The U.S. Supreme Court denied a challenge to a landmark ruling protecting same-sex marriage equality. The rainbow flag of the gay pride movement and the flag of the United States | Getty Images

The United States Supreme Court has declined to revisit the 2015 landmark ruling that gave same-sex couples marriage equality, a failure for former Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis.

Davis made national headlines in 2015 for refusing to issue marriage licenses to several same-sex couples based on her religious beliefs. With the help of conservative legal firm Liberty Counsel, Davis has tried to avoid paying $100,000 as ordered by a federal jury to one of the couples she refused, David Ermold and David Moore. She ultimately tried to use that appeal to challenge Obergefell v. Hodges, the case that required states to license same-sex marriages.

The nation’s highest court on Monday said it will not hear the challenge.

Mat Staver, Liberty Counsel’s founder and chairman who represents Davis, said he “will continue to work to overturn Obergefell.”

“Davis was jailed, hauled before a jury, and now faces crippling monetary damages based on nothing more than purported hurt feelings,” Staver said. “By denying this petition, the High Court has let stand a decision to strip a government defendant of their immunity and any personal First Amendment defense for their religious expression.”

Kevin Jennings, the CEO of Lambda Legal, a pro-LGBTQ+ advocacy law firm, called the case “frivolous” in celebrating its defeat.

“This is a victory not only for the LGBTQ+ community, but for everyone who believes in our Constitution and the rule of law. The court’s decision reaffirms a simple fact: equal protection of the law applies to all, not just some,” Jennings said in a statement. “This frivolous case now belongs in the trash bin of history.”

Jenny Pizer, Lambda Legal’s senior director of strategic initiatives said the decision to not hear the case by the Supreme Court “rightly leaves marriage equality crystal clear and undisturbed.”

Pizer said LGBTQ+ people and their families “still need vigilance and protection,” though.

“We secured the freedom to marry for same-sex couples over a decade ago in our landmark 2015 Supreme Court victory, Obergefell v. Hodges, thanks to the powerful stories of thousands of couples and their families throughout the country, including in our many court cases,” Pizer said. “The fundamental rights of liberty and equal protection that the court affirmed back then remain essential for all American families today.”

Kentucky Lantern is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com.

Documents collected and analyzed by UW-Milwaukee geography Professor Anne Bonds show examples of racial covenants in Milwaukee, one for a residential subdivision and another for a cemetary. (Wisconsin Examiner photo illustration).

“Do you ever wonder why there are Black neighborhoods?” Derek Handley, an associate professor of English, African and African Diaspora and Urban studies at UW-Milwaukee, asks his students. How did Milwaukee County become one of the most segregated counties in the country, and what has that meant for the generations of families who either benefited from that bigotry, or were the targets of it?

On Saturday Handley, alongside fellow UW-Milwaukee professor Anne Bonds, will unveil a new project that deeply examines the historic use of racial housing covenants in Milwaukee. From 1-3 p.m. at the Milwaukee Public Library’s Centennial Hall, the professors will present “Mapping Racism and Resistance,” the culmination of three years of work and reflection by thousands of Milwaukee residents. 

Racial covenants were legal clauses in property records that explicitly prohibited people who were non-white from living within, occupying, owning or even being present on certain properties. The first covenants in Milwaukee popped up  in the city of Wauwatosa in 1911, 10-20 years before neighboring states established similar practices. Covenants in Wauwatosa and the rest of the Milwaukee area pre-date the practice of redlining,  where financial institutions systematically denied mortgages and financial investments to residents from Black and minority neighborhoods, and which began in 1938. 

In fact, the covenants set the stage for later forms of discrimination like redlining. Bonds explained that redlining was “a process that re-enforced and layered upon racial covenants” and that the level of racism in some communities was so strong it motivated entire neighborhoods to send the message to Black, brown and non-Christian people that they were not welcome. 

Covenants became popular during the 1920s and continued into the 1960s, even after multiple Supreme Court rulings rendered them illegal and, in theory, unenforceable. 

Sometimes the covenants were established before houses were even built in an area. Other times neighbors spent time and money in the courts to create covenants in already developed areas. “It cost money,” said Bonds, “it wasn’t cheap to go and then insert these racial covenants into their property records kind of after the fact.” Not only did covenants root themselves in communities which did not yet have Black residents, there were actually more restrictive covenants than there were Black residents of Milwaukee from 1910 to 1960. Milwaukee had a very small population of Black people when covenants arose, Handley said, adding, “there were three times as many covenants as there were Black people.” Bonds stressed that, “None of this is really passive in any way, shape, or form…It’s a very active whites-only kind thing.” 

That history “disrupts the notion that Jim Crow only happened in the South,” Handley told the Wisconsin Examiner. Never before has a map of racial covenants centralized or visualized those records for study. A network of over 6,000 people helped transcribe and analyze 1.9 million images of deeds, wills, court cases, property records and other Milwaukee County documents from 1910-1960. The records needed to be indexed, converted and checked by five different people to verify that they were covenants. Although computer programs helped organize the bulk of the data, human volunteers were needed to sift out false positives and to verify the findings. 

