Lisa Fazio expected her National Science Foundation grant to be cancelled. The associate professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University had watched, with apprehension, the GOP targeting disinformation in a series of legislative attacks. She only grew more certain when, on April 18, the National Science Foundation (NSF) put out a statement on how grants would henceforth be evaluated for funding. In addition to limiting the inclusion of underrepresented groups, the statement cited Trump’s Inauguration Day executive order, “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” to cut funding for disinformation research: > “NSF will not support research with the goal of combating “misinformation,” > “disinformation,” and “malinformation” that could be used to infringe on the > constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the > United States in a manner that advances a preferred narrative about > significant matters of public debate.” Fazio knew her research—”How false beliefs form and how to correct them“—was toast. Building on the established understanding that the more times a given piece of information is repeated, the more likely people are to believe it—whether or not it’s true—Fazio’s research tested that idea outside the lab in studies based on social media and texting. The question, Fazio said, was, “How can we best design misinformation debunks and misinformation corrections so that they’re as effective as possible?” She didn’t have to wait long for the news. Hours after the NSF statement was released, Fazio received an email about the termination of the roughly $500,000 grant funding her study. Despite expecting the news, Fazio described it as a “gut punch.” Mary Feeney, a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Public Affairs, worked as a program officer at NSF under the Biden administration, overseeing its “Science of Science” program, which approved grants in fields like science communication and information quality. Feeney expressed confusion: none of the research she approved, she remarked, could reasonably be said to infringe on the constitutional right to free speech or debate. “No research project I ever recommended for funding, or that I’ve ever heard of, goes out and denies someone from speaking or doing a media report,” Feeney said. > “We know false information is out there, we know it spreads widely, and it’s > important for people’s health and for democracy to understand what we can do > about it.” “The work that we’re doing is not censorship,” said Fazio. “We’re telling what the scientific community thinks about topics where there’s consensus on what we think is true or false, based on what we know. That’s not censorship. That’s adding additional speech to the conversation.” Moreover, said Feeney, NSF doesn’t regulate anyone’s speech; it funds research that leads to “an advancement of knowledge, the delivery of courses, training for junior scientists.” “I think it’s a big leap between ‘we fund research on X topic’ and ‘the results of that research prevent someone from doing something,'” she said. But the cuts didn’t surprise her, either. In Feeney’s final year with NSF, she says, leadership asked her to remove the word “misinformation” from grant titles, replacing it with other terms. She believes that the Biden White House “sensed that misinformation was becoming a target word for the incoming administration, and they were trying to kind of move it out of the system.” Regardless, more than 50 other NSF grants studying how information is disseminated and trusted—worth some $9 million—have been cancelled since Friday, when the body released its new guidelines. Most of those grants funded studies on disinformation. Fazio is one of the lucky ones. Most of her grant had already been used, with several papers already published. She hopes to continue follow-up research on a smaller scale with private funding, although it’s harder to come by. “Since the federal government started attacking misinformation researchers, nonprofits and foundations have been less interested in funding this research than they were before,” she said. But she worries about the impacts of the funding loss. Fazio’s next project was going to study the formation of false beliefs broadly—she offered the example of “how repeating false information about immigrants might affect your belief about immigration as a whole.” The loss of NSF funding may make that project impossible. “We know false information is out there,” Fazio says, “We know it spreads widely, and it’s important for people’s health and for democracy to understand what we can do about it.” NSF’s “Science of Science” program, Feeney explained, wasn’t just about spotting false narratives but making science more understandable. “Some of it was misinformation, but a lot of it is also trust,” she says. “Misinformation is one component of this broader understanding of science communication.” The new NSF statement is “creating a false narrative about science in America,” said Fazio. “It’s misinformation [to say] that research on misinformation is actually censoring the general public.” “The administration is complaining about the censorship while censoring academics and what we research,” she lamented.

Dani Izzie, a wheelchair user with quadriplegia, tried to take public transit, as she usually does, when visiting Miami in 2022. Heading to catch a bus, Izzie came to the end of a street without curb cuts—meaning she couldn’t safely cross it to the bus stop. She tried to get an accessible taxi; none were available. The door-to-door paratransit service wasn’t an option, since it needs advance scheduling. It ultimately took a call to police, who helped her down the curb. This wasn’t the first time, says Izzie, that “the absurdity of one little oversight” limited her autonomy and mobility. The real estate website Redfin’s Walk Score rates Miami the sixth-most walkable large city in the United States. But its methodology, Redfin confirmed to me, does not account for accessibility. Since the 1990s, there’s been a push among urbanists to reduce city driving and its hazards: American pedestrian fatalities number more than 7,000 a year, and with each car in a city releasing close to 5 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, car reliance harms everyone else, too. > The rate of vehicle-pedestrian deaths among wheelchair users was 36 percent > higher than that of the overall population. Some US cities—including Los Angeles; Tempe, Arizona; and Jersey City, New Jersey—have made great strides toward limiting cars, mainly by designating car-free streets or areas. But car-free zones have met opposition, and not just from irate conservatives. Opponents of such initiatives have called them “exclusionary,” “not progressive or inclusive,” and bound to “hurt people with disabilities,” pointing out that many disabled people simply need cars to get around. But Anna Zivarts, director of Disability Rights Washington’s Disability Mobility Initiative and author of the book When Driving Is Not an Option, points out that disabled people are actually less likely to drive than nondisabled people “and more likely to get around [by] walking and rolling and taking transit.” Car-heavy cities are also disproportionately dangerous for disabled folks: A 2015 study by Georgetown University researchers found that the rate of vehicle-pedestrian deaths among wheelchair users was 36 percent higher than that of the overall population. Zivarts herself bikes, not drives, around her city