During the past year, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made a series of false statements referring to “environmental toxins” as a cause of autism. Meanwhile, the Trump Administration is creating a truly toxic environment for people in the United States with disabilities.
U.S. President Donald Trump has spent his first year in office removing access to health care, exacerbating poverty, reducing access to food, threatening civil rights, and contributing to stigma against already marginalized people. The stress that Americans now face as a result of this resource deprivation and discrimination will in fact cause even more disability.
The relationship between collective material conditions and individual health outcomes has been the subject of extensive research—the social model of disability, developed in the 1970s and 1980s by disability activists, posits that it’s not the differences in our bodies that makes us disabled, but rather, the ways that our society fails to support us. In other words, a society that devalues disabled people and refuses to provide the things we need to thrive (e.g. mobility devices, accessible buildings, affordable health care) is disabling by nature.
This doesn’t mean that, in an equal society, people with physical or mental impairments would never struggle. It means that a lack of inclusive social and physical environments disable us much more than our bodies do.
Research shows that inequality, trauma, poverty, and discrimination are disabling and can result in conditions including high blood pressure, chronic pain, and mental health disabilities. By taking away rights and making life harder for us people with disabilities, our government is creating an environment that will cause more disability.
Disabled people in the United States are already significantly more likely than non-disabled people to live in poverty, especially if they are Black, Indigenous, LGBTQ+, or women. Despite supposed protection from discrimination, many disabled people struggle to find and maintain employment. Those who are employed may be paid sub-minimum wages.
Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Social Security Disability are notoriously difficult to access, and even those who can access these benefits are forced to live in poverty and subjected to strict asset limits that prevent them from escaping poverty. The administration is now preparing to cut SSI even further, contributing to an even worse environment for disabled people.
In a country where health insurance is tied to employment, it’s unsurprising that disabled people—who are often underemployed—have reduced access to affordable, quality health care. As the current administration endeavors to cut Medicare and Medicaid, gut public health systems, and spread vaccine misinformation, it’s clear they are not only threatening the health of disabled people, but creating an environment where more people will become disabled by lack of access to health care and the continued spread of infectious diseases.
The current administration is also defunding research that aims to better support autistic people, improve medical care, and increase educational equity. Instead, it is backing poorly designed research that reaches faulty conclusions while ignoring decades of evidence. These funding priorities send a clear message: that our country’s leaders don’t value disabled lives or well-being.
The administration’s actions will have widespread consequences, as more than one in four adults and one in five children in the U.S. have disabilities. If we can’t care for or support the current disabled population, how can we be prepared to care for and support future generations and the increasing number of people becoming disabled by harmful social and policy environments?
Autism and other disabilities can come with serious challenges, but that doesn’t mean disabled people’s lives are not valuable. Disabled people have always existed—there’s evidence of people caring for disabled individuals throughout human history. But today, our country’s leaders prioritize misinformation over our lives while disabling even more people by ignoring decades of evidence and lived experience and stripping away our already insufficient safety nets.
These actions show a failure to address the needs of a large portion of our current population as well as a failure to prepare for our country’s future. Disabled people and our communities deserve better.
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.