An Emancipator investigation examining 74 disability advocacy groups found that around thirty percent of well-funded organizations that receive significant federal grants and contracts likely changed their language around diversity, equity and inclusion since President Donald Trump took office.
The Emancipator investigated this sector since federal funding pays for much of the work of many disability organizations, possibly a larger percentage than many other nonprofit sectors.
With federal money at stake, amid pressure from federal demands to abandon words like “diversity” and “marginalized,” about thirty percent of the groups appear to have quieted previously robust language.
The wording changes involved the apparent deletion of material or words from their websites or mission statements.
In one case, a “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee” was rebranded as a “Cultural Connections Committee.”
And in still another case, a Multicultural Connections Committee, a major body of diversity work, appears to have been scrubbed from a publicly listed councils page.
To test the effectiveness of the Trump administration’s attacks on diversity, The Emancipator decided to pursue a replicable methodology that would preserve the anonymity of the groups involved and avoid singling out some groups that could be targeted by ableist actors and the administration.
We scraped 74 disability organization names from publicly listed networks and groups that had recently testified to federal advisory groups. The Emancipator focused on groups in the disability space that perform advocacy as a core function, meaning that the list tried to intentionally exclude universities, colleges and government programs.
Within that list, The Emancipator reviewed a subset of 10 organizations with the highest dependence on federal dollars and thereby the largest fiscal exposure to pressure from the Trump administration. The revenue and significant government grants or contracts go back to the Biden administration, which we discovered through publicly available federal spending data. This was determined through 990 disclosure documents, pulled via ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer, and federal spending data pulled via USAspending.gov.
Importantly, the months covered by these documents are not standardized, as what counts as a “fiscal year” on a 990 form is different from federal contracting documents, and varies from group to group. We chose to focus on 990 forms that ended in the calendar year 2024, to establish where these nonprofits were at when Trump stepped into office for his second term.
The 10 groups with the highest federal exposure have revenue spanning from roughly $2 million to $16 million, according to their 990s filed in the fiscal year 2024. The groups that had significant federal grants — often spread over multiple years — ranged from $2 million to around $37 million.
And six groups we investigated were awarded contracts ranging from roughly $500,000 to roughly $15 million.
Focusing on this list of 10 organizations with the highest dependence on federal money, we looked at archived versions of public websites, diversity statements and descriptions in 990 forms. The Emancipator found that three of those 10 organizations shifted away from their diversity language.
We also compiled a second list of 13 organizations with the highest overall revenue based on their 990s. We discovered that four of those organizations rolled back their diversity language.
No organization appeared on both lists: highest federal exposure and highest federal revenue.
For some groups, whether they had changed their language was unknowable, because there were no archived versions of diversity statements prior to Trump’s second term.
While some of the others had not changed diversity commitments or had made only small or neutral alterations, some groups appeared to have publicly changed their messaging around diversity in some way, either paring back the language or striking out references to diversity groups on their web pages.
This fit with what sources were telling The Emancipator was going on, as groups struggle to adapt to the Trump administration’s anti-diversity actions.
The Emancipator has reached out to several of the groups for comment, but had not heard back in time for publication.
Experts told The Emancipator that the Trump administration put these organizations in an almost impossible position: either keep their diversity language and risk losing federal funding, or change their language and keep federal money.
“President Trump was resoundingly elected with a mandate to end divisive, racist policies and restore merit and efficiency,” White House Spokeswoman Allison Schuster told The Emancipator in a statement.
“DEI ran rampant during the Biden Administration, and Americans ultimately paid the price for these destructive policies with a restricted labor pool, higher operational costs, and workforce inefficiencies,” she wrote. “The Trump Administration will always promote equal treatment under the law for every American.”
The State Department, which oversees some of the federal grants we examined as part of our investigation, claimed the “Biden Administration forced illegal and immoral discrimination programs, going by the name ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI), into virtually all aspects of the Federal Government, in areas ranging from airline safety to the military.”
Under the Trump administration, people with disabilities who also come from a marginalized racial or sexual identity background find themselves in a particularly precarious moment.
Many of the Trump administration’s recent cuts target or disproportionately impact people with disabilities. For example, a large share of the federal workforce, 23% based on 2024 data, identifies as persons with a disability, according to the Center for American Progress, meaning that they may have been heavily impacted by federal staffing cuts. The U.S. Department of Labor has also proposed a rollback of hiring rules that protect people with disabilities from ableist practices.
Taken together, these add significance to how groups can message around disability.
“It’s a lot of rewording, and also putting the pen down for a minute, or going silent a little bit, and going behind the scenes to figure out, ‘well, okay, how are we going to do this,’ without feeling like we’re excluding folks that need help,’” said Leah Aniefuna, a Black disability advocate who previously worked at the Office of Access and Services for Individuals with Disabilities at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Many of the organizations that advocate for people with disabilities rely on government funding. During the second term of the Trump administration federal funding has become a weapon to undermine antiracist efforts within the disability sector and all sectors of society.
Some worry that if organizations that are reliant on federal funding are forced to change how they describe race or sexual identity, it could impact how people whose experiences cross multiple forms of marginalization are represented.
