On Wednesday, a leaked draft Health and Human Services budget document revealed, among other sweeping cuts to health- and disability-related services, that Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s department plans to defund protection and advocacy services for people with developmental disabilities—including autistic people, about whom Kennedy also spreads harmful disinformation. The budget document is a proposal, pending official release and eventually congressional approval; it’s also unclear whether suggested cuts originate with Kennedy’s HHS or Project 2025 architect Russell Vought’s Office of Management and Budget.
Federal funding for nongovernmental organizations to provide legal and advocacy services to people with developmental disabilities started in 1978 with the Developmentally Disabled Assistance and Bill of Rights Act. There are now 57 protection and advocacy agencies—one in every state, every territory, and in Washington, DC—that work to enforce the rights of people with developmental disabilities, those with mental health conditions, and other disabilities. The agencies, known as P&As, are overseen by HHS’s Administration for Community Living—which is being dismantled.
“What they’ve outlined here is eliminating almost all of the disability infrastructure in this country providing for services, supports, [and] research across the board to disabled people,” said Kate Caldwell, director of research and policy at Northwestern University’s Center for Racial and Disability Justice. Protection and advocacy agencies, Caldwell explains, are granted what’s called “access authority,” powers that allow them to independently investigate reports of abuse in facilities and community settings.
Caldwell is also very concerned, she says, about the draft budget’s proposed elimination of funding for the University Centers for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities Education, Research, and Services, and for state developmental disability councils.
“There’s been five decades of bipartisan consensus that it’s good to have a network that…can go in and expose abuses.”
Those cuts, as Caldwell noted, can’t just come from the executive branch—and would unquestionably spark legal action. “If HHS withheld funding or dismantled the program without an actual statutory repeal,” Caldwell said, “it would face multiple lawsuits from disability rights organizations, as well as state attorneys general, for violating the law.”
The nonprofit Disability Rights California is one such protection and advocacy agency. It receives a mix of federal funding—including through sources not on the chopping block, such as funding for assistive technology and traumatic brain injury assistance—alongside state and private funds. Its executive director, Andy Imparato, said that his organization stands to lose around $6 million annually from an approximately $50 million budget, if the cuts go through as written—which would also end funding for protection and advocacy agencies’ voting access work.
But his group is an outlier. “California is a little bit of a unicorn in the sense that we have a lot of state funding,” Imparato said. “Most protection and advocacy agencies, over 90 percent of their funding is federal. In our case, it’s only 40 percent.”
HHS’s funding threat was surprising news for Imparato. “There’s been five decades of bipartisan consensus that it’s good to have a network that has access authority,” he said, “and can go in and expose abuses that are happening for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and other disabilities.”
That access allows Imparato’s team to “go to places where people are experiencing abuse and neglect and expose that and address it, even if they are not seeking us out as their lawyers,” he said. “That is kind of a unique thing about the protection and advocacy agencies.”
Amidst the chaos, Imparato does see a silver lining: “I see it as an opportunity for our networks that are affected by these cuts to educate this group of members of Congress,” he said. “Hopefully it puts us in a stronger position to not just survive whatever proposal is coming from this administration, but for members of Congress to feel…that this network matters.”
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.