The right of disabled people to live in our own communities is being taken apart.
Not in one place, and not by one ruling. On both sides of the Atlantic — through courts, through budgets, through quiet rule changes that never make the news — the systems that let disabled people stay in our homes are being pulled down at the same time. This is not a series of accidents. It is a direction.
Read separately, each fight looks discrete: a UK court ruling, a multi-state lawsuit, a Medicaid rule, a benefits tweak. Read together, they tell one story. The right to live in community is being dismantled, and the legal tools to defend it are being dismantled alongside it.
Three jurisdictions, one logic
In the UK, the Supreme Court has overturned Cheshire West, the precedent that protected hundreds of thousands of disabled people under the Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards. Disabled people’s organisations say the ruling dismantles independent oversight and hands public bodies a legal route to “warehouse” disabled people when proper social care support is judged too expensive. Under the new logic, a disabled person who lacks the capacity to consent to where and how they live can now be treated as consenting by merely expressing “wishes and feelings.” The check that asked whether an arrangement was actually in someone’s best interest is gone. Absence of objection is being recast as consent.
In the United States, a coalition of states is attacking the integration mandate — the requirement under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, upheld by the Supreme Court in Olmstead v. L.C. in 1999, that disabled people receive services in the most integrated setting appropriate. In an amended complaint filed January 23, 2026, nine states asked a federal court to block the HHS regulations that implement Section 504 — including the protection that says a state can discriminate when its policies put disabled people at serious risk of unnecessary institutionalization. Sustained advocacy has since peeled states away: Indiana, South Dakota, and Kansas have all withdrawn from Texas v. Kennedy, leaving six — Texas, Alaska, Florida, Louisiana, Missouri, and Montana — with written arguments due through July 7. What is at stake is not whether Section 504 exists. It is whether anyone can enforce it before harm happens — before a person is forced into an institution because the community services they need were never funded. You can contact your state Attorney General through DREDF’s campaign.
And the money is being pulled out from under community-based services entirely. H.R. 1 cut roughly $1 trillion from Medicaid over ten years. On June 1, 2026, CMS issued a rule imposing work requirements on Medicaid expansion and narrowing who counts as “medically frail” — now demanding that disabled people prove they cannot work, even when no accessible job exists, even when they cannot afford the steps required to get one. As the Autistic Self Advocacy Network put it, nothing in the rule makes it easier for Autistic people, people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, or older adults to get the care they need — and the rule itself admits millions will lose coverage. Human Rights Watch reached the same conclusion. Health experts warn the medically frail will be swept up regardless, and advocates expect the changes to push disabled people off the program. The CMS comment period runs through July 31. The cuts then land state by state, on staggered timelines, throughout 2026 — some states resisting, others using federal cover to cut Home and Community-Based Services they never wanted to fund.
It does not stop there
The same direction runs through every adjacent system at once.
The Trump administration is preparing a Supplemental Security Income rule that would deduct the value of a disabled adult’s bedroom from their SSI check if they live with family poor enough to receive SNAP — slashing benefits by up to a third for as many as 400,000 of the lowest-income recipients, or ending their support outright. The premise is that a disabled adult living in their childhood bedroom must have a hidden benefactor. The reality is a sanitation worker making $2,000 a month and a daughter who absorbs the family’s money stress in her body. The decades-old SSI marriage penalty still stands; the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act would end rules that have not changed in nearly forty years, and it waits. Meanwhile, proposals to move the Office of Special Education Programs out of the Department of Education, new voucher schemes that strip IDEA protections, and pressure on federal housing supports all sit on the same watch list. Different agencies. Different statutes. One direction of travel.
The watch list became an action
It did not stay a proposal. On June 16, 2026, the Department of Education announced that it is moving the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services — the office that administers IDEA — into the Department of Health and Human Services, and shifting the Office for Civil Rights into the Department of Justice. Four interagency agreements, signed and announced, on the way to closing the department for good.
The administration calls these “partnerships.” They are not partnerships. As DREDF names it, this is not reform — it is abandonment. An illegal dismantling carried out by press release, without Congress, without authority. Congress wrote the special education office into the Department of Education by statute. Congress created the Office for Civil Rights to enforce civil rights law in the nation’s schools. A press release does not undo a statute. Calling an unlawful transfer a partnership does not make it lawful.
IDEA is an education law. Moving its oversight into a health agency tells disabled students they belong to the medical system, not the school system — that disability is a diagnosis to be managed rather than a natural part of human life. It is the medical model dressed up as reform. The same deficit ideology, wearing a new agency’s letterhead.
