Bureaucratic Eugenics and the War on Disabled and Immigrant Lives
They no longer need gas chambers or sterilization laws. In 2025, eugenics wears a bureaucrat’s suit and speaks the language of public health. It operates through executive orders and budget cuts, service eliminations and administrative reorganizations. It speaks in the dialect of fiscal responsibility and public safety, but its targets are the same: disabled, poor, immigrant, and otherwise expendable lives.
The Innovation of Administrative Eugenics
As the American fascist state flexes its muscles with unprecedented cruelty, the ghosts of Buck v. Bell dance once again in the corridors of power. This time they wear MAGA hats and speak of “wellness farms.” They promise to “Make America Healthy Again” while systematically dismantling the infrastructure of care, replacing it with the machinery of elimination.
Bureaucratic eugenics emerges as the next stage of American governance. Biopolitics once aimed to manage life; today necropolitics operates openly through budgets and mandates. Prevention has given way to disappearance.
The Executive Assault on Disability Rights
On July 24, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that disability rights experts say represents the gravest threat to civil liberties since the height of institutionalization. The order, titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” directs the Attorney General to “seek, in appropriate cases, the reversal of Federal or State judicial precedents that impede civil commitment of individuals with mental illness”.
The language sounds clinical, administrative. But Jennifer Mathis of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law immediately recognized its implications: “We cannot go back to the times when people’s liberty could be taken away with no rhyme or reason”. The order targets decades of legal protections won through disability rights activism, systematically dismantling the barriers that prevent arbitrary psychiatric detention.
This represents something new in the history of American eugenics: the achievement of eugenic outcomes through the façade of legitimate bureaucratic processes. Where historical eugenics required explicit laws authorizing sterilization or institutionalization, today’s approach operates through executive orders, budget cuts, and administrative reorganizations that create the same systematic marginalization while maintaining ‘democratic legitimacy’.
The Secretary's Vision of Elimination
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been explicit about his eugenic intentions, though he wraps them in the language of care. At an April 16, 2025 HHS press conference, Kennedy declared: “Autism destroys families, and more importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which is our children. These are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date”.
To speak of autism as an epidemic requiring elimination is to declare war on neurodivergent children before they are born.
Kennedy has framed a much more sinister vision. His statements are textbook neo-eugenics: presenting disabled lives as burdens on society, measuring human worth in productivity, and proposing segregation as treatment. His solution, detailed in a July 2024 podcast, involves “wellness farms”—three-to-four-year facilities where people could be sent for drug offenses or to discontinue psychiatric medications, with no cell phones and mandatory agricultural labor. The language of wellness masks the reality: forced labor camps for those deemed mentally unfit. The Autistic Self Advocacy Network responded, calling it “a dangerous ideology based on the idea that some people are born to be a burden.”
The Historical Mirror
President John F. Kennedy spearheaded deinstitutionalization efforts, pushing for community-based care rather than isolating disabled individuals in large institutions. His administration’s Community Mental Health Act (1963) marked a historic move away from the warehousing of people with disabilities in asylums and other restrictive settings. RFK Jr.’s proposal to place people in “wellness farms” reverses this progress, reviving a model that closely resembles the institutions his uncle sought to dismantle.
Additionally, the forced lobotomy and institutionalization of Rosemary Kennedy, RFK Jr.’s aunt, was a personal and public tragedy that shaped the family’s advocacy for disability rights. Rosemary’s mistreatment was an example of how institutionalization could destroy lives, leading the Kennedy family to push for the end of forced institutionalization and the development of disability rights protections.
The current Robert Kennedy has chosen to betray his family’s legacy of disability rights, becoming instead an architect of the very system his uncle fought to dismantle.
The Systematic Destruction of Care
While expanding involuntary commitment, the administration has simultaneously dismantled the infrastructure of voluntary mental health care. In March 2025, Kennedy announced the dissolution of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), eliminating the federal agency responsible for mental health and addiction services.
Regional offices closed on April 1. Over 30% of staff were fired. The entire National Survey on Drug Use and Health team was disbanded. Over $1 billion in federal programming evaporated. Former SAMHSA executive Paolo del Vecchio warned these actions “set us back decades to the days of warehousing people in back hospital wards”.