Mapping Racism and Resistance is both a crowdsourcing effort and a reckoning for the community. Not only does it map where the racial covenants were in Milwaukee County, “but more than anything we wanted the project to be about teaching people more, exposing people to more about the mechanisms and the kinds of techniques that were used to segregate cities,” said Bonds. “And it’s really painful to see this language, and jarring…It’s really jarring. It’s one thing to learn about housing discrimination and to say, ‘Yeah, people didn’t want to live by people who were not white.’ It’s another thing to see that language that says, ‘This home can never be occupied by anybody of the colored race.’ And to see that language inserted in a legal document, it’s pretty eye opening.” 

Mary Roberts, one of the project’s volunteer transcribers who helped upload and verify the covenants, was shocked by what she saw. Having grown up in Sheboygan when the community was essentially whites-only before attending UW-Milwaukee, Roberts had a peripheral understanding of Milwaukee’s housing covenants. Now at retirement age, she was drawn to the project out of a desire to get involved in social justice issues in the city. 

“I have to confess, I did not really understand it,” Roberts told the Examiner. “I understood it in the abstract, but it really deepened my understanding in a way that I just don’t know if I can fully explain. You know, reading in black and white these very calculating and cold and indifferent property deeds…It was incredibly eye-opening to me.” Seeing the racial covenants went far beyond any lesson that can be learned in school, Roberts said. “I was born in 1965, so some of the racial covenants I found were like, they were living, breathing documents in my lifetime. So I went into this thinking that it was really more about history, but it is a living history that was really present in my lifetime. And I think that was very surprising to me.” 

A large portion of the covenants reviewed by Roberts were established in Wauwatosa and largely discriminated against Black people. However, she also found covenants from Greenfield, and others which also included Jewish people and other non-Christians including  Armenian people and Asian people. Covenants also existed to the north and east of Wauwatosa, as well as in Milwaukee’s Sherman Park, Sunset Heights and Roosevelt Heights neighborhoods on the South Side near the airport. “A lot of people talk about the way that Milwaukee is surrounded by its predominately white suburbs,” said Bonds. “And certainly when you look at the racial covenants, you can see that pattern playing out, that they surround the city of Milwaukee.” 

Roberts noticed that the covenants seemed to put the racial clauses alongside other restrictions like not being allowed to have livestock, or how close a lot could be to a street or property line. She described the covenants as “this very cold, unemotional, sickening language that really is treating people like farm animals, or like an out-building.” 

“So much of the language really was like, you know, no person of African American descent, no one who’s Armenian, could live at this property ever, unless you were a servant. Some of them even excluded servants from properties…It says that in one spot, and then in the next spot it says you can’t have any farm animals at this property. So it was really equating people to really sub-human status, essentially.” 

The Greenfield covenant Roberts found was created by neighbors who’d formed a homeowners association and signed their names to the record. As she transcribed the records, Roberts found herself thinking of her own life, and how the property she lives on now had been passed down through three generations of her husband’s family. “We could never have built the house that we did if we had not inherited land from his dad,” said Roberts. “So it really hammers home in a way that I think other things don’t, that ability to build generational wealth was really denied to a whole class of people in our community. And that those inequities persist today, because that is how things were back then.” 

The same aspect of the project struck Handley when he and Bonds met the descendants of Zeddie Hyler, the first Black homeowner of Wauwatosa. In 1955 Hyler sought to build a home in Wauwatosa, but had to get a white friend to buy the property before he could begin. Local residents attempted to harass him out of the neighborhood, and even resorted to arson. Hyler’s descendants told the professors that Hyler and his brothers were forced to camp out with shotguns in order to protect the house. Hyler died in 2004, and his home has been designated as a historic place. 

Handley recalled looking online to compare the value of the Hyler family home with the house he’d moved from in Milwaukee’s Bronzeville neighborhood. “We’re literally talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars, so the racial wealth gap is so significant because of housing discrimination,” said Handley. Resisting racist housing practices took bravery and ingenuity. “Black people in Milwaukee knew about it, NAACP was actively fighting against it,” said Handley.

In the early 1940s, NAACP Attorney George Brawley surveyed plats filed in Milwaukee County and found that about 90 percent of the subdivisions in Milwaukee County since 1910 had some type of restrictive covenant which “pledged the owner not to sell or rent to anyone other than Caucasians.” Wilbur and Ardie Clark Halyard, who founded Columbia Savings & Loan Association in 1924, helped give Black people, poor whites and other disadvantaged groups the opportunity to get a loan to buy a house. While other states focused on winning in court, key players in Milwaukee worked on economic efforts to “break into certain neighborhoods, to provide the economic means for Black people to get the support they need to purchase homes, and then try to find pathways into those neighborhoods,” Handley told the Examiner. 

This history of defiance is also something the professors hope the Nov. 8 unveiling of Mapping Racism and Resistance will reveal to people, especially those who may not believe that the housing covenants really played a role in shaping their community, or who doubt that their legacy continues to endure. Hyler’s story particularly shows how far people would go to maintain whites-only communities. Although the covenants became unenforceable after the 1960s, communities like Wauwatosa maintained racist attitudes. In the late 1980s, a whistleblower exposed that Wauwatosa police officers, firefighters and residents were attending annual Martin Luther King Day parties where attendees wore Black face, distributed fliers suggesting hunting Black people instead of deer, and other racist behaviors. 

