I have noticed that prominent supporters of President Trump have recently made disturbing statements about children with learning disabilities. In an interview with my colleague Ross Douthat earlier this year, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said:
Take what you would think would be a bulletproof program, like child disability in schools. It’s far from clear to me that the median taxpayer would support that if they really knew what that was. As you and I both know, what that has become is basically a medicalized mental illness. To the point where students in schools now are basically using fake diagnoses of mental illness in order to get drugs and in order to get extra time on tests. That whole program has run completely out of control, and everybody with kids knows that, but it’s not a discrete thing that people can wrap their heads around and understand.
Andreessen seems to be conflating two separate things. It is true that there is a small number of very wealthy parents who are spending tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket on private neuropsychological evaluations, but it’s unclear how many of those diagnoses are “fake,” and that process costs taxpayers nothing. Giving children more time on tests is also free — it does not necessarily require extra staffing, adjustments to classrooms or the implementation of expensive technology.
Separately, there are children who have all different kinds of real disabilities, from mild to severe, and those children are legally entitled to various kinds of educational support and funding from public schools because of the 50-year-old Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).
This kind of sentiment is not just coming from the tech bro wing of the MAGAverse. Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, while questioning Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said, “We have an attention deficit problem in this country. You know, attention deficit when you and I were growing up, our parents didn’t use a drug, they used a belt and whipped our butt, you know, and told us to sit down.” We can certainly have a debate about the best way to treat attention deficit issues, but suggesting in the year 2025 that beating children should be part of the repertoire is sick.
Behind both Tuberville and Andreessen’s statements I’m hearing a similar argument: Learning differences are exaggerated, and by providing support to students who have received what critics consider nonsense diagnoses, we’re coddling America’s children and bilking taxpayers.
Because one of the big things that the Department of Education does is enforce and partially fund IDEA, this kind of argument offers a predicate for getting rid of the Department of Education and even slashing funding for education overall. According to The Washington Post, President Trump is “preparing an executive order aimed at eventually closing the Education Department and, in the short term, dismantling it from within.” Trump has previously said that he wants to close the Department of Education, and it has been a longtime Republican goal.
To back up a bit: The vast majority of education funding comes from state and local governments. About 14 percent of funding for all public schools comes from the federal government, but how much each state relies on federal government money varies considerably — Alaska and North Dakota receive the most funding per pupil from the federal government and Utah and Kansas the least, according to the Education Data Initiative.
Two big chunks of federal funding are to support Title I, which helps fund districts with low-income populations, and another chunk is for IDEA.
As I noted right after the election, the president cannot get rid of the Department of Education with an executive order. He needs Congress to do that, and getting rid of the D.O.E. is not popular with voters. That remains true. But given the chaos of the past few weeks and Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s disregard for existing statutes, I am increasingly concerned that though Trump may not succeed in getting rid of the Department of Education, he will hobble it severely.
Democrats in Congress share this concern: On Feb. 5, a group of five senior members of Congress sent a letter to the acting secretary of education, Denise Carter, demanding transparency into whatever Musk’s initiative is attempting to do, because “These actions appear to be part of a broader plan to dismantle the federal government until it is unable to function and meet the needs of the American people.”
We’re already seeing evidence of the kind of havoc Trump can bring to our kids’ lives even without a change in law. Thousands of young children have been affected by delays in funding for Head Start and some preschools may need to close temporarily, even though there has been no official change in federal funding to the program. Musk and his team slashed “$900 million in Education Department contracts, taking away a key source of data on the quality and performance of the nation’s schools,” according to ProPublica.
“If I were to read the tea leaves,” said Lauren Morando Rhim, a co-founder and the executive director of the Center for Learner Equity, “I think that we’re going to see a huge decrease of staffing and simply reducing the function of the department.” Morando Rhim thinks that what Trump and Musk have done to U.S.A.I.D. could be a blueprint for their plans for the Department of Education.
Disability advocates are also worried that if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is confirmed as the secretary of Health and Human Services, he would meddle with the $2 billion Congress has appropriated for the Autism CARES Act of 2024, because of Kennedy’s previous connection to a debunked link between vaccines and autism. Project 2025 suggests that “the responsibilities for administering” IDEA be moved under H.H.S. if the Department of Education is dismantled, and if that comes to pass, Kennedy could have a good deal of sway over the treatment of disabled children in our schools.
How might this play out for families? The most frequent concern I have heard so far is about families of disabled children having little recourse if their kids do not receive the services they’re legally entitled to. David Perry, a journalist and historian who has a son, Nico, with Down syndrome, told me that when Nico’s educational needs were not being met by the state of Minnesota during the pandemic, he was able to make a complaint to the federal Department of Education and hold the state accountable.
“There’s an online process to issue a complaint” to the Department of Education, Perry explained. He is concerned that if Musk and his team cut staff willy-nilly, there will be no one to respond to those complaints.
If Trump does actually succeed in getting rid of the Department of Education entirely — which I still think is unlikely — then the plan put forth by Project 2025 is to distribute the money for IDEA to states in the form of block grants with no strings attached. If there is little oversight for these block grants, it will be much more difficult to hold states accountable when they are not providing appropriate educational opportunities for disabled children.
President Trump signed an executive order supporting the use of federal funds for school choice, including private and faith-based schools — which are beyond the reach of IDEA enforcement. As Morando Rhim wrote in an opinion essay in December, “a child with autism, dyslexia or Down syndrome, for example, may be denied access, and private schools are under no obligation to provide any specialized services or supports to help them succeed.”
We can’t predict the future — especially when it comes to Trump and Musk. So I asked Tim Daly, the chief executive of EdNavigator and the author of a newsletter on education, about what concerned families can do right now if they’re worried about what will happen if federal funding gets cut, or if the Department of Education ceases to function as it has been. He said to put the pressure on local and state officials. Ask them: “What are you committed to doing and what is your plan? If a federal role simply diminishes, what would you do on special education? What would you do on funding for low-income schools?”
We can also disavow anyone who tries to separate “fake” disabilities from real ones, or tries to diminish the struggles of families who are battling every day to get their children an education. Most families I have spoken to over the years whose children have special needs spend much of their free time, and money they often don’t have, fighting to get the proper diagnoses and support for their kids. “It has always been a part-time job for me and my wife, basically since birth,” Perry said, of getting Nico’s needs met.
We should be making it easier for the families of disabled children to thrive, and this is not the way to do it.
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