DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) has issued a memo dated June 18, 2026, taking the position that Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) impose no legal duty on states to provide integrated services to people with disabilities in their communities instead of segregating them in institutions. This breaks with decades of legal precedent interpreting the Supreme Court’s 1999 decision in Olmstead v. L.C., nearly 50 years of regulatory practice, and DOJ’s own longstanding position.

Under the standard OLC now rejects, often called the “integration mandate,” states and local governments must provide services in “the most integrated setting appropriate” to the needs of people with disabilities. An integrated setting is one that “enables individuals with disabilities to interact with nondisabled persons to the fullest extent possible.”

DOJ’s enforcement of the integration mandate over the past two decades has reached the lives of tens of thousands of people and can have a profound impact on people with disabilities and their families:

• children with medical needs who were confined to nursing facilities
• children with behavioral health needs who cycled through psychiatric residential placements
• adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities who were placed in institutions rather than served at home
• adults with age-related or physical disabilities who faced needless placements in nursing facilities
• people with serious mental illness who were relegated to segregated adult care homes and psychiatric facilities when community services could meet their needs
• children with disabilities segregated in schools and classrooms

While the OLC opinion is binding on the executive branch, it does not change the underlying law, and does not overturn Olmstead or bind judges. What it will do is reshape how DOJ enforces and litigates disability rights going forward.

The Supreme Court’s Decision in Olmstead v. L.C.

Olmstead v. L.C., the landmark 1999 Supreme Court case that’s often referred to as the Brown v. Board of Education for people with disabilities, was about two women confined at a state psychiatric hospital in Georgia. Both women had mental illness and developmental disabilities. Even though their treating professionals had determined that each could live in the community with appropriate services, the state kept them institutionalized. In 1999, the Supreme Court held that this kind of unjustified institutional segregation constitutes discrimination under Title II of the ADA.

Courts and DOJ have since read Olmstead’s central holding the same way: public entities must provide community-based services to people with disabilities when those services are appropriate, the person does not oppose community-based treatment, and the services can be reasonably accommodated.

The White House-Driven Memo Contradicts Decades of Law and DOJ’s Longstanding Position

While DOJ acknowledges, as it must, that needless segregation constitutes discrimination under the ADA, it now argues that states have no obligation to provide community-based services, where appropriate and where the person does not object, in order to address that discrimination. DOJ instead concludes that “institutional treatment constitutes disability discrimination only where the mere fact of disability—as opposed to the special needs resulting from that disability—is the sole factor motivating the choice of treatment setting.”

This reading would allow states to justify segregation with any “nonarbitrary rationale.” Under that standard, a state need only show some rational basis for keeping a person institutionalized, the same low bar courts apply to ordinary government decisions where no heightened right is at stake.

DOJ grounds its argument largely on the fractured nature of the Supreme Court opinion in Olmstead, while acknowledging that its argument is “out of step” with “the common understanding of that decision within the federal courts.”

DOJ goes further, arguing that the integration mandate as courts have understood it for decades likely exceeds Congress’s authority under the Constitution.

The integration requirement was included in 1977 regulations issued by the then Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. Congress explicitly directed the Attorney General to issue Title II regulations “consistent with” those 1977 rules, and DOJ did so in 1991. As DOJ itself argued in a 1998 amicus brief in the Olmstead case, “Congress therefore virtually mandated the integration regulation at issue here.” OLC now writes that it is “not persuaded” by HEW’s original analysis. Congress was persuaded, however, when it directed DOJ to align its regulations with the 1977 rule. So was the Supreme Court, when it decided Olmstead in 1999.

In the decades since, virtually every federal district and circuit court across the country have applied Olmstead to require states to provide community-based alternatives to institutionalization when those alternatives can be reasonably accommodated and would not require a fundamental alteration of the state’s programs.

The OLC memo states it was requested by the White House Counsel’s Office. Bloomberg Law separately reported that Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller was the driving force behind the opinion. The White House and DOJ denied that the report; a DOJ spokesperson said the OLC’s position “was reached completely independently of the White House or Stephen Miller.”

The memo has prompted congressional inquiries.

The Law Hasn’t Changed. Enforcement Already Has.

The OLC memo carries the official position of the United States, and DOJ has begun acting on that: DOJ started dropping its own Olmstead cases in the wake of the memo and has filed a notice of its intent to revisit its own 2011 Olmstead guidance. Beyond DOJ’s own docket, the opinion gives states facing Olmstead litigation a new argument to raise, and potential cover to cut back community services to people with disabilities.

The regulations implementing the integration mandate are also at risk. In 2024, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) amended its 1977 integration regulation under Section 504 to provide further clarification regarding the integration mandate in light of decades of legal precedent. On August 31, 2026, DOJ—representing HHS as a defendant—joined Texas, Alaska, and Florida in asking the court to vacate the ‘most integrated setting’ provisions across HHS’s Section 504 regulations, citing the OLC memo as the basis for resolving the case rather than continuing to defend the rule. DOJ’s 504 coordination regulation and its ADA Title II integration regulation remain in effect. Rescinding any regulations absent a court’s legitimate order should require notice-and-comment rulemaking under the Administrative Procedure Act, which the OLC opinion does not accomplish.

DOJ has roughly two dozen active Olmstead cases that it could close or seek to end. Red Line will track developments in those cases.

On April 20, 2026, the Civil Rights Division imposed a one-year delay of the compliance dates for its Title II web accessibility rule, a landmark regulatory action under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The April 2024 rule established clear technical standards to ensure that state and local governments’ websites, online services, and mobile apps are accessible to people with disabilities. For example, the rule ensures that people with disabilities who rely on accessible technology can access online government services, such as filing a police report, paying taxes, learning about the programs at the local library, and accessing their child’s school report card. As more and more government services move online, accessibility becomes even more crucial.

Two former Civil Rights Division leaders, Rebecca Bond and Kristin Stitcher, who were involved in the development of the Title II web accessibility rule, explain in this podcast the obligations under the rule, the history of the regulation dating back to 2010, and how it responded directly to requests from state and local governments for clear technical standards during the rulemaking process.

In September 2025, while still in the early regulatory stages, the Department of Justice published a notice that it may “reconsider whether some of the regulatory provisions imposed by the [Title II web accessibility rule] could be made less costly.”

Then, on April 20, 2026, four days before the set compliance date, the Department published an Interim Final Rule, extending the date of compliance by one year, pushing the compliance date for state and local government entities with a total population of 50,000 or more to April 26, 2027, and for those with a population of less than 50,000, to April 26, 2028. According to the Interim Final Rule, the Department “overestimated the capabilities (whether staffing or technology) of covered entities to comply with the rule in the time frames provided.”

Beyond extending the compliance deadlines, the Interim Final Rule delays access to basic government services for people with disabilities and again signals the Department’s intent to pursue future rulemaking on the “substantive requirements” of the rule.