Misdiagnosed: The Administration Handed Special Education to an Agency That Knows Nothing About Schools
On June 16, the Trump Administration did the thing children’s advocates have spent more than a year warning against. Through four new interagency agreements, the Department of Education announced it would move the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS) — the office that administers the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) for more than 8 million students — to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), while shipping civil rights enforcement off to the Department of Justice.
The Administration calls these “partnerships.” In reality, they are the latest and largest step in a campaign to dismantle the Department of Education without ever asking Congress, which is the only body with the power to abolish it.
With this move, more than 8 million students with disabilities now face a fragmented federal system in which special education, civil rights enforcement, and other educational programs are scattered across multiple agencies with overlapping authority and limited expertise.
Since the Department of Education still has the authority to administer these programs, the Administration has created overlapping, duplicative bureaucratic structures that will lead to confusion and conflicting lines of accountability. Administration officials insist nothing will change, which begs the question as to why it is being done, but you cannot create a duplicative authority in an agency that has no education expertise, force school districts across this country to now have to deal with several different federal agencies (some on the same topic), and argue that students and families will be unharmed.
For the child with dyslexia who needs reading supports, the teenager with an intellectual disability preparing for adulthood, or the child whose parents are fighting for speech therapy, this is not a bureaucratic debate. It is about whether the people overseeing their education understand schools, teaching, and learning.
Unfortunately, HHS lacks the educational expertise or orientation needed to administer IDEA effectively, and the people who do have it are being eliminated.
HHS Has Zero Education Expertise, and That Is the Whole Problem
Start with what HHS is. It runs Medicare and Medicaid. It runs the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Maternal and Child Health Bureau, the Health Resources and Services Administration, and the Food and Drug Administration.
HHS is one of the largest agencies in the federal government, and every one of its flagship programs operates on a medical model: diagnose a condition, treat it, manage it. That is the right model for a hospital or a health clinic. It is the wrong model for a classroom.
IDEA was built on the opposite premise. It does not treat disability as a health care diagnosis to be managed. It treats it as a natural part of human life and guarantees something a doctor cannot prescribe: a Free and Appropriate Public Education in the Least Restrictive Environment, delivered alongside a child’s general education peers. The people who make that real — the staff who understand Individualized Education Programs (IEPs), child find, transition planning, instructional practice, due process, and state compliance — work in education, not medicine.
As Denise Marshall, head of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates (COPAA), told NPR:
There is no logical sense why anyone would move [students with disabilities] under HHS. We’re not going to all of a sudden go to our surgeon to learn how to read.
Chad Rummel, CEO of the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) added:
[IDEA is] an education law. That means we need to have special education interacting with all of education at the department, not over [at HHS] on its own in a medical environment.
HHS does not employ people with expertise in pedagogy. It has never run a classroom, written an IEP, or held a state education agency accountable for serving students with disabilities. Handing it IDEA doesn’t “align” anything; it severs the program from the only federal workforce that knows how it works. And the career experts at OSEP who do know and have built 50 years of institutional knowledge are exactly the people this administration has spent the past year pushing out.
We have run this experiment before, and we already know how it ends. Before 1979, education, including special education, was housed within the sprawling Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), where it was perpetually an afterthought.
Congress created a standalone Department of Education precisely to rescue education from a health-and-welfare bureaucracy that kept it buried and ignored. According to the Department of Education’s own website on the history of IDEA:
Congress enacted the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, also known as the EHA, in 1975 to support states and localities in protecting the rights of, meeting the individual needs of, and improving the results of infants, toddlers, children, and youth with disabilities and their families.
In a subsequent reauthorization of the law in 1990, the name was changed to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act or IDEA. As the Department of Education explains:
Before EHA, many children were denied access to education and opportunities to learn. In 1970, U.S. schools educated only one in five children with disabilities, and many states had laws excluding certain students, including children who were deaf, blind, emotionally disturbed, or had an intellectual disability.
Since the passage of EHA in 1975, significant progress has been made toward meeting major national goals for developing and implementing effective programs and services for early intervention, special education, and related services. The U.S. has progressed from excluding nearly 1.8 million children with disabilities from public schools prior to EHA implementation to providing more than 8 million children with disabilities with special education and related services designed to meet their individual needs in the 2022-23 school year.
Sending IDEA back to HHS doesn’t modernize anything. It turns back the clock to the era this country deliberately left behind — when children with disabilities were treated as patients to be managed and largely ignored rather than students to be taught.
