Center for American Progress

RELEASE: The Top 5 Ways Project 2025 Will Hurt Disabled People
Press Release

RELEASE: The Top 5 Ways Project 2025 Will Hurt Disabled People

Washington, D.C. — A new Center for American Progress issue brief highlights the top five ways the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 will directly harm disabled people by removing basic civil rights protections and making it harder to access necessary resources and services.

Here are five ways in which Project 2025 would harm the disability community: 

  1. Project 2025 plans to eliminate the rights and protections of disabled students. By eliminating the U.S. Department of Education, Project 2025 would make it much more difficult to coordinate a knowledge base and resources. It also would be harder to ensure that disabled students receive a free, appropriate public education. Project 2025 also intends to eliminate earmarked funding and plans to strip disabled people of access to valued educational institutions, possibly including the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, the American Printing House for the Blind, and Gallaudet University. The far-right plan would also eliminate the equity requirements in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and remove its funding to help address discrepancies around the overrepresentation of students of color in special education. 
  2. Project 2025 would enact major cuts to key health coverage programs and services. It would set time limits on Medicaid coverage or arbitrary lifetime caps on benefits, which could put millions of Americans at risk of losing coverage. Project 2025 would also fully repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, which would affect up to 18.5 million Medicare Part D enrollees who could face increased out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs. Project 2025 plans to strip consumer protections from people who buy insurance on their own, allowing plans to revert to discriminating against people with preexisting conditions; setting lifetime caps on coverage; charging people more or denying them altogether based on their medical history; or excluding benefits for basic services such as mental health care or maternity care. Project 2025 advocates for tracking comparisons between live births and abortions across demographics, potentially targeting marginalized communities. Project 2025 would also reduce the size of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and split the agency in two, jeopardizing its ability to mitigate pandemics by limiting its scientifically based public health recommendations and guidelines—putting disabled people, who tend to have weaker immune systems and complex medical needs, at higher risk.
  3. Project 2025 would create even more barriers to employment for disabled workers. Project 2025 intends to remove the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s enforcement capacity of antidiscrimination laws by making it impossible to demonstrate how an employer’s workplace policies and practices can harm workers. Project 2025 also explicitly states the intention to misuse an outdated statute called the Comstock Act to achieve a backdoor, nationwide abortion ban by inhibiting the transfer of medication abortion via mail. Banning medication abortion would worsen preexisting health care disparities, particularly for disabled pregnant people, and create insurmountable barriers to care.
  4. Project 2025 would restrict disability and other social benefits. Project 2025 would automate the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) claims process and make it more difficult for veterans to obtain disability benefits. The far-right plan intends to eliminate “work requirement waivers” for states, putting disabled people who aren’t receiving Supplemental Security Income or Social Security Disability Insurance or who aren’t classified as disabled by the VA at risk of losing their eligibility.
  5. Project 2025 would reduce the ability to enforce the ADA. Project 2025 proposes that the federal government stop using “disparate impact” regulations in assessing discrimination and cease bringing lawsuits that challenge the standard’s constitutionality. Discontinuing the use of disparate impact rules would make it harder for the federal government to enforce civil rights protections under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). 

“Project 2025 takes a wrecking ball to federal measures that address real issues disabled people face in accessing critical supports and services,” said Mia Ives-Rublee, senior director for the Disability Justice Initiative at CAP and co-author of the brief. “If even only some of the policies outlined here are fully enacted or required by executive order, disabled people would face insurmountable hurdles to living and participating in their communities.”

Read the issue brief: The Top 5 Ways Project 2025 Would Hurt Disabled People” by Mia Ives-Rublee and Casey Doherty

For more information or to speak with an expert, please contact Jasmine Razeghi at [email protected]. 

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