2026-04-06 19:00:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
In a country characterized by antiquated systems for regulating how electricity is produced and transported to homes and businesses, one utility in Arizona may be the most outdated. In 1903, almost a decade before Arizona became a state, a group of landowners around Phoenix secured a federal loan for a dam on the Salt River. The dam collected water to irrigate farms and produce hydroelectric power to run irrigation pumps. The landowners created the Salt River Project Association to govern the operation of the dam, and gave each landowner a vote for every acre of land they owned.
The Salt River Project (SRP) now serves one of the nation’s largest metro areas, not just a swath of farmland. With several hydropower dams and a fleet of power plants, it generates power for more than 2 million customers in the Phoenix area, making it the largest public power utility in the country and one of the few in which customers elect the people who run the utility itself.
Even though Phoenix has transformed from a patch of farmland into a sprawling city, the utility still uses an acreage-based voting system. A person who holds 20 acres gets 20 votes, a person who owns a half-acre lot gets half a vote, and many condo owners get only .01 votes. Renters can’t vote at all. Only individual homeowners and trusts can vote, so a company like Target doesn’t get to vote with the acres of its shopping center. Thousands of ratepayers, then, are excluded from voting. Even taking into consideration the restricted pool of voters, turnout for these elections is usually very low, which further constrains the mandates that board members carry when making decisions about how Salt River generates electricity.
“It’s effectively feudal,” said John Qua, a campaign director at Lead Locally. Qua has been working on clean energy advocacy in the SRP over the past six years, through three election cycles. That undemocratic governance structure has kept the Salt River association stuck in its opposition to clean energy — despite the association’s location in sunny Arizona, a region that also has the benefit of flat desert expanses with steady winds. The utility relied on fossil fuels for almost two-thirds of its generation in 2024, and its carbon reduction target could allow the utility to burn more fossil fuels in 2035 than it does now.
Next week, though, the balance of power might finally shift. On Tuesday, Salt River ratepayers will elect candidates for half of the utility’s 14 board seats.
Turning Point has cast the race as a referendum on “radical change” and says it is opposed to wind and “bad solar.”
In recent years, a new slate of board members who want to boost clean energy have been elected, and with Tuesday’s election, their coalition stands to win a majority if it sweeps its races. Their opponents are part of a coalition of large landowners and business leaders backed by the conservative political group Turning Point USA.
The clean energy advocates say that their presence on the board has already shifted SRP toward solar and distributed energy. The district identified around 2.8 gigawatts of new solar for addition to the grid in 2024, which could power hundreds of thousands of homes. Even under its current plans, solar and renewables will make up 45 percent of its generation within a decade. It has also piloted a number of programs that can make home air-conditioning more efficient and ratchet down demand during peak periods.
The election comes at a pivotal moment: The utility is now facing a huge spike in demand, and the two sides differ on how to meet it. In its latest long-term plan, the utility estimated that peak demand could grow by around 4 percent per year between 2023 and 2035, and that power consumption from large customers like data centers could almost triple over the same period. The adoption of electric vehicles and the sprawl of the Phoenix metro will further stress the grid.
Other big utilities around the country are struggling to meet similar demand growth, and in most cases the utilities are responding by building more natural gas to provide around-the-clock backup power, and extending the lifespans of coal plants. That’s the strategy of the pro-business slate, which argues that shunning fossil energy will lead to high prices or even shortages of energy.
The clean energy advocates, meanwhile, believe that SRP can meet peak demand with renewables. They want to build more batteries that can store solar energy for nighttime use and invest in other carbon-free baseload power such as nuclear reactors. They also want to reduce demand stress by installing rooftop solar panels and making homes more energy-efficient.
Both sides have claimed that the data center boom is proof that their preferred source of energy should dominate. “A lot of the votes on resources are split, us all on one side and them all on the other,” said Casey Clowes, one of the clean energy advocates on the Salt River Project board, who is now running for vice president. “What’s holding up us being faster and adopting more and just getting more solar online is really that the board controls those decisions.”
Clowes and her allies believe that the utility’s nine existing gas plants are enough to provide round-the-clock power while the utility builds out more solar, wind, and battery storage. The conservative slate, by contrast, supports SRP’s current plan to convert retiring coal units into gas-fired power plants and to build new gas turbines across the service territory.
“They’re chasing rainbows and unicorns,” said Barry Paceley, a construction business owner and utility council member who is running against Clowes for vice president. “If we’re sitting here static, and said nobody else can move to Arizona, no more businesses come in, no more chips, no more data centers, then maybe. But for the real world, where are you getting the power from?”