The Cruelest Irony: A Kennedy Is Dismantling the Kennedy Legacy
There is a bitter historical irony at the center of this decision, and it carries the name of the very Cabinet secretary now taking custody of these children: Kennedy.
The federal commitment to educating children with disabilities, rather than warehousing them as medical patients, was built in no small part by President John F. Kennedy.
In February 1963, President John F. Kennedy, delivered a landmark Special Message to Congress on what was then called mental illness and mental retardation, calling for “a bold new approach.”
JFK’s entire purpose was to end the era of institutional confinement — to replace, in his words, “the cold mercy of custodial isolation” with “the open warmth of community concern and capability.” The laws JFK signed that fall moved the federal government toward educating these children and training their teachers.
Two years later, in 1965, RFK Jr.’s father — then-Sen. Robert F. Kennedy — paid an unannounced visit to the Willowbrook State School, a New York institution where thousands of disabled children were confined. RFK found them “living in filth and dirt, their clothing in rags, in rooms less comfortable and cheerful than the cages in which we put animals in a zoo.”
RFK called Willowbrook a “snake pit,” declared that the whole country was at fault, and said action was long overdue. His outrage helped ignite the movement to close such institutions and to insist that children with disabilities belong in classrooms and communities — not custodial wards.
And it was RFK Jr.’s other uncle, Sen. Ted Kennedy, who turned that conviction into durable law. He was an original cosponsor of the 1975 Education for All Handicapped Children Act — the statute that became IDEA — and the lead Senate negotiator of its reauthorizations, whose explicit aim was to align special education more closely with general education and hold schools accountable for the outcomes of every student.
Sen. Ted Kennedy was a chief sponsor of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which he argued would serve as “an emancipation proclamation” for disabled citizens. Disability advocates have said plainly that without Ted Kennedy, IDEA would have been stripped of the very due-process protections that let parents enforce it. (The family thread runs deeper still: their sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver founded the Special Olympics and chaired by her son Timothy Shriver.)
So look at where we now stand. The federal architecture that pulled children with disabilities out of the snake pit and into the classroom — the work of a president, a senator, and a half-century of bipartisan effort, much of it bearing the Kennedy name — is being unwound, with a Kennedy presiding over the agency absorbing it. And not a reluctant one: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has championed this move, insisting that special education consists of “health-related” programs rather than education programs — the exact reframing his uncle JFK spent his presidency trying to undo. He arrives at it carrying a long record of promoting the thoroughly debunked claim that vaccines cause autism, and of rhetoric that disability advocates have condemned as stigmatizing toward the very children he would now oversee.
That is the danger in a single sentence. The moment a child with a disability is treated as a medical case to be managed rather than a student to be taught, the promise of inclusion begins to slip away. We know where that road leads, and the Kennedy family, of all families, is the one that documented it and then spent three generations leading the country in the other direction.
Civil Rights Without a Home: The Justice Department Split
The same reorganization that sends special education to HHS sends civil rights enforcement somewhere else entirely — to the Department of Justice. That split deserves its own alarm.
The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) exists to protect students from discrimination based on disability, race, sex, and national origin by enforcing Title IX, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, and the disability protections that operate alongside IDEA.
For a child with a disability, special education and civil rights are not separate concerns: they are the same concern. When a student is improperly restrained or secluded, disciplined for behavior tied to their disability, or denied an accommodation they are legally owed, that is at once an IDEA matter and a civil rights matter.
As Katy Neas, CEO of The Arc, told The 19th:
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. Moving special education to HHS and civil rights enforcement to DOJ would split apart the offices responsible for making disability rights real in schools, leaving families chasing answers across the federal government instead of getting accountability from one education agency.
Until now, one agency could see the whole child. After this reorganization, a single family may have their child’s special education administered by HHS, their general education programs run out of Labor, and their civil rights complaint routed to DOJ — three departments, no coordination, and no one accountable for the student as a whole.
The mismatch gets worse when you look at how these agencies actually work. OCR was built for education: its staff worked directly with school districts on compliance, resolved complaints administratively, and understood what “reasonable accommodation” or “free appropriate public education” means in a real classroom. DOJ, on the other hand, is a prosecutorial agency built around litigation. It does not have OCR’s education-specific expertise, its established relationships with districts, or its complaint-resolution machinery. A parent whose child is being denied services needs a fast administrative remedy, not a federal lawsuit they have no power to file. Handing education civil rights to DOJ also subjects students’ protections to that department’s shifting enforcement priorities, with no guarantee that disabled children stay anywhere near the top of the list.