of Seattle: She lives with the eye condition nystagmus, as does her son, which makes operating a car unsafe. Fighting for greater accessibility, she says, would also “make the world more accessible for him.” That doesn’t just mean car-free zones, but issues like sidewalk safety: One of her initiative’s first major successes was helping to get an additional $83 million added to a levy on Seattle’s November ballot to fix and expand sidewalks for accessibility, which ultimately passed with 66 percent support. Maddy Ruvolo, a disabled transportation planner for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, focuses on mobility and accessibility. Ruvolo acknowledges that some disabled people find car ownership “important for their mobility”: It “wouldn’t be fair to say that no disabled people need cars,” she says. But she’s concerned to see “accessibility used as a political football.” In Vancouver, opponents argued that a bike lane hurt disabled drivers’ ability to get to a public park—though some disabled people themselves supported the initiative—and got most of the lane removed by the Vancouver Park Board. And vice versa: Ruvolo says it’s also harmful for people to throw “statistics around disability and transportation as a way of arguing for active transportation projects that don’t necessarily take accessibility into account.” Evidence shows that walkable communities are good for disabled people—even beyond simply letting them enjoy the considerable benefits of being outdoors. A 2022 study in the Journal of Transport Geography scored walkability across six Southern ­California counties by housing density, street connectivity, and land use mix: An area with abundant sidewalks and, say, pharmacies and grocery stores was rated more walkable. It found that a modest increase in walkability meant disabled people took transit 33 percent more often than before—likely because better walkability made transit stops easier to get to. Making cities accessible is also an equity issue. Ruvolo is a member of the US Access Board, an independent federal agency that works toward better accessibility for people with disabilities. Disabled people, she notes, are more likely to have lower incomes—they’re twice as likely to live below the poverty line—and to rely on public transit by necessity. In San Francisco, for example, low-income people with certain disabilities have qualified for free bus and subway rides since 2015. Paris does the same for many aging adults and some disabled people. That’s much cheaper than gas and auto maintenance. Retrofitting sidewalks and adding shuttles can make a dent in a city’s budget. But in theory, as pointed out by Sarah Kaufman, executive director of New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management, in a Scientific American opinion piece, you can solve that problem by linking accessibility to congestion pricing. Before it was blocked for months by Gov. Kathy ­Hochul, New York City’s charge on Manhattan traffic was set to help fund accessibility upgrades, like elevators, to its subways. Hochul decided to restore that plan in November, ahead of a possible ban on such charges under Donald Trump’s administration. As Kaufman wrote in August, when Hochul was still preventing its implementation, “the defeat of this measure—meant to bolster public transit use and reduce city traffic—served as yet another accelerant down the road to a looming crisis across the US: the growing inability of aging boomers to travel.” London has had congestion prices since 2003—disabled people who qualify are exempt from its costs—and just four years later, reports showed that the system had generated tens of millions of dollars annually for transit improvement. > Better public transit improves quality of life for disabled people, Ruvolo > says, “as long as accessibility is baked in there.” There are undeniably cases in which walkability and accessibility come head-to-head: Take some historic pedestrian-­only alleyways in Charleston, South Carolina, which can be hard to navigate with a walker due to their unevenness. Yet there’s often an affordable solution to be found. In 2022, when San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park permanently closed a major boulevard to cars, opponents, including city Supervisor Connie Chan, said it was disabled and aging folks who would pay the price. But free shuttles, ­accessible to anyone, now bridge the gap. Other roads throughout the park remain open to drivers. For Ruvolo, the key to solving accessibility problems is soliciting disabled residents’ input—and using it. She and her team meet regularly with disability groups in San Francisco, incorporating their ideas into new and existing initiatives. In 2023, for example, the team had disabled students test electric scooters for the city’s scooter-share program. Their feedback helped make the program better for disabled people: Officials picked more scooters with backrests and larger wheels that keep them stable. Better public transit improves the quality of life for disabled people, Ruvolo says, “as long as accessibility is baked in there.”

When the Fair Labor Standards Act was signed into law in 1938, first establishing a national minimum wage, it came with an exemption: employers could pay some disabled workers less than minimum wage. The federal exemption still stands, even as many states roll back their versions—and that wage can still be as little as 25 cents an hour. 25 states have since introduced or enacted legislation to phase out this outdated practice. Defenders of the 14(c) certificate program often argue that the disabled workers it covers, most of whom have intellectual and developmental disabilities, just wouldn’t get a job elsewhere. A study published today in JAMA Health Forum by University of Pennsylvania researchers refutes that argument. Its authors found that in two states—New Hampshire and Maryland—that banned the practice, employment rates for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, such as people who are autistic, either increased or didn’t change when employers had to pay them an equal wage. Neurologist Mihir Kakara, the study’s lead author, says the finding “points towards the fact that these people are able to work in equal-paying, fully integrated jobs as their peers who do not have a disability, given the right resources.” Many employers paying disabled workers subminimum wage use so-called “sheltered workshops,” which have also been criticized by disability advocates, as they segregate disabled workers. Whether or not a state maintains the subminimum wage, workers with cognitive disabilities still work fewer hours overall, and are paid less than those without cognitive disabilities. Notably, New Hampshire had no below-minimum-wage disabled workers at the time of its repeal, unlike Maryland—but the employment rate for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities still increased when the state legally kicked the exemption to the curb. The researchers theorize that “media coverage and debates around Section 14(c) repeal might encourage or signal to families and individuals with [intellectual and development disabilities] previously out of the labor force to apply for employment training.” While the Biden Department of Labor was expected to introduce a rule to either make the program more equitable or get rid of it entirely, it has yet to take action. For now, paying a worker less than minimum wage because they’re in a protected class remains, in many states, entirely legal.