And the civil rights office goes to a Justice Department with no education expertise and a documented record of retreating from civil rights enforcement. Scattering that work sends the clearest possible message about whose rights this administration treats as expendable. Disabled students of color, disabled girls, disabled LGBTQ+ students, disabled English learners, Autistic students, students with intellectual and developmental disabilities — the ones who live at the intersections, the ones the system already fails most. They are the students this decision endangers first.
This is the same logic running through every other thread. A right enforced from inside an agency built to understand schools is a right with somewhere to go. A right scattered across agencies that were never built to run public education is a right families are told to assemble themselves — chasing answers between departments while students lose time, support, and opportunity they do not get back. The premise that this improves coordination is false. It guarantees confusion, delay, and weaker accountability. That is not a side effect. It is the function.
Different agencies. Different statutes. One direction of travel.
And the tools to fight back are being taken too
This is the part that makes the rest cohere into a strategy rather than a coincidence. In Trump v. CASA, a 6–3 Supreme Court restricted nationwide injunctions — the tool that let a single court stop a harmful federal policy for everyone affected, not just the people who managed to find a lawyer and file. Justice Jackson called the decision a gash in the founding charter that could turn out to be a mortal wound. For disability rights, the first line of defense has been weakened: people harmed by an unlawful policy must now sue and win individually, which takes years, while the policy keeps operating in the meantime.
Stack the threads and the design becomes legible. A weakened integration mandate makes Medicaid cuts harder to challenge in court. A weakened injunction power makes every challenge slower and narrower. The attack on the right and the attack on the means of defending the right are not two stories. They are the same campaign, run on parallel tracks.
The ideology underneath
Every one of these policies rests on the same belief: that disabled people are a cost to be minimized, a fraud risk to be surveilled, a burden whose care is cheaper behind a wall. That is deficit ideology written as budget policy. The endpoint it keeps arriving at is the institution — the warehouse the UK ruling names out loud and the integration mandate exists to prevent.
The premise is false, and it is not even efficient. Supporting people in their own homes is more humane and cheaper than institutionalizing them. ProPublica’s reporting makes the math brutal: cutting one young woman’s SSI would save taxpayers about $11 a day, and could cost hundreds of dollars a day if it pushes her out of her father’s house and into a residential facility. The savings are a fiction. What remains, once the accounting fails, is the ideology — the conviction that disabled lives are worth less, lived smaller, and best kept out of sight.
We say it the other way. The systems are broken, not the people. Independence was never the absence of support; it was always interdependence with the support in place. A right you cannot enforce is not a right.
What we hold
As these supports erode, demand on mutual aid networks rises — and we need to be honest about what that means. Mutual aid is not a replacement for the systems being dismantled. It is what people fall back on when those systems fail, and it cannot carry $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts on its back. Defending the systems and building the networks are not alternatives. We do both, because we have to.
This is a window, not a verdict. The CMS comment period is open through July 31. The state Attorneys General in the six remaining Texas v. Kennedy states have phone numbers. The court’s briefing schedule has a deadline. Three states have already withdrawn from the lawsuit — not because the administration relented, but because disabled people and their families called, wrote, and refused to be quiet. Nothing about us without us is not a slogan here. It is the mechanism that is already working.
The right to live in community was never given. It was won. It is being taken — methodically, on every front, by people who would rather count us than properly house us.
We name the system, not the person. And we do not consent.
Sources
- ASAN, New Medicaid Expansion Changes Hurt People with Disabilities
- Disability News Service, Supreme Court ruling ‘opens the door to reduced scrutiny’ and ‘warehousing’ of disabled people
- DREDF, Protect 504
- National Health Law Program, Texas and Eight Other States Renew Attack on Section 504
- Disability Belongs, States Continue Legal Attack on Section 504 and the Right to Live in the Community
- WFYI, Work requirements and Medicaid cuts: health experts worry changes will impact medically frail people
- Disability Scoop, Medicaid Changes Will Push People With Disabilities Off Program, Advocates Warn
- Human Rights Watch, US: Medicaid Work Requirements Risk Coverage Loss for Millions
- ProPublica, The Trump Administration Aims to Penalize Disabled Adults Who Live With Their Families
- The Arc, A New Limit on Disability Rights Lawsuits? What Trump v. CASA Means
- The Arc, 2026 Disability Advocacy: What We’re Watching & How to Help
- DREDF, This Isn’t Reform, It’s Abandonment.
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