ACL, We Hardly Knew Thee...

Note: This blog entry was written by Reyma McCoy Hyten, ex Commissioner for the Administration for Disabilities, which was housed within the Administration for Community Living. She was the first appointee to resign from the Biden administration because, among other concerns that extended beyond her agency, she was troubled by the dynamics within her agency that she encountered during her tenure.

The Administration for Community Living (ACL), established at the behest of Big #DisCo by the Obama administration is 2012 in the interest of creating a centralized federal hub for aging and disability programming, is no more. Thanks to significant restructuring of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under appointee Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., components of ACL will be parsed out to various other agencies within HHS. As of 3/31/25, it isn’t known which programs are going where; and, perhaps more importantly, which programs will be discontinued outright. In the past, ACL administered funding for Area Agencies on Aging (AAAs), Aging and Disability Resource Centers (ADRCs), Meals on Wheels, Centers for Independent Living (CILs), Developmental Disabilities Councils (DD Councils), University Centers for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities (UCEDDs), Protection and Advocacy Agencies (P&As), and other programs/projects that purport to serve/support/advocate for aging and disabled people.

Yet, with the exception of Meals on Wheels, you likely have never heard of the majority, if not any, of the above.

That’s no accident.

One of #BigDisCo’s arguments pertaining to the creation of ACL was that people with lived experience were best suited to serving/supporting/advocating for people with disabilities. This imperative was coupled with Since many of the programs that came to comprise ACL operated with a federal mandate pertaining to representation of people with disabilities within the staff and/or boards of program grantees, housing all of these programs within the same federal agency would, therefore, create something unprecedented at the federal level: an administration that serves the professionals with disabilities that, in turn, serve people with disabilities. Couple this with the imperative articulated by the Government Accountability Office (GAO): “ACL was created, in part, to help manage fragmentation among federal programs that help people who are aging or have disabilities live independently.”

Laudable intentions, indeed.

However, instead of advancing the status of disabled people, as well as building bridges between all of the federal factions that administer programming for aging and disabled populations, ACL and its programs created a parallel- and secretive- system of divisiveness and oppression, albeit wheelchair accessible. GAO noted in 2022 that(ACL) has not identified a mechanism to sustain efforts to share… information among agencies... ACL has not used its existing network of disability organizations and providers to share information... By facilitating information sharing across federal programs and among its own disability network, ACL could better help all groups… to safely age and live in their homes and communities.

The general public - including people who are aging and/or disabled - are unfamiliar with the programs of ACL. The people who are familiar with the programs’ satisfaction with ACL’s programs is low, at best. This is particularly true with regard to CILs, which is sadly ironic, given the fact that CILs are mandated to be both consumer-controlled, as well as staffed and led by people with disabilities. Additionally, a federal-level assessment of CILs from 2003 determined that they attained an 8% for program results/accountability. Although ACL did not exist until 2012, the only step ACL chose to take to address the challenges and gaps that the assessment identified was to file multiple requests to reduce the number of annual onsite review of CILs. CIL grantees, once they realized that they would not experience any consequences as the result of the assessment, felt further emboldened to not evolve and improve.

Additionally, the disabled professionals at the leadership of most, nearly all, of the ACL grantees are white; unsurprising given the disparities in access to education opportunities, services and supports between white disabled students steered into post-secondary education, and their Black and brown counterparts who are pipelined into institutional, including prison, settings. Grantees are notorious for intentionally operating in locations that are inconvenient - if not impossible - to reach via public transportation, for keeping their doors locked during business hours, for employing intake processes that are unnecessarily bureaucratic, for using federal funds intended to provide services to purchase equipment - like a riding mower, for instance - for staff use at their homes, etc. Many ACL funded organizations, under grant directives to seek out supplemental funding, have become Medicaid service providers or United Way/city/state contractors, creating a tension between helping individuals advocate against Medicaid systems (a CIL “core service” – individual advocacy and self-advocacy), and maintaining contracts that often eclipse these agencies’ federal grant funds.

Both grantees and ACL, despite advocating for a mainstream society that is inclusive to people who are aging and/or disabled, oftentimes struggle to ensure that their own spaces meet the mark.

And both, across the board, are notorious for fostering environments that are hostile to Black and Brown people, consumers of services and staff alike.

Despite the impetus behind the creation of ACL, in the end, with eight of its twelve year tenure occurring during the Obama and Biden years, it operated like a stratified fiefdom, with political appointees, career staff, #BigDisCo leadership, and grantees each operating with as much power as their positions could afford them, always in the interest of ascending one’s rank at every available opportunity. Because of this, cronyism abounded, with appointees and career staff both openly engaging in favoritism amongst grantees, as well as using their power and positions to engage in acts of retribution with grantees that had fallen out of favor with the decisionmakers of ACL- up to and including the revocation of funding.

ACL was red flagged during the first Trump administration for a variety of reasons and not all of them stemmed from a Republican bias against people with disabilities. Four years ago, ACLs political appointees were briefed on the points that rendered ACL vulnerable in the eyes of the Trump administration. None of those points were addressed during the Biden years. Trump was reelected.

And now ACL is gone.

Aside from #BigDisCo insiders and the folks who rely on Meals on Wheels, will anyone notice?

For further reading: Independent Living for People with Disabilities Assessment

Older Adults and Adults with Disabilities: Federal Programs Provide Support for Preventing Falls, but Program Reach is Limited