The Trump administration’s decision to lay off most employees within the U.S. Department of Education’s special education office was described by the president this week as part of cuts to “Democrat programs that we were opposed to.” This was news to many conservative parents of disabled children, as well as disability policy experts.
More than 7.3 million children in all 50 states rely on special education services, which are partially funded and enforced by the federal government.
“Special education is a nonpartisan program. Special education services are provided to any student with a disability, regardless of political party,” said Maria Town, president of the nonpartisan American Association of People with Disabilities.
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A federal district court judge in Northern California on Wednesday granted an emergency order to temporarily pause the mass layoffs that occurred throughout the federal government. If the gutting of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, or OSERS, proceeds, Town and other disability advocates said there is no way the Department of Education can continue to fulfill its responsibilities to enforce the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The act — known by its acronym, IDEA — guarantees students with disabilities the same right to public education as students without disabilities.
Town pointed out that during the first term of President Donald Trump, a Republican, the office determined that Texas, a Republican-led state, had illegally placed a cap on the number of students who could receive special education services in each district. Texas lawmakers lifted the cap in 2017, after receiving pressure from the Department of Education.
Many of the biggest legislative victories for students with disabilities happened under Republican administrations.
“Education for people with disabilities goes hand in hand with conservative ideals,” wrote disabled journalist Eric Garcia in a recent MSNBC column. “While that may seem counterintuitive, having people with disabilities integrated into larger society is a way to reduce the chance that they have to depend on the government.”.
Former Republican President Gerald Ford signed the first iteration of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, then-called the Handicapped Children Act. It required that students with disabilities receive “individualized education plans” and established that they have a right to a “free, appropriate public education.” Republican President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act into law in 1990. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was later expanded and reauthorized by a Republican-majority Congress and signed by Republican President George W. Bush in 2004.
Across some of the largest special education and parent groups on Facebook, debate has raged about what this recent move will mean for disabled children. Among conservative-leaning parents, opinions roughly fell into three categories: denial, hopefulness and a sense of betrayal.
Some parents were certain that the change would not affect their children and that the people who had been laid off were just overpaid government bureaucrats. One mother to a child on the autism spectrum from West Virginia wrote in a private parent group with over 100,000 members: “Good grief people. Nobody is throwing our kids to the wolves. They will be given the supports [sic] that they need.”
This, Town said, is most likely not the case.
“There is a perception that because IDEA, the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act technically remain the law of the land, that enforcement from the Department of Education is redundant and that is simply not the case,” she said. “Although these laws remain on the books, students and children and families still have rights that need to be enforced.”
Other parents praised the layoffs, believing that it would be better for special education services to be moved either to the Department of Health and Human Services or for individual states to hold more responsibility. Many believed that such a change had already happened. This is not the case.
“Love it! Gives us more control! Having it under the HHS is so much better. I think we will see better changes and resources than ever before,” wrote one Texan mother in Special Education Community, a public Facebook group with over 400,000 members.
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has previously suggested that she would like special education to be managed by the Department of Health and Human Services. In a Fox News interview in March, McMahon said, “IDEA funding for our children with disabilities and special needs was in place before there was a Department of Education and it managed to work incredibly well.”
However, that change cannot legally happen without an act of Congress, and the office managing special education funding and enforcement is not being moved to Health and Human Services. Instead, most of the staff were laid off.
Reducing the Department of Education has long been a stated goal for some on the right.
“Republicans generally are seeing education as mostly a state and local project, and that the increase in the federalization of education programs and dollars is not a step in the right direction,” said Rachel Barkley, director of Able Americans.
Able Americans is one of the only conservative think tank projects dedicated entirely to disability policy. It is housed within the National Center for Public Policy Research, one of the many conservative organizations that contributed to the development of Project 2025.
But Barkley said that this does not mean a lack of support among conservatives for special education services. She pointed to President Trump’s previous fiscal year 2026 discretionary budget request. While it proposes zeroing out or reducing many federal programs’ funding, that was not the case for special education funding.
“The President’s budget is a kind of ideological statement — a wish list that never gets enacted. His budget level funded IDEA, kept it at the same level, despite other programs having a 15% drop,” Barkley said. While she and some other conservatives oppose having a Department of Education, she says they do not oppose support for disabled students.
Republican Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota has repeatedly introduced legislation that would abolish the Department of Education while keeping special education funding and enforcement, which would move to other departments. A previous iteration of the bill died before making it to committee; no legislation will move while the government is shut down.
Other conservative and right-leaning parents online felt less hope and certainty about the future.
In a private group for parents of children with Down syndrome, one Indiana mother wrote that while she agrees with others who feel the federal bureaucracy is bloated and big changes are needed, “gutting the entire department with no replacement or plan isn’t help. It doesn’t help us.”
Trump’s attempt to gut special education office has some conservative parents on edge was first published on The 19th and was republished with permission.
Sara Luterman is the 19th's disability and aging reporter.
