The Trump administration’s disability policy changes reach nearly every federal program that people with disabilities rely on: Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income, Medicaid and home-based care, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and federal civil rights enforcement. Some changes are formal rules. Others are staffing cuts, delayed deadlines, or reinterpretations of existing law. Together they tighten who qualifies for benefits, shrink the services available to people who do qualify, and narrow the federal government’s role in enforcing disability rights.
Here is what has changed, what is proposed, and where things stand.
Social Security Disability Benefits
The Social Security Administration drafted a regulation (RIN 0960-AI67) that would have changed how it evaluates disability claims from workers over 50, discounting the effect of age, limited education, and narrow work experience on someone’s ability to return to work. The Urban Institute estimated the rule could reduce approvals by up to 20 percent overall and up to 30 percent for older applicants, which would be the largest cut in SSDI’s history. At half that magnitude, the same analysis projected 750,000 fewer people receiving benefits within ten years, with the sharpest effects in the South, Appalachia, the Rust Belt, and Maine.1Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Trump Administration Plans Deep Cuts to Social Security Disability Insurance
In November 2025, White House deputy chief of staff James Blair and SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano told advocates the rule would “no longer be moving forward.” A White House official later called those reports “media speculation.”2Nextgov. SSA Abandons Planned Disability Program Overhaul Expected to Cut Benefits for Thousands
The SSI In-Kind Support Rule
A separate proposed rule targets SSI recipients who live with family. Current policy exempts households where at least one person receives SNAP from having in-kind housing support deducted from a disabled adult’s SSI check. The proposed rule would end that exemption, calculate the value of the recipient’s bedroom and any income or assets held by other family members in the home, and deduct those amounts from the monthly benefit. Recipients would also file extensive monthly reports on household finances.
Up to 400,000 SSI recipients could see reduced or eliminated benefits, including people with Down syndrome, autism, and dementia, and older adults living with relatives. As of April 2026, the rule was under review at the White House Office of Management and Budget, with finalization potentially stretching into 2027.3ProPublica. Trump Social Security SSI Disability Benefits Cuts Parents Children
More Frequent Continuing Disability Reviews
Another proposal would increase the frequency of continuing disability reviews by creating a new “Medical Improvement Likely” category requiring review at least every two years.4National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare. SSDI Beneficiaries Don’t Need Trump Administration’s New Rule Each review requires a 15-page form documenting medical treatment, daily activities, and assistive device usage, often at the beneficiary’s own expense. In 2015, nearly 72 percent of people who appealed a termination after a continuing disability review had the denial overturned.5NOSSCR. Social Security Rule Changes Will Harm Disabled Workers
What It Takes to Reach the SSA
Even without formal eligibility changes, applying for and keeping benefits has become harder. The Department of Government Efficiency drove much of the disruption.
SSA cut more than 7,100 jobs, over 13 percent of its workforce, closed six of ten regional offices, and shifted services online. As of May 2026, ten field offices in nine states were either closed to the public or operating by appointment only.6The Conversation. Getting Disability Benefits Got Harder After the Social Security Administration’s Staff Was Slashed Fifty percent of callers hung up before reaching a representative. The online portal crashed four times in one month. In June 2025 the agency removed customer service metrics, including phone wait times and disability claim processing times, from its website.7Economic Policy Institute. What Is DOGE Doing to Social Security
Disability claims filed in the first half of 2025 ran seven percent below the same period the prior year. Prior research on field office closures has found a 13 percent drop in the number of people receiving disability benefits in affected areas. Some terminally ill applicants died before receiving benefits they qualified for.6The Conversation. Getting Disability Benefits Got Harder After the Social Security Administration’s Staff Was Slashed
DOGE also sought access to SSA’s earnings record database. Acting Commissioner Michelle King resigned in February 2025 after refusing that access. In March 2025 a federal judge in Maryland issued a temporary restraining order barring DOGE employees from SSA systems and requiring them to delete non-anonymized data taken since January 2025.8Brookings Institution. DOGE Is Disrupting Social Security
SSA Information and ICE
In February 2026, reports surfaced that some SSA staff had been verbally instructed to give Immigration and Customs Enforcement the date and time of a person’s upcoming appointment if asked.9Rep. John Larson. Social Security Agency Tells Workers to Give ICE Details About Beneficiary Appointments A disclosed agreement between SSA and ICE reportedly planned to share personal and financial information on 50,000 immigrants per month. Advocacy groups sued in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, and in February 2026 a federal court blocked ICE from using the protected taxpayer information.10Asian Law Caucus. Advocates Sue ICE, IRS, SSA to Stop Information Sharing Advocates said the policy discouraged immigrant families from visiting SSA offices to apply for benefits, including disability benefits for their U.S. citizen children.