In late 2020, Mayor Dennis McBride acknowledged that “the Wauwatosa I grew up in was a racist, almost totally white community,” though he denied that it struggles with racism today. Earlier that year, some Wauwatosa residents received letters which stated: “We Whites must stand together. We must keep Wauwatosa free from Blacks and their lack of morals. We must keep Blacks from destroying our property, raping our wives and daughters, and recruiting our children into street gangs. We MUST keep Wauwatosa great. Together we can keep Wauwatosa White! Together we can keep Wauwatosa safe!” The Wauwatosa Police Department said that it didn’t plan to investigate who distributed the letters, and the department focused on surveilling and disrupting Black Lives Matter protesters that summer. 

Wauwatosa didn’t elect its first Black alderman until 2022. The following year, Wauwatosa’s common council voted to request that the state dissolve its housing covenants, which still exist today as invalid clauses of deeds passed to homeowners upon buying certain properties. Other Milwaukee-area suburban communities, like Brookfield, continue to struggle with accepting affordable housing developments and newcomers. 

Bonds cautions against the impulse to erase uncomfortable histories. Most people don’t want to live in a home with racist ownership clauses, Bonds told the Examiner, and “it’s a relic of the past, and something that is obviously really dark.” Yet, Bonds said, “We are wary of erasing the record,” because “removing them today obscures the work that they’ve already done. We can take them out of here now, but it doesn’t mean that they didn’t have an impact. It doesn’t mean that they didn’t do the work that they were set out to do when they were implemented in the first place.” The covenants conferred legal and economic power regardless of whether people who have benefited from them are “able to see it or understand it,” said Bonds.

A fully interactive website planned as part of the project has been delayed due to grant cuts, and Bonds and Handley are also working on a book. Viewers will be able to look up covenants for properties, and get down even to the parcel-level. “I definitely see this as just part of a longer study of trying to understand housing and the availability of housing to all residents of Milwaukee County,” said Bonds. “We really view this as a community project.”  

Roberts says Mapping Racism and Resistance captures an important history for people to see, especially people whose families have lived in communities built on a foundation of covenants and redlining for generations. “It’s important to not look away from that,” said Roberts. “And unless we’re having these tough conversations, I don’t think anything can get better.” Handley agreed, adding, “this is part of Milwaukee’s history, and what we can learn from it, and what we can do moving forward.”

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A boy plays with a wooden numbers puzzle. Sensory exercises like this are often used in special education classrooms. (Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — Proposed mass layoffs at the U.S. Department of Education have raised alarm among disability advocates and Democratic lawmakers over the potential impact on millions of students with disabilities. 

Advocates warn that the department cannot carry out its legally mandated functions for special education services and support at the staffing levels put forward by President Donald Trump’s proposed reduction in force, or RIF. 

The agency is also reportedly weighing a transfer of special education programs to a different department. 

“If we’ve learned anything this year, it’s that the fight is just beginning,” Rachel Gittleman, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents Education Department workers, told States Newsroom. “And we’re going to do everything we can to fight these illegal firings and the dismantling of the department, but it is just beginning.”

Trump’s administration took another axe to the department earlier this month amid the ongoing government shutdown, effectively gutting key units that serve students with disabilities. The affected offices administer $15 billion in formula and discretionary grant programs under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, provide guidance and support to families and states and investigate disability-based discrimination complaints, among other responsibilities. 

Though a federal judge has temporarily blocked the administration from carrying out the layoffs, the ruling provides only short-term relief as legal proceedings unfold. 

The administration moved to lay off 465 department employees, including 121 at the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, or OSERS, 132 in the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, or OESE, and 137 in the Office for Civil Rights, or OCR. 

The layoffs also hit the Office of the Secretary, Office of Communications and Office of Postsecondary Education. 

“You can’t look at any of this in a silo,” Gittleman said. “When you’re thinking about special education specifically, you also have to think about the fact that OESE, the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, also saw an almost full RIF as well.” 

Gittleman called the civil rights office “the place that ensures families have a place to go for help when students are denied access for education based on their disability.”

“That was also almost entirely gutted,” she said. “So you’re debilitating these programs in multiple ways because … kids with disabilities benefit from OESE programs, OCR assistance and OSERS programs.” 

Those three units had already been hit with a separate set of department layoffs earlier this year. 

Parents as advocates

Katy Neas, CEO of The Arc of the United States, an advocacy group for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, said that while IDEA has not been changed and the rights of children with disabilities continue, the government’s ability to enforce and implement those rights has deteriorated. 

OSERS is responsible for managing and supporting IDEA, which guarantees a free public education for students with disabilities and is in its 50th year. The umbrella unit OSERS includes the Office of the Assistant Secretary, Office of Special Education Programs and the Rehabilitation Services Administration.

