The HHS Layoffs Accentuate the precarity of Disability And the Antipathy of accessibility
NPR’s Joseph Shapiro reported last week about the layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) having collateral damage. Namely, not only are employees losing their jobs, but the federal agency is slashing labor on major programs such as Meals on Wheels. As the headline on Shapiro’s story makes clear, programs like Meals on Wheels is a lifeline for millions of senior citizens and disabled people in this country.
“At least 40% of staff got layoff notices and many were turned away at the front door Tuesday when they showed up for work at the Administration for Community Living, or ACL, which coordinates federal policy on aging and disability. That’s according to the agency’s former director under the Biden Administration, Alison Barkoff, who says she talked to multiple members of her former staff,” Shapiro wrote of the recent job cuts at HHS. “The agency funds programs that run senior centers and distribute 216 million meals a year to older and disabled people through the Meals on Wheels program.”
Similar to how oversight of special education services will (purportedly) be redirected once the Department of Education is fully dismantled, Shapiro notes Project 2025 recommends the aforementioned Administration for Community Living take up the task of overseeing programs such as Meals on Wheels. However explicitly unstated, the moves carry a strong undercurrent of President Trump and his acolytes running the government not giving a whit about Americans on the margins. The disability community in particular has forever existed at the margin’s margin; given what it took for us to secure our rights in the first place, these earliest days of Trump’s second term are as frightening—and soberingly reaffirming—as they are crazy and chaotic. The reality is programs such as Meals on Wheels is bonafide accessibility, albeit analog, because not every elderly person or disabled person can get out to the supermarket to buy groceries, then carry them home and prepare meals. My grandmother used Meals on Wheels for about a year before she died from complications of dementia in early 2007. She was unable to chew solids anymore by that point in her life, so her meals came to the house helpfully puréed such that all my uncle and I needed to do was feed her. It was accessibility in more ways than one: first and foremost, it obviously afforded her basic daily sustenance, but it also alleviated some of the caregiving load from us.
Call it fatalistic thinking, but the undoing of things like the Department of Education or, in this case, the Meals on Wheels program, provides the slipperiest of slopes to more dramatic and sinister action later. Even dating back to Trump’s first term, I’ve believed he and his cronies would take steps to repeal the Americans with Disabilities Act and thus institutionalize us were it possible and politically expedient. The White House clearly believes in flouting the law, so it wouldn’t surprise me one iota if they tried to weasel rationale for pulling back crucial protections for people like me—those who ostensibly provide the least value to the economy and to society. In other words, today’s Republicans aren’t the George H.W. Bush variety conservatives by a long shot.
