6/29/26 - DOJ, RFK, and the Supreme Court

Good afternoon!

Let's start the week with more followup on disability issues discussed in the last few days, weeks, and months ...

DOJ memo stokes fear among disability advocates of a return to institutionalization

Cory Turner, National Public Radio - June 20, 2026

"'It is now the position of the United States government that people with disabilities don't have a right to be part of their communities,' says Alison Barkoff, a health law and policy professor at George Washington University who led disability law and policy efforts during both the Obama and Biden administrations. 'I can't overstate how significant this change in position is.'"

This is another article on the US Department of Justice memo that has disability activists and organizations in the more afraid and angry than I think we've been in at least several years. This piece I think does a better job than others I've shared here in explaining what the opinion is all about, and how it fits into the larger context of disability rights under the second Trump administration.

Parents of adults with disabilities fear Medicaid cuts after RFK Jr. comments

Drew Mikkelsen, KING TV 5 - June 24, 2026

"Advocates and families of adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities are sounding the alarm over recent comments by U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggesting that federal Medicaid programs that fund in-home care could be reduced or eliminated ... In April, during a hearing before Congress, Kennedy characterized Medicaid waiver programs — which allow family members to be paid caregivers — as ripe for abuse ... 'These are family members who are getting paid to do things that they used to do as family members for free,' Kennedy said ... He added that waivers present 'an opportunity for fraud' being exploited by 'corrupt people' and 'fraudsters' across the country."

This is another, somewhat different angle of attack on home and community-based services. It stems from an advocacy problem that has been a low-grade, periodic pain for disability communities for a long time, and now seems to be growing into a major threat: an instinctual belief by certain politicians across the political spectrum that decentralized, community-based, individualized disability services are uniquely rife with "fraud and abuse." It's not just specific allegations, which can sometimes be true, most often not. It's like a belief, one might say a stereotype, that an entire category of human service is inherently corrupt. It's the idea that the individual, grassroots, often family-based nature of home and community-based services is a weakness rather than a strength. This is clearly becoming a bigger threat to disabled people than it was ten years or so ago. And it's being championed not only by MAGA and MAGA-adjacent politicians, but also Democrats like Kathy Hochul, the governor of my own State of New York, who has wasted money and horribly disrupted a system of consumer-directed home care in order to bring it under what she and her administration seems to consider "control," but which is simply handing the entire program over to a for-profit management company in Florida. All of which is simply to suggest that our disability communities probably need to do more than simply complain and deny when our support programs are rashly accused of fraud. We need to revitalize the argument that decentralized programs that put control in our hands may be scary for bureaucrats and economists, but it's at the core of the whole point – supporting our independence, and allowing us to have control of our own lives. And by the way, paying families to provide care for disabled relatives isn't some kind of violation of sacred, old-fashioned family values as RFK Jr. seems to imply. It's what enables them to give up other paid jobs be caregivers.

Supreme Court declines to hear Texas man's intellectual disability case in capital case

Nina Totenberg, National Public Radio - June 22, 2026

"The U.S. Supreme Court refused Monday to stop the execution of Victor Saldaño, convicted of murder in Texas in 1996, but who subsequently got the support of not just defense experts, but state experts as well, who determined that he was intellectually disabled and thus not eligible for execution under the law."

I'm not sure what to add here. But, it's important to keep tabs on death penalty cases like this in the US where disability may be a factor. Also, for no logical or important reason, it gives me a personal feeling of disability recognition or validation when a journalist I have been aware of for decades reports on a disability issue. And I have been reading and listening to Nina Totenberg's Supreme Court reporting since the 1990s.

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