“You take away the knowledge of the folks at the U.S. Department of Education at the Office of Special Education Programs — the law is complex, the combination of the federal law with state laws is complex — you need that trusted source of accurate information, and so, I think it’s going to make the implementation of this law that much more difficult,” Neas told States Newsroom. 

During the 2022-2023 school year, 7.5 million students in the United States received services through IDEA, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, a federal agency. 

Neas encouraged parents to “know your rights” and “understand what the law does and does not do for your child, and don’t take no for an answer.” 

She said parents “really have to be well-versed in what the law requires schools to provide to their child,” and “have to be the ones that insist that the law is implemented with fidelity, because they’re the ones that are going to be on the front lines trying to make that happen.” 

‘Flabbergasted’

Jacqueline Rodriguez, CEO at the National Center for Learning Disabilities, said the RIFs would make it “impossible” for the Office of Special Education Programs to “carry out its statutory requirements.” 

Rodriguez, whose organization advocates for people with learning and attention issues, said “we had hundreds of staff doing this type of work — the statutory requirements are monitoring, compliance, guidance, support — it’s not just pressing a button and issuing funding.” 

She also noted that advocacy groups, including hers, are “flabbergasted” regarding the sweeping layoffs of special education staff because of the contrast with previous assurances Education Secretary Linda McMahon has made to both Rodriguez and Congress about supporting students with disabilities. 

“I am not stunned that the administration would try to dismantle something that was legally required in place,” she said. “But I am flabbergasted that the secretary would sit and give congressional testimony at her confirmation hearing. She did it at the oversight hearing. She sat in front of me and said, ‘No, Jackie, this administration supports kids with special needs. We will always be good advocates. You don’t have to worry.’”

Just days after the layoff notices were sent out, McMahon took to social media to downplay the consequences of the shutdown on her department.   

Two weeks into the shutdown, “millions of American students are still going to school, teachers are getting paid, and schools are operating as normal,” McMahon wrote. 

The secretary added that “it confirms what the President has said: the federal Department of Education is unnecessary, and we should return education to the states.” 

McMahon also specified that “no education funding is impacted by the RIF, including funding for special education.” 

Rodriguez said McMahon’s post indicates the secretary believes the “status quo is perfectly reasonable — when we know that’s not the case — and she dismantles every opportunity for a kid with a disability to actually have his or her legally-entitled education.”

“I am beyond being polite and providing professional deference because there has been no consideration or deference to kids with disabilities for the last 10 months,” she added.

The groups that advocate for students with disabilities are united in their opposition, Rodriguez continued.

“Disability organizations across the country are united, we are all talking to one another,” she said. “We all work collaboratively, and we are in concert, lock and step.”

Congressional Dems fiercely oppose cuts 

Meanwhile, a slew of Democratic lawmakers expressed outrage and concern over the department RIFs in two separate letters to the administration this month. 

Reps. Lucy McBath of Georgia, Mark DeSaulnier and Lateefah Simon of California, led dozens of fellow House Democrats in an Oct. 17 letter voicing to McMahon and White House budget director Russ Vought their “deep opposition” to the layoffs and urging them to “immediately reverse course and rescind the termination notices that were sent to these workers.”

In another letter to McMahon, 31 members of the Senate Democratic Caucus wrote Monday that “punitive, reckless actions like these latest firings demonstrate how President Trump and …Vought are relishing the government shutdown they caused — and are treating students as political pawns,” adding: “That is outrageous — and flatly unacceptable.”

Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, led the letter, along with: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York; Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, ranking member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions; and Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, ranking member of the Appropriations subcommittee overseeing Education Department funding.

Photo by Westend61/Getty Images

If someone had walked past the storage of the neuroscience lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in May, they might have heard quiet sobbing.

It was Uma Chatterjee, a doctoral student, having a severe obsessive-compulsive disorder flare-up triggered by the pressure of disappearing research funding.

Since January, core funding from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health has faced deep cuts. The administration of President Donald Trump has cut more than $4 billion from the National Institutes of Health and $970 million from the National Science Foundation, affecting more than 7,000 grants, according to Grant Witness, a database tracked by scientists. Although a federal judge ordered the NIH to reinstate some funding, Scott Delaney, a co-founder of Grant Witness, said that “most grants that have been terminated are still terminated. They haven’t come back, and they likely won’t.”

Among the programs being targeted are those designed to expand access to science for underrepresented groups — including people with disabilities, who account for one in four adults in the U.S.

In 2021, President Joe Biden’s administration issued an executive order that prioritized their inclusion in the federal workforce. But the Trump administration has mounted a broad attack on diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility initiatives, leaving some early career scientists with disabilities increasingly uncertain about their place in a field where they have long faced systemic barriers.

Chatterjee studies the biology and treatment of OCD, a neuropsychiatric disorder that affected an estimated 1.2% of U.S. adults last year, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Her lab was awarded a five-year NIH grant expected to provide annual funding, but a few months ago the amount was reduced without explanation, according to Chatterjee. Now the lab is struggling to pay its staff, she said.

