From the safety of our northern vantage, it is easy to feel heartbroken and a little superior when we watch the dismantling of the American social welfare state—when we see libraries defunded, schools privatised, and healthcare withdrawn with brutal efficiency. We shake our heads at the cruelty of it, believing ourselves buffered by decency or geography. Yet beneath our patina of inclusion lies the same ideology—quieter, better branded, and equally lethal in its effects. What appears as benign underfunding, what passes as bureaucratic caution or fiscal prudence, is the slow-motion violence of eugenic design.
The illusion of moral distance
Eugenics has always disguised itself as care. Where the early twentieth century promised protection of the social body through segregation and forced sterilisation, today’s governance promises “inclusive” systems while ensuring that true inclusion remains administratively impossible. Policy documents glow with the language of belonging; budgets tell the truth of abandonment.
Our government releases glossy statements about historic investments, while children wait years for assessments, families collapse under advocacy fatigue, and teachers ration compassion across overcrowded classrooms. The violence of omission produces the same result as the violence of overt exclusion—the quiet removal of those who cost too much to accommodate.
Underfunding as selection mechanism
Every dollar withheld from public education functions as a sorting device. Chronic underfunding filters children by endurance, by parental wealth, by the ability to mask pain long enough to remain in the room. The outcome is predictable: disabled, racialised, and low-income students are the first to be displaced from public education’s narrowing frame, pushing their families toward poverty, instability, and the exhausting labour of recreating care in the aftermath.
Austerity has become our province’s preferred instrument of moral governance. Its beauty lies in deniability: harm without fingerprints, exclusion without explicit intent. When scarcity is declared inevitable, every policy failure can be recast as regret rather than responsibility.
Policy as quiet eugenics
The modern face of eugenics does not wield coercion through laboratories or surgical wards; it operates through spreadsheets, consultation frameworks, performance metrics, and accessibility committees. The education funding formula itself is an instrument of selection—it rewards stability, punishes complexity, and normalises exclusion through budgetary constraint.
Procedures that appear neutral—eligibility thresholds, waitlists, “urgent intervention” pathways—translate human need into administrative risk. The child who cannot endure waiting is labelled unsafe. The parent who refuses to accept delay is reframed as hostile. In this way, moral worth is measured not by need, but by compliance.
Containment as compassion’s disguise
What families experience as abandonment is officially described as “case management.” What children experience as isolation is logged as “support in an alternate setting.” These linguistic inversions sanitise cruelty, allowing administrators to perform empathy while perpetuating structural harm. As No accidents left to excuse observed, this is not misfortune—it is design.
When oversight bodies thank families for their “valuable feedback” and promise future learning, they perform a kind of bureaucratic transubstantiation: pain becomes data; injustice becomes improvement; absence becomes virtue. This is the moral economy of modern eugenics—an ethics of appearance that prizes process over prevention.
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No accidents left to excuse
When I first read the Canary Collective’s Systemic Abuse in Education: Breaking the Cycle and Kim Block’s companion essay Is this Systemic Oppression or Systemic Abuse?, I did not feel revelation so much as recognition. I have called what happens to disabled and neurodivergent children in…
Scarcity as ideology, not condition
As The Scarcity Script argued, “scarcity is not the absence of resources—it is their misallocation, their enclosure, their calculated withholding”. Underfunding is not an economic reality; it is a political strategy. The crisis is fabricated. When the government insists there is “simply not enough,” it is invoking scarcity as a moral shield for abandonment.
This moral shield reframes neglect as prudence and transforms disabled children into symbols of fiscal restraint. We thank you for your suffering. In a system governed by performance indicators, their exclusion becomes evidence of ruthless efficiency.
The intergenerational logic of loss
Eugenics has always sought to manage the future by narrowing who counts as its subject. Underfunding achieves the same end through neglect rather than decree. Each unfilled resource position, each abandoned program, each delayed support plan is a small act of demographic design—a way of ensuring that disabled, neurodivergent, or otherwise complex citizens enter adulthood with fewer options, less health, and diminished trust in public institutions.
This is how a government decides, without ever saying so, whose flourishing is expendable.
Families as unpaid infrastructure
Every mother who becomes a case manager, every father who becomes an aide, every child who becomes self-contained in self-defence—all are part of a hidden welfare apparatus that props up the illusion of a functioning system. The family absorbs what the state withholds. Their exhaustion is recorded nowhere, yet it sustains the province’s balance sheet.
In the absence of adequate funding, advocacy itself becomes a form of unpaid labour, with families navigating policy architectures never designed to be traversed, translating grief into paperwork while government officials applaud their resilience, even as their children absorb daily harm within an education system that narrows the window of learning opportunity until it closes entirely, leaving parents to watch health deteriorate, savings vanish, and the future for caring for their child dissolve into uncertainty. Disability, in this context, emerges not from a child’s body or mind but from the state’s architecture of neglect—from the way institutions transform need into burden and difference into disqualification.
The myth of inevitability
When harm repeats with such fidelity that it becomes predictable, accident loses meaning. Underfunding is not the residue of imperfection; it is the mechanism by which the system preserves hierarchy. Each deferral of funding reform, each procedural “review,” each task force on inclusion reaffirms the central fiction that the system is improving. Improvement has become our new mythology—a secular faith that allows cruelty to persist so long as it is periodically audited.
Abundance as refusal
To name this pattern as eugenics is to reclaim moral language from euphemism. It is to refuse the narrative that fiscal limits justify human limits. A just education system begins with the presumption of abundance—with the belief that every child deserves the best possible start, not the most affordable one.
When a government underfunds access, it is not saving money—it is deciding whose lives are worth the investment. And when citizens accept this calculus, they participate in a moral hierarchy that measures worth by cost.
The reckoning to come
We may believe we are watching the United States slide into social decay, yet the same architecture is already under our feet—polished, polite, and administered in the language of care. To confront it will require more than empathy; it will require a public declaration that starvation is a form of violence, that scarcity is a political invention, and that eugenics, however rebranded, remains alive in the policies that decide who receives help soon enough to survive.
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What would it really cost to fix the problem?
We talk so much about the cost of inclusion—as if it’s indulgent, optional, something that must be justified—but we rarely talk about the cost of exclusion. And those costs are everywhere: in emergency rooms, in overburdened case files, in classrooms where distress goes…
