Trump Administration Splits Up Education Department's Disability Functions While Launching New Autism Safety Program

Josette Smith's 9-year-old son Ethan has autism and ADHD. According to KFF Health News, reporting for CBS News, his elementary school in Winter Haven, Florida agreed he needed a dedicated aide to stay in class, then allegedly never provided one. Instead, Smith's complaints say, the school pulled him out of instruction, suspended him, and called police on him in third grade.

Smith filed complaints with her school district, the state, and eventually the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, alleging discrimination based on disability and race. In May, that office agreed to investigate several of her claims, according to KFF Health News.

That office is now smaller and structured differently than when Smith filed. In June, the Trump administration announced it would shift core Education Department functions elsewhere: special-education services under the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS) would move to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and civil-rights investigations would move to the Justice Department under Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, according to The Nation.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon has said the changes are meant to "break down bureaucratic barriers and strengthen coordination of resources," per The Nation's reporting. Whether that holds up depends on what happens to families like Smith's when the office handling their case no longer sits inside the Education Department.

The Kennedy problem, according to advocates

Zoe Gross of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network told The Nation that putting Kennedy in charge of special-education services is troubling given his own comments about autism. In April 2025, Kennedy called autism an "epidemic" and said autistic people would "never pay taxes," "never hold a job," "never play baseball," "never write a poem," and "never go out on a date," according to The Nation's account of that press conference.

Kennedy has also pledged to find an environmental cause for rising autism diagnoses, despite what The Nation describes as years of research pointing to multiple causes, including expanded diagnostic criteria and awareness. HHS has reportedly contracted with David Geier, an anti-vaccine activist known for a hormone-blocking treatment that has been widely debunked, to investigate a vaccine-autism link that has already been disproven in prior research, per The Nation.

These are serious allegations about who is now overseeing special-education policy, and they deserve scrutiny against what HHS is actually doing on the ground.

What HHS actually launched

On August 21, 2026, HHS announced the first National Autism Missing and Endangered Person Alert initiative, in partnership with the Justice Department and FEMA, according to an HHS press release. The program aims to speed up law enforcement and emergency response when autistic individuals go missing, and to address drowning linked to wandering, which HHS calls a leading cause of preventable death among autistic people.

"When an autistic child or adult goes missing, every minute matters," Kennedy said in the release. Deputy Attorney General Blanche and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem echoed that framing, calling it a preparedness and coordination effort. Wandering-related drownings are a well-documented risk for autistic children, and a federal alert framework addressing it is a concrete, measurable safety initiative, not a symbolic gesture.

That's the tension in this story. The same administration official facing accusations of dismissive rhetoric toward autistic people is also standing up a program specifically designed to save autistic lives. Both things are true at once, and neither cancels out the other.

The civil-rights enforcement question

The bigger unresolved issue is what happens to enforcement capacity. The Nation reports that two days after McMahon handed civil-rights investigations to the Justice Department, that department issued a memo advocates worry signals a return toward institutionalizing people who rely on home- and community-based care, particularly alongside nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts over 10 years included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Gross also told The Nation the Justice Department's civil-rights division under Harmeet Dhillon has scaled back Americans with Disabilities Act enforcement cases.

None of that is confirmed as a documented pattern of dropped cases in these sources beyond Gross's characterization, and no investigation or formal finding establishes intentional under-enforcement. It is an allegation from an advocacy source, not a proven outcome.

Separately, Senator Jack Reed has been pushing back on a related but distinct fight: a proposed HHS rule that would loosen federal Head Start requirements around curriculum, staffing ratios, and family engagement. The administration says the changes would let Head Start serve 200,000 more children at no added cost. Reed calls that math implausible, arguing you can't add more children without more staff and expect the same outcomes.

For families like Smith's, the practical question is whether a complaint against a public school will move faster, slower, or nowhere once civil-rights enforcement lands at a Justice Department with, according to advocates, a shrinking caseload in this area. Ethan Smith's case, opened in May under the old structure, is still pending. What agency finishes it, and how fast, is the answer nobody has yet.