Disability researcher harmed

Chatterjee is not the only early career disabled scholar affected. Soli Guzman, a Mount Holyoke College graduate with multiple chronic and neurological conditions, had plans to continue research in protein biochemistry through a program that places underrepresented recent graduates in labs across the country — but those plans were upended by funding cuts.

In April, the NIH ended funding for the Postbaccalaureate Research Education Program, forcing colleges nationwide to halt applications. About 50 campus-based programs were affected when DEI initiatives came under political attack, according to John Shacka, an associate professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who chairs a group of PREP program directors. After two lawsuits — one brought by Massachusetts and a coalition of states, the other by public health groups and others — challenged the cuts, a federal judge ordered the grants restored. But last month, the Supreme Court ruled that the lower court lacked jurisdiction, although it left in place the finding that NIH’s process was unlawful. Meanwhile, roughly half of PREP programs remain without support, according to Shacka.

When PREP was first suspended, Guzman had just finished submitting 27 applications to local programs across the country. “The ground was ripped out from under me,” they said. “I’m a planner. I always have a backup. But suddenly, Plan A and Plan B were both gone. I was devastated.”

In April, Guzman received an offer from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Because of funding delays, the university could not place them with a principal investigator until early August. At that point, the lab required them to commit within 10 days.

They turned it down.

They also faced financial and logistical hurdles: the challenge of finding affordable housing, the difficulty of quickly finding a roommate, and the need to pay out of pocket for repairs to a car that lacked proper heating. As a person with disabilities, moving would also have meant establishing a new network of care providers. “My health is at its best since 2020, and I didn’t want to change how good my health is,” they said. “If I got sick, I was stuck.”

NSF grantmaking has also stalled. Tara Lepore, a postdoctoral researcher at Western Michigan University and a grant reviewer, said NSF had paused most review activity for months. While the agency’s grantmaking process has recently resumed, many grants that were already awarded were revoked, something they had never seen before.

Lepore, who lives with multiple disabilities, studies equity in STEM education, or science, technology, engineering and math education. The NSF proposal that they submitted would have funded undergraduate and doctoral students to build collaborations between STEM instructors and neurodiverse students. In June, they heard that while the NSF grant was deemed “highly competitive,” it would not be funded because it did not align with the  administration’s priorities.

“It has all the words that the administration doesn’t like in it,” Lepore said.

In February, NPR reported that the NSF had begun using a keyword filter, flagging terms such as “diverse” and “underrepresented” to screen applications, aligning with new restrictions on DEI content.

Lepore’s project centers on “STEM,” “education” and “equity.”

Capital & Main contacted the NSF and the NIH to ask whether the cuts will affect initiatives designed to expand disabled people’s access to the workforce, education and other areas of public life.

Cassandra Eichner, a spokesperson for the NSF, pointed Capital & Main to a statement made by Sethuraman Panchanathan, the NSF’s director, in April, in which he said that the agency’s investments “should not preference some groups at the expense of others, or directly/indirectly exclude individuals or groups.”

An email from the NIH press team said: “NIH and [the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] are taking actions to prioritize research” that directly affects “the health of all Americans. We will leave no stone unturned in [our] mission to Make America Healthy Again.”

The New York Times reported in February that the NSF had indefinitely postponed an engineering workshop aimed at workforce inclusion for people with autism and other neurocognitive differences in the workforce.

Funding cuts worsen longstanding systematic bias

Guzman’s path to becoming a scientist has been marked by significant health challenges. In college, they developed long COVID-19 and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS, leaving them mostly bedridden. They were later diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a connective tissue disorder. Despite holding student leadership roles and completing three research projects, their chronic health issues affected their grade point average, which stood at 3.4.

“Disabled people are the only minority group anyone can join at any point in their life — but we’re treated like a problem,” they said. “I’ve even been told not to mention my disability in job applications because, in this political climate, it’s too risky. ”

Chatterjee, who studies biomedical science, shared that view. While she was in college, her health nearly derailed her studies. She graduated with a 1.83 grade point average and had to pursue a master’s degree before applying to doctoral programs. She said lab work remains one of the least accessible academic environments for disabled scientists.

“Our work is dependent on rigid protocols, timing and animal models. There’s almost no room for flexibility,” Chatterjee said. “In theory, there should be systems to help — accommodations, people to back you up — but in practice, the culture is incredibly toxic. People brag about working 80, 100 hours a week, skipping holidays, never taking time off. I fought tooth and nail to get here.”

And it’s not just about inclusion or justice. Chatterjee said she believes the Trump administration’s assault on accessibility represents a loss of potential.

Guzman, who is working in a lab focused on disability-related research, echoed this view. They pointed to the Norris Lab at the Medical University of South Carolina’s Department of Regenerative Medicine & Cell Biology in Charleston, South Carolina, which studies Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and said that many in the lab live with the condition themselves. To Guzman, this is a clear example of how lived experience can drive empathy and innovation. “We’re often more flexible and empathetic because of our own experiences,” they said. “That makes a difference not just in what gets studied, but in how labs are run and how students are supported.”

Yet scientists who bring their perspective remain scarce. According to the National Science Foundation, only about 10% of STEM Ph.D. recipients reported having a disability.

