Easterseals CEO: SNAP, Medicaid Cuts in Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ A ‘Double Whammy’ to disabled
Earlier this month, Liza Berger at McKnight’s Home Care Daily Pulse posted an interview with Easterseals president and chief executive Kendra Davenport in which Davenport detailed how Americans with disabilities are impacted by the Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. President Trump officially signed the bill into law on July 4.
Easterseals, founded in 1919, is America’s oldest disability nonprofit organization.
Among the cuts in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” are substantial cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, or food stamps. The cuts, Berger said, amount to $900 billion and will, Davenport said, “deal a punishing blow to many people with disabilities, including many seniors.”
“Many people with disabilities are reliant on [food assistance], especially seniors,” Davenport said about the massive budget cuts levied by Trump and his cronies. “If that goes away, it’s a double whammy. They’re losing their healthcare. They’re losing their access to food and their assistance to be able to nourish themselves consistently. Those are big concerns, and it’s all hitting the same people, if you will.”
In addition to the SNAP cuts, Davenport sounded the alarm on the cuts to Medicaid services—which, here in California is known as Medi-Cal—as well as so-called direct service professionals, or DSPs, who visit disabled people in their homes and help them with independent living. The Medicaid cuts have a collateral damage effect on these workers, as Berger notes they will receive less money per hour. For its part, Easterseals, according to Berger, “has 70 affiliates and touches 70 million people including older adults and veterans.” The reduction in wages for DSPs, she added, may prove too much for the organization’s affiliates to bear; the result of which is ultimately less of these professionals for members of the disability community to lean on for crucial support.
Berger’s story is worth a read in its entirety. The Trump administration’s cuts to such crucial services do, in my opinion, underscore society’s general disdain for disability and disabled people. We’re seen as less than human, extant primarily to serve as inspiration for overcoming adversity, the odds, and our own bodies. It’s discouraging (and grossly ableist) but also entirely predictable. More broadly, these budget cuts also show the evil callousness of Trump and his sycophants—a reminder in itself that the modern Republican Party is decidedly not the Republican Party of George H.W. Bush, who signed the Americans with Disabilities Act into law 35 years ago this month.
Technologically speaking, the SNAP cuts comes amid Uber announcing expansion of retailers who accept SNAP payment in UberEats. The less money disabled people have to spend on UberEats, the less food they’ll have to eat. Which goes back to my point in the previous paragraph: most abled people don’t give two shits about people like me.
