The squatter currently occupying the White House has always seemed like he is hell-bent on making sure that he includes people with disabilities among the many folks whom he intends to screw over. But lately, he seems unsure how to go about doing that, at least when it comes to public education.
After saying frequently—even back on the campaign trail—that he wants to completely close down the U.S. Department of Education, the squatter issued an Executive Order last March that said, “The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the states and local communities while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”
The squatter has no legal authority to just get rid of the department, which U.S. lawmakers created in 1979. What Congress giveth, only Congress can taketh away. But he can render it as ineffective as possible by stripping it of money and responsibilities. And that’s the strategy he seemed to be adopting with that particular order.
But one of the many potential problems with this ham-handed approach is that the department enforces federal laws designed “to ensure that all children with disabilities have available to them a free appropriate public education.” How it enforces these laws depends on the legislation. For Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, the department uses the Office of Civil Rights (OCR). For the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), it uses the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP).
The Education Department had already closed seven of the twelve regional OCR offices, including the one here in Chicago, Illinois, and in other major cities such as New York City and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Also last March, the agency announced that it was firing almost 1,400 employees, reducing its workforce to roughly half the size it was when the squatter was inaugurated in January 2025. Nearly 600 employees had already resigned or retired by that time. So if the Department of Education wasn’t going to enforce this legislation, who was?
All the squatter had to say in answer to that question was that he wanted to shift some of the department’s essential functions to other federal agencies.
Then he released his budget request for the 2026 fiscal year, which began October 1, 2025. Overall, it called for Congress to cut non-defense discretionary spending by 22.6 percent and slash the federal budget by $163 billion. Most aspects of IDEA did not receive a funding increase, and the request called for some aspects to be restructured.
In response, fourteen former Department of Education officials who were responsible for overseeing IDEA implementation under Republican and Democratic administrations dating back to President Richard Nixon urged the squatter not to transfer IDEA enforcement responsibility to another federal agency. A letter they signed said the Congressional budget proposal should maintain the existing statutory authority for the Department of Education “to oversee all education programs” and not eliminate the department or move its offices to other agencies.
Not increasing IDEA funding is pretty much the same as cutting it, because the legislation also pledges that the federal government will cover 40 percent of the cost of educating disabled kids. But the federal government has never come close to doing that.
Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, and Representative Jared Huffman, Democrat of California, are the lead sponsors of the IDEA Full Funding Act. The current version of the bill would annually increase the IDEA funding minimum until it reaches 40 percent in fiscal year 2035. But Van Hollen and other Senators have tried in several previous sessions of Congress to pass bills that would gradually increase federal IDEA funding levels over several years until 40 percent is reached once and for all. None of these attempts have gotten anywhere, regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats were in the majority in the House or Senate.
If Congress had passed and obeyed the original version of the IDEA Full Funding Act that was introduced in 2011, the 40 percent level would have been reached in the fiscal year 2021. Coming in well under 40 percent, as Congress has done for fifty years, gives school districts more room to complain that they are being forced to follow an “unfunded mandate.”
In addition, the squatter’s budget proposal ran into trouble when the Senate Appropriations Committee approved a bill last July to fund federal labor, education, and health and human services programs by a heavily bipartisan vote of twenty-six to three.
The appropriations bill retained the existing funding structure for IDEA and directed the administration to release funds as appropriated, avoid staff cuts at the Department of Education, and keep special education oversight at the agency.
The squatter said that he wanted to turn the Department of Education’s enforcement responsibilities under IDEA over to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). That would mean that the legendary doofus, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has repeatedly demonstrated his dim view of the value and potential of people with disabilities, would ultimately be the person in charge of enforcing this law.
Kennedy said in a post on X in March 2025 that HHS “is fully prepared to take on the responsibility of supporting individuals with special needs.” But he claimed at a press conference just a month later that people with autism “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 on a date, many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”
But when the squatter’s administration announced that it is entering into six “interagency agreements” with four other federal agencies to “co-manage” some Department of Education programs, nothing related to IDEA was included in the programs that would potentially be farmed out.
And when the new federal fiscal year rolled around on October 1 and the government shut down because Congress couldn’t pass a budget that the squatter would agree to sign, everything came to a screeching halt. Thus, his administration sent reduction in force notices to about 4,100 employees across various agencies, including more than 400 staff members at the Department of Education. The notice informed those who received them that their jobs would soon be permanently eliminated. A federal judge then barred federal agencies, including the Education Department, from firing workers during the government shutdown.
The shutdown turned out to be the longest in U.S. history, lasting forty-three days. The agreement that finally ended it said the squatter’s administration had to reverse layoffs issued during the shutdown and couldn’t conduct any further firings through January 30, 2026. So all of the Education Department employees who had been laid off were invited to return to work.
But what happens after January 30? Who knows? If nothing changes, the squatter would be free to resume his layoff rampage on February 1.
The Arc, an organization that “protects and promotes the rights of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities,” joined a federal lawsuit filed in November by several education stakeholders, such as school districts and labor unions. The lawsuit names the squatter as a defendant. It says that he has “set about systematically dismantling” the Department of Education, and it seeks to put a stop to this.
It also says that OCR complaints have increased by 200 percent in the past five years, which has created a “substantial backlog.” Disability cases, it says, are a “substantial and rising portion of OCR’s docket.” However, according to the lawsuit, many families with school-age children have “entirely stopped filing complaints” because of the “dysfunction at OCR” that resulted from the mass layoffs.
IDEA has turned out to be a downright transformational law. The text of the original version said that one million disabled kids of school age in the United States “are excluded entirely from the public school system and will not go through the educational process with their peers.”
When my sister and I were of K-12 age in the 1960s and early 1970s, my mother went to our local public and Catholic schools and asked them to accept us as students. But she was told that we couldn’t attend because we were both wheelchair users. So we had no choice but to attend one of the few segregated Chicago Public Schools that were only for students with disabilities.
School districts today don’t dare turn away disabled kids so blatantly, because they could be sued for violating IDEA. I still hear a lot of stories about parents and guardians who have to engage in needlessly protracted and brutal legal battles with their school districts just to get a disabled child the educational services they need. But at least the parents and guardians of today have a fighting chance when they file an OCR or OSEP complaint.