This represents the core mechanism of bureaucratic eugenics: eliminate community-based alternatives while expanding institutional capacity, creating artificial crises that justify forced treatment. When people cannot access voluntary services, involuntary commitment becomes the only option the system provides. Cutting mental health funding while promoting coercion is a terrifying return to the policies of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when individuals could be committed to remote state institutions for decades with little to no due process or legal recourse.
The Pipeline from Service Desert to Institution
The administration’s approach demonstrates sophisticated understanding of how to achieve eugenic outcomes through policy integration. By eliminating community mental health services while simultaneously expanding involuntary commitment standards, they create a service-institution pipeline.
Research from the Government Accountability Office documents how this operates in practice: families lose access to community-based supports, individuals experience predictable crises, and the only remaining intervention is institutional placement under expanded civil commitment standards. The process appears medically justified while systematically removing disabled people from community life.
University of Vermont historian Lutz Kaelber’s research reveals the scope exceeds historical programs. Where Nazi Germany’s peak sterilization rate affected 75–80 people per 100,000 annually, current U.S. policies targeting disabled communities through service cuts and institutional placement affect vastly more people.
The Intersectional Targeting Machine
The normalization of these policies across the U.S. has directly fed the rise of Trumpism, and the return of eugenics to the mainstream. The president’s support of this ideology is also explicit: Trump, throughout his campaigns and now in the White House (again), has made comments about “immigrant bloodlines,” implying Black and Brown immigrants are inherently animalistic, criminal, subhuman.
The goal of the current administration is clear: Advancing whiteness and eliminating marginalized and variant bodies. And the administration is acting quickly. In May 2025, the Supreme Court permitted the Trump administration to revoke the protected status of 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants. This action was described as “the largest single action stripping any group of non-citizens of immigration status in the modern U.S.”
What supporters refuse to acknowledge is that Trump is revoking immigrants’ status in order to round them up and send them to immigration camps in order to profit off their status. The leader of the ‘free world’ is trafficking families, selling the nation a dream of a ‘safer land’, and no one blinks an eye.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) elimination of “sensitive location” protections allows arrests at healthcare facilities, while deportation fears reduce mental health service utilization by 57% among Latino families. The result: disabled immigrants avoid necessary care, experience predictable deterioration, and become targets for both deportation and involuntary commitment. Brookings Institution research documents how this creates cumulative marginalization effects. Unlike historical state-by-state eugenic programs, current policies demonstrate federal coordination across immigration, health, and social services.
Disappearance and Genetics of 'Bad Blood'
The current administration operates on multiple fronts, each designed to reduce the population of “undesirable” Americans. While Kennedy pursues his eugenic vision of wellness farms, Trump has unleashed the largest deportation campaign in American history, one that explicitly targets people based on genetic and racial characteristics.
During a rally in Dubuque, Iowa on September 20, Trump said that he would “follow the Dwight D. Eisenhower model,” and carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” In other words, Trump intends to surpass the Eisenhower policy called “Operation Wetback,” which used military-style tactics to round up and expel from the US more than 1 million Mexican immigrants in 1954.
As early as April 2025, multiple polls found that the majority of Americans thought that the deportations went “too far”. The Trump administration has claimed that around 140,000 people had been deported as of April 2025. But the numbers tell only part of the story. Trump, seeking to go down in history as the president who carried out the largest mass deportation in U.S. history, deemed that the Biden administration program that allowed Flo and hundreds of thousands of others to legally enter the U.S was actually illegal.
The administration has essentially created new categories of “illegal” people, retroactively criminalizing those who had legal status under previous policies. This is eugenics by bureaucracy—the systematic reclassification of human beings to justify their detainment, because the majority of those kidnapped by individuals cosplaying as federal ICE agents aren’t being deported, they’re being detained for profit.
Trump’s rhetoric about immigration explicitly invokes eugenic language about genetic deficiency. When Donald Trump talks about undocumented immigrants, he often brings up genetics. Immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” he said at a rally last year. “Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States,” he said earlier this month. “You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now”.