The clean energy advocates have an even harder task ahead of them this year thanks to the involvement of Turning Point USA, the conservative political group founded by the late Charlie Kirk, who was a resident of Scottsdale. The group has deployed hundreds of volunteers to turn voters out for the pro-business slate, which has also drawn $500,000 in spending from a pro-business political finance group. Turning Point’s lawn signs are widespread, says Qua of Lead Locally. The clean energy advocates are trying to run a similar ground game, but they expect the pro-business slate to outspend them by a 10-to-1 margin.
Turning Point has cast the race as a referendum on “radical change” and says it is opposed to wind and “bad solar,” but its website notes with apparent approval that the Salt River Project “supports clean energy initiatives” and “supports solar and storage.” (Turning Point didn’t respond to interview requests.)
The clean energy slate controls six of the board’s 14 seats, and the establishment controls eight seats, including the presidency and the vice presidency. Clowes and a former state utility regulator named Sandra Kennedy are running for the presidency and the vice presidency; the clean energy coalition is also running candidates in three of the seven district-level elections for the board. They will need to win all three, or flip two and the presidency, in order to take control of the utility.
The areas in question are extremely small, and represent the purplest of Maricopa County’s famously purple suburban landscape. The two seats that are most up in the air are for Districts 4 and 6, which encompass the western side of Phoenix and its immediate suburb Glendale. There are only around 7,000 acres of votable land in District 4, split across around 57,000 landowners. The largest landowners in Salt River’s service area used to own big patches of farmland, but many of them have sold their farms to developers, commercial parks, and even data centers. Because only individuals and trusts can vote, the land sales have shifted voting power toward a larger group of ordinary landowners who own much smaller lots. Even so, the big landowners still have significant sway over election outcomes.
Most of these landowners won’t cast a vote: In a comparable election in District 8 in 2022, the clean energy candidate won by a margin of 248.33 acres to 209.01, meaning that well under 10 percent of eligible voters even showed up to the polls.
Rebecca Egan McCarthy contributed reporting to this story.
2026-04-06 04:39:01
Thousands of striking workers at a beef plant in Colorado agreed on Saturday to return to work as JBS, the world’s largest meatpacker, agreed to resume contract negotiations.
The workers, who are part of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, went on strike on March 16, 2026, focused on disputes over wages, safety equipment, and working conditions at the plant, which packs about seven percent of beef in the entire country. The strike took place as the price of beef has spiked over the past year. According to the personal finance website Money, a pound of ground beef is now more expensive than the federal minimum wage.
UFCW Local 7 President Kim Cordova said that JBS would meet on April 9 and 10 to resume negotiations, and workers would return to work on Tuesday, April 7. “Workers remain united and will continue to fight until JBS fully ends its unfair labor practices and gives workers a contract offer that protects them,” Cordova said in the Saturday press release.
In a March story for Mother Jones, just days into the strike, Ted Genoways summarized the stakes:
“If the strike lasts more than a few days, then what has been a local battle over workplace conditions, healthcare, and wages could turn into a proxy for bigger picture conflicts—inflation and affordability, the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants, and corrupt corporate influence.”
Genoways explained that most of the workers at the Greeley, Colorado, plant are foreign-born laborers from Haiti, Somalia, Burma, and Mexico. The last major meatpacking worker strike, which took place 40 years ago at a Minnesota pork facility, largely failed as the plant brought in over 500 “permanent replacements,” leading to hundreds of union members ultimately crossing the picket line and returning to work. This paved the way for meatpacking companies to consolidate the market, replacing a majority-white, US-born workforce with immigrant workers. A lawsuit filed last December by Haitian workers in the Colorado plant alleges the plant segregated them to a night shift and forced them to work at “dangerously fast speeds.”
In explaining the rationale for this strike, the UFCW press release notes, “Instead of shifting toward fair treatment, the Company has recently doubled down on its illegal tactics by threatening to discontinue their healthcare benefits, and by threatening workers with termination if they did not resign from the Union and refuse to strike.”
“This decision by the union comes without any new agreement or change to [the] company’s original offer,” JBS said in a Saturday news release about the return to work, maintaining that the company’s “Last, Best and Final offer” is still on the table.
The union said the company had offered less than two percent more a year in wages, which does not reflect the rate of inflation in Colorado. JBS has denied any labor law violations and said its contract offer was fair.
