Unprecedented Blitz Against People With Disabilities Requires New Strategies
Substack subscribers: Today I’m cross-posting another piece from my LinkedIn newsletter, Progressive Strategy Now.
Key Takeaways – Why This Matters
Everything we have today — Medicaid, disability rights, public education — exists because past movements fought and won.
This isn’t just the usual budget cuts, it’s a policy blitz designed to overwhelm opposition.
They’re not just targeting programs, they’re dismantling movements.
We must track cascading harms across systems.
Traditional research is too slow, we need real-time tracking methods.
No movement can win alone, broad coalitions are now a necessity.
We Fight for What We Love
We’ve fought many times before — and won.
Every civil right and program we have today exists because people before us organized, built coalitions, and mobilized supporters to further the ideals of democracy - building a government of the people and for the people. We fought for these because we love our families, we love our neighbors, and we love our country.
Now, we’re facing our biggest fight yet. And it's time to reclaim patriotism as a progressive value.
This isn’t just another round of rollbacks and cuts, it’s a policy ‘blitz,’ defined as:
A high-speed, intensive, coordinated assault designed to overwhelm, confuse, and divide opposition before resistance can form.
A relentless flood of executive orders, funding cuts, and regulatory rollbacks—all hitting at once.
That’s not incompetence. That’s the plan.
Trump enablers literally call this strategy “flooding the zone with sh!t.” It’s meant to overwhelm and paralyze opposition, to break democracy.
But they underestimate us. We’re some of democracy’s strongest defenders, and we’re not easy to break.
Key Insight: They aren’t just attacking policies. They’re attacking movements — disability rights, civil rights, voting rights, women’s health, LGBTQ protections, public education.
Why? Because these are the movements that have organized successfully to use the tools of democracy for grassroots change.
If you want to weaken democracy, you attack and neutralize the groups that have most successfully engaged in democratic governance.
If we keep fighting like we always have, one cut at a time, we will lose. Traditional advocacy models aren’t built for this kind of blitz attack.
We need a new strategy — and we have the power to create one.
This post lays out preliminary ideas for one aspect of that new strategy. We need to map the full scale of this blitz, document its consequences in real time, and build coalitions strong enough to fight back.
Co-Impacts: How a Wave of Cuts Becomes a System-Wide Collapse
The danger isn’t just each cut by itself — it’s how they interact, compounding harm and destabilizing entire systems.
We need to stop thinking about harm in isolation.
Bad policies don’t just cause direct harm. They create ripple effects that spread far beyond their original target. This is the concept of co-impacts. Cuts trigger chain reactions that impact families, schools, hospitals, state economies, and even democracy itself.
How Co-Impacts Unfold in Real Life
Medicaid cuts don’t just hurt enrollees. They destabilize entire state economies.
Home care agencies shut down → caregivers leave the workforce → local economies take a hit.
ER visits spike as families lose preventive care → hospitals get overwhelmed.
State healthcare costs rise as untreated conditions worsen → governors slash other programs or raise taxes to fill the gap.
Special education rollbacks don’t just harm students. They weaken entire communities.
Schools lose Medicaid-funded therapists and aides → teachers are overwhelmed, behavioral crises rise.
More expulsions and dropouts → higher juvenile justice involvement.
Families relocate or struggle financially to compensate for lost services.
Co-Impacts Show Why Old Advocacy Models Won’t Work
Historically, movements have fought in silos. The disability rights movement passed the ADA without deep ties to the reproductive rights or labor movements. That approach worked when goals were tightly focused and we were addressing one harm at a time.
It won’t work now. When multiple movements are under attack across multiple policies at once, staying in silos is a losing strategy.
If we’re going to resist a blitz, we need a strategy as expansive as the attack itself. We need ways to spot and stop the cascading waves of domino effects as sweeping cuts across multiple fronts cause cumulative harms that can be hard to see at the outset.
The Methodological Gap: Why Traditional Research Models Can’t Keep Up
We can’t fight what we can’t measure. But here’s the problem: the tools we’ve traditionally relied on – academic studies, government reports, and large-scale policy evaluations – aren’t built for this moment. Before we can react to one cut, three more have already happened.
Most policy research models focus on one policy change, one affected group, and one measurable outcome. But a policy blitz doesn’t work like that.
We’re facing a fundamental measurement failure:
Most policy studies take years to complete. By the time we have solid data, the damage is done.
Many traditional evaluations rely on federally funded data sources, but those sources are being dismantled – disability research budgets slashed, public health metrics erased, federal reporting weakened, administrative datasets hidden.
If we wait for a peer-reviewed study to confirm what we already know – that these cuts are devastating lives and communities – we’ll already have lost.
We Need a New Model for Tracking Harm in Real Time
To resist effectively, we need harm tracking methods that are:
Faster – Capturing impacts as they unfold, rather than waiting for multi-year evaluations.
Broader – Tracking not just direct harm, but the full web of co-impacts across healthcare, civil rights, democratic institutions, safety nets, education, labor, and public infrastructure.
