How the safety net destroys itself from the inside — and who gets buried in the rubble
Politics Are Personal | Disability, Housing, and Administrative Collapse
The Fight I Shouldn’t Have Had to Win
When the park I was living in got new management, I spent almost a year fighting to keep my service dogs.
Under the previous manager, my service dogs had been approved and documented. I had the contract. I had the emails. I had the texts. When new management came in and I signed the new annual lease, my service dogs weren’t listed. They wanted to charge me pet fees for them. Same dogs. Same disability. Same legal right. That’s when the fighting began.
So I built a 160-page document.
My training background. My coursework. Training handouts covering the different levels of service and working dogs and their legal requirements. ADA law. Case law I found myself. My dogs’ certifications and graduation certificates. Photos of their vests and tags. Photos of them doing their jobs. Medical records that referenced my service dog by name. Every email and text from the previous manager approving Shamrock and acknowledging my senior boy’s transition from structural service work to ESA work.
I became my own paralegal. My own ADA scholar. My own archivist. I made my monthly payments at the amount in the contract I didn’t yet have back — in good faith, because that’s what you do when you’re trying to do the right things. I knew holding payments in escrow was an option. I knew I could have lawyered up. I chose the good faith path because I was already carrying everything else.
Almost a year later, I got a signed lease back with my service dogs recognized.
I did the right things.
The Part Most People Don’t See
And I want you to hold that — because I had every advantage a person in that situation could have. Training background. Documentation instincts. Knowledge of the law. Organized records. The cognitive bandwidth, on that particular stretch of time, to fight.
Most people don’t have all of that. Most people are just trying to keep their dog and their housing at the same time while managing a disability and they have none of what I had.
And that was before the memo.
The Memo That Pulls the Ladder Up
Recently, the Trump administration told HUD’s fair housing office that effective immediately, emotional support animals are no longer recognized as qualifying accommodations for disabled tenants. They’re also tightening the definition of what counts as a service animal at all. No vote. No law. An internal memo telling enforcement staff to stop enforcing.
The Fair Housing Act hasn’t changed. Your rights on paper are the same.
But HUD just told its own people not to fight for you anymore.
Which means your landlord can deny your accommodation request and the federal agency that was supposed to back you up will look the other way. For veterans with PTSD whose psychiatric service dog is their primary accommodation — this just got harder. For disabled people who already know how exhausting it is to fight for something you’re legally entitled to — this just got harder. For anyone housing insecure who can’t afford to lose both their home and their animal at the same time — this just got harder.
I built 160 pages under full protections. I knew the law. I won — barely.
What happens now to the person who doesn’t know the law? Who doesn’t have the background? Who doesn’t have the energy for a year-long fight on top of everything else they’re already carrying?
They lose. Not because the law isn’t on their side. Because the fight is designed to outlast them.
They Just Did It to Olmstead Too
If the HUD memo felt familiar, that’s because it’s the same move, run twice in one summer.
On June 18, 2026, the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel released a memo arguing that neither the ADA nor Section 504 actually requires states to serve disabled people in the most integrated setting appropriate — the core of what’s known as the Olmstead integration mandate.⁶ The memo was written by Lanora Pettit, a former Ken Paxton appellate lawyer, not a disability policy expert.⁷ Four days later, the decision it’s targeting turned 27.
Same shape as the HUD memo. No new law. No repeal. Just an internal reinterpretation telling federal agencies they no longer have to enforce what they’ve enforced for almost three decades.
The memo doesn’t erase Olmstead. It can’t. Olmstead is still controlling Supreme Court precedent, and courts are still bound by it.⁸ But OLC opinions exist to tell the executive branch how to interpret and enforce the law — and this one tells DOJ and HHS they’re now free to walk away from defending it.⁹ The memo even admits, in its own text, that its reading is out of step with how federal courts have understood Olmstead for years.¹⁰
That’s the tell. They know they’re wrong. They’re doing it anyway, because being wrong doesn’t matter if nobody’s left to enforce the correction.
This lands in the middle of Texas v. Kennedy, where Texas and eight other states are already arguing the integration mandate is unconstitutional.¹¹ The memo doesn’t just sit next to that lawsuit — it hands it a federal government pointed in the same direction.
