Among the many targets of the executive orders from Trump’s first few weeks in office are the over 70 million adults in the United States who report having a disability. That’s about one in four American adults, according to 2022 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—people who now face threats to their employment, education, and more.
Trump falsely blamed workers with intellectual disabilities on January 29 when a US Army Black Hawk helicopter collided with an American Airlines regional jet outside Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Washington, DC. At a press conference following the fatal incident, Trump criticized both Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) workers and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, saying, “He’s run it right into the ground with his diversity.”
While the crash is still under investigation, Kelly Buckland, disability policy advisor to Buttigieg, told NPR that if the FAA hired workers with disabilities, they “would only be qualified people with disabilities, with the emphasis on qualified.” Added Katy Neas, chief executive officer of the disability rights nonprofit The Arc of the United States, “To scapegoat people with disabilities for this tragedy just seems inconsistent with the facts.”
Trump’s comments came just days after one of his first executive orders demanded the rescinding of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts by the secretary of transportation and the FAA administrator. This order joined similar executive orders aimed at dismantling long-standing federal policies guaranteeing that opportunity was not denied because of race, gender, disability, sexual identity, gender identity, or other legally protected characteristics. Many of these policies came from federal anti-discrimination laws passed following the civil rights struggle of the 1960s and were later expanded to include people with disabilities.
Deep Disparities
People with disabilities make up the largest minority group in both the country and the world, with 10 percent of the Earth’s population living with a disability—a number that is only expected to grow as people live longer and mass disabling events like COVID and long COVID continue. Equal rights for people with disabilities, despite their large numbers—from education to transportation access to employment—remain a battle, even decades after the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the civil rights legislation prohibiting discrimination based on disability, was signed into law in 1990.
As the American Psychological Association wrote in 2020, upon the 30th anniversary of the signing of the ADA: “True equality remains elusive, especially for people of color with disabilities and for those whose socioeconomic position makes access to health care and other services more challenging. People with disabilities face systems that were not designed to accommodate all people, ranging from the health-care system to the criminal justice system to employment and education.”
What could have an even more devastating impact…is another of Trump’s demands: that people return to in-person work.
Unemployment and underemployment among people with disabilities is rampant, with Americans with disabilities facing an unemployment rate double that of Americans without a disability. Around the world, workers with disabilities are paid 12 percent less per hour on average than workers without disabilities. In the United States, it is still legal to pay people with disabilities less than minimum wage, what’s called a subminimum wage, which can be $3.63 an hour—or even less. Some US companies paid people with disabilities 22 cents an hour in 2024 and were cited for doing so.
With such low wages, it’s little wonder that adults with disabilities are living in poverty at a rate twice that of adults who don’t have disabilities—a statistic that mirrors the employment rates above.
DEI and Disability
The COVID-19 pandemic led to an increase in employment for Americans with disabilities, thanks to the huge rise in remote work. Working from home allows for a greater pool of job applicants, removing some barriers to employment such as location, parking, access to transportation, family care responsibilities, and allowing for the privacy needed to attend to certain physical or medical conditions.
Rights for workers with disabilities also received a boost in 2017 with the implementation of Section 501 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, a federal civil rights law prohibiting federal agencies from discriminating against job applicants and employees based on disability and requiring affirmative action for people with disabilities.
People with disabilities make up the largest minority group in both the country and the world.
That’s a federal law that the Trump administration may already be violating with its failure to provide American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters at press conferences or broadcasts, according to The Washington Post, which also reported that the accessibility section of the White House government website had disappeared.
Kevin Owen, an employment lawyer representing federal employees, told The Washington Post that issues of accessibility and accommodation are occurring in rapid succession across multiple sectors of the federal government. “It appears to be emerging more as an attack on the deaf community,” he said.
Trump’s executive orders seeking to remove both mention and practice of “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” in the federal government will have a huge impact on the relatively large federal workforce with disabilities; about 9.4 percent of federal workers report having a disability. As with many of the president’s executive orders, it’s unclear what exactly the execution of anti-DEI orders will entail, but eradicating the practice of accessibility could lead to such regressions as desk setups that don’t allow for wheelchairs or the removal of screen reader software.
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As an employee of the Environmental Protection Agency who is hard of hearing told USA Today: “People look at us as not being able. Nobody wants to feel less than. For somebody to make us feel like that, especially the president, the guy whose picture I see on the wall every day, it’s a kick in the teeth.”
What could have an even more devasting impact on the members of the federal workforce who have disabilities is another of Trump’s demands: that people return to in-person work. Washington, DC, news channel NBC4 reported on massive traffic backups as 17,000 people tried to report to work at Washington Navy Yard, a base with a parking lot that only fits 4,000 cars.
Employers, Nonprofits, and Workers Respond
These anti-DEI executive orders are having a trickle-down effect on companies, some of which are already scaling back their equity efforts, including initiatives to employ and accommodate people with disabilities. That includes veterans, about 30 percent of whom have disabilities.
“It appears to be emerging more as an attack on the deaf community.”
One veteran who spoke to USA Today on the condition of anonymity said that vets he knows who have disabilities are no longer even applying for federal employment. When it comes to other jobs, major employers from Walmart to Meta to McDonald’s have canceled training programs, rescinded resources, and laid off workers. But some companies are doubling down on efforts to support a diverse workplace, including supporting workers with disabilities. Costco soundly defeated a measure to evaluate “risks” from its DEI initiatives. JPMorgan Chase has also publicly reconfirmed the financial giant’s commitment to DEI programs.
Nonprofit organizations have been feeling intense pressure and scrutiny from the Trump administration, including a sweeping financial freeze. That has hugely impacted the day-to-day operations of nonprofits that support people with disabilities, from preventing young people with disabilities from starting their first jobs at Goodwill to cutting off support to children with disabilities.
But some nonprofits are also digging in their heels, like the National Association of the Deaf (NAD), the country’s largest organization of, by, and for the deaf and hard of hearing. NAD sent a letter to the White House chief of staff calling on accommodations like ASL interpreters to be restored immediately. NAD and others are also not shying away from legal action; in 2020, NAD sued the first Trump administration—and won—for failure to provide interpreters, an especially urgent accommodation during the first deadly months of the COVID pandemic.
NAD’s interim chief executive Bobbie Beth Scoggins said in a video statement, “If interpreters and other accommodations are viewed as expendable, it sets a dangerous precedent that undermines the rights and inclusion of deaf and hard of hearing individuals nationwide.”
The threats to the lives and livelihoods of people with disabilities posed by the president’s executive orders underscore another issue: Not all disabilities are visible. Over 90 percent of disabilities are invisible, according to the Department of Commerce, from learning disabilities to chronic illnesses like long COVID. And not everyone who has a disability is open about it. Fear of retribution, including being denied opportunities and advancements or even losing their job, will only keep workers with disabilities in the shadows.
As a Homeland Security Department supervisor who has a disability told USA Today, “I have employees who are frankly scared to even ask for a reasonable accommodation based on a disability because they fear they will be flagged for that in a negative way.”
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