On June 16, the U.S. Department of Education handed most of its special education oversight to Health and Human Services. That means Linda McMahon passed the torch to Bobby Kennedy Jr. We know why that should worry us.
Kennedy rejects the idea that rising autism diagnosis rates reflect better screening and broader diagnostic criteria. He instead describes autism as an "epidemic" driven by "environmental exposures." At a 2025 press conference, he said flatly that "autism destroys families." He has directed NIH to study mold, obesity, and Tylenol as potential causes and pledged answers by September. He has called autism "preventable."
Autism and disability advocates pushed back hard on the "cure/prevent" framing. Zoe Gross of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network told CNN Health that said Kennedy "set up this litmus test of what it is to be a person and have a valuable life." That's the crux of the concern for IDEA oversight: the law is built on an educational premise — what can this student learn, and how do we get them there — not a medical one asking what's wrong and how to eliminate it.
In real life, I've been wondering what this will actually mean for a child like my own. Jerell Hill, a longtime special education administrator, offers a useful comparison in Education Week:
Picture a child behind in math. Under a medical model, a specialist might log the trouble as a deficit and hand the child a screen-based program built to fix it.
But under an education model, the question is different — what does math look like through this child's eyes, and how do we help him see he can master anything he can picture? "Same child, different childhood," he writes.
Hill's an educator, and that's what our children need. To be fair, DOE has said this HHS handoff changes nothing about the law itself. McMahon told parents in a letter that IDEA and civil rights protections existed before the department did, and will outlast this reorganization too — and she's stated that IDEA "ensures that a child's disability isn't viewed as a medical condition" to be treated. She's framed the HHS partnership as aligning services toward "academic outcomes" and "meaningful employment," not redefining disability as illness. Whether that holds against Kennedy's own public framing of autism as a preventable epidemic is the open question.
Keep asking what your child is ready to become, document as if the oversight is still watching even when it isn't, and don't let a reorganization chart decide who a student is.
Did Trump Get Rid of the Special Education Department?
Not exactly. The Department of Education still exists, and it technically keeps statutory responsibility for IDEA. But on June 16, 2026, it signed interagency agreements handing day-to-day management — funding distribution, compliance monitoring, enrollment data — to HHS, while civil rights enforcement moved to the Department of Justice. The law didn't move. The people responsible for making sure schools follow it did.
Is IDEA Still in Effect?
Yes. IDEA, Section 504, and FERPA all remain fully in force — this was a reorganization of federal agencies, not a repeal of any law. Your child's IEP is still binding. The school still owes every service written into it. Your enforcement paths are unchanged too: raise concerns with the IEP team in writing, file a state complaint, request a due process hearing, or file a civil rights complaint — the process just now routes through a different set of federal offices than it did a month ago.
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[Editorial note: paraphrased from Jerell Hill's Education Week op-ed (June 22, 2026), with one short direct quote under 15 words, attributed.
Kennedy quotes drawn from public press conference remarks and reporting (April 2025 CDC autism press conference; Sept.–Oct. 2025 Tylenol/autism reporting).
McMahon quote from her public parent letter, June 2026. Attribution and links to originals should run with this piece.