And here’s the part they don’t put in the memo: institutional care costs more. On average, Medicaid pays roughly three times more per person for institutional care than for community-based care.¹² This was never about saving money. It was never about what actually works. It’s about who gets to decide whether disabled people are allowed to stay in the world.
I know what “institutionalized” means because I know people who lived it. The last of those institutions weren’t some distant historical footnote — they were still open into the 1990s. We have the record of what they did to people: warehousing, neglect, abuse, lives shrunk down to a bed and a hallway. And we have the record of what happened after Olmstead, too — people who got to live in their own communities, learn beside their peers instead of apart from them, work alongside people instead of being filed away out of sight. That’s not a hypothetical comparison. We ran both experiments. We know which one is a kindness and which one only gets called a kindness by people who will never have to live inside it.
So watch the sequence, because it’s the same one from the HUD section above, just wearing a different name. Cut the enforcement. Let states quietly stop building the home and community-based services disabled people need to stay out of institutions — services already under pressure from the Medicaid cuts in HR1.¹³ Watch waitlists grow, watch people lose housing and support, watch the system fail loudly and visibly. Then point at the wreckage and say: see, they need to be institutionalized. It’s kinder this way.
It is not kinder. We have the receipts. We lived the before and the after, and we are not going to let them memo their way back to the before.
They dropped these actions days before July. Before Disability Pride Month. Before the one month a year built to celebrate disabled people existing fully in their communities, they quietly told the federal government it no longer has to fight for us to stay in them. And its reasons and actions like this that make Disability pride month so important.
That’s not a coincidence I’m willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to.
This Is Not a Bug. It’s the Design.
This is not a new design. It is the same one running through every program in this piece.
Caseworkers pulled off active cases to answer overflow phones. Intake lines so backed up that staff are reassigned from managing existing clients to triaging the next wave of people trying and failing to get through. The system begins to consume itself.
What looks like dysfunction from the outside is architecture from the inside.
Programs like Medicaid, SSI, SSDI, SNAP, and home and community based waivers all require constant documentation, recertification, and procedural compliance. You are never simply in the system. You are continuously proving you deserve to remain in it.¹
When the administrative system slows down, breaks down, or becomes unreachable — benefits don’t pause. They disappear. Medicaid terminated because a form wasn’t returned in time. A disability review missed and benefits cut off. An in-home care waiver lapsed because no one processed the paperwork. Not because the person was no longer eligible. Because eligibility was never the only requirement. Compliance with the machinery itself is.²
That is the hidden design: survival is conditional not just on disability status, income, or need — but on administrative endurance.
I know what administrative endurance costs. I’ve written about it before — chasing faxes from a hand-me-down phone while healing from spinal surgery, coordinating between clinics that SSA claimed to have contacted but hadn’t, doing the jobs of people getting paid to do the very thing they kept dropping the ball on. [ for more reading check out, This Is What It Takes / Red Tape and Roadblocks]
I know what it costs. I counted it in pages.
We’ve Seen This Business Model Before
We already know what happens when housing people becomes a revenue stream instead of a public obligation. It’s called prison for profit, and we’ve spent decades watching what happens when the incentive is bodies in beds instead of people out of them.
Weaken the integration mandate, and you don’t just get more institutionalization. You get institutionalization for profit.
Private equity is already circling. Firms have been buying up nursing homes and long-term care facilities for years, and the research on what happens next isn’t subtle — one study tracking over 18,000 U.S. nursing homes found resident mortality jumped 10% after a private equity acquisition, alongside a 50% increase in antipsychotic prescriptions, the kind used to sedate residents when staffing gets cut too thin to actually care for them.¹⁴ Private equity firms operate on a fixed return timeline, usually ten years or less, which means the fastest profit comes from cutting staff and squeezing costs, not from care.¹⁵
And Medicaid cuts make this worse, not better. When smaller, independent, or safety-net facilities get financially starved, they become cheaper acquisition targets for exactly these firms.¹⁶ Weaken the mandate that lets people stay in their communities, strip the funding that keeps community-based care running, and you funnel more disabled people into a system that private capital is already positioned to profit from.
This isn’t a slippery slope argument. It’s an existing business model waiting for the enforcement to look away so it can expand into a bigger market. We’ve watched this exact move happen with incarceration. We are watching it happen to disability now.
