A new DOJ legal opinion signals that states may no longer be required to keep disabled residents out
A legal opinion released this week by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has set off a fierce response from disability advocates, civil rights attorneys, and former federal officials who say it represents the most significant rollback of disability rights protections in decades.
The opinion, authored by Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Lanora Pettit, argues that states are not legally required to provide home or community-based care to people with disabilities. That position directly contradicts how federal law has been interpreted and enforced across both Republican and Democratic administrations for nearly 50 years, and it raises the prospect of states cutting services that currently allow millions of Americans with disabilities to live, work, and learn within their own communities rather than in institutional settings.
By 2023, roughly 8.4 million Americans were receiving home and community-based services through Medicaid. The question now is whether states will continue providing those services if the federal government no longer requires them to.
What the law has said until now
The foundation of modern disability integration law is a 1999 Supreme Court case, Olmstead v. L.C., in which two women with mental disabilities sued the state of Georgia after being repeatedly institutionalized despite being eligible for community-based support. The Supreme Court ruled that unnecessary institutionalization of people with disabilities constitutes discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act, establishing what became known as the integration mandate. Institutionalization, the court held, should be a last resort.
For nearly three decades, federal courts across the country applied that interpretation consistently. The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division enforced it, bringing actions against states that relied too heavily on segregated institutional care. That enforcement continued under administrations of both parties, including the first Trump administration.
The new memo argues that the Olmstead ruling was narrower than it has long been understood to be and that the Civil Rights Division exceeded its authority by pressuring states into compliance agreements tied to deinstitutionalization benchmarks. The memo even acknowledges its own departure from consensus, noting that its reading of Olmstead is out of step with the common understanding of that decision within the federal courts.
What advocates say is actually at stake
The response from the disability community was immediate and pointed. Alison Barkoff, a health law and policy professor at George Washington University who led federal disability policy under both the Obama and Biden administrations, said the memo signals that the federal government no longer believes disabled Americans have a right to be part of their communities. She described the shift as one of the most consequential changes in federal disability policy in her career.
Jennifer Mathis of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law put the human stakes in direct terms. Institutionalization is not simply a change of address. It means losing control over who you see, when you eat, where you go, and who shares your living space. For many people who have been institutionalized, she said, daily life collapses into a single hallway.
The American Association of People with Disabilities warned that the memo opens the door for states to warehouse disabled people out of public view, and The Arc of the United States called it a direct threat to decades of progress toward community living. Both organizations stressed that no one should face forced institutionalization simply because a state decides community services are too expensive to fund.
Regan Rush, a former DOJ civil rights attorney now directing a Democracy Forward project focused on civil rights, noted that the memo does not change the law itself since only Congress can do that. But it functions as a clear signal that the department intends to stop enforcing the protections that have defined its disability rights work for a generation.
Why this is happening now
The memo does not exist in isolation. It arrives alongside deep cuts to Medicaid passed by Republicans through last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, cuts that legal experts say will force states to reduce a wide range of services that disabled Americans currently rely on. With the federal government now signaling that it will not require states to provide community-based alternatives, advocates warn that institutionalization becomes not just a possibility but a financially convenient option for cash-strapped states.
The memo also connects to a broader administration push around homelessness. A July 2025 executive order called for greater use of civil commitment to address homelessness, and the new DOJ opinion appears to remove one of the primary legal obstacles to that approach. Barkoff noted that the Olmstead framework has historically been one of the most effective tools for providing stable housing and services to people experiencing homelessness, not a contributor to the problem as the memo’s footnotes suggest.
A separate case currently working through the courts, Texas v. Kennedy, brought by Texas and several other states, challenges the integration mandate directly. With this memo, the federal government has aligned itself with the plaintiffs.
The Justice Department did not respond to requests from NPR or CBS News to explain or defend the new position.