Why Does the Richest Country on Earth Choose to Fail Its Kids?

GMA spent a whole segment this week on Ashley Tisdale quitting her mommy group because it felt “too high school.” And honestly, that tells you everything about the state of news priorities. Sadly, it’s been that way for a while now.

Meanwhile, in the actual high‑stakes world where kids’ futures are on the line, we’re watching systems behave with the same clique‑y energy, just with worse lighting and higher consequences.

The Myth of Complexity

Let’s stop pretending this is complicated.

The suffering baked into American systems isn’t an accident. It’s not because we lack data, wisdom, or money. It’s because people with power keep making the same damn choices and then acting shocked — shocked! — when kids end up paying the bill.

You see it clearest in health care, disability support, and education, basically anywhere kids need consistency, flexibility, or an actual human being to support them.

And the pattern is painfully familiar. Systems tighten up the moment someone doesn’t fit the mold, especially when difference isn’t convenient or easy for the people to interpret. It’s not new. Just the same logic wearing a different outfit.

A Feature, Not a Bug

The second Trump administration didn’t invent this mess in 2025. Please. This mess is older than half the memes we still quote. What they did do was kick out the supports, slap a leadership sticker on the wreckage, and call it a day. Oversight? Thinned. Funding? Gutted. Enforcement? Hollowed out like a chocolate Easter bunny.

And suddenly all the harm everyone warned about became “someone else’s problem.” Classic move.

Because decisions at the top don’t stay theoretical. They trickle down, teaching every layer underneath exactly what kind of harm is acceptable and who’s expected to absorb it quietly.

When cruelty, austerity, and hierarchy get marketed as “grown‑up realism,” institutions take notes. They quickly learn which corners they can cut. This doesn’t create chaos. It creates consistency. Ugly, reliable consistency.

The Void of Accountability

Here’s what that looks like in real life.

In March 2025, the Department of Education cut nearly half its workforce, including the people whose job was literally to enforce civil rights and protect students with disabilities. These weren’t “extra” positions. These were the adults who made the law mean something. When they’re gone, violations don’t stop. They just stop getting answered. Like sending an email into the void.

Then came the shutdown. The office overseeing special education funding and compliance got sidelined. Delays piled up. Confusion spread. Safeguards thinned. Exactly as anyone who’s ever worked in a system could’ve predicted.

Meanwhile, hundreds of millions in special education grants were put on the chopping block — pretty much shitcanned, really. Training. Family support. The unglamorous infrastructure that actually keeps kids afloat. Cut. Because apparently that’s where fiscal discipline suddenly becomes holy.

Budgets as Moral Documents

And this is where people start lying to themselves.

We pretend this is about budgets. It’s not. Budgets are moral documents. They tell you whose discomfort matters and whose does not. You know how to tell? The money always appears when power wants it to. When it doesn’t, we slap a label on the absence and call it “responsible governance.”

We call it neutrality. Kids feel it as abandonment.

I’m not neutral about this. I’ve watched these systems up close, across generations. I’ve seen what happens when support is treated as inconvenient. This isn’t theory. It’s pattern recognition. It’s the part of the movie where you and I look at each other and go, “Oh, we’ve seen this plot twist before.”

Willful Ignorance

For example, when it comes to neurodiverse kids who struggle, this isn’t some cosmic mystery. We actually know the basics of their various conditions, and we’ve known them for years.

• We know how executive function affects learning and regulation.

• We know stress wrecks regulation.

• We know early support prevents long‑term damage and costs less later.

Anyone who doesn’t get it — that you just can’t punish an ADHD kid into focusing better — is willfully ignorant. In my book, they belong in the same stinky bucket as people who believe in conversion therapy for the LGBTQ+ community. But that’s a discussion for another time.

The New Eugenics

This isn’t a knowledge problem. It’s a commitment problem. And an attitude problem. And a eugenics problem. Yes, eugenics. Remember, if it walks like a duck…

Eugenics didn’t disappear after World War II. The language got embarrassing, so it changed outfits. The idea stayed. The idea that some people are worth more investment than others. That support must be earned. That difference is a burden. Today we call it efficiency. Or austerity. Or realism. Same rot, new packaging.

In education and disability policy, that logic becomes sorting instead of supporting. Triage instead of access. In poverty policy, it becomes moral judgment dressed up as fiscal responsibility. Once you start believing that not everyone deserves the same care or even the same basic respect, you don’t need cartoon villains. You just need people willing to go along.

The Cost of Quiet

And when systems pull back, the burden doesn’t disappear. It gets dumped somewhere else: into kitchens late at night, into cars turned into waiting rooms, into exhausted adults doing unpaid institutional labor just to keep kids afloat.

That’s not accidental. That’s the design.

We’ve been told for years that things are improving. Awareness is better. Systems are evolving. The vocabulary has changed. The pressure hasn’t. The same people are still absorbing the same damage, quiet as hell, because making noise is expensive.

That quiet is what keeps this crapification scheme going.

Every time funding disappears, someone made a choice.

Every time enforcement weakens, someone decided the harm was acceptable.

Those aren’t side effects. They’re outcomes.

It’s 2026. Nobody says it’s easy to do the right thing. But we do know what works. We know what prevents harm. Every rollback, every cut, every hollowed‑out institution is a decision to let our children take the hit for political ideology.

As a nation, we can absolutely do better. The problem is too many people don’t give a damn about doing better for other people’s kids.