And this isn’t a future risk. It’s a current business model. Look at what detention-for-profit already looks like, right now, with ICE. CoreCivic reported $116.5 million in profit for 2025, an almost 70% jump from the year before, and told investors it expects 2026 to be even more lucrative.¹⁷ GEO Group did the same math and landed on $254 million in profit, a roughly 700% increase over 2024.¹⁸ On their earnings calls, investors weren’t satisfied. They pushed for more detention, frustrated that ICE hadn’t filled beds fast enough to hit their projected numbers.¹⁹
Read that again. Investors on a public earnings call, upset that not enough human beings were being detained to hit a revenue target.
That is the exact mechanism waiting for disability. Weaken Olmstead, let the states quietly stop funding community-based care, and you don’t get empty institutions. You get beds that need filling, and companies with a fixed return timeline who profit more the fuller those beds stay. We’re not guessing what that looks like. We’re watching it happen to another population, in real time, on the same earnings calls, with the same investors asking for more bodies to hit their number.
Inside the System Right Now
Right now, my social worker and I have made over ten calls to disability lawyers trying to find someone to take my appeals case.
Disability lawyers are leaving these cases — and not just because the system is collapsing. It’s because the wins are harder to get. The backlog is longer. The fights are longer. Some attorneys are narrowing who they’ll even take on.
I was turned away by my last lawyer for being under 50. They said so explicitly. Age requirements for disability representation. Let that land.
I found someone. I had my hearing — new judge, new lawyer, new vocational expert, new battle. How long I’ll be in this waiting stage, I don’t know. That’s the other thing no one tells you about the disability system: even when you clear every hurdle, you wait. And while you wait, nothing pauses.³
That same social worker who made those calls with me cried on the phone. Not unprofessionally. Not dramatically. She cried because she got into this work to help people and she is watching the tools she needs to do that disappear in real time. Building closures. Staff cuts. The weight of the One Big Beautiful Bill landing on programs she has spent her career holding together.⁴
And while she’s crying, her phone is ringing. Upset people. Scared people. Angry people. People already living on the edge of being unhoused, who have too much to lose, calling because the system that was supposed to catch them is no longer picking up.
Most social workers got into this field because they genuinely wanted to help. The more their hands are tied by bad policy and deliberate cuts, the more impossible their jobs become. That doesn’t just hurt the people they serve. It destroys them too.
We’ve Already Seen This Play Out
We have covered work requirements before. In Who Really Relies on Medicaid? we documented what happened in Arkansas when work requirements were imposed: over 18,000 people lost Medicaid coverage. Not because they were ineligible. Because they couldn’t keep up with the paperwork. In Fraud Claims vs. Reality we documented who actually commits Medicaid fraud — and who gets pardoned for it.
We said then what is now visible in real time: adding compliance burdens to SNAP and Medicaid doesn’t move people into stability. It moves them out of coverage. It bogs down already strained systems with verification paperwork that serves no one except the argument that the programs are too expensive to maintain.⁵
How They Pull the Ladder Up Without Touching the Law
They cannot repeal Medicaid outright. Too popular. Too visible. Too many people who vote depend on it.
So they hollow it out administratively. They cut the staff. They close the offices. They add the requirements. They let the phones go unanswered and the renewals get missed and the lawyers leave and the social workers cry and the 160-page fights become 200-page fights and then impossible fights and then fights no one has the capacity to take on anymore.
And then they point at the failure.
See? Government doesn’t work.
It wasn’t incompetence. It was the plan.
They don’t announce they’re removing protections. They send a memo to enforcement staff and wait to see who notices. They don’t repeal the Fair Housing Act. They just stop enforcing it and let the fights outlast the people trying to survive them.
This is the doom loop. This is the conveyor belt. This is the ladder pulled up while people are still climbing it.
What You Can Still Do
The law is still on your side. Document everything. Put accommodation requests in writing. If you’re denied, file a complaint — HUD may not fight for you but the Fair Housing Act still exists and so do fair housing organizations and legal aid. Don’t let the memo be the last word.
And if this doesn’t directly affect you — if you’re not disabled (yet), not housing insecure, not in the system — understand what you’re watching.
