Maryland Disability Advocates Discuss Systemic Hardships and Self-Advocacy

When James Orman received a late-in-life Autism diagnosis at age 36 in 2022, the Baltimore local made the decision to disclose his diagnosis to his then-employer.

“It did not go down well,” recalled James, who now serves as Program Coordinator and Director of Autistic Adult Programming at People On the Go Maryland, a statewide self-advocacy group for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities based in Baltimore County. “I suddenly stopped having opportunities and other things, and I eventually had to leave that position.”

Of the nearly 8.1 million employed Americans with a disability, James fell into the approximately 43% who tell their employer about their disability. But the subsequent discrimination he faced highlights why many hesitate to do the same, even as federal law mandates employers to provide reasonable accommodations to employees with disabilities. In practice, many find that, like James, disclosing their disability leads to fewer opportunities in the workplace. For people with visible disabilities, this struggle to find a suitable job with room to advance can be especially difficult, a reality all-too-familiar to Tracy Wright, who works alongside James as Deputy Director and Director of Training for People On the Go.

“When I first joined the workforce, I was working for the federal government in a job that was a special category,” recounted Tracy, who has cerebral palsy and uses a power wheelchair for mobility. “It didn’t allow for even any advancement.”

Low-paying, non-competitive “special category” jobs are often pushed to Americans with disabilities and are only a slight step above sheltered workshops, said Tracy, referring to isolated facilities that employ people with disabilities, often paying them subminimum wage. Disability advocates widely condemn sheltered workshops as segregating and exploitative.

“[People in these jobs] are never going to be able to really support themselves, because there’s no opportunity for growth,” said Tracy. But, she continued, better-paying jobs with more growth opportunities often require candidates to have attended higher education institutions, which frequently exclude people with disabilities.

“Back when I got out of school, there were not a lot of opportunities to continue your education,” recalled Tracy. “It actually took me 10 years to earn [my Associate’s degree] and two different tries at it, because the first time I got sent away from college saying that there were places for people like me, but the college setting was not one of them.”

Tracy said that growing up, her disability was rarely discussed with her, making it difficult to understand her needs, let alone advocate for them in educational and employment settings.

“I knew I was different, but I didn’t know all parts of my disability,” reflected Tracy. In particular, she said, she did not know that sometimes she needs extra processing time, so she rarely asked others to break things down and often felt excluded from conversations. It was not until she joined People On the Go, which offers Steps Toward Independence and Responsibility (STIR) training to community members with disabilities, that she fully learned the importance of self-advocacy to improve access for herself and others with disabilities.

“What [People On the Go] taught me, the whole group, was that I had to be comfortable with being me,” said Tracy. “I had to be okay with asking questions, and I had to be okay with asking for support.”

For James, People On the Go’s STIR training was pivotal in his journey to better understand and advocate for himself while navigating his Autism diagnosis in adulthood.

“To relay your thoughts and opinions in a way that other people can hear it, you have to know yourself,” said James. “It was only through encountering People On the Go’s trainings and its mission that I was able to connect me with myself in a way that I think a lot of us are missing just as people generally.”

At People On the Go, James and Tracy met Mat Rice, the organization’s Executive Director and Advocacy Coordinator. Mat, who frequently testifies at Maryland legislative sessions, said that he became involved in public policy advocacy after seeing the under-representation of people with disabilities in the law-making process and the systemic failures that followed.

“I’ll speak with legislators and the governor and his staff on certain cases, but what I see all too often is I will be, if not the only person with a disability in the room, maybe the second,” said Mat, who has cerebral palsy and is legally blind. “There’s very little consideration for the overall impact that a policy actually could have on the lives of people with disabilities.”

Subminimum Wage

Even well-intended policies, noted Mat, can harm people with disabilities when designed without their input, a notable example being subminimum wage. First legalized in 1938 by the Fair Labor Standards Act, the practice of paying people with disabilities subminimum wage sought to expand employment access by incentivizing employers to hire them. But in its 87-year lifespan, the practice has subjected people with disabilities to unliveable pay and reinforced attitudes that they cannot meaningfully contribute or integrate into the workplace. James described his frustration after hearing these sentiments espoused by parents and other proclaimed supporters of people with disabilities during a Department of Labor listening session on subminimum wage.

