By Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp
In November 2015, during his first Presidential campaign, Trump provoked widespread criticism by publicly mocking disabled New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski. His shocking contempt foreshadowed a deeply cruel ableism characterizing his second term in which Trump has attacked all forms of human difference.
This was immediately evident when shadow-president and unelected slasher-in-chief Elon Musk darkened the websites of CDC, NIH, FHA/HUD, and BLS. Under President Trump’s freeze on federal financial support for any agency suspected of supporting DEIA or unproven and “trumped up” charges of waste, fraud and abuse, Musk threw vast segments of the US population into chaos, turmoil, and terror. Despite multiple court cases winning injunctions against these illegal actions, the Trump administration has routinely failed to obey temporary restraining orders: the data removed has rarely been restored. Those seeking such information on a government website are likely to receive the message: “The Page you are Looking for was not Found.” In short, the consequences of mass budget cuts and the removal of crucial data on which life-affirming/threatening policy decisions are made have become horrifically clear.
Disabled people, their families, allies, and service providers are particularly affected by these attacks. Crucial statistics for education, employment, housing, transport, health and healthcare are disappearing with reckless abandon, along with life-sustaining payments often administered through state Medicaid programs, currently in the cross-hairs of this irrational budget-slashing strategy. Were President Trump to succeed in abolishing the Department of Education, where would disabled students with Individualized Education Plans (IEPs) (or 504 accommodations) find the supports they need to get a “free and appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment” as mandated by law? Should the Bureau of Labor Statistics be enjoined from collecting unemployment data, how will the already-perilous workforce struggles of disabled people be recognized? Most importantly, the GOP’s threatened cuts to Medicaid to enable and sustain tax benefits for the billionaire class will be a disaster for the millions of disabled people who rely on these modest but crucial benefits to survive.
Data removal is the first step in disguising the human impact of such cuts. Shockingly, this moment resonates with an earlier eugenic period in American history when disabled children were routinely removed from families to institutions and adults with disabilities were banned from urban streets by the “ugly laws,” rendering them invisible in public space. As the authors of Disability Worlds and two of four co-editors of the collection How to be Disabled in a Pandemic, we are deeply alarmed by this frightening ableist destruction of hard-won legal protections and funding for disabled people across the lifespan, threatening to disenfranchise them once again.
Furthermore, with the destruction of data, it will be nearly impossible to quantitatively track the draconian effects of policy reversals. The deletion of baseline and subsequent measurements effectively “disappears” disabled people from the public eye, subjecting them to further marginalization and thrusting them into what disability activist/scholars term “inaccessible futures.” Dramatic and often heart-rending scenes of desperate disabled citizens and their supporters on nightly news and social media are springing up like mushrooms. But without statistical evidence on which policy depends, these powerful first-person accounts are doomed to erasure, as right-wing media censorship creates other forms of disappearance.
Virtually every Trumpian cut to federal data, policy experts, and personnel has ableist implications: the loss of monitoring housing discrimination by HUD, the increasing toxic environmental consequences resulting from the destruction of the EPA and NOAA. Of equal concern is the cutting of significant NIH research leading to treatment of a wide range of debilitating conditions, and potential kneecapping of the FDA’s oversight of drug safety.
Public outrage against these ableist actions is focused on the threatened cuts to continued funding of the Department of Education and Medicaid that affect a wide range of disabled Americans. For example, the February slashing of $900 million from the budget of the Institute for Educational Sciences, the Department of Education’s research arm, will erase an enormous amount of data regarding America’s school-age population. This includes the 7.5 million disabled students – roughly 15% of the US student population — whose lives have been enhanced by access to public education since the 1975 passage of the IDEA.
Trump has directed his pick for education secretary, the remarkably unqualified former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon, to dismantle the Department of Education. Federal funds would be redistributed to states without oversight, almost certainly threatening services to students with disabilities.
Additionally, in late February, the House approved a budget cut of $880 billion in Medicaid services over the next decade, an amount that would destroy the nation’s disability services. As disability historian Michael Rembis commented, “For many people, Medicaid is literally their lifeline. It’s what sustains them. People who depend on these services to live wouldn’t have the medical equipment, the prescriptions, the healthcare, or the daily supports they need if these programs were limited, let alone cut. Thousands of people would die.” Given the alarming increase in the speed of data deletion and distortion, the deaths that Rembis predicts are likely to be invisible to most.
Yet there are reasons for hope despite the current cruel chaos. Activist librarians and data scientists have been racing to counter data erasure. Organizers of the Data Rescue Project are coordinating the rescuing of US federal data. The Free Government Information group is saving government data for scientific use before they disappear while other data activists are filing lawsuits. Another group, STAT has been downloading all available files from data.cdc.gov since Trump took office; their archives are available publicly. The Internet Archive continues its crucial role in preserving statistics and reports from each administration, ensuring ongoing public access to vital government publications and data. In late February, CNN provided an easy guide for citizens to use the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and a new site, Disability Statistics, was launched for, by, and about disabled people. For the 25 percent of Americans with disabling impairments and their many supporters and allies, this data rescue resistance ensures that they will not be rendered invisible again.
Faye Ginsburg is David Kriser Professor of anthropology, director of the NYU Center for Media, Culture & History, and founding co-chair with Mara Mills of the NYU Center for Disability Studies.
Rayna Rapp is Professor Emerita of anthropology at New York University, specializing in gender and health; the politics of reproduction; and disability.
Together they co-authored Disability Worlds (2024), and co-edited How to be Disabled in a Pandemic (2025) with Mara Mills and Harris Kornstein.
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