By Bruce Darling, President/CEO, Center for Disability Rights

On June 18, 2026, the Trump administration’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a legal opinion that attempts to dismantle the federal integration mandate – the regulatory requirement that Disabled people be served in the most integrated setting appropriate to their needs. For those of us who have been tracking the legal erosion of Olmstead v. L.C. since the Dobbs decision in 2022, this was not a surprise. This piece explains what the OLC memo says, how we got here, and why the Latonya Reeves Freedom Act which was introduced on June 23, 2026 is the correct and necessary legislative response.

The writing has been on the wall

In 2022, when Dobbs overturned 50 years of abortion precedent, I wrote about the implications for Olmstead. The Originalist framework frequently used by the Court could be turned on Olmstead – because Disabled people’s lives, as we know them today, are a 20th century phenomenon. No one who drafted the Constitution in 1788, or the 14th Amendment in 1868, was thinking about people who use personal assistants, ventilators, or wheelchairs. I also noted then that Justice Clarence Thomas had already laid out a roadmap in his Olmstead dissent for gutting it entirely and warned that Disabled people were “just one Supreme Court decision away from having the freedom and bodily autonomy Disabled people being taken away.”

The threats to Olmstead run deeper than any single court decision. In his Olmstead dissent, Justice Thomas argued that the ordinary meaning of “discrimination” requires treating one group worse than a different, similarly situated group – and that treating some Disabled people in institutions while serving others in the community is not discrimination at all, just different treatment of members of the same group. The more dangerous threat is structural. The conservative originalists and textualists who now hold a majority on the Court are deeply skeptical of agency power – specifically, of federal agencies using regulations to expand the scope of what a statute specifically says. The integration mandate is exactly that kind of regulation: it does not appear in the text of the ADA or the Rehabilitation Act, but was created through rulemaking and then given weight by the Olmstead Court. To a textualist, that is the original sin – an agency manufacturing an obligation Congress never wrote into law. This is precisely the reasoning the DOJ memo deploys, and it is precisely the reasoning a future Supreme Court could use to strike Olmstead down entirely. Our freedom is resting on a regulatory foundation that this Court has signaled, again and again, it is prepared to dismantle.

In 2024, I wrote about the Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which dismantled the 40-year-old Chevron doctrine and stripped federal agencies of their authority to interpret ambiguous statutes. I explained that this was a direct threat to Olmstead, because the integration mandate was grounded not just in the court decision itself but in HHS and DOJ regulations – regulations that courts could now disregard entirely and reinterpret on their own. The Loper decision didn’t just weaken the regulatory floor under Olmstead. It handed future courts the legal authority to do exactly what the OLC opinion now does: declare those regulations invalid, say the agencies exceeded their authority, and walk away.

Dobbs showed us the Court would overturn settled precedent nearly a half century old. Loper stripped the regulations stripped the regulations of their presumptive weight in judicial interpretation. The OLC opinion now declares those regulations unlawful and calls for their rescission.

This is not a surprise. It is the next step.

What the OLC Memo Actually Says

The opinion, signed by Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Lanora C. Pettit, makes three core arguments.

First, it argues that Olmstead never actually established a legal mandate for integration. The majority opinion was narrow and the justices fragmented – five agreed that “unjustified institutional isolation” can constitute discrimination, but there was no majority for the proposition that states are required to move people to community settings when specific conditions are met. That broader holding, the memo argues, belonged only to the plurality, not the Court.

Second, it argues that reading the Rehabilitation Act or the ADA to impose a universal integration mandate would raise serious constitutional problems: the Fourteenth Amendment’s congruence-and-proportionality requirement, the Commerce Clause’s limits on regulating intrastate activity, and the Spending Clause’s requirement that conditions on federal funding be stated unambiguously in statute.

Third – and most immediately consequential – it concludes that the HHS and DOJ regulations imposing the integration mandate exceed the agencies’ statutory authority and should be rescinded. Under Loper, courts are no longer required to defer to those regulations. The memo argues the regulations are simply wrong.

The memo is careful to avoid calling for mass institutionalization. But removing the regulatory floor means states can make resource decisions that favor institutional settings, and there will be no federal enforcement mechanism to stop them.

How the Disability Community Responds

We have been warned about what comes next. We need to decide how we respond to this threat.

There are two fundamentally different ways the Disability Community can respond to this moment. One feels satisfying. The other protects our freedom.

The first is the culture war response. Many people see this as part of the larger culture war and want to treat the OLC memo as one more outrage in the partisan fight against the Trump administration, channeling our energy into denunciation – statements, hashtags, and rallies aimed at the other side. It advances the culture war while doing nothing to underpin the right of Disabled people to live in freedom.

This approach might make sense if Democrats unilaterally supported Disability Freedom, but they don’t. Although President Obama supported the Community Choice Act as a Senator, he backed away from supporting the legislation as President. Under the leadership of Nancy Pelosi, there was more than enough support in the House of Representatives to pass the Disability Integration Act in 2019, but she and others in House Leadership didn’t allow the bill to move through the committee process to the House floor for a vote. Minority Leader Jeffries refused to back a discharge petition that would have moved the Latonya Reeves Freedom Act to the floor for a vote during the last Congress. Rank-and-file Democrats have been very supportive of the legislation – but we cannot expect Democrats, as a party, to FREE OUR PEOPLE. Tying our freedom to one side of the culture war means tying it to people who have repeatedly declined to deliver when they had the power to do so.

