Susan Popkin has a brother-in-law who was kept out of traditional education until high school. David Bateman has a brother-in-law who couldn’t enroll for the first 17 years of his life.
These stories were common before special education accommodations saw a massive overhaul in the 1970s, with the passage of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in 1975, and again in the 1990s, with the start of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Now, with large cuts to the federal Department of Education, advocates are concerned that the learning experience schools offer to students who have disabilities could revert back in time.
“It does seem like so far ago, but right now we’re witnessing all we accomplished could go away in the blink of an eye,” Denise Marshall, CEO of the Council of Parents Attorneys and Advocates (COPAA), says.
After all, she adds, her young granddaughter has heard questions from other children about whether her 12-year-old brother really belongs in a normal school, considering his special education needs.
The Trump administration’s plans to eventually slash the Department of Education were previewed by the conservative policy playbook “Project 2025.” Despite several outstanding lawsuits, the administration has largely made good on that promise with a massive reduction in force hitting the department. The official rationale for the cuts is that they “empower states to take charge and advocate for and implement what is best” for students’ education, according to Secretary of Education Linda McMahon.
“Closing the Department does not mean cutting off funds from those who depend on them—we will continue to support K-12 students, students with special needs, college student borrowers, and others who rely on essential programs,” McMahon said in a statement.
The administration added that IDEA, individual education programs (IEPs) and other accommodations will remain in place for the 7.5 million students across the U.S. who rely on them in schools.
But experts say that gutting the Department of Education, which serves as the umbrella for those services, essentially cuts those accommodations off by proxy.
“If there's no one to do the work, then you have gotten rid of them,” Eve Hill, a disability rights lawyer, says. “They’re reducing our rights to pieces of paper.”
Millions of Students Set to Be Affected
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, students receiving special education accommodations grew by over 1 million students over the last decade, increasing from 6.4 million in the 2012–2013 school year to 7.5 million in the 2022–2023 academic year. Special education services serve the equivalent of 15 percent of all public school students.
The system has never been fully comprehensive or uniform, with many states offering varying levels of services based on their own investments into special education programs. Each state also receives a cut of $15 billion from the federal government designated for special education, covering costs of special education teachers and aides, screening and early intervention for infants and toddlers, and speech and occupational therapists, among other resources. Most advocates say they believe it will be “nearly impossible” for the now-reduced Department of Education workforce to properly distribute and oversee that pool of funding.
“You end up with no oversight and no way to distribute the resources,” Susan Popkin, co-director of the Disability Equity Policy Initiative at the nonprofit Urban Institute, says.
She compared it to the patchwork attempt by states to cover SNAP food assistance programs with local funds during the 2025 government shutdown.
“Some states will have funding and services ready to go and others won’t do anything at all, so we’ll have huge holes across the country,” she says. “The hope is parents and local government will unite and come up with local solutions, but it'll be patchy. There’s no way of getting around it.”
There are also discussions of turning IDEA funding into a block grant, meaning states could theoretically use discretion to put the federal money toward one priority — like autism services — while disregarding others, like services for blind and deaf populations.
“They may prioritize it in odd or harmful ways,” says Carrie Gillispie, project director of Early Development and Disability at think tank New America. “We don't know for sure if it'll be block granted, but everything we've seen in the president's proposal and other rhetoric leading up to now is making people worried they will block grant it.”
The funding also helps with early intervention programs intended to prevent children from needing special education services later — for example, identifying a speech impediment and fixing it early on.
“There’s a real danger that the youngest learners, particularly infants and toddlers, will not get the funding they need,” Gillispie says.
She added federal cuts to Medicaid could further eat into funding for early intervention programs.
“It’s already underfunded, it’s already strained. There’s already a workforce crisis,” she says. “Demand keeps rising for young kids with disabilities; there's more young children being identified, so demand is going up with supply going down.”
More Complaints, Fewer Resources
There could be more confusion about special education rights with the loss of Department of Education oversight. Federal staffers provide long-standing institutional knowledge. Gillespie pointed toward 18 new state directors of special education who “now have no one to call.”
“Parents, educators and state administrators rely on ED [the Education Department] for a lot of help and technical assistance in making special education work,” she says. At the state level, “a lot are saying, ‘Where do we get the guidance to follow the law?’ [ED officials] have institutional knowledge you can't read from a textbook.”
With that confusion comes more complaints filed. Often, families file complaints within the school district or the state, before going to the federal Office for Civil Rights. They typically stem from violations of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which guarantees individuals with disabilities have equal opportunities and rights, and the IDEA Act, which guarantees a “free appropriate public education to eligible children with disabilities.” A complaint could cover anything from a school not having wheelchair accessibility to a teacher not giving a student extra time to take an exam.
According to data from the Department of Education , over one-third of the complaints OCR handles are related to disabilities. That office was largely gutted in February and again in October. Hill, an attorney, expects parents will begin turning toward private lawyers as OCR will be unable to keep up with the deluge of complaints.
“I think there will be more problems; there just won't be anywhere to go with them,” Hill, a partner at law firm Brown, Goldstein and Levy, says. “Parents and kids will have complaints they need to file, but nowhere to file them. So, they'll go to private lawyers. But there are not enough of us, so people will end up having their educational rights taken away.”
Hiring private lawyers also requires time and money many do not have.
“Parents are taking out second mortgages on their homes just to get the rights for the child, but they can also take off from work to prep for the hearing and attend the hearing,” says David Bateman, a special education consultant and retired professor of special education at Shippensburg University. “Most don't have the money, nor flexibility.”
Special education advocates advise parents to reach out to their local and state representatives, while also working alongside their schools.
“Everyone can take some level of action to reverse this and it's important to be loud about it,” Marshall says. “The worst thing we can do is allow this to continue and not take the steps to educate people why it's part of their fight.”
Hill pointed toward Marshall’s COPAA as a good resource, along with the National Disabilities Rights Network, though said the latter is going through its own potential funding crisis.
Popkin suggested connecting with, or creating, a special education PTA within school districts and calling local representatives to pressure them to fill in the gaps left by the federal government.
“Things are different than the earlier eras; there's a lot of strong advocacy groups for disabilities and parents are always motivated to protect their kids,” she says. “If we’re not going to protect our children, who will we protect?”