2026-04-06 00:11:22
President Donald Trump gave Americans a bizarre, expletive-filled Easter Sunday message, celebrating US plans for war crimes against Iran following what appears to be the rescue of two airmen shot down in southern Iran.
“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!!” Trump posted on Truth Social Sunday morning. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
As a text launched on the morning of one of the most significant religious holidays on the Christian calendar, the post is disturbing enough, but it becomes even more so when read aloud, as Jake Tapper did on CNN’s Sunday show, State of the Union:
Aside from the president’s uninhibited vocabulary, attacking civilian infrastructure such as power plants is generally considered a war crime by international law experts.
“Given that such power plants are essential for meeting the basic needs and livelihoods of tens of millions of civilians, attacking them would be disproportionate and thus unlawful under international humanitarian law,” Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International’s senior director of research, advocacy, policy and campaigns, said when such threats initially surfaced, “even in the limited cases that they qualify as military targets.”
Trump’s repeated belligerence and the continued and escalating military aggression in Iran, which has reportedly killed at least 2,000 people since the US and Israel launched the war on February 28, framed the sermon of Pope Leo XIV, who proclaimed in his Easter message on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica that the world was becoming “accustomed to violence.”
“Let those who have weapons lay them down,” he said. “Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace. Not a peace imposed by force, but through dialogue.”
Pope Leo has long criticized the war and, for the first time, explicitly mentioned Trump last Tuesday, saying he hoped the president would find an “off-ramp” to end the fighting.
But perhaps the president was just overtaken with joy on Sunday with the news that the US military had rescued the second American pilot who was shot down while flying over southern Iran on Friday. The two-member fighter jet was the first US aircraft to crash in Iranian territory since the beginning of the war. The first pilot was rescued just hours after the crash.
“At my direction, the U.S. Military sent dozens of aircraft, armed with the most lethal weapons in the World, to retrieve him,” Trump posted in celebration on Truth Social just after midnight on Sunday. “The fact that we were able to pull off both of these operations, without a SINGLE American killed, or even wounded, just proves once again, that we have achieved overwhelming Air Dominance and Superiority over the Iranian skies.”
As Amin Saikal, a professor of Middle East and Central Asian studies at the Australian National University, told Al Jazeera on Sunday, rescuing the two pilots allows Trump to more freely pursue his military strategy, namely, the 48-hour deadline he imposed on Iran’s leadership Saturday morning to open the Strait of Hormuz before “all Hell will reign down on them.”
Later on Sunday, Trump told ABC News‘ Rachel Scott that if Iran does not agree to a deal, “we’re blowing up the whole country.”
2026-04-05 19:30:00
This story was originally published by Yale e360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
In 2021, China’s leader Xi Jinping made two important promises intended to signal China‘s commitment to fighting climate change. At the Leaders Climate Summit in that April, he announced that China would “strictly control” coal generation until 2025 when it would start to gradually phase it out. He also pledged that year that China would reduce the energy intensity of its economy—the amount of CO2 used to produce a unit of GDP—to 65 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.
This month, as China unveiled its plans for the next five years, both promises appeared to be in trouble.
The annual meeting of the National People’s Congress, held in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing and attended by some 3,000 delegates, is the occasion for China’s Communist Party leaders to make important policy announcements to China and the world. This year’s meeting was keenly watched: Running from March 5 to March 12, it marked the launch of China’s 15th Five-Year Plan, a set of national policies and targets that will determine the shape and ambitions of China’s economy up to 2030.
China is the biggest installer of renewable energy, the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, and the biggest user of coal.
2030 is also the date by which China promised, in 2015, that the country will have peaked its greenhouse gas emissions, a milestone on the way to becoming carbon neutral by 2060. Since first making that commitment a decade ago, China’s leadership has further promised to bring the peaking date forward. What happens in the next five years will determine if those promises can be kept. But analysts fear that the continuing growth in the numbers of China’s coal-fired power stations and the lack of any clear commitment in the new five-year plan to call a halt to coal expansion, may make both promises impossible to reach.
China’s government can point to some progress in the long battle against coal: In 2015 coal generated 69 percent of China’s primary energy, and by 2024 it was down to 56 percent (still much higher than the United States at 8 percent). But the actual volume of coal consumed was greater than ever, simply because China’s electricity demand continues to grow. Despite its efforts to reduce coal use, four years after Xi Jinping’s pledges, China was consuming 40 percent more coal than the rest of the world combined.