Decentralized – Less dependent on federal agencies that are being hollowed out, and more reliant on community-level data, advocacy networks, and real-time reporting.
Instead of waiting for the next government report, we must be building our own tracking systems.
We Need Methods That See What the Real Issue Is
The Trump-Musk administration is actively looking for ways to pay for trillions in tax breaks for wealthy individuals and corporations. Main targets under discussion? Deep cuts to Medicaid, Social Security disability benefits, and other safety net programs.
On the surface, these cuts look like just another budget fight. But this isn’t about fiscal policy or “efficiency”, it’s about enabling a gigantic anti-democracy power grab. Using old research methods designed for the yesterday’s battlefield means showing up unarmed for the new tactics and weapons of today’s battlefield.
Disability advocates have used grassroots organizing to win victories like Medicaid expansions and special education funding. These movements have successfully built public support, mobilized voters, and secured legal protections. That makes them a threat to would-be dictators.
By dismantling Medicaid and other public programs, the administration isn’t just cutting costs. It’s strategically weakening the infrastructure that sustains these movements, making it harder for people to organize, advocate, and resist further power grabs.
To make this concrete, let’s walk through a real-world example.
Worked Example of the Co-Impacts Framework: How Medicaid Cuts Trigger a Tsunami of Co-Impacts and Undermine Democracy
This section illustrates two key points:
How cascading co-impacts unfold across multiple sectors, using Medicaid cuts as a case study.
How dismantling public programs serves a larger authoritarian agenda—shrinking the space for democratic resistance.
How Medicaid Cuts Unfold in Four Stages of Co-Impact
Stage 1: The Hammer Falls—Immediate Shock to Essential Systems
Home care agencies shut down.
Schools lose Medicaid-funded therapists and aides.
Rural hospitals struggle or close.
Stage 2: Cracks Spread—Survival Mode Undermines Resistance
ER visits spike, overwhelming hospitals.
Behavioral crises in schools increase, leading to more expulsions and juvenile justice referrals.
Families are forced into medical debt, reducing their ability to engage in civic life.
Stage 3: System Failure—Destabilizing Local Economies and Public Trust
State budgets strain under rising healthcare costs.
Cities and towns lose jobs as home care workers and hospital staff are laid off.
More people turn to emergency safety nets, further straining underfunded systems.
Stage 4: Permanent Damage—Locking in Power Imbalances
Institutional knowledge is lost as providers shut down.
Local economies shrink as Medicaid cuts reduce consumer spending.
States adjust to a lower funding baseline, making it harder to restore benefits in the future.
Defending Medicaid is Defending Democracy
Medicaid isn’t just a healthcare program—it’s part of the infrastructure that sustains communities, enables civic participation, and ensures that people can engage in public life. When these supports are dismantled, people are pushed into survival mode, making it harder to organize, advocate, and push back.
This isn’t just about funding cuts—it’s about who holds power and who gets silenced. When public institutions are weakened, movements that rely on them lose critical footing. Defending these programs isn’t just about preserving benefits—it’s about keeping democracy itself functional.
Turning Awareness into Action
The scale and speed of this policy blitz demand a different kind of response, one that moves beyond fighting individual cuts and instead focuses on building alliances, tracking harm in real time, and strengthening resistance across movements to defend democracy itself.
Now is the time to connect, strategize, and act. What ideas, data, and insights can help us expose, track, and counter these attacks? What partnerships need to be built? Let’s push this conversation forward – because stopping the blitz starts with seeing this new battlefield and fighting the broader strategic objectives of Trump and Musk with equally new tools rather than the rocks and arrows of yesterday.
Framing Questions: Where Do We Go from Here?
To move forward, we need new ideas, new alliances, and new ways of tracking harm. Consider these framing questions as a way to continue the conversation within your networks:
Imagine if we had a real-time, community-driven system to track and expose the full ripple effects of looming disability cuts. What would that look like?
What would it take to build alliances across movements that have never deeply collaborated before — so that no group fights alone?
How might we design faster, decentralized ways to document and communicate co-impacts, even as official data sources are dismantled?
If we could shift from playing defense to setting the agenda, what proactive strategies would we launch to protect and expand disability rights?
Imagine a future where policymakers cannot ignore the full social and economic consequences of their cuts. What new tools or coalitions would we need to make that happen?
Who else needs to be in this conversation, and how can we bring them in?
If this post sparked new ideas, share them. If you see opportunities for collaboration, reach out. Let’s make this conversation bigger than any one of us, because that’s the only way we win.
Let’s Talk
📞 Need a strategic plan that protects your mission—and your funding? I work with disability leaders to navigate these threats and build stronger, future-proof organizations. Let’s talk.
📩 Message me to start the conversation: paul@ptshattuck.com
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From Progressive Strategy Now, a publication of Paul T Shattuck LLC.
***The views expressed here reflect my personal analysis as a researcher and consultant, and do not represent the positions of any employer, clients, or affiliated organizations.