Decades of advocacy to “deinstitutionalize” have fortunately transformed quality of life for people with disabilities, but it wasn’t until just 27 years ago that the Supreme Court's 1999 decision in Olmstead v. Lois Curtis made it so disabled Americans could rest easy knowing forced segregation wasn’t inevitable.
Now, however, the foundation that underpins our nation’s wide spectrum of community-based services is crumbling.
The DOJ memo follows a range of other actions by the Trump Administration, including significant cuts to federal Medicaid spending set to go into effect next year and the withholding of hundreds of millions of dollars of funding for community-based services in the name of protecting program integrity. In July 2026, the administration paused more than one billion dollars in Medicaid payments to California and Minnesota, citing fraud but offering little specificity to support their claim. Taken together, these moves seem to falsely imply that home- and community-based services (HCBS) are wasteful, rather than essential.
Statements such as these have real-world implications and could serve to justify gutting these HCBS services—potentially forcing people with disabilities back into large public institutions, while pushing family caregivers and direct support professionals out of their respective workforces and into poverty.
These activities are neither optional nor negotiable—they’re the foundation of the inclusion that this country promised through the ADA.
Moreover, this thinking also ignores reality. For instance, many disabled adults’ parents are elderly or deceased. Many of their spouses work full time, sometimes in multiple jobs to meet their families’ financial needs. Many of their siblings are in the same boat but may live hundreds of miles away. Some have no family to fall back on at all.
All of this threatens to devastate families and local economies. If protecting taxpayers is truly the goal, community-based services shouldn’t be slashed—they should be upheld as the gold standard, especially given the dramatic cost savings they make possible. Supporting someone with an intellectual or developmental disability through home- and community-based services costs about $70,500 per year, versus more than $395,000 annually in a public institution.
While the DOJ’s memo and the administration’s other actions don’t overturn Olmstead, they do place another crack in the fragile foundation on which community living for millions of Americans is built. As we wrote last summer on the 35th anniversary of the ADA, we must reaffirm, not reinterpret or undo, the rights Olmstead upheld.
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