That total might have been greater still if not for China’s impressive growth in renewable energy. China installed a record 300 gigawatts of solar power and 100 gigawatts of wind power last year, which meant that the continuing increase in China’s electricity demand was largely met by clean energy. But although China’s decades-long investment in the manufacture of renewable technologies has been a hugely successful industrial policy, its attachment to coal means that this success has not translated into a correspondingly large reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
Paradoxically, China is at the same time the biggest installer of renewable energy, the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, and the biggest user of coal. One explanation for this conundrum is a national concern over energy security: Coal is the only fossil fuel that China is not obliged to import, either through vulnerable pipelines or along sea routes that pass through precarious choke points like the Straits of Hormuz.
China has an abundant supply of coal, boasting about 13 percent of the world’s recoverable coal reserves, and, importantly, it is the one fossil fuel that Chinese planners know will remain abundantly available, regardless of any tensions in China’s East Asia region or military action in the Middle East, the region that supplies China with nearly half its oil. This means that despite China’s role as a renewable energy superpower, coal has continued to play a leading role in its energy system.
Until recently, China has argued that its claim to be a developing country meant it did not need to set emissions limits.
The importance to China of a steady coal market was reinforced in 2021, the same year that Xi Jinping made his coal pledge, when China suffered power shortages that affected 20 provinces and impacted both industry and consumers. The problem arose as China emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic: Industrial production recovered, electricity demand soared, and that in turn sent coal prices spiralling upward. Coal-fired power stations were locked into regulated prices for the sale of their electricity, but the price of coal was not controlled. When the coal price became too high, the generators began to cut output to limit their losses, pleading supply shortages or technical problems.
In October that year, the then Premier Li Keqiang reacted to the crisis, signaling an adjustment to China’s approach to climate policy. Economic growth, he said, was the key to lowering emissions in the long term and “energy security should be the premise on which a modern energy system is built.” China soon announced a new lending facility to support the “clean and efficient use of coal.”
The following year there was a new energy crisis: A severe drought in Sichuan caused output to drop from the province’s hydroelectric plants, normally the source of 80 percent of its electricity. Factories were ordered to close or reduce their output to save households from power cuts, and applications for permission to build new coal-fired power plants reached record levels as provincial authorities worried about having the energy to meet their economic growth targets. The equivalent of two new coal plants per week were approved in 2022, and by 2023, permitting reached a 10-year high of almost 113 gigawatts. The pace of construction continued in 2024, when China started building 94.5 gigawatts of new coal-fired capacity—roughly 93 percent of all new global coal construction that year.
By 2023, analysts were warning that, in addition to putting its climate goals out of reach, the surge in new coal meant that China risked building coal-fired power stations that would never recover their investment and were likely to become stranded assets. Most of the new projects, according to a report from the energy think tank CREA, did not meet the central government’s criteria for new plants since they were located in provinces that had sufficient generating capacity to meet their needs.
With a further 243 gigawatts of new coal power permitted or under construction and 149 gigawatts more announced, CREA’s analysts predicted that there were two possible results, both negative: a massive increase in coal power generation and emissions, or the coal plants would have to run well below their capacity. There would be no reduction in coal use, the report concluded, unless new projects were canceled or existing plants retired early.
Not only have none been canceled, but the rush to build new plants has continued, and as predicted, the utilization rate of the new plants has dropped.
China’s energy demand has continued to rise, and so despite greater efficiency, its emissions have increased.
The 15th Five-Year Plan offered a chance to correct these negative trends and get China’s climate ambitions back on track, but it is an opportunity the government appears to have missed. The plan does promise a continuing effort to produce and install renewable energy, and China did install more renewable solar and wind power last year than the whole of the rest of the world, but other signals were less encouraging.
Until recently, China argued that its continuing claim to be a developing country meant it did not need to set emissions limits, focusing instead on the energy density (also known as energy intensity) targets highlighted by Xi Jinping. In measuring the energy required to produce a unit of GDP, they are essentially measures of efficiency: As long as energy consumption grows more slowly than GDP, energy intensity is reduced.
China set its first energy density target in the 11th Five-Year Plan in 2006, and it has been an important target in every subsequent plan, steadily improving the efficiency of China’s energy use. But greater efficiency does not necessarily mean that emissions fall. China’s energy demand has continued to rise, and so despite its greater efficiency, its emissions have increased. In the last 18 months, emissions have been down slightly, but if energy density improvements slacken off, that trend is expected to reverse.
