On Thursday, May 7, 2026 at 4:15pm EDT, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) filed an Interim Final Rule for public inspection (IFR). It was scheduled for official publication on May 11 – the same day the original compliance date was set to take effect.
I want to talk about what’s in that document. Not the deadline. The document.
Because buried in the regulatory impact analysis – in a federal document, filed publicly, in the Federal Register – is something I haven’t seen anyone talk about yet.
They ran the numbers. They published them.
They calculated the savings: about $114 million a year.
They also calculated the cost to disabled people: about $204 million a year.
The people the law was written to protect lose about $90 million a year overall.
They knew. They filed it. They did it anyway.
That’s not a bureaucratic oversight. That’s a choice, written down, signed, and submitted for public record by the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Who was in the room
I wrote about this pattern in The Rooms Where It Happens. The decisions that shape disabled people’s lives keep getting made in rooms they’re not in. The rulemaking processes, the legislative hearings, the budget meetings – the people most affected are the ones most reliably absent from the table.
The IFR is a receipt.
Here’s who appears in the official justification for delaying a civil rights protection that has existed in statute since 1973:
- a virtual mental health provider arguing the rule imposed financial burdens without meaningful benefits,
- an anonymous deregulatory comment submitted through DOGE,
- local government associations,
- business and administrative stakeholders concerned about cost, staffing, vendors, PDFs, and litigation exposure.
Those concerns are real. But they are not the only concerns that matter.
The IFR itself notes that HHS had not received recent comments from disability rights organizations regarding the rule’s web accessibility requirements.
An anonymous DOGE comment made the Federal Register.
The disability community barely appears in the public-facing record at all.
The pattern
Section 504 is 53 years old. The obligation to make federally funded programs accessible to people with disabilities has existed since the Nixon administration. The 2024 rule didn’t create that obligation – it named a technical standard for one that was already there.
The deadline was May 11, 2026. Then it wasn’t.
This is not the first time this has happened. If you’ve read The ACCESS Act Isn’t New. It’s Just Back Again. you already know what 25 years of can-kicking looks like in legislative form. This is the regulatory version of the same move.
Delay. Revisit. Signal future weakening. Repeat.
The IFR even telegraphs what’s coming: the Department “plans to engage in future rulemaking related to the substantive requirements of the 2024 final rule.” The deadline extension might not be where this ends.
And the process itself appears to be narrowing too.
The public-facing consultation footprint around these accessibility delays appears remarkably thin. The EO 12866 meeting record for the Section 504 IFR shows almost no visible outside engagement at all. Similar concerns emerged during the ADA Title II delay process, where scheduled meetings disappeared toward the end of rulemaking before the delay was published.
At the same time, the Richardson Waiver – a 1971 policy requiring HHS to use notice-and-comment rulemaking for grant-related rules, meaning the public got to weigh in – was quietly rescinded in March 2025. Future rulemaking on 504 can now happen with less public participation. By design.
The rooms are getting smaller.
What I keep coming back to
The disability community has a phrase: nothing about us without us. It’s not a radical demand. It’s a minimum standard. Include the people most affected by the decisions being made in the rooms where those decisions happen.
An anonymous DOGE comment is in the Federal Register.
The disability community wasn’t.
I’m a militant optimist. I have to be. It’s the only way to keep doing this work. (And maybe screaming into the void here on my blog.) But optimism isn’t the same as patience, and it isn’t the same as silence.
They did the math. They published it. They moved the deadline anyway.
I think we’re allowed to notice that.