“Specifically for disabled individuals, this is a really tough time,” Aniefuna said.
Some groups refuse to alter their messaging, because they want to take a stand, but they will see a reduced capacity for research as they lose federal funds, Aniefuna said. “It’s a real reckoning going on, trying to figure out how to move forward. How do we get additional funding outside of that federal funding?”
The attacks on diversity have become a signature Trump administration campaign, as legal battles continue to play out in court.
Immediately upon entering its second term, the Trump administration signed executive orders labeling diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives as “illegal and immoral discrimination,” and wasteful spending. In those orders, the administration argues that it is fighting government waste and restoring “merit.”
One executive order, E.O. 14173, recasts antiracist and feminist initiatives as “dangerous, demeaning and illegal.” And another, E.O. 14151, explicitly ties accessibility to diversity, equity and inclusion, characterizing “DEIA” as “illegal and immoral discrimination.”
Since assuming office, the Trump administration has tried to purge diversity, equity and inclusion programs, going after schools, universities and even private companies. For example, PayPal agreed to a $30M settlement over a diverse investment program, and IBM removed diversity language from its site, and scrapped diversity programs, in addition to settling a $17M settlement last year.
Across several other sectors, including higher education and immigration, the Trump administration has turned federal funding into a cudgel to force organizations to embrace its view on diversity.
And an ongoing legal challenge argues that the administration has admitted to using artificial intelligence and diversity-related keywords to figure out which federal contracts to revoke.
Courts have blocked the administration’s attempts to use funding as coercive leverage against universities such as Harvard University. The administration attempted to withdraw $2 billion in federal research grants, at least in part because the university wouldn’t end diversity programs.
The think tank American Enterprise Institute, which is sympathetic to the administration’s agenda, even noted that there was “no legal authority” for using grants in this way.
But disability advocates worry that the administration will have a better chance at enforcing its anti-diversity agenda by moving into areas where the administration has more leeway.
Courts have repeatedly ruled that the administration’s attempts to use federal funding coercively is unlawful, and the administration has been migrating the same agenda into statutory and regulatory channels that are harder to challenge, argued Glenda Simms, a prominent digital accessibility expert, in an email.
Nonprofits have moved into step with the administration: More than 1,000 non-profit organizations rewrote their federal disclosure filings to excise words like “diversity,” “marginalized” and “equity,” according to ProPublica.
But some view this as a particular challenge for nonprofits that engage in the disability space.
Federal employees within “DEIA” offices have been forced out of their positions, federal agencies like the U.S. Department of Education, the Rehabilitation Services Administration and the National Institute of Health canceled grants, experts note.
And there’s been a response by advocates as well.
Advocates and researchers have proactively sanitized their grant applications of terms like “disability,” “BIPOC,” “gender,” “trauma” and “marginalized” to avoid automatic flagging for manual compliance reviews, one expert noted to The Emancipator.
That has an impact.
“Removing [diversity] wording is dangerous in many ways,” Aniefuna said.
It causes challenges in representation.
“People who are just coming into those spaces might not know what that means, versus students or faculty members that have already been in those spaces and understand that that’s the DEI program now,” Aniefuna said.
The disability advocacy movement has been intentional about including others, and being forced to backtrack due to the administration’s actions is disappointing, she added.
The attacks have also touched upon a division within approaches to disability advocacy.
There’s a deep structural divide within the disability movement that’s influencing how advocacy groups respond to Trump’s agenda, wrote Sambhavi Chandrashekar, global accessibility lead for D2L, a learning management company, in an email to The Emancipator.
Some take a “Disability Rights” approach, and they tend to emphasize formal administrative procedures and legal compliance. These groups have largely adapted to the administration’s attacks by swapping out broad terms like “inclusion” or “accessibility” with strict statutory terms like “Section 508 compliance,” “functional accommodations,” and “ADA baseline standards,” according to Chandrashekar.
But others focus on “Disability Justice,” an approach that emphasizes where disability overlaps with race, sexual orientation, class and systemic oppression. For these advocates, the anti-diversity directives and federal keyword sweeps “struck at [the] core,” Chandrashekar wrote.
The Emancipator classified the 10 groups using these categories, based upon whether the language in their mission statements emphasized legal terminology (disability rights) or intersectional language (disability justice).
An initial review by The Emancipator indicated that two of the three organizations with the highest dependency on federal funds that amended their diversity language fit within the “disability rights” category. But given the small sample size of our review, it may not be the case that “disability rights” organizations have been more likely to shift away from diversity language than “disability justice” organizations.
For some, even seemingly small changes in language can weigh heavily.
“It is heartbreaking to disconnect disability from DEI,” wrote Simms, the longtime accessibility advocate, in an email.
But many feel that they have to trade the ability to continue the work for choosing the correct language to message about it.
Within the sector, there are feelings of “survivor’s guilt,” Simms later said during a call.
For some, it may be a matter of waiting out the administration.
At the moment, the game is “survival” for race and gender scholars, who are continuing their work while figuring out how to make their advocacy sound acceptable to ignorant people, Aniefuna said.
But for now, advocates say that backtracking on inclusion, even through language changes, flies in the face of years of progress.