“A lot of diversity fellowships end up going to people who are marginalized but still fit the mold of being ‘high-performing,’” Chaterjee said. “Disabled researchers who need real accommodations are often left out, because the system still measures worth by productivity instead of equity.”

Copyright 2025 Capital & Main. Credit and a link to the original story at Capital & Main are required when republishing.

Capital & Main is an award-winning nonprofit publication whose mission is to educate the public on matters of importance such as economic inequality, climate change, health care, threats to democracy, hate and extremism and immigration.

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A sign on the entrance to the U.S. National Arboretum says it is closed due to the federal government shut down on Oct.  1, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — The first federal government shutdown in seven years has left hundreds of thousands of workers furloughed and members of the public struggling to understand what’s open, what’s closed and what might be delayed.

States Newsroom’s Washington, D.C. Bureau scoured agency plans published by the Trump administration and the courts, and produced this guide to help you understand what’s going on:

Agriculture Department 

The USDA plans to furlough about half, 42,300, of its nearly 86,000 employees, though workers at several programs for farm communities and rural areas will keep working without pay.

Operations will continue on some farm loans, certain natural resource and conservation programs, essential food safety operations related to public health and wildland firefighting activities. 

Agriculture Department employees working on animal and plant health emergency programs — including African swine fever, highly pathogenic avian influenza, exotic fruit flies, new world screwworm and rabies — are exempt from furloughs.  

But dozens of USDA programs addressing everything from disaster assistance processing to trade negotiations to long-term research on animal diseases will cease until Congress reaches a funding deal. 

Employees working on those programs will be furloughed until the government is once again funded, but both working and non-working federal employees in all agencies are required to receive back pay under the law. 

Agencies housed within the USDA have varying levels of furloughs. The Food and Nutrition Service, Office of the Inspector General and Natural Resources Conservation Service are among those with higher numbers of furloughed workers.

Commerce Department

The Department of Commerce will retain just over 19% of its nearly 43,000 employees during the shutdown, and most will have to stay on without pay, as outlined in its government funding lapse plan. 

The department oversees a wide range of federal government activities — weather forecasting, issuing patents and trademarks, regulating fisheries, enforcing export laws, managing government-owned and -controlled spectrum frequencies, and collecting demographics and other population data.

Notably, the department houses the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and will continue providing “weather, water and climate observations, prediction, forecasting, warning and related support.” But research activities will largely stop.

The U.S. Census Bureau, also part of the department, will cease most operations, including providing monthly economic indicators and updated data about disaster-impacted areas. Certain preparations for the 2030 Census will stop, as will any data collection for the American Community Survey.

Funding outside of annual appropriations may keep some U.S. Patent and Trademark Office units open, but the timelines will be variable, according to the department. When funding runs out, the office will continue “a bare minimum set of activities necessary to protect against the actual loss of intellectual property (IP) rights.”

Defense Department 

The Defense Department’s contingency plan calls for the nearly 2.1 million military personnel to keep working as normal and says 406,500 of its roughly 741,000 civilian employees will work without pay, while the others will be furloughed.  

The plan says the Defense Department believes operations to secure the U.S. southern border, Middle East operations, Golden Dome for America defense system, depot maintenance, shipbuilding and critical munitions are the “highest priorities” in the event of a shutdown. 

Medical and dental services, including private sector care under the TRICARE health care program, would largely continue at the Defense Department, though “(e)lective surgery and other routine/elective procedures in DoW medical and dental facilities are generally not excepted activities, unless the deferral or delay of such procedures would impact personnel readiness or deployability.”

Education Department 

The Department of Education said it would furlough roughly 95% of employees outside its federal student aid unit. 

The agency will continue disbursing Federal Direct Loans as well as Pell Grants, which help low-income students pay for college. 

Borrowers still have to make payments toward their student loan debt during the shutdown. 

Title I and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, grant funding would continue to be available as usual, according to the department. Title I provides funding for low-income school districts, while IDEA guarantees a free public education for students with disabilities. 

But the agency is ceasing several operations, including any new grantmaking activities. Still, the department said the majority of its grant programs “typically make awards over the summer and therefore there would be limited impact on the Department’s grantmaking.”

The agency’s Office for Civil Rights also has to pause investigations of any civil rights complaints. 

Energy Department 

The Energy Department will furlough a little over 8,100 of its 13,800 federal workers – nearly 60% of its workforce, according to its contingency plan. 

The National Nuclear Security Administration would continue maintenance and safeguarding of nuclear weapons. 

Some programs, like the medical isotope program, will require DOE to “produce additional isotopes in order to protect human life.” 

“The need to do this will depend on the length of the lapse and the stockpile of individual isotopes,” according to DOE. 

Certain programs are self-funded, such as the Bonneville Power Administration, which provides hydropower in the Columbia River Basin of the Pacific Northwest.

Environmental Protection Agency 

EPA, according to its contingency plan, will have the biggest percentage of federal employees furloughed. Nearly 90% of its workforce, or 13,400 out of 15,000, will be furloughed. 

Only agency activities that revolve around protecting human life, such as monitoring some Superfund sites and responding to emergency environmental disasters, will continue. 