They are collapsing these programs from the inside because they cannot attack them from the outside. And most people aren’t seeing it because the media they watch isn’t covering it, or they don’t know anyone boots on the ground inside it.
I am boots on the ground inside it. I built the 160 pages. I made the ten calls. I listened to my social worker cry. I got turned away by a lawyer for being the wrong age. I sat in front of a new judge with a new lawyer and started over.
I did the right things.
And I’m writing it down so there’s a record.
We notice.
If You’re in Michigan and Struggling — Some Tools to Try
I want to be honest here: I have personally exhausted most of these resources. They helped me where and when they could, with what they had available. My situation may be more severe than yours, or yours may be worse than mine. Everyone’s path through these systems is different. But if you haven’t tried these yet, they may still be a starting point.
211 Michigan — Dial 2-1-1 or visit mi211.org. Connects you to local resources for housing, food, utilities, health care, and more. Available 24/7.
Disability Network Eastern Michigan (DNEM) — dnem.org — Advocacy, independent living support, and systems navigation for people with disabilities in eastern Michigan.
Michigan Rehabilitation Services (MRS) — michigan.gov/mrs — Vocational rehabilitation services for people with disabilities who want to work or can still work or maintain employment. (They did help me get an updated FCE (functional capacity evaluation, and that showed I could not work due to my disabilities).
Michigan Legal Help — michiganlegalhelp.org — Free legal information and resources, including housing, benefits, and disability-related issues.
Michigan Protection & Advocacy Service (MPAS) — mpas.org — Legal advocacy specifically for people with disabilities in Michigan. If your rights have been violated, this is a resource worth knowing about.
Fair Housing Center of Southeast & Mid Michigan — fhcmichigan.org — If you are facing housing discrimination including service animal and ESA accommodation denials, they can help you understand your options and file complaints.
These systems are under pressure. The people staffing them are under pressure. But they exist, and some of them still have capacity to help. Start with 211 if you don’t know where to begin. And if you’ve already been through all of it — I see you. You are not failing. The system is.
Sources & Footnotes
¹ Medicaid “churn” and administrative instability — people cycling on and off coverage due to paperwork, processing delays, and system barriers. kff.org
² Administrative burden in public benefits systems, including disability-related programs — how paperwork, recertification, and procedural barriers reduce access even when eligibility exists. urban.org
³ Caseworker workload, staffing shortages, and system inefficiencies across public benefit programs including Medicaid and disability services. cbpp.org
⁴ Government Accountability Office reporting on delays, improper terminations, and administrative failures in federal benefit programs. gao.gov
⁵ Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services guidance on eligibility redeterminations and Medicaid unwinding processes, including coverage loss risks. cms.gov
⁶ DOJ Office of Legal Counsel memo, June 18, 2026, reinterpreting the ADA and Section 504’s integration mandate. justice.gov/olc
⁷ Background on OLC memo author Lanora Pettit. adayinourshoes.com
⁸ Legal analysis confirming Olmstead remains binding precedent regardless of the memo. statnews.com
⁹ On OLC’s role advising the executive branch and the memo’s practical enforcement effect. sligolawgroup.com
¹⁰ The memo’s own acknowledgment that its interpretation is “out of step” with federal courts. acb.org
¹¹ Texas v. Kennedy and the states’ challenge to the integration mandate’s constitutionality. the50501movement.org
¹² Medicaid cost comparison, institutional vs. community-based care, 2023 figures. the50501movement.org
¹³ HR1 Medicaid cuts and their effect on home and community-based services. moddcouncil.org
¹⁴ Research on private equity nursing home acquisitions and resident mortality and prescribing outcomes. chcs.org
¹⁵ On private equity’s fixed-return investment timeline and its effect on cost-cutting in acquired facilities. minnpost.com
¹⁶ On Medicaid cuts financially weakening safety-net facilities into acquisition targets. stateline.org
¹⁷ CoreCivic’s 2025 profit and 2026 revenue projections tied to ICE detention contracts. theappeal.org
¹⁸ GEO Group’s 2025 profit increase driven by new detention contracts. commondreams.org
¹⁹ Investor comments on CoreCivic and GEO Group earnings calls pushing for higher detention numbers. theappeal.org