by Annika Berlin
It’s only 9 a.m., and it’s already another brutally hot June day in DC.
My Mom, who grew up in Virginia, had warned me about the swampy weather before I moved here for a summer fellowship with the National Association for the Advancement of Orthotics and Prosthetics (NAAOP). I’m just beginning my second week, and I’ve already learned that swampy weather causes my prosthesis to pool with sweat within 10 minutes. By the time I reach the office, my bionic hand has a mind of its own.
Walking through the glass doors, I’m hit by a wall of air conditioning as I pull out my phone to check the Monday morning news: “Medicaid under new scrutiny as cost-cutting talks resume.” “Lawmakers renew debate over NIH budget.” “Universities scale back DEI programs.” I keep scrolling. My thumb flicks through a mix of weekend photos from college friends and disability rights groups’ calls to action. Does anyone’s social media not produce cognitive dissonance?
I pause on a story that catches my eye, bold white text on a red background: “Department of Energy attempting to roll back decades of disability protections? Submit your comment now.” Hmmm. Odd. Not something I’d seen in my news feed. The elevator beeps at six. I slip my phone into my bag and step into the office.
Through the Back Channels
I arrived in DC as NAAOP’s Breece Fellow, hoping to understand how disability policy really works and how access takes form inside government. I was born without part of my left arm, and advocacy has always been part of my personal life as someone with a disability, but I hadn’t yet imagined it would become my work. The fellowship, established by George and Dena Breece to support emerging disability advocates, offered the chance to learn from Peter Thomas, a nationally respected disability rights attorney and one of the best in the business. Working alongside him gave me a front-row seat to national disability policy and how it gets made, challenged, and defended in real time.
Before my Monday morning check-in with Peter, I quickly searched for more information about the Department of Energy item. At the end of our meeting I asked him, almost in passing, “Have you seen anything from the DOE lately?” Peter looked up from his laptop. “No, what’s going on?”
I explained that I’d come across a few scattered posts—some from smaller disability accounts, others buried deep in the back alleys of the internet where niche disability news tends to land first. Reddit’s r/DisabilityJustice. A thread on r/ChronicIllness where someone linked to a DOE docket and said, “This feels big but I don’t totally get it.” Another user replied, “Yeah, this is bad. They’re deleting the Section 504 accessibility section entirely.”
That would be very big and very bad, if true. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 established the legal foundation of policies that prohibit anti-disability discrimination, including the Americans With Disabilities Act. But none of the policy calls I’d been on that morning with allied health groups had mentioned anything about the DOE, and nothing had shown up in the usual policy newsletters or news alerts. It felt strange. If this were real, wouldn’t someone have already raised the alarm?
I told Peter I wasn’t sure yet whether it carried the implications people online were suggesting or if it was something NAAOP should even weigh in on. He scanned the notice, nodded once, and said, “Write something up. Send me what you find.”
I spent the rest of the day digging in. I read through every line of the proposed rule, compared DOE’s language to the regulations of other agencies, traced the history of Section 504 enforcement, and pulled examples from court decisions about accessibility guidance. What I learned was incredibly concerning. The DOE was indeed proposing a drastic change in the interpretation of Section 504, and it was due to take effect, if no significant opposition was made, by the beginning of next week.
Learning to Listen Sideways
The proposal was buried inside a “direct final rule,” an obscure procedural shortcut used when an agency believes a change is routine or noncontroversial. Instead of undergoing a lengthy public comment process, the agency simply declares the change final unless they receive “significant and adverse” objections within a very short window.
The problem was that this rule change wasn’t routine. It would delete the sections requiring all DOE-funded projects to accommodate people with disabilities. Basic guidelines for accessible design—ramps, doorways, restrooms, signage, and more—would no longer be mandatory. They would merely be “encouraged.” That single edit, removing enforceable standards and replacing them with general language about nondiscrimination, would quietly unravel fifty years of progress.
No one in our orbit had this on their radar. DOE doesn’t administer disability programs, so disability advocates don’t watch it closely. And that was exactly the point: If DOE could successfully lower the bar, that weaker precedent could ripple outward. Other departments could copy it. Other disability protections could be reinterpreted. Before anyone noticed, accessibility itself could become optional across large swaths of federally funded infrastructure.
By late Monday afternoon, I had the beginnings of a draft. It was part legal analysis, part call to action. Peter reviewed it, offered feedback, and said, “Let’s turn this into our comment letter.”
We had to move fast, because the window to submit “significant adverse comments” was closing quickly. I spent the next couple of days refining the draft, incorporating Peter’s feedback, and working with him to secure NAAOP’s approval. Then, to maximize the letter’s impact, we circulated it to allied health and disability coalitions, encouraging them to add their voices and register their opposition. By Friday, we filed our formal comment letter with the Department of Energy. And that’s how I spent my second week as a Breece Fellow.
The Rhythm of the Work
The remainder of my summer in DC moved at the same breakneck pace. It became clear that disability rights were no longer sitting on settled ground. The pressure to defend them was constant, sometimes direct, sometimes quiet, but always there. The DOE proposal was one of those moments: a small technicality on paper, but consequential in every way that mattered.
That realization changed how I saw advocacy. It’s not just about responding to the loudest debates in congressional hearings, budget documents, social media, or cable TV. It’s also about learning to track what moves beneath the noise, tucked into agency rule changes or buried in administrative updates that few people outside of Washington ever read. This steady churn can be almost invisible, but it’s where disability rights are constantly being tested, stretched thin, or quietly rewritten.
There were nights when I left the firm late and walked home through the swampy summer air. The sun was low, and DC hummed around me: cars idling at crosswalks, the faint chorus of cicadas somewhere between the trees and the traffic. I would think about the pace this work demands right now, and how it felt at odds with what my body often asks for.
Through disability, I’ve learned that rest can be resistance. Slowing down can be an act of defiance in a world that demands constant motion. But this summer, slowing down wasn’t really an option. Policy flows incredibly quickly in DC at this moment. Rules drop without warning. Proposals move quietly in the background. You have to read quickly, act quickly, and make sure the right people see what’s coming before it takes hold. Advocacy doesn’t occur in big, heroic acts. It’s a thousand small moments of attention, carried out by people who care enough to stay with it. Progress sometimes looks like a pause. Hope often lives in the margins.
It felt like a strange rhythm to step into, but it also felt familiar. The disability community has always lived within contradiction. Our lives ask for adaptation, creativity, and persistence. We have learned to move at our own pace while navigating systems that rarely move for us.
Strength in Each Other
Somewhere in that rhythm, I started to understand something else. The real power right now comes from interdependence. I have always known this at a personal level—that depending on each other makes us strong, not weak. But this summer, I started to see it in policy too. Interdependence involved coalition letters filled with logos from dozens of disability organizations, shared documents that changed by the hour, late-night calls where partners compared notes. It involved our organization alerting other O&P organizations or allied health groups to a change buried in federal code, and those groups helping to amplify it within days. That kind of collaboration was not just efficient. It was essential.
No one person or organization can keep watch over everything. The strength of this movement is in our overlap, in how one group’s attention catches what another might miss. If rest is how we recover, interdependence is how we endure, and not just when it comes to federal policy. Interdependence, both personal and collective, is the wisdom of disability itself. We do not have to do this alone. We just have to keep noticing, keep naming, and keep holding the line.
Annika Berlin is a disability advocate and writer serving as Grassroots Advocacy Contractor for the Amputee Coalition. She leads grassroots efforts for the So Every BODY Can Move campaign.