Some EPA functions that will halt include issuing of new grants, publishing new research, pausing of cleanup of Superfund sites that don’t pose an imminent threat to human life, enforcement inspections and issuing of permits.

Health and Human Services Department 

The department, one of the larger ones within the executive branch that houses many of the country’s best-known public health agencies, has furloughed about 32,500 of its nearly 80,000 employees, according to its contingency plan.

Many of HHS’ activities fall under the life and property or even the national security exceptions during a funding lapse, though dozens of programs will still be affected.

HHS officials plan to ensure “minimal readiness” at the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response for “all hazards, including pandemic flu and hurricane responses.”

Certain employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will keep working, albeit without pay, to monitor for any disease outbreaks. But the contingency plan says the CDC’s “communication to the American public about health-related information will be hampered.”

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services plans to keep 3,300, or about 53%, of its employees during the shutdown in order to keep running core programs.

Since many of the country’s major health care programs are funded outside of the annual government funding process, they shouldn’t be affected by the shutdown, even though the employees who run the programs often rely on full-year or stopgap spending bills for their salaries.

CMS’ contingency plan says “the Medicare Program will continue during a lapse in appropriations” and that it has “sufficient funding for Medicaid to fund the first quarter of FY 2026,” which includes October, November and December.  

Additionally, it “will maintain the staff necessary to make payments to eligible states for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).”

Department of Housing and Urban Development 

The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s website opens with a message that reads: “The Radical Left in Congress shut down the government. HUD will use available resources to help Americans in need.”

The department says the majority of its annual grant programs, including those that provide for emergency housing for people experiencing homelessness and people living with HIV/AIDS, “continue to operate in States and local communities across the country when such grant funding has already been obligated.” 

The agency also said many of its programs “addressing imminent threats to the health and welfare of HUD tenants and children will continue where such grant funding has already been obligated before the lapse occurs.”  

For as long as the funding remains available, “monthly subsidy programs such as the public housing operating subsidies, housing choice voucher subsidies, and multifamily assistance contracts will continue to operate,” according to the department.  

However, the agency said nearly all of its “fair housing activities” will halt during the shutdown. 

Internal Revenue Service 

The Internal Revenue Service will continue normal operations using supplemental funding enacted under the Democrats’ 2022 budget reconciliation law, known as the Inflation Reduction Act.

The IRS will retain its 74,299 employees, according to the latest available shutdown contingency plan. 

The Trump administration has shrunk the IRS significantly this year, down from its roughly 95,000 employees, and has turned over the agency’s top leadership six times.

The agency processes about 180 million income tax returns each year.

The body that independently oversees the IRS will not operate at full capacity during the shutdown. Only 40% of employees in the department’s Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration will remain on, with a small fraction required to stay without pay if necessary, according to the agency’s plan.

As of Thursday afternoon Eastern time, the home page for that agency, tigta.gov, was blank except for the message “Due to a lack of apportionment of funds, this website is currently unavailable.”

Interior Department

A little more than half of the federal workforce for the Interior Department will be furloughed – 31,000 out of 58,600 employees – according to its contingency plan.

Some services within the agency will continue, such as the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ wildland fire management, but programs that provide social services to foster children and residential adults will pause.

As for national parks, the trails, open memorials and overlooks will generally remain open. The National Park Service will retain minimal staff to allow for visitors. But general maintenance, trash pick-up and educational programs, will cease during the shutdown. 

Hunters or people seeking access to public lands will not be able to have their permits processed by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services. 

Justice Department

The Justice Department will keep a majority of its federal workers during the shutdown, according to its contingency plan. Out of roughly 110,000 employees, nearly 13,000 will be furloughed. 

Because the judicial branch will continue to function, the Justice Department will retain most of its attorneys for criminal and civil litigation. Federal law enforcement agencies and their agents will continue to work, such as the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. 

A shutdown typically means that immigration cases would be rescheduled and courts not located in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center will be shut down. But the Trump administration has prioritized the Executive Office for Immigration Review, housed within the Department of Justice, as essential. 

The contingency plan points to the president’s national emergency, “citing the threat to the national security and economy of the United States caused by illegal migration.”

Labor Department 

More than 75% of the Department of Labor’s employees will be furloughed, according to the agency’s contingency plan. 

Several units will come to a halt, such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Veterans’ Employment and Training Service, Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, Office of Disability Employment Policy, Women’s Bureau, Office of Administrative Law Judges, Administrative Review Board, and Benefits Review Board, as well as the Employees’ Compensation Appeals Board.

The agency said it will continue to support states and other agencies when it comes to administering and paying unemployment insurance benefits. 

The department notes that “unless excepted or exempt, agencies’ technical assistance, compliance assistance, regulatory, policy, research, advisories, responding to inquiries, most oversight, hearing preparation, and cooperative activities will cease.”

Job Corps centers that house students “will remain in operation while funds remain available,” and “federal oversight of those centers related to safety and property will continue,” per the department. 

Homeland Security Department 

Homeland Security will retain most of its workforce without pay. About 14,000 employees will be furloughed among its nearly 272,000 workforce, according to its contingency plan. 

