The Education Department announced this week that it wants to move key special education functions to the Department of Health and Human Services, a change that would put Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of those duties and further the Trump administration’s push to hollow out the Education Department.
The move matters now because it reaches into the part of government that families turn to when school systems fail children with disabilities. OSERS helps people with disabilities achieve competitive integrated employment, and under the plan its core functions would shift away from the Education Department even though the law says the office must exist there. For advocates, that is not a technical swap. It is a break in the chain of responsibility.
Katy Neas put the concern in plain language: “A student who is denied services, disciplined for disability-related needs, or blocked from an accessible classroom needs one federal education system that can see the whole picture and act.” That is the case against scattering the work across agencies. A single education department can track a service denial, a discipline issue and an access problem as one student’s experience. Split the jobs up, and the student can get lost between bureaucracies.
The legal problem is just as sharp. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was last reauthorized in 2004, when President George W. Bush signed it, and it says the office must exist within the Education Department. The Trump administration’s broader effort is already reminiscent of the president’s executive order to eliminate the Education Department entirely, a step that would require an act of Congress. This latest shift does not erase that problem; it runs straight into it.
Then there is who would be holding the file. In April, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said of autistic children, “These are kids who will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.” Many autistic people wind up doing all of the things he described. That gap between what he said and what families know is why disability rights advocates are alarmed that he would oversee functions meant to serve students with disabilities.
The administration has not explained how it plans to carry out a transfer that the statute appears to forbid. Last year, during the government shutdown, the Trump administration fired almost all OSERS employees, a reminder that the effort to weaken the office has already started once. The new plan pushes the same fight into a more direct form: it tries to move the work without first fixing the law that says where that work belongs.
