In the past, Americans with disabilities were sent off to large, isolating, state-run institutions as a matter of course. In overcrowded, understaffed facilities, residents were too often neglected and stripped of privacy, autonomy, or any meaningful connection to their communities. When these conditions were brought to light, they sparked national outrage. That reckoning helped galvanize the deinstitutionalization movement, a decades-long push to create services that support people with disabilities in their homes and communities.  

Decades of advocacy to “deinstitutionalize” have fortunately transformed quality of life for people with disabilities, but it wasn’t until just 27 years ago that the Supreme Court's 1999 decision in Olmstead v. Lois Curtis made it so disabled Americans could rest easy knowing forced segregation wasn’t inevitable. 

For much of our history, few options existed between mass institutionalization in expensive and confining facilities on one end of the spectrum, and fully independent living absent any supports on the other end of the spectrum. The legal precedent rooted in Olmstead, plus the proliferation of once-nonexistent community-based services, changed that.

Now, however, the foundation that underpins our nation’s wide spectrum of community-based services is crumbling.

Olmstead affirmed that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) grants people with disabilities the right to live, work, and participate in their communities with the supports they need. That’s why we found it especially egregious that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) released a legal memo last month........

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