And this handoff is happening to an office that has already been hollowed out. Mass layoffs gutted OCR over the past year, and the damage is measurable: a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found that between March and September 2025, roughly 90% of the discrimination complaints OCR handled were resolved by simply dismissing them — closed without review.
Moving a depleted enforcement function to an agency with different priorities does not repair it. It risks formalizing the collapse. For students with disabilities, who account for a large share of those complaints, it means the one federal door built to hear them may now be closed, relocated, or both.
Accountability and Funding Are on the Line, Too
The expertise problem is the root. The damage radiates outward into accountability and funding, the other two areas our fact sheet flagged as most exposed.
Accountability. For 50 years, IDEA has guaranteed students with disabilities a real education, and the results are undeniable. The high school graduation rate for these students climbed from 27.2% in 1995–96 to 73.6% by 2021–22.
That progress did not happen by accident — it happened because the Department of Education tracks whether states actually comply with the law. Remove the agency whose job is to hold states accountable, hand the function to a department with no education enforcement capacity, and the obvious risk is that compliance — already weak — quietly erodes.
Funding. The Administration claims this cuts bureaucracy. It does the opposite. States and districts will now have to coordinate with multiple agencies and learn new payment systems, and we have already seen what that produces. When K–12 programs create duplicative authority in the Department of Labor, DOL’s grant system didn’t even recognize state education agencies’ bank accounts. Rural school leaders received their funding two months late. For students who depend on IDEA dollars for the services they are legally owed, a payment delay isn’t a paperwork glitch — it’s a child going without.
This Objection Is Bipartisan
It would be easy to wave away the alarm over this move as routine opposition to a Republican administration. It isn’t. The most consequential resistance is coming from inside the Senate committee that oversees both departments — and from a Republican chairman.
“I agree that that should not be moved to HHS,” he told a June 17 committee meeting, adding that if special education had to be relocated at all, he would rather it go to the Labor Department than to RFK Jr.’s agency. And he didn’t stop at registering an objection: Cassidy promised Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) a committee vote next month on a measure to bar HHS from administering the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services. With moderate Republicans like Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine also on the panel, that is not an idle threat.
Kaine, who said he believes members of both parties can support the measure, called the special education office the “core” of the Education Department — the piece lawmakers across the aisle care about most. Kaine also captured the lawlessness of the broader project in a single line, charging that the administration has treated the Department of Education “as if it’s a going-out-of-business sale of a discount furniture outlet.”
And this is not the first bipartisan warning. When Congress passed the fiscal 2026 budget, appropriators from both parties used the accompanying report to question both the wisdom and the legality of these interagency agreements. The bipartisan Appropriators wrote they were:
…concerned that fragmenting responsibilities for education programs across multiple agencies will create inefficiencies, result in additional costs to the American taxpayer, and cause delays and administrative challenges in Federal funding reaching States, school districts, and schools.
That was not an advocacy talking point. That was the committee that controls the money, predicting on the record the very problems now unfolding.
The Administration is gambling that it can break the Department of Education apart faster than Congress can organize to stop it. The early, cross-party resistance suggests that bet is far from safe.
The Bottom Line
This is what “organized abandonment” looks like in practice: strip the agency that holds the expertise, scatter its functions to departments that don’t, and let the resulting dysfunction do the work that Congress refused to authorize.
No press release calling this a “partnership” changes the fact that 8 million children with disabilities have just been handed to an agency that does not know how to teach them, and that the offices built to protect their rights are being pulled apart and gutted.
IDEA is a promise this country made 50 years ago: that a child’s disability would never again be a reason to deny them an education. Keeping that promise requires keeping IDEA where the expertise, the accountability, and the civil rights enforcement actually live — at the Department of Education.
Congress should say so, loudly — as a bipartisan group of senators has already begun to — and reverse this before the damage hardens into permanence.
Fifty years ago, Congress made a promise that disability would never again be a reason to exclude a child from a meaningful education. That promise depends on expertise, accountability, and enforceable rights – not bureaucratic shell games that scatter responsibility across government.
Children with disabilities only get one childhood and one education. Congress should stop this dreadful experiment before another generation pays the price.