The Trump administration has declared autism one of "the most alarming public health developments in history" while simultaneously closing seven of the twelve regional offices responsible for protecting disabled students' civil rights, leaving nearly 12,000 discrimination complaints rotting in a backlog. A nine-year-old Black autistic boy in Florida named Ethan had police called on him in third grade because his school wouldn't provide the aide his own education plan required. His mother filed a federal complaint. The office that was supposed to investigate it may not survive long enough to finish the job.
Ethan's Story Is the Rule, Not the Exception
Josette Smith is a seventh grade science teacher in Winter Haven, Florida. She knows how schools work. She knows the paperwork, the processes, the meetings. And still, according to complaints she filed against Chain of Lakes Elementary School, she could not get her 9-year-old son Ethan a trained paraprofessional aide that his own individualized education program said he needed.
Ethan has autism and ADHD. He loves crafts, math, and science. He was diagnosed with autism in kindergarten after pacing, arm-flapping, and developing the kind of intense, specific interests that are textbook early markers of the condition. His school's response, Smith alleges, was to repeatedly pull him from instruction, suspend him, and call the police on him while he was in third grade. He is nine years old.
Smith filed complaints at the district level, the state level, and finally with the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, the federal backstop for families whose children face discrimination based on race, disability, or gender at school. The office agreed in May to investigate several of her allegations. What happens to that investigation now is genuinely unclear, because the office investigating it has been partially dismantled.
Twelve Offices Became Five. Twelve Thousand Cases Are Just Sitting There.
In March 2025, Trump signed an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education and closed seven of the Office for Civil Rights' twelve regional offices. This June, his administration shifted special education oversight largely to HHS and moved the Office for Civil Rights itself to the Department of Justice. CBS News reports that a Senate committee report from Bernie Sanders, published in April, found the office had reached a twelve-year low in resolving discrimination complaints, with a backlog of nearly 12,000 open cases. A Washington Post investigation found many of those cases have been indefinitely frozen.
Think about what that number represents. Twelve thousand families who went through the entire process of documenting their child's mistreatment, filling out federal forms, submitting evidence, waiting. And the response from their government is essentially a loading bar that never completes.
Nancy Potter, a former supervising attorney at the Office for Civil Rights who now runs her own education law firm, told CBS News that on paper this looks like a reorganization. In practice, she said, families whose cases involve overlapping harms, like a Black autistic child facing both race and disability discrimination, are now caught between agencies designed for different purposes. Her summary: "The hardest thing to prove in these cases is now the thing with no obvious home."
They Also Killed the Research That Proves the Problem Exists
Here is where it gets particularly ugly. The same administration gutting the enforcement mechanisms also canceled roughly $900 million in funding for the Institute of Education Sciences, the Department of Education's research arm, including long-standing data collection programs in schools. CBS News reports the administration further proposed ending data collection initiatives entirely. You eliminate the watchdog and then you eliminate the evidence. Convenient.
That research mattered enormously for autism specifically. A study from the State University of New York at Albany's Institute for Social and Health Equity found that from 2003 to 2022, among fourth graders, students of color, girls, low-income students, and multilingual learners were consistently less likely to be identified with autism than their peers, even as overall diagnosis rates rose. A forthcoming larger study by the same researchers found the gaps were worst at the intersection of identities. Black and Hispanic girls, CBS News reports, were especially unlikely to be identified.
That's the research the administration just defunded. The data showing exactly which kids fall through the cracks. Gone.
RFK and Trump Are Performing Concern While Dismantling the Safety Net
The White House has been loudly, insistently performative about autism. Trump signed an executive order in early August to scale back routine childhood vaccinations while falsely linking vaccines to autism, a claim that has been debunked by decades of research. He has described autism as a personal priority. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called it a "tragedy" that "destroys families" and has lent credibility to pseudoscientific claims about its causes, including the long-debunked vaccine link and a new one about Tylenol during pregnancy.
HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard told CBS News that Kennedy's statements "emphasized the need for increased research into environmental factors" and that agency changes are "about making federal support systems work better for children and families." The White House did not respond to a request for comment. The Department of Education press office also did not respond.
So the position is: autism is a catastrophic public health emergency, and the response is to close civil rights offices, freeze 12,000 discrimination cases, cancel $900 million in education research, and spread vaccine misinformation. Got it. Camille Proctor, founder and executive director of The Color of Autism Foundation, put it plainly to CBS News: "This administration is taking us backwards."
What 'Pro-Family' Looks Like in Practice
The administration has also directed the Office for Civil Rights to stop pursuing so-called "equity" investigations, including cases involving school discipline disparities. This, despite clear research showing that nonwhite and low-income children face disproportionate barriers to autism diagnosis and to accessing the resources that come with that diagnosis.
School discipline and special education are not separate issues. They are deeply entangled. Kids who don't get identified with autism don't get IEPs. Kids without IEPs don't get aides. Kids without aides who act out don't get support, they get suspensions. They get handcuffs. They get police called in third grade. That is the pipeline the administration just decided it doesn't want to investigate anymore.
About 1 in 31 U.S. kids had been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder as of 2022, according to CBS News. That number is going to keep rising. The families are going to keep filing complaints. And right now, the federal government's message to those families is essentially: file it here, then wait, then wait some more, then find out your case doesn't have an obvious home anymore.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe these two things at once: autism is an unprecedented national emergency requiring executive orders and press conferences and RFK Jr. speechifying, and also the agency that protected autistic kids from discrimination in school didn't need most of its offices. Both cannot be true. One of them is a performance and the other is a policy. The performance is for the cameras. The policy is what happens to Ethan.
The cruelty isn't incidental here. Targeting equity investigations while gutting the research that proves disparities exist is a strategy. You remove the enforcement, then you remove the evidence that enforcement was ever needed, then you stand at a podium and declare that you care deeply about autism while pushing junk science that stigmatizes the very kids your policies just left unprotected. It's not incompetence. It's a closed loop designed to produce exactly this outcome.
Josette Smith did everything right. She documented everything, filed everywhere, escalated appropriately, and eventually got a federal agency to agree her son's case deserved investigation. That agency now has a 12,000-case backlog, half its regional offices, and an uncertain institutional future. Ethan is nine. He likes crafts and math and science and Martin Luther King Jr. and dachshunds. He had the cops called on him in third grade because his school wouldn't follow his own education plan. Whatever this administration is doing for autism, it is not doing it for him.
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