Medicaid and Home-Based Care
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025, cut federal Medicaid spending by roughly $1 trillion over ten years, according to the Congressional Budget Office, with an estimated 10.5 million people projected to lose coverage by 2034.11Center for American Progress. The Truth About the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s Cuts to Medicaid and Medicare The law added work requirements, restricted states’ use of provider taxes, and shortened eligibility redeterminations from annual to every six months.12American Medical Association. Changes to Medicaid, ACA and Other Key Provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill
Home and community-based services carry a specific risk. Nursing home care is a mandatory Medicaid benefit; home-based services are optional. When states face budget pressure, the optional services are the first to be cut. Nearly two million people with disabilities use HCBS to live outside institutions, and waiting lists already exceeded 700,000 people before the law passed.13Cornell Law School. Slashing Spending and Survivability: Disabled Lives on the Line Post One Big Beautiful Bill
Iowa, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, and Idaho have already considered or implemented cuts to Medicaid waiver programs for home-based services. In Iowa, an insurer tried to cut a participant’s in-home care hours by 40 percent by reclassifying “supervision” as an ineligible service; an administrative law judge reversed the cut on appeal. Advocates note that home care was estimated at roughly $11,000 per month per person, compared to about $22,000 for institutional care.14KFF Health News. Medicaid Cuts Disabilities Home Community-Based Services Iowa
The Right to Live in the Community
In June 2026 the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a 39-page memo asserting that neither the ADA nor Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act contains a statutory “integration mandate.” That is the principle, rooted in the Supreme Court’s 1999 decision in Olmstead v. L.C., that states must serve people with disabilities in the most integrated community setting appropriate rather than in institutions.
The memo, written by Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Lanora Pettit, argues Olmstead was a narrow ruling about “unjustified institutional isolation” and did not require broad deinstitutionalization, and it invokes federalism to give states more discretion over service delivery. The DOJ acknowledged in the memo itself that this position is “out of step with the common understanding of that decision within the federal courts.”15U.S. Department of Justice. Office of Legal Counsel Memorandum16STAT News. DOJ Memo Targets Disability Integration Olmstead Mandate
The memo does not change existing law and does not alter the ADA or the Olmstead ruling. It signals a federal withdrawal from enforcing integration claims and suggests DOJ and HHS may amend their regulations to match the new interpretation.17Disability Scoop. Trump Administration Claims People With Disabilities Don’t Have Right to Community-Based Services The federal position now aligns with plaintiff states in Texas v. Kennedy (formerly Texas v. Becerra), a 2024 lawsuit seeking to overturn the integration mandate. As of June 2026, six states remained plaintiffs: Alaska, Florida, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, and Texas. The case is moving toward summary judgment.18Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund. Protect Section 504
The Executive Order on Involuntary Institutionalization
On July 24, 2025, President Trump signed “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” an executive order directing federal agencies to develop methods for placing homeless people with mental illness or substance use disorders into long-term institutional treatment. The order tells the Attorney General and the Secretary of HHS to seek reversal of court precedents and termination of consent decrees that limit civil commitment.19The White House. Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets
Federal support for “Housing First” programs, which provide housing without treatment preconditions, is to end. Funding priority goes to states that ban public camping and use civil commitment. Federal homelessness assistance recipients must require participants with serious mental illness to use treatment services as a condition of help. The order provided no new funding for psychiatric treatment capacity, while the administration separately proposed cutting the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration budget by $1 billion and HUD’s by 50 percent.20KFF. A Look at the New Executive Order and the Intersection of Homelessness and Mental Illness
The ACLU and the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law warned the order would produce “arbitrary confinement of people based on a disability” and clash with the Supreme Court’s 1975 decision in O’Connor v. Donaldson, which held that states cannot constitutionally confine non-dangerous individuals capable of living safely in freedom.21Courthouse News Service. Trump Signs Executive Order Pushing to Institutionalize Homeless People
Special Education and IDEA