Over the last five years, China’s continuing dramatic growth in demand seemed largely to have been met by the equally rapidly expanding supply of renewable energy. But on the negative side, China has missed its energy density target, for the first time. Aiming at a 17 percent improvement over those five years, it achieved only 12.4 percent. Given its GDP growth, that would imply that its emissions increased by 13 percent over the same period.
That would put the country’s hopes of meeting its Paris commitments and Xi Jinping’s promise to reduce China’s carbon intensity by 65 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 severely off track. Planners could have compensated with renewed ambition in the 15th Five-Year Plan. Instead, they changed the way they calculate energy intensity, perhaps to disguise the failure to meet Xi’s target, and set a looser ambition for the next five years.
If one aspect of China’s reluctance to abandon coal is related to energy security, another major obstacle is the vested interests within the system: Coal-producing provinces want to preserve jobs and local economies, and for provincial governments, a steady supply of electricity is more important than controlling emissions. These concerns can be in competition with national climate goals.
The government claims coal is necessary to balance the grid, filling the gaps in supply when demand is at its peak.
In China, which has the largest electricity system in the world, power generation is under the control of provincial governments, while the generating companies and the grid operators who distribute the energy are dominated by state-owned companies. When China started to build large-scale wind and solar projects more than 10 years ago, the energy system was dominated by coal-fired power stations with annual contracts to supply the grid with electricity. Because the grid operator paid for that output regardless of how much it used, the operator ensured that coal output had preferential access. That meant that when wind farms were producing high levels of electricity, they frequently found that they were unable to sell onto the grid, and it was wasted.
There have been successive attempts to reform the system to favor renewable energy, and in the 15th Five-Year Plan, the government points to its continuing commitment to expanding the renewables sector as the key to its climate policy. But this industrial policy, however successful, will not in itself reduce emissions if coal continues to play a substantial role in the power sector.
The government continues to claim that coal is necessary to balance the grid, filling the gaps in supply when demand is at its peak or when renewable output falls. But as the analysts at CREA point out, that is not the best or most efficient use of a coal-fired power station that has been designed for steady rather than sporadic operation. It can take several hours to get a coal-fired station into operation and, once operating at its maximum, it cannot easily be turned down when demand drops. To get around this problem, it appears that many operators are keeping plants in a state known as “spinning reserve,” running in the background and ready to dispatch energy at short notice. But this is inefficient both in energy use and in carbon emissions since the plant just keeps ticking, using fuel and emitting CO2.
There has also been a remarkable expansion of various forms of energy storage in China, including battery and pumped hydro, precisely to address the challenge of intermittent renewable power. Battery storage alone has increased by a factor of 20 in just four years. These forms of storage are cheaper, more efficient, and more climate friendly than keeping a coal fleet on standby and, as they grow, the case for the continued use of coal, let alone its expansion, seems sure to grow even weaker.
Of concern for investors, the cost of China’s recent coal build-out in long-term stranded assets could run into trillions. The cost to the climate is of concern to everybody.
2026-04-05 02:06:26
The US Department of Health and Human Services gave at least $34 million directly to 16 crisis pregnancy centers between 2018 and 2024, according to a US Government Accountability Office report publicly released on Wednesday.
Crisis pregnancy centers, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, are “facilities that represent themselves as legitimate reproductive health care clinics providing care for pregnant people” but work to dissuade them from seeing abortions, even during life-threatening situations such as ectopic pregnancies. There are between 2,400 and 2,800 crisis pregnancy centers in the United States.
This report comes as the Trump administration doubles down on its “pro-life and pro-family agenda,” according to White House spokesperson Kush Desai. On Friday, the Trump administration, in its budget proposal, announced plans to overhaul its Title X family planning program, moving away from contraception and instead focusing on “optimal health (defined as physical, mental, and social wellbeing), not just medical intervention.” This also seems to dismiss that some people need medical interventions, like IVF, in order to have children.
The researchers at GAO noted that it was difficult to identify how much money was given to crisis pregnancy centers over the six-year period, which does not include Trump’s second term, as they “are not easy to identify in government spending data.” They were able to identify 16 crisis pregnancy centers that received federal funds from HHS because they received a large amount of funding through two HHS Sexual Risk Avoidance Education grants.
“HHS’s oversight of federal funding obligated to CPCs is specific to the
requirements of the grant awarded and varies depending on whether the CPC is
the direct or pass-through recipient of the grant, according to HHS officials,” the researchers wrote. “HHS neither targets nor excludes CPCs from any federal grant opportunities, according to agency officials.”
