Not much for disabled in Trump’s budget plan

Marlee Matlin, the Oscar-winning actress who is deaf, is worried. She thinks the Trump White House and GOP-led Congress want budget cuts, particularly in Medicaid, that will harm the disabled.

She’s right; they will. That’s the bad news and the main point I’m making. But I take comfort in Matlin’s concern. It shows the disability rights movement, composed of people with sensory, intellectual, physical and other forms of disabilities, is as strong as it was in 1990 when the movement got the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) with little but guts and will and the clear fact we were morally, financially and politically right.

Nearly three decades later, that’s still all we have. No Super-PACs. No TV ads. No cable news channel host championing our cause nightly. All we have is us, a lot of whom are poor and/or different-looking and/or hard to understand. To Trump and his allies, we must look like toy soldiers.

Trump showed how he felt about the disabled by mocking Serge Kovaleski for his uncontrollable movements and then denying he did. But he got away with it. That may have led him to assume the disabled could be mistreated with no consequences.

Trump went beyond schoolyard bullying when he released his budget in late May. It is shockingly heartless.

First, his proposal would cut federal spending for special education despite the fact the Feds have never fully funded the program as the 1973 law required.

When Washington mandated a free and appropriate public education for every child regardless of disability, it both echoed the triumph of the Supreme Court 1954 Brown decision, which ended racial segregation in public schools, and presaged the ADA.

But now Trump proposes cutting special ed as if education of a boy with autism or a girl with Down syndrome was a frivolous luxury. He needs to tell parents of such kids that to their faces.

Trump’s budget also cuts funds for the office that helps people with disabilities get jobs. When White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney rolled out its first spending plan, he said one of its goals was to move people from welfare to work. You cannot reconcile the cut with that statement.

What I suspect is Trump doesn’t like the ADA and will do anything he can to undermine it. That’s based on his Kovaleski remark and the fact that big businesses have tended to resist it and its regulations. When Trump speaks about rolling back burdensome regulations, I get an image of the ADA being gutted.

We know a part of the GOP repeal of Obamacare is turning Medicaid into a block grant system. That means each state would get only a fixed amount for Medicaid. Washington Republicans say that will give the states more flexibility the way a straight jacket does.

Commenting on the proposed budget, Starkey CEO Colin McKenney said not much good could be found in it for those who need services and programs the most, a definite understatement.

This story was originally published June 25, 2017 at 5:05 AM with the headline "Not much for disabled in Trump’s budget plan."