Trump is gutting special education enforcement after fifty years of starving it.
The federal government promised to fund 40 percent of what it costs to educate children with disabilities. That was 1975, when Congress passed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The closest the government ever came was about 18 percent, in the mid-2000s. Today the federal share is less than 12 percent. For seven million students with disabilities in public schools — 14 percent of every enrollment in the country — the gap between promise and payment now runs to $38.66 billion a year, per the Congressional Research Service. That number is roughly twice the entire Title I appropriation for high-poverty schools. The difference comes out of every other line in the local school budget.
And now the administration is moving the people who enforce what little federal support exists to a different agency. The Office for Special Education and Rehabilitative Services — the staff who help states implement IDEA, who monitor compliance, who investigate complaints when a school denies services a child is legally entitled to — will relocate to the Department of Health and Human Services under the same interagency agreement process the administration has been using to dismantle the department. Kelly Rogers, the acting assistant secretary overseeing special education, told advocates on a call Thursday that “The U.S. Health and Human Services is not taking over IDEA. Period.” She also said the OSERS staff would move to HHS. She said she would oversee them from the Education Department “with additional support by HHS.” No timeline was shared. NPR obtained the recording. The department’s press secretary, Savannah Newhouse, said the plan would “place these important federal responsibilities in a better positioned agency.”
Disability rights advocates were not reassured. “Today’s briefing left more questions than answers for parents and educators,” said Chad Rummel of the Council for Exceptional Children. Jacqueline Rodriguez of the National Center for Learning Disabilities put it more directly: “The concern is not that IDEA disappears overnight. The concern is that the administration is preserving IDEA at the Department of Education on paper, while moving much of the work that makes IDEA real for families somewhere else.” Denise Marshall, CEO of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, called the strategy “a sham.”
This is not a reorganization. It is the shifting of special education and civil rights offices out of the building while keeping the legal responsibility on paper. A press secretary’s assurance that a different desk does not change job responsibilities answers a question no family is asking. The question families have is structural: when the legal authority lives at one agency and the enforcement staff lives at another, who forces compliance.
The kitchen-table version of this move is a mother sitting in an IEP meeting, watching a district deny her child the services they need, knowing the federal mandate that is supposed to protect that child is now being enforced by a staffer in a different building answering to a different secretary. When the federal government fails to monitor the schools, the parents pay the difference, and the math is staggering. Out-of-pocket occupational therapy runs two hundred an hour. Speech therapy the same. A private evaluation runs three thousand dollars. A specialized private school runs fifty thousand a year.
Brigid Schulte named the cognitive load we live with as “contaminated time.” Schulte named it for working mothers; the special-ed parent lives a more concentrated version. It is the state in which a mother is technically at her desk but mentally fielding the district’s refusal to assess her child, researching legal precedent at midnight, drafting a due-process complaint before breakfast. When the enforcement apparatus is scattered across agencies, the contaminated time expands into a full-time job. You become your child’s lobbyist, your child’s legal counsel, your child’s case manager. The lateral safety net shrinks to the mothers in the same special-ed Facebook group, trading PDFs of legal precedents and sharing the names of lawyers who actually return calls.
IDEA enforcement is not an abstraction. When a family files a complaint because their child’s individualized education program has not been followed — because the speech therapy was cut, because the paraprofessional was reassigned, because the aide who knows the child’s name was not replaced — the complaint goes to OSERS staff. Those are the people being moved to a different agency. The legal obligation to enforce IDEA stays at the Education Department. The people who do the enforcing will be elsewhere.
Pope Francis named the principle IDEA was built on in Fratelli Tutti: “the same rule clearly does not apply to a disabled person, to someone born in dire poverty, to those lacking a good education and with little access to adequate health care. If a society is governed primarily by the criteria of market freedom and efficiency, there is no place for such persons.” IDEA was the federal government’s legislative acknowledgment of that truth — a promise that the market’s verdict on a disabled child would not be the final one. For fifty years the government has paid a fraction of what it authorized. Now the administration is moving the enforcement staff to a different agency and calling it streamlining.
Dorothy Day understood that the works of mercy without the works of justice are inadequate; you cannot tell a family to have faith while the state dismantles the legal mechanism designed to protect them.
The affirmative fix is not complicated, and it requires Congress to do its job. A federal agency can only be completely dissolved by an act of Congress; members of both chambers must use that authority to block this sham. Fully fund the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to the forty percent originally promised. Keep the enforcement staff at the Department of Education, where the legal authority resides. Stop using administrative jargon to disguise the abandonment of the most vulnerable students in the country.
The IDEA math is the same math every family that opens a school-budget document eventually runs: a promise made, a promise broken, a gap filled with money that was never supposed to carry the whole weight. Taylor Swift wrote a song that is the only honest description of what this administration is telling families of disabled children — you’re on your own, kid. And just as the friendship bracelets became the tour’s defining artifact, families navigating IDEA have been building that lateral network for decades — the other parents, the community that holds together when the institutions walk away. They built it because the federal government was never going to show up with the money it promised. Now it is not even showing up with the people.