The amount of grant funding that GAO located given to crisis pregnancy centers was not exclusive to the years during the first Trump administration. 2021 to 2024, HHS gave an average of just under $4.8 million per year over a four-year period during the Biden administration, just under the average of $5 million per year under the first Trump administration.
The GAO report lines up with a 2024 Health Management Associates report, which found that 650 crisis pregnancy centers received close to $400 million from federal funding streams between 2017 and 2023.
2026-04-05 01:04:25
On Friday, President Donald Trump released his budget proposal for the fiscal year 2027. Surprisingly, given the cuts that would be necessary to fund the $1.5 trillion the Trump administration is asking for military spending, the budget also included over $500 million more funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, for a total of over $16 billion. But disability experts are wary of other aspects of what the Office of Management and Budget head Russell Vought, Project 2025’s architect, put forward. Vought wrote in the proposal that the budget “continues the Department of Education’s path to elimination, returning control of education back to America’s families.”
Under the IDEA, qualifying students with disabilities are able to receive modifications to their education, making sure that they have equitable access to learning opportunities in the least restrictive environment for them. The administration’s proposal includes nearly $700 million that would go directly to states.
“We do need to provide more money to states to provide direct services for kids with disabilities,” said Rob Trombley, who was an account lead for the Department of Education’s IDEA team during the Obama administration.
“IDEA really is a comprehensive program, and all of the parts of it kind of work in tandem and together to support the implementation.”
The budget recommends removing funding specifically designated for parent information centers, which help equip parents with information and resources they need to advocate for their kids with disabilities, as well as technical assistance for schools. This funding would instead come out of each state’s IDEA budget. Multiple experts I spoke with expressed concerns that this will lead to these parent programs not getting the funding they need.
“These are programs that are really critical for ensuring the implementation of IDEA,” National Center for Learning Disabilities‘ associate director of policy and advocacy Nicole Fuller said. “IDEA really is a comprehensive program, and all of the parts of it kind of work in tandem and together to support the implementation.”
The Trump administration tried the same move last year, but Congress, in a bipartisan fashion, rejected this change to the budget for parent information centers. “Advocates for students and families will call on Congress to do so again,” said Stephanie Smith Lee, former director of the Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs during the George W. Bush administration.
Last year, there was also an attempt to put funding for preschool for kids with disabilities in the states through consolidated grants. Though that was similarly rejected, it is again in the budget bill for fiscal year 2027.
Early intervention during preschool years can help kids learn the skills that they need to thrive. “The sooner we can provide services for those who have developmental delays, the less likelihood that they may have a more severe disability,” Trombley told me.
It is also perhaps unsurprising that the budget refers to unborn disabled children, as anti-abortion activists tend to do, claiming that IDEA serves “eight million children with disabilities, including those unborn.” But there’s no tracking of the federal government by the Department of Education of fetuses with disabilities—that eight million number just refers to students with Individualized Education Plans, commonly known as IEPs.
There are also attacks on other aspects of education that will undoubtedly impact disabled students of color if the budget is approved by Congress, including an attempt to eliminate the English language acquisition program entirely and funding for minority-serving institutions programs. The 93-page Special Education appropriations report for the budget proposal also only mentions the term “race” once, acknowledging that schools can be held to account for disproportionately penalizing disabled students of one race over another.
Disability education is, of course, far from perfect. The federal government has already not followed through on a commitment to fund 40 percent of the cost of IEPs. The new budget proposal says that it will reduce “paperwork burdens on special educators so they can focus their time on serving students.” But, reducing paperwork for IEPs may not end up helping disabled students. Trombley told me that he does think a pilot program for finding ways to streamline IEPs could be useful if it is effective, but he does not have faith in the current administration to accomplish this. “We still need to make sure that kids are protected,” he added.
“For families, [an] IEP being comprehensive is really important, not only for their child’s services and supports,” Fuller noted, “but also should they need to use their due process rights.”
There very much remains a concern among disability education advocates that the Trump administration will soon try to move the disability education programs from the Department of Education to the Department of Health and Human Services, where Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has suggested that autistic people have no value, would have a more profound influence on disability education policy.
“It is time to focus on how to improve educational opportunities for all students, including students with disabilities,” Smith Lee, now the co-director of policy and advocacy at the National Down Syndrome Congress, said, “and stop focusing on eliminating important programs, dismantling the US Department of Education, and cutting department staff.”