That means ports of entry will remain open for inspections from Customs and Border Protection, but there could be delays in paperwork at U.S. borders. 

Most federal workers responsible for security at airports across the country – more than 61,000 Transportation Security Administration employees – would be required to work without pay. 

Another agency within DHS that will remain most of its workforce is the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. About 21,000 employees out of 24,000 will continue to work. 

The office involved in departmental oversight, the Office of Inspector General, will pause its work on reports and investigations. 

And the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown will continue, with nearly all employees from Immigration and Customs Enforcement considered non-exempt, about 19,600 out of 21,000.

Several agencies within the Department of Homeland Security will remain running because they are fee-based, such as U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Some visa programs within USCIS are tied to appropriations funding, so those programs will be suspended. 

That includes E-Verify, which verifies immigration status; visas for foreign doctors; and visas for non-minister religious workers. 

State Department 

A little more than half the employees in the State Department will be furloughed, about 16,600 out of its nearly 27,000-employee workforce, according to its contingency plan.

Because visa and passport services are fee-funded, they will likely not be impacted. Consular operations will be affected and diplomatic visas will only be issued in “life or death” emergencies.

Social Security Administration 

The program for America’s seniors and some people with disabilities is largely funded outside of the annual government spending process, which makes it mostly exempt from shutdowns. 

One big caveat is that the federal workers who administer the program are paid through one of the 12 congressional appropriations bills, which can cause issues during a funding lapse. 

SSA’s contingency plan says it will furlough about 6,200 of its nearly 52,000 employees until the government is fully operational again. 

The agency plans to continue “accurate and timely payment of benefits” as well as taking applications, requests for appeal, issuing and replacing Social Security cards and fraud prevention activities, among others. 

The SSA during the lapse will not conduct certain activities, including benefits verification, replacement of Medicare cards, or addressing overpayments processing during the funding lapse. 

Transportation Department

Slightly more than 11,000 of the department’s nearly 45,000 employees will be furloughed for the remainder of the government shutdown, but its leaders plan to keep several activities essential for the traveling public going during a shutdown, according to its contingency plan.

Air traffic control services and hiring, hazardous materials safety inspections, airport inspections and much more will continue, though many activities will cease. 

Some agencies within the Transportation Department will see little impact on their staffing, even though workers will not be paid until the shutdown ends. 

For example, no one at the Federal Highway Administration, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Federal Transit Administration, or the Great Lakes St. Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation will be furloughed. 

Treasury Department 

The department has individual contingency plans for its various components, including departmental offices, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the Internal Revenue Service, the Office of the Inspector General and the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.

Treasury officials expect to keep about 1,850 of its more than 2,700 employees working in the departmental offices without pay during the shutdown, in part to “support the president” with “market and economic updates, economic policy options and recommendations, including those related to national security incidents.”

The Office of Inspector General, which oversees officials’ actions for waste, fraud and abuse, will keep about 30 of its roughly 150 employees working throughout the shutdown and furlough the rest. 

Department of Veterans Affairs

Large parts of the Department of Veterans Affairs, including the processing and payout of benefits, are funded outside of the annual appropriations process and will continue through the shutdown.

The department projects 97% of its staff will continue to work, and most will be paid, according to its latest publicly available shutdown contingency plan. 

Health care will continue uninterrupted at VA medical centers and outpatient clinics, and vets will still receive benefits, including compensation, pension, education and housing.

Veterans suicide prevention and homelessness programs will remain in operation, and the Veterans Crisis Line will continue to answer calls. The crisis line can be reached by dialing 988 followed by pressing 1, or by texting 838255.

The MyVA411 and PACT Act call centers will operate “as necessary to prevent disruption to mandatory VA benefit programs,” according to the department’s guide.

The National Cemetery Administration will continue to inter veterans and eligible family members, as well as schedule burials, determine eligibility and process headstone applications. However, headstone and marker installation and groundskeeping will cease, and the application assistance unit call center will be closed.

All Transition Assistance Programs, including career and financial counseling, are suspended, and the GI Bill hotline is not taking calls. 

The department’s whistleblower program is also not accepting or investigating complaints. 

Executive Office of the President

The first Trump administration posted a contingency plan in March 2018, though it doesn’t appear there is a current one and the White House did not respond to a request from States Newsroom about how it’s implementing the shutdown. 

The earlier three-page plan said the president planned to place “1068 of the 1759 EOP staff in furlough status (“Non-Excepted Staff’), while an estimated 691 EOP staff would continue to report to duty.”

President Donald Trump continues to be paid during a shutdown, as are members of Congress, under the law.

Judicial branch 

The Supreme Court will remain functioning during the shutdown, as well as the federal courts. 

By using court fees, the judiciary branch can continue with paid operations until Oct. 17, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. Most proceedings and deadlines set in cases will continue, but if Department of Justice attorneys representing the executive branch are furloughed, then those cases will be rescheduled. 

Supreme Court judges and federal judges will continue to be paid due to Article III of the U.S. Constitution that specifies judge’s compensation “shall not be diminished” during their term.