal care services.  The assistance with daily activities provided through these programs allows many disabled people to get out of the house each day.  While such services aren’t named directly, it is difficult to see how the logic of Project 2025 wouldn’t target them as “nonmedical” expenses that contribute to the “burden” of Medicaid.

This is, of course, not an exhaustive description of what the 900-some pages of Project 2025 envision for disability policy. Even within these three realms of education, housing, and health care policy, there are other proposals that would impact disabled lives.  Trump himself has long sought to cultivate a plausible deniability around some of his most outrageous statements, with his defenders rushing to insist that he doesn’t mean what he says. But Project 2025 is a written blueprint intended to guide a new Republican administration, widely endorsed among Trump’s governing coalition.  On Election Day, disabled voters and their friends and families should pay careful attention to how it proposes that the party govern.

Matthew Borus is a sociologist who studies how disability is defined and enacted in the workplace, in systems of social provision, and in other social settings. In addition to his current role as an Assistant Professor of Social Work at Binghamton University, he has previously worked as a policy analyst, case manager, and community organizer.

For more on how the election might affect disability policy, read Pam Herd on how a Harris plan to expand Medicare can fulfill unkept promises for the old and disabled.