To the Members of the United States Congress,
While you have been comfortably debating spending caps and tax extensions in your air-conditioned chambers, a quiet, coordinated assault has been launched against the fundamental civil rights of every disabled adult in this country.
Between a predatory 39-page “slip opinion” dropped by the Department of Justice on June 18 and the trillion-dollar budget cuts currently targeting our healthcare safety nets, a terrifyingly clear message is being sent to the disability community: You are too expensive to be allowed to live in public. Pack your bags; we are warehousing you.
As a 30-year veteran of freeform radio, a specialist in Assistive Technology, and a wheelchair user, I am writing this to tell you directly: We see exactly what you are doing. Both of my middle fingers are squarely in the air, and we are not going quietly back into the shadows.
The State-Sanctioned Warehouse Pipeline
Let’s strip away the clinical policy jargon you hide behind. For over 25 years, the Supreme Court’s landmark 1999 Olmstead decision stood as our legal floor. It declared that unnecessarily segregating disabled people in institutions—which I will call what they actually are today: nursing homes—is a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. It guaranteed our right to live in our own communities with the help of home aides and adaptive tools.
The new DOJ memo systematically destroys the enforcement of that right, claiming the federal government isn’t legally obligated to prioritize community integration if a state cites “budgetary constraints” or “administrative convenience.”
And why would a state suddenly have “budgetary constraints”? Because Congress is concurrently engineering a massive, historical $1.1 trillion budget cut aimed directly at the throat of Medicaid and basic social services.
This is a malicious pincer movement. Congress is gutting the Medicaid funds that pay for the home health aides and assistive technologies keeping us independent. Then, the DOJ steps in with a legal hall-pass saying states don’t have to offer community care if they can’t afford it. You are cutting the funding to deliberately collapse the system, leaving disabled Americans with a horrific ultimatum: surrender your freedom and move into a nursing home, or die.
Dismantling the Myth of the “Handout”
I already know the exact, toxic counter-argument that brews in the comment sections and congressional hearings. There are people out there who will look at programs like SSI or SSDI and say, “Well, it’s taxpayer money anyway. If the state takes your check to pay for a nursing home room, what’s the big deal? It wasn’t really yours to begin with.”
Let’s choke that corporate-welfare brain rot right now.
First of all, SSDI (Social Security Disability Insurance) is an insurance policy that working Americans are legally forced to pay into out of every single paycheck via FICA taxes. It is an earned benefit. When a private insurance policy pays out a claim after a catastrophic accident, the corporation doesn’t get to confiscate the payout and tell the beneficiary how to live.
Second, the “taxpayer money” argument is a disgusting double standard reserved exclusively to police the poor and the disabled. This country hands out billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies, bailouts, and tax write-offs to billionaire oil executives and tech monopolies every single year. Nobody follows an executive into a grocery store to audit their cart or tells a billionaire they can only have $45 a month in walking-around cash because they accepted federal funds.
Yet, the moment a disabled person is forced into a Medicaid-funded nursing home, the state systematically confiscates their entire monthly check under the guise of “living expenses.” They bleed your financial autonomy down to a pathetic, federally mandated minimum floor called a Personal Needs Allowance.
In most states, that allowance ranges between $45 and $50 a month.
Think about the sheer, dehumanizing cruelty of that. A grown adult is expected to navigate their entire existence on $45 a month. If you want a specific brand of shampoo, a haircut, a tube of toothpaste, a magazine, or if you just want to order a single delivery pizza to feel like a human being for one evening—you are completely broke for the next thirty days.
It is institutionalized poverty. It strips away every ounce of leverage, every shred of dignity, and every dollar of self-determination, reducing a citizen to a permanent line-item profit margin for a private care facility.
We Refuse the Cage
We have spent decades fighting for the right to wheel down public sidewalks, to write code with our voices, to produce media, and to exist as equal partners in American society. We built our independent lives brick by brick, utilizing the exact Medicaid and Medicare services you are currently trying to dismantle.
We are not going back to the era of horrific, isolated warehouses. We will not allow our citizenship to be revoked by a quiet bureaucratic memo or a backroom budget cut.
To the members of Congress holding the scissors: look closely at the budget lines you are trying to trim. You are cutting into human lives, human dignity, and human freedom. We refuse the cage, we refuse to be hidden away for your administrative convenience, and we sure as hell aren’t trading our autonomy for a forty-five-dollar allowance.
Sincerely,
Lucas Osmond a.k.a. the prince of darkness
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