This language directly echoes the eugenicists of a century ago. Just over 100 years ago, eugenicist Harry Laughlin testified before the U.S. House of Representatives that “The character of our civilization will be modified by the ‘blood’ or the natural hereditary qualities which the sexually fertile immigrant brings to our shores.” His argument wouldn’t be out of place today.
The Constitutional Crisis Hidden in Plain Sight
The July executive order centers its power in the phrase “unable to care for oneself”—a dangerously vague standard that disability scholars say could include anyone with autism, intellectual disability, or psychiatric history. Legal scholars argue this directly threatens precedents like Olmstead v. L.C. and could enable mass institutionalization with minimal judicial review.
The Logic of Disposability
Underlying all current policies is the fundamental eugenic logic that some lives are productive and valuable, while others represent burdens requiring management or elimination. This logic extends beyond disability to encompass immigration, mental health, and poverty policy. The administration consistently targets populations deemed economically unproductive or socially problematic, using different policy mechanisms to achieve systematic marginalization across multiple domains.
The sophistication lies in avoiding explicit eugenic language while implementing eugenic logic through bureaucratic processes that appear medically or economically justified. The result is a society engineered to eliminate those deemed unprofitable. Whether through immigration raids, disability policy, or psychiatric law, the objective remains: control or remove populations framed as threats to national purity, safety, or economy. It is an ideology of disposability.
The pattern reveals the underlying logic: the state must be purified of all sources of genetic, mental, and social contamination. Those who cannot be “cured” must be contained. Those who cannot be contained must be eliminated.
The Manufacturing of Crisis
The National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced a data-sharing partnership Wednesday giving NIH researchers access to the data of Medicare and Medicaid enrollees diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, a neurological and developmental condition.
The administration creates artificial health crises to justify eugenic interventions. By framing autism as an epidemic requiring urgent action, Kennedy manufactures the emergency necessary to implement radical measures. The data collection on autistic Americans creates the infrastructure for future targeting and intervention.
Trump invokes false claims about mental illness to demonize immigrants, whom he is now hunting via a mass arrest and incarceration campaign. Last month, he signed an executive order that allows police to arrest and forcibly institutionalise poor Americans who are unhoused, deemed mentally ill, or struggling with addiction, effectively incarcerating them for indefinite periods.
The Violence of "Wellness"
The administration’s euphemistic language cannot hide the violent reality of its policies. Kennedy has framed this as an alternative to incarceration for drug users, but history tells us that such programs quickly devolve into coercive institutions where marginalized people are forcibly confined and exploited.
RFK Jr.’s anti-everything rhetoric suggests that these facilities may deny participants access to essential, evidence-based care, replacing it with experimential interventions that strip individuals of choice and autonomy. The farms will become laboratories for the administration’s broader eugenic experiment: can society’s “problems” be solved through forced isolation and labor?
Given the history of medical racism and queerphobic psychiatric practices, “wellness farms” could easily become a modern-day tool for racialized and gendered oppression. BIPOC individuals struggling with addiction already face harsher sentencing and minimal access to care and resources.
The Resistance of the Targeted
Despite unprecedented threat levels, disabled communities and their allies have mounted coordinated resistance. The National Disability Rights Network, Autistic Self Advocacy Network, ADAPT, and Bazelon Center issued joint statements warning of regression to “pre-ADA era policies.”
Their response reveals understanding of the stakes: this represents an existential threat to disabled people’s place in American society. As ASAN declared: “Our autistic lives are worth living. Our lives are worth saving. Our officials must recognize both. Nothing about us, without us.”
The Reckoning
We stand at a crossroads more dangerous than any in American history since the height of the first eugenic era. The current administration has combined the ideological fervor of historical eugenics with the technological capacity of the modern surveillance state and the political power of an explicitly fascist movement.
The ghosts of eugenics past have returned as the architects of America’s fascist present. They whisper their ancient promise:
a perfect world requires imperfect people to disappear.
But we who remain will not be disappeared.
The choice facing American society is fundamental: will we accept the administrative perfection of eugenic governance, or will we defend the principle that every life possesses inherent worth beyond economic calculation? In 2025, there is no middle ground between dignity and disposability.
A society built on elimination cannot claim to have a future worth living in.
