By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Governor Wes Moore’s official account marked the start of Disability Pride Month with a message honoring the people who fought for disability rights and pledging to keep working to remove the barriers many disabled Marylanders still face. The post, accompanied by a video celebrating award-winning members of the state’s disability community under the Moore-Miller banner, is the kind of proclamation governors’ offices issue every July without much scrutiny.
This year, it’s worth a second look, because the fiscal record sitting behind the message tells a different story than the one in the post.
The fiscal record sitting behind the message tells a different story than the one in the post.
Two years, two rounds of cuts
Moore’s fiscal year 2027 budget, signed into law this spring, includes $126 million in cuts to the Developmental Disabilities Administration, the state agency that funds care for more than 19,000 Marylanders with intellectual and developmental disabilities. That follows $164 million in cuts to the same agency the year before, for fiscal year 2026. Two consecutive budget cycles, roughly $290 million combined.
The FY2027 number represents a reduction from where Moore started. His January budget proposal called for $150 million in what the administration termed “cost containment” measures at DDA, framed as necessary to close a $1.5 billion statewide budget gap without raising taxes. After weeks of advocate testimony, State House rallies, and lobbying from families and providers, legislative negotiators trimmed that to $126 million and rejected a separate proposal to cap individual person-centered service plans at $500,000. A later supplemental budget restored roughly $36 million more.
The final vote wasn’t close, and it wasn’t partisan. The Senate passed the conference report 38-6. The House passed it 102-13. A Republican floor amendment from Del. Lauren Arikan that would have restored a further slice of DDA funding failed 23-97. Whatever the story is here, it isn’t one party protecting disabled Marylanders from another.
Who absorbs the cut
The reductions fall hardest on families using self-directed care, the model where individuals or their relatives hire support staff directly rather than going through a licensed community provider. That model exists because some people’s needs are too complex for standard provider settings to handle.
The reductions fall hardest on families using self-directed care.
Baltimore County resident Tracie Feron is the mother of 30-year-old Connor, who has autism and complex medical needs requiring around-the-clock care. Residential facilities have already turned Connor away because they can’t meet his level of need; his DDA waiver is what lets the family hire staff directly instead. Feron has said a special educator who worked with her son for more than twenty years resigned last year over wage cuts tied to the prior round of reductions. Advocates warn that further squeezes on self-directed wages make it harder to keep the staff these families depend on, and that the alternative for some families is institutional care.
Advocates warn that further squeezes on self-directed wages make it harder to keep the staff these families depend on, and that the alternative for some families is institutional care.
The pattern
This is now the second year in a row Moore’s office has opened budget season with a larger DDA cut than what ultimately survives, relying on advocates to organize, rally in Annapolis, and claw back a portion of the reduction before final passage. It worked, to a degree, both years. It has also meant two straight years in which the state’s developmental disability community has had to fight defensively just to keep from losing more ground.
Where the gap runs deeper than the budget
The DDA fight is about dollars. There’s a separate, less visible problem in how disabled Marylanders are treated once they’re inside the state’s institutions rather than applying for services from them — specifically, in Maryland’s courts.
If a judge denies an ADA accommodation, there is no body with the authority to overrule that decision.
Every Maryland courthouse has a designated ADA coordinator empowered to process accommodation requests. But if a judge denies one, there is no body with the authority to overrule that decision. The formal grievance process routes complaints to the Maryland Judiciary’s own Human Resources department — the institution investigating itself. The one independent body with power over judges, the Commission on Judicial Disabilities, is explicitly barred from reviewing, reversing, or modifying any ruling or action a judge takes in a case; its jurisdiction covers judicial misconduct and judges’ own impairments, not how a judge handles someone else’s disability accommodation request. Disability Rights Maryland and Legal Aid, the state’s primary disability legal aid providers, have, in practice, not treated judicial ADA denials as within their scope.
The state cannot currently answer the basic question of how often its own courts are failing the people the ADA was written to protect, because it isn’t counting.
No Maryland agency publishes aggregate data on how many ADA accommodation requests are filed in state courts, how many are denied, or how those numbers vary by county. That absence is itself notable: the state cannot currently answer the basic question of how often its own courts are failing the people the ADA was written to protect, because it isn’t counting.
Bottom line
A governor’s office asking Marylanders to honor a community’s fight for rights carries more weight when it isn’t accompanied by two straight years of cuts to the agency that keeps that community out of institutions.
None of this means the Disability Pride Month message was insincere, or that nothing in Moore’s record counts as progress — his administration has secured federal workforce funding for disabled Marylanders and kept Carol Beatty, a longtime disability rights advocate, in place at the Department of Disabilities. But a governor’s office asking Marylanders to honor a community’s fight for rights carries more weight when it isn’t accompanied by two straight years of cuts to the agency that keeps that community out of institutions, and by a court system that still has no functioning mechanism to enforce the rights the proclamation is celebrating.
Celebrating disability rights carries more weight when government also protects the systems that make those rights meaningful.
Sourcing: Maryland budget figures and legislative vote totals per Maryland Matters and MDBayNews’ prior coverage of Senate Bill 282; family accounts per Maryland Matters reporting; Maryland Judiciary ADA and Commission on Judicial Disabilities procedures per courts.state.md.us and mdcourts.gov; Daily Record commentary on informal family court accommodation decisions.
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