An excerpt of an article by Cory Turner of NPR (December 3, 2025) appears below:
Fifty years ago, just after Thanksgiving of 1975, President Gerald Ford signed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, the landmark law that created special education as it exists today, and guaranteed all children with disabilities the right to a “free appropriate public education.” (The law was later renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA.)
Yet, “rather than celebrating progress, we face a crisis,” warned a recent letter to Congress, signed by hundreds of disability, civil rights and education groups.
That crisis, according to the letter, is “the dismantling of the very infrastructure Congress created to ensure children with disabilities could reach their full potential.”
The Trump administration has fired, or tried to fire, many of the federal staff at the U.S. Department of Education who manage and enforce federal disability law, though Education Secretary Linda McMahon has said federal funding for special education is not at risk.
In a November op-ed in USA Today, McMahon wrote that “returning education to the states does not mean the end of federal support for education. It simply means the end of a centralized bureaucracy micromanaging what should be a state-led responsibility.”
But, in interviews with 40 parents, educators, disability-rights advocates, subject matter experts and Education Department staffers, NPR heard a growing fear: that the Trump administration’s efforts to cut federal staff and oversight of special education could return the U.S. to a time, before 1975, when some schools denied access or services to children with disabilities.
