🏖️ ASAN July Update 🏖️

July 31, 2024

ASAN July Newsletter

Dear friend,

July has been a busy month at ASAN, which makes sense. Our favorite way to celebrate Disability Pride Month is through continued advocacy! Check out what we’ve been up to.

We welcomed the removal of Section 722 from the Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act. Last month, some members of Congress introduced a rider to the act that would have stopped the FDA from banning the electric shock devices used at the Judge Rotenberg Center. Fortunately, because of our grassroots efforts, the rider was removed from the bill and the FDA still has the power to #StopTheShock. Thank you for calling, emailing, and sharing across social media to make your voices heard.

We held our Autism Campus Inclusion (ACI) Leadership Academy this month, where a cohort of autistic students learn to make their college campuses better for people with disabilities. In light of the ongoing pandemic, this was our fifth year hosting ACI virtually, allowing participants to join and learn remotely.

Additionally, this month, we’ve continued our advocacy towards better jobs and fair pay for disabled workers. We’re pushing Congress to include the Transformation to Competitive Integrated Employment Act (TCIEA) in the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pension (HELP) Committee’s workforce markup package. The Transformation to Competitive Integrated Employment Act (S.533) is a bill that would create competitive integrated employment opportunities for disabled people.

This month, we celebrate the 34th Anniversary of the American with Disabilities Act (ADA), one of the most important civil rights laws for disabled people. In honor of the anniversary, we released a new video series called “A Self-Advocate’s Guide to the Americans with Disabilities Act.” This is a video version of our Easy Read toolkit all about the ADA.

In June, we condemned the United States Supreme Court ruling on two combined cases, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless v. Department of Commerce. The Court stopped using a decades-old legal principle known as Chevron deference – which meant that when a law was ambiguous, courts would accept what federal agencies said it meant in their regulations. The end of Chevron will affect all of society, because federal regulations touch everything from food safety and environmental justice to student loans and consumer protection. It will especially affect marginalized people, including the disability community. This month, we put out a legal memo called “The End of Chevron Deference and the Disability Community: New Obstacles to Advocacy and Wellbeing,” which explains the potential outcomes of this Supreme Court decision and what we think this means for disabled people.

In case you missed it, last month we released two new resources as part of our Proud and Supported series. “A Self-Advocate’s Guide to Gender Affirming Health Care” talks about what being transgender or nonbinary is, what gender affirming care is, and how people who aren’t transgender or nonbinary can be good allies. “Barriers to Gender Affirming Health Care” talks about ways our society makes it harder for transgender and nonbinary people to get gender affirming care, including health insurance, the cost of care, rules about what people need to do before they can get care, and new laws in some states that limit gender affirming care.

As always, there’s more work to be done and we can only do it because of you! We’re grateful for your support this month and every month.

Sincerely,

The Team at ASAN

ASAN signed on to a letter opposing any appropriations bills that contain riders that would restrict access to essential health care, including abortion, contraception, and gender-affirming care.
We signed on to a Council of State Administrators of Vocational Rehabilitation letter opposing any rescission of Vocational Rehabilitation (VR) funding and advocating against any prohibition of the statutorily mandated inflationary increase to the VR State grants program.
ASAN signed onto the Consortium for Constituents with Disabilities (CCD) Health Task Force letter on the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)’s request for information on disability equity.
We signed onto a statement against the practice of assisted suicide for people with eating disorders.
With the Census Project, we signed onto a letter expressing concerns about the proposed appropriations bill that would undermine the ability of the Census Bureau to meet its constitutional mandate as the result of inadequate funding, and a policy provision (Sec. 621) that limits the ability of the Bureau to conduct a statistically-valid census.
ASAN signed onto a letter calling on the Department of Education to improve data collection on postsecondary students with disabilities.
We thanked members of the House Appropriation Committee for removing section 722 of the Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies funding bill. This provision would have prohibited the FDA from banning the electric shock devices used at the JRC.
We joined CCD in urging the House of Representatives to pass the Autism CARES Act swiftly before the expiration of the current version on September 30th.
ASAN endorsed the Health Equity and Accountability Act.
We commented and signed onto comments with organizations like the Brennan Center and the National Coalition on Accessible Voting on the new digital form filler tool for the National Mail Voter Registration Form, advocating for more accessibility.