The second is the pragmatic statutory response. This approach is focused on one thing: establishing a clear statutory right for Disabled people to live in freedom – a right written into law, enforceable in court, and beyond the reach of any administration’s memo. Leadership on both sides has blocked us. Democratic leadership smothered the Disability Integration Act in committee when it had the votes; Republican leadership has its own history of inaction. But here is what we have proven: at the rank-and-file level, Disability Freedom draws genuine bipartisan support. The Latonya Reeves Freedom Act and its predecessors have repeatedly attracted cosponsors from both parties because the right to live in your own home, rather than be warehoused in an institution, is not a partisan idea. Two of the bill’s sponsors in the House were Republicans. Our job is to convert that broad individual support into action despite leadership on both sides being beholden to the insurance companies and institutional unions.

We have leverage right now. With an election approaching, every member of Congress is deciding what they stand for and what they will tell their constituents. We can make Disability Freedom a question every candidate has to answer – and we can press for action now, while the OLC memo has made the stakes impossible to ignore.

How the Latonya Reeves Freedom Act Protects Disability Freedom

The Latonya Reeves Freedom Act – which was introduced in the House of Representatives (HR 9401) and Senate (S4865) just days after the release of the OLC Memo – was written with a full understanding of Olmstead’s vulnerabilities. It isn’t a program or funding stream that leaves people behind. Importantly, the LRFA doesn’t merely codify the existing integration mandate. It strengthens and expands our rights in significant ways:

It creates an affirmative, judicially enforceable statutory right. The existing integration mandate lived in agency regulations that Loper empowered courts to disregard and that the OLC memo now calls unlawful. The LRFA creates a statutory right enforceable in federal court – one that no future administration can rescind by memo.

It covers all disabilities, not just mental disabilities. The OLC memo is explicitly limited to the mental disability context addressed in Olmstead. The LRFA establishes the right to community living for Disabled people across all disability types – physical, sensory, cognitive, psychiatric – without the categorical carve-outs the memo invites.

It covers public entities, managed care organizations managing LTSS, and private LTSS insurance providers. The existing integration mandate applied primarily to public entities. The LRFA extends coverage to long-term services and supports insurance providers, closing a significant gap that has allowed private managed care companies to enforce institutional bias while technically complying with Olmstead.

It addresses the housing barrier directly. Under the LRFA, a public entity’s failure to ensure sufficient availability of affordable, accessible, integrated housing itself constitutes discrimination. The existing integration mandate said nothing about housing – meaning states could claim compliance while offering community services that had nowhere to be delivered.

It expands the definition of Long-Term Services and Supports to include equipment and technology. The LRFA explicitly includes adaptive equipment and assistive technology in the definition of LTSS. Lacking a wheelchair, a communication device, or other essential equipment can force a person into an institution just as surely as a lack of personal assistance hours. For the first time, federal law treats that barrier as the civil rights violation it is.

It requires services to be portable and under the individual’s control. Current personal assistance models often tie services to settings or providers in ways that restrict Disabled people’s ability to work, pursue education, raise children, have pets, and otherwise live the lives they choose. The LRFA requires that services follow the person and be directed by the person.

It binds subcontractors. The LRFA includes language that requires subcontractors of covered entities to be bound by the Act’s requirements, eliminating the loophole that has allowed covered entities to contract around their obligations.

The OLC memo is, in a perverse way, a precise map of what has been missing from the legal framework for Disabled people’s freedom. The Latonya Reeves Freedom Act fills those gaps – and goes further.

The bill’s sponsors engaged the Trump Department of Justice directly prior to introducing the legislation. DOJ’s feedback raised a concern that the legislation would run afoul of the anticommandeering doctrine – the constitutional principle holding that the federal government cannot conscript state machinery to implement federal programs. The sponsors restructured the bill’s framework in response. That revised language was independently reviewed by Jennifer Mathis of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law. This vetting process meaningfully strengthens the bill’s constitutional footing on the anticommandeering question specifically. It does not guarantee the bill would survive every constitutional challenge, but it represents a serious, good-faith effort to navigate the constitutional landscape as it currently exists.

The legislation has bipartisan support as well. Four Republicans signed on as initial cosponsors of the House legislation and a fifth Republican has signed on (as of right now). We have had more than a majority of House members signed on during two of the last three Congresses. With the threat to Olmstead clearly articulated, we need to push Congress to act. NOW!

What We Can Do Now

Contact your U.S. Representative and your U.S. Senators and ask them to sign on as cosponsors.

House offices that want to sign on to HR9401 should contact Congressman Cohen’s office.
Senate offices that want to sign on to S4865 should contact Senator Bennet’s office.

I have been warning about legal erosion of the Olmstead since Dobbs. Since Loper. The OLC memo is not the end of this fight – it is the beginning of the next phase of it. We know what to do. We have the legislation already introduced. We need to create the political will to pass it. That will take all of us working together.

We know what will happen if we don’t. We have been warned.

Bruce Darling is President/CEO of the Center for Disability Rights and Regional Center for Independent Living, both based in Rochester, NY. Read his earlier posts on the threat to Olmstead: SCOTUS Dobbs Decision Raises Serious Concerns for Future of Olmstead | Supreme Court Decision in Loper Jeopardizes Disability Freedom