Roughly 7.5 million students with disabilities receive services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. President Trump signed an executive order on March 20, 2025, calling for the dissolution of the U.S. Department of Education. Full abolition requires Congressional approval, which has not been granted. The administration has moved functions through interagency agreements instead. In June 2026, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon announced an agreement transferring administration of IDEA grants and Rehabilitation Act programs to the Department of Health and Human Services, while the Office for Civil Rights was moved to the Department of Justice.22Disability Scoop. ED Department Strikes Deal to Offload Special Education
Staffing losses have been steep. In March 2025 the administration fired nearly half of the Department of Education’s workforce, including legal staff in the Office of Special Education Programs. In October 2025 it announced plans to fire nearly all remaining staff responsible for distributing IDEA funding and monitoring state compliance. After those layoffs, fewer than six employees remained to oversee special education nationwide. The Rehabilitation Services Administration, which coordinated vocational rehabilitation funding for more than 870,000 clients, lost almost every employee.23Center for American Progress. The Trump Administration’s Recent Special Education Layoffs Will Have Major Long-Term Impacts on Disabled Children and Students
The Office for Civil Rights lost more than 250 employees in March 2025. A Government Accountability Office report found that between March and September 2025, roughly 90 percent of discrimination cases were resolved by dismissal without review. States sued to block the layoffs, and in July 2025 the Supreme Court issued a shadow-docket ruling that allowed the workforce reductions to proceed during litigation.24First Focus on Children. How Eliminating the Department of Education Threatens Students With Disabilities Only 19 of 50 states currently meet IDEA requirements. A Senate panel has considered legislation to block the transfer to HHS.
ADA Rules and Disability Hiring
On September 11, 2025, DOJ said it would halt 54 pending regulatory actions to comply with Executive Order 14192, which requires the total incremental cost of new regulations to be “significantly less than zero.” Two of the halted rules concerned ADA accessibility: one on accessible equipment and furniture in public accommodations, and one on accessible routes in public areas.25ADA Title III. Trump Administration Puts the Kibosh on Two Pending ADA Rulemakings
The DOJ also extended compliance deadlines for website accessibility rules finalized under the Biden administration. The April 2026 deadline for state and local government web accessibility was pushed back one year. An HHS rule requiring web accessibility for healthcare providers receiving federal funding was delayed from May 2026 to May 2027. In May 2026 the National Federation of the Blind sued in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, alleging the delays violated the Administrative Procedure Act because the administration skipped notice and comment.26Disability Scoop. Trump Administration Sued Over Delay of Accessibility Rules
The Department of Labor proposed eliminating the seven percent utilization goal for hiring people with disabilities among federal contractors under Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act. The July 2025 proposal would also remove the voluntary self-identification survey and the utilization analysis requirement, dismantling the affirmative action framework for disability hiring in the federal contracting workforce.27American Bar Association. Reversing Progress: Trump Administration’s Proposed Changes
Where Advocates Are Pushing Back
The disability rights community has responded across multiple fronts. On May 13, 2025, protesters were arrested during a House Committee on Energy and Commerce markup of proposed Medicaid cuts.28Center for American Progress. Federal Medicaid Cuts Would Force States to Eliminate Services for Disabled Adults, Older Adults, and Children Disability organizations have lobbied Congress against transferring special education programs to HHS, mobilized against state-level HCBS cuts, and filed amicus briefs in Texas v. Kennedy.
Responding to the OLC memo, Jennifer Mathis of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law called it “potentially devastating for the rights of people with disabilities,” while noting that “a federal agency cannot change the law — only Congress can do that.”17Disability Scoop. Trump Administration Claims People With Disabilities Don’t Have Right to Community-Based Services Shira Wakschlag of The Arc of the United States described the memo as a “direct threat to decades of progress toward community living.” Alison Barkoff, a former HHS official, summarized the stakes: “It is now the position of the United States government that people with disabilities don’t have a right to be part of their communities.”29NPR. DOJ Memo Trump Disability Civil Rights Institutionalization
Courts have blocked some pieces (DOGE data access, ICE use of SSA taxpayer information), the SSDI eligibility overhaul has reportedly been shelved, and several proposed rules remain in review or under challenge. The rest is in force or on track.