What is "Eugenics" and How Does it Relate to Special Education?

Many people don't know what the word "eugenics" means, but parents of special education students will recognize the behavior associated with eugenicist thinking. Special education is not an isolated, siloed experience with no bearing on the rest of society, and history shows us that societies don’t just collapse because of a few bad actors or terrible ideas. They collapse because their systems stop evolving with the needs of their people. 

I have spent the last 34 years upholding democracy at the local level through special education compliance, asserting all the while that special education is the “canary in the coalmine” for the rest of our civilization. The degree to which a society is civilized is revealed by the degree to which it takes care of its most vulnerable members.

When societies collapse, systems that once protected people can no longer fulfill their functions and start existing for their own benefit, causing constituent needs to become the means of perpetuating the system rather than the ends served by the system. These systems stop spiraling upward through stages of reflection, accountability, and self-correction and, instead, stagnate and drift into patterns we recognize all too well; patterns that include horrors like eugenics.

What Is Eugenics, and Why Should We Be Worried?

Eugenics is the scientifically discredited and morally indefensible idea that society can be “improved” by encouraging reproduction among people with “desirable” traits while suppressing or eliminating reproduction among those deemed “undesirable.” In the early 20th century this ideology fueled forced sterilizations, segregation, and systemic discrimination against the poor, disabled, mentally ill, and minority populations (NHGRI).

Even after the Holocaust exposed the full horror of where eugenic thinking leads, many of its assumptions remained embedded in law, policy, and cultural attitudes. Today we are seeing a resurgence of these ideas under new guises:

• Coerced sterilizations of women in immigration detention centers
• Cuts to disaster relief and public-health infrastructure that disproportionately impact marginalized communities
• Erasure of tracking systems for disease, disaster, and civil-rights data, making vulnerable groups less visible and less protected

These actions aren’t accidents. They are systematic attempts to decide who deserves to survive and who doesn’t, without ever saying the real intent out loud. One of the things about my tendency to use Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) in any attempt to understand behavior is that it really helps identify when actions speak louder than words, which is why I recommend that everyone have a basic understanding of ABA. It's hard to miss the function of a behavior when it's this obvious.

Project 2025 Threatens Publicly Funded Special Education

Project 2025 is a published blueprint backed by major political operatives that calls for dismantling federal civil-rights enforcement, including abolishing the U.S. Department of Education. Key figures inside the current administration have publicly stated that their job is to “eliminate” the Department.

Project 2025 proposes to:

• Eliminate or severely weaken the USDOE
• Roll back enforcement of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)
• Shift authority to states without guaranteeing civil-rights compliance
• Divert public funds to private schools that need not serve disabled students equitably

So, Project 2025 and Eugenics: Here's the Link

At its core, eugenics builds systems that decide whose lives are worth protecting and whose are expendable. Project 2025 follows this template by removing protections for disabled, poor, and marginalized students, making survival and success conditional on wealth, ability, and conformity.

While supporters frame these moves in language about “freedom” and “efficiency,” the practical effect is to systematically privilege some groups while abandoning others. Selective protection of life, determined by productivity and conformity, is the operational definition of modern eugenics (ACLU analysis).

Understandin