Students with Disabilities: What is the Government’s Role?

The U.S. Education Department’s role in helping students with disabilities may be changing soon. President Trump has said his administration is going to move “special needs” to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), an agency that recently announced its own drastic cuts. His administration hasn’t specified exactly which programs will be moved, and whether IDEA, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, is among them. The conservative policy playbook Project 2025 does propose moving IDEA to HHS, however.

Department of Education spokesperson Madi Biedermann said, “The Department is actively reviewing where [Education Department] programs can be responsibly managed to best serve students and families. This will be done in partnership with Congress, other agencies, and national and state education leaders.” Experts say any such move would be incredibly complicated.

Special education laws are “intertwined” with the Education Department, says Katy Neas, a former deputy assistant secretary in the department’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services. “To have the separation away from a broader institution of education just seems misguided to me,” says Neas, who now leads The Arc, an advocacy organization for people with disabilities. Neas says moving some of the legally protected programs to another agency would also require an act of Congress.

But some wonder if the federal government has even been that helpful when it comes to special education. “I mean, parents make their [education plans] with their local educators, right? With their school and their school district. They don’t make it with Washington,” says Jonathan Butcher, an education researcher at the Heritage Foundation, which helped shape Project 2025.

Several experts expressed concern about moving special education programs to HHS, and away from the Education Department, an institution that specializes in helping all students learn. Alison Barkoff, who led disability programs at HHS until last year, says splintering special education programs into different agencies “is really counterproductive to what IDEA and the goals of special education are about, which is students with disabilities as students first, as part of their schools, part of their classrooms. And that can’t happen if it’s separated from general education.”

Jonathan Butcher of the Heritage Foundation sees the proposed moves as an opportunity to improve the role of the federal government in the lives of students. “I think that moving it to another agency is an appropriate move because I don’t think that we have evidence that the U.S. Department of Education has effectively served these families,” he says. “Change is difficult and that’s why it doesn’t happen very often at the federal level, but this is an opportunity to streamline federal processes.”

Disability advocate Sueli Gwiazdowski says history has shown the dangers of separating the rights of disabled students from non-disabled students. “When educating disabled students has not been considered part of normative general education, that has looked like what? It’s looked like institutionalization.” She worries if special education were to move to HHS, disability could be categorized as a health concern rather than an integrated part of public life, including in schools.

Allison Green
Boston Tutoring Services