JAN 30, 2025 | OPINION | By Kole Petersen
The words that a politician speaks can be incredibly damaging. Millions of people hear the opinions spouted by a president, influencing the dialogue spoken across the country. However, the true impact of a president, how they can change lives, comes from the federal documents they support. At the time of writing, Donald Trump has barely been in office for a week, and he has already signed executive orders and established harmful precedents that will endanger the livelihoods of the millions of disabled people in the United States. In the second part of this series about the second Trump administration, I will discuss how the policies Trump instituted during his first term, supported on the campaign trail and signed just in the first week of his current term will negatively impact the lives of disabled people.
Before we jump into this second part, I want to make the same disclaimer I made last time. This series is not an attempt to fearmonger, defame or mischaracterize Trump’s policies. I sincerely hope that Trump will take a more positive stance on disability policy. I want to believe that Trump will walk along a different path and improve the perceptions and lives of our country’s disabled population. However, based on the precedents he has established throughout his political career, I am hard-pressed to be optimistic.
Let’s start with the relatively mild. During his first presidential term, Trump declared April 2, 2017, as National Autism Awareness Day, calling upon Americans to “Light it up Blue” and affirming his administration’s desire to develop new treatments ‘and cures’ for autism. Although some of the language in this proclamation sounds optimistic, with Trump urging people to “do what they can to support individuals with autism spectrum disorders and their families,” there are a few glaring problems that illuminate Trump’s perspective on autism.
Firstly, partnering with Autism Speaks is a harmful way to go about autism advocacy, as I have discussed at length in a previous article. In short, while Autism Speaks claims to promote solutions for “the needs of individuals with autism and their families,” very little of their budget is allocated to researching these solutions, only two members of their Board of Directors are autistic, and one of the main motivations behind their continued operations is to find a cure for autism. Autistic voices are not valued by Autism Speaks, and the organization’s goal of eliminating autism is a detrimental attitude to be reflected by the President of the United States.
Indeed, Trump has perpetuated misinformation about the causes of autism spectrum disorders, appearing to prioritize curing autism over improving the lives of autistic Americans. For instance, during an interview at his Mar-a-Lago club on November 25, 2024, Trump questioned whether vaccines caused autism, and said that he would consider altering childhood vaccination programs to address the “problem” of rising childhood autism rates. “The autism rate is at a level that nobody ever believed possible,” Trump said, suggesting a link between vaccinations and autism. Trump has spouted anti-vaccine rhetoric for years and pledged to defund schools with vaccine mandates on the campaign trail, emphasizing his distaste for childhood vaccinations and his suspicions that autism is correlated with vaccines. This promised policy ignores the changes in diagnostic criteria, improved screenings and increased medical understandings that have led to an uptick in autism diagnoses, and reinforces the findings of a singular 1998 study that was retracted in 2010 due to insufficient data and the study’s author being a paid adviser in lawsuits brought by families alleging vaccines had harmed their children.
Speaking of public schools, Trump’s education plan will encroach on the protections guaranteed to disabled students and diminish the scope of special education programs. For example, Trump’s plan centers around providing families with vouchers to send their children to schools of their choosing, often a private school. While an equitable idea in theory, voucher programs remove or erode the rights otherwise guaranteed to disabled students under federal law, specifically those under the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA).
Furthermore, since this program would require parents to waive their children’s educational rights, schools would not be obligated to provide necessary accommodations for disabled students that would otherwise be legally required, and schools would be allowed to deny admission to disabled students if they determine they can’t accommodate their needs. If this voucher program is initiated, disabled students would lose access to the services they need to have an equitable schooling experience, essentially pushing their education quality back to a time before disability policy.
Disabled students’ experience in the classroom would also be a consequence of Trump’s plan to slash Medicaid and change the Affordable Care Act. Medicaid provides many crucial services to students eligible for special education, so even disabled students lucky enough to be at a school allowing for their accommodations would be receiving lower-quality support. Additionally, Trump has repeatedly tried to add work requirements via Section 1115 waivers to the Medicaid program, and although past legislative attempts to incorporate these requirements have failed, Republican and conservative groups continue to support this policy due to reductions in federal spending.
Many people have disabilities that inhibit them from working while still being considered “not disabled enough” to qualify for exemptions from these work requirements. This guidance from the Trump administration could lead to millions of disabled Americans losing their health insurance coverage because their disabilities are not deemed severe enough, which could genuinely threaten the lives of the United State’s disabled population.
Of course, Trump is not the only person that has been supporting these detrimental policies. Tune in to the third and final part of this series, where I will cover how JD Vance, Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other individuals Trump has brought into his administration have encouraged the spread of misinformation surrounding disability and supported the dangerous rhetoric behind the policies discussed in this part.