“I was really infuriated just by the ways in which this was spoken about, as people with disabilities have one opportunity and one opportunity only, and that is to work in a sheltered workshop, to get paid pennies on the dollar of anyone else, and as soon as you take that away, they’ll have nothing left,” recalled James. “We needed to have that culture shift.”

In 2020, Maryland became the second state to eliminate subminimum wage after adopting the Ken Capone Equal Employment Act, legislation championed by People On the Go that phased out the practice statewide. Since then, Mat said that more people are having conversations about how to better integrate people with disabilities into Maryland workplaces.

“But we still see rampant unemployment and under-employment for people with disabilities,” he noted. “Overall, unfortunately, we still see at the national level that it’s kind of an uphill battle.”

Although 16 states have banned the practice in recent years, nearly 40,000 Americans with disabilities were paid subminimum wage in 2024. And in Maryland, the unemployment rate for people with disabilities is, at 9.6%, still nearly three times that for people without disabilities, according to the Center for Disability Research’s most recent dataset from 2023. A staggering 23.7% of Marylanders with disabilities also experienced poverty in 2023, a rate only slightly lower than the 24.2% of Americans with disabilities nationwide who experienced poverty in 2023––translating to nearly 5.4 million people across all 50 states. Both in Maryland and nationally, this persistence of economic hardship for people with disabilities is tied not only to low wages and employment barriers, but also to inaccessible healthcare.

Healthcare

“We have a system where we say we want people to work, but we actively discourage those things,” said Mat, who relies on a Maryland-wide Medicaid buy-in program known as Employed Individuals with Disabilities (EID) for staff support. EID, like many Medicaid buy-in programs across the country, provides medical assistance waivers to workers with disabilities whose incomes surpass the Medicaid eligibility limit—which, at 138% of the Federal Poverty Line in most states, often disincentivizes people with disabilities from seeking higher incomes or saving money, as doing so could disqualify them from Medicaid.

In early 2024, Maryland scrapped EID’s income eligibility limit altogether, giving people with disabilities more flexibility to pursue higher incomes without sacrificing their healthcare access, in a major policy win for advocacy groups like People On the Go. But participants’ assets are still capped at $10,000, and the program’s application process is far from perfect, said Mat.

“It’s very invasive, and it’s also very easy to slip up and make accidental mistakes. I’ve heard of situations where people have gone to recertify, and they’ve been over, like, a dollar, and they haven’t been able to keep their benefits until that gets straightened out,” said Mat.

Monthly fees, rigorous paperwork, and demands to submit bank statements, retirement accounts, and medical records all contribute to these programs’ relatively low enrollment rate: as of early 2025, fewer than 200,000 Americans total were covered by the Medicaid buy-in programs that exist in 47 states. Now, Mat noted, accessing these programs may become increasingly difficult under new federal policies, such as the Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which will require enrollees to recertify their eligibility every six months, instead of annually.

Disability advocates fear, moreover, that this undercutting of healthcare access fits into a recent backsliding of their community’s resources and civil rights. James reported that neurodivergent individuals are increasingly worried about privacy violations, amid HealthvSecretary RFK Jr.’s efforts to amass private medical records to research Autism and peddle unfounded claims linking the condition to vaccines. James, Tracy, and Mat also cited rising fears of institutionalization among people with disabilities, stoked by Trump’s executive orders calling for the institutionalization of homeless individuals with mental health and substance use disorders. Historically, the institutionalization of people with disabilities has been notoriously linked to abuse and neglect.

“It’s very Orwellian. It’s very scary. And it is a symptom of the idea that people with disabilities can’t do for themselves, that there are two categories of people... those with disabilities and those without, and people with disabilities need to be protected, taken care of, and otherwise done for,” said James. “Once you hit that point that there’s that segregation in society, everything else at that point becomes possible.”

Tracy added that new generations may not realize how much effort has gone into ending inhumane treatment of and expanding resources for people with disabilities over the years.

“Most important for me right now is that the younger generations understand that there’s so much that they could lose,” said Tracy. “All people deserve the right to live and work and build the kind of lives they want in the community, and I just worry that as things are slipping away slowly, people may not be paying as much attention.”

Artificial Intelligence

Beyond federal policy, Mat identified one other recent development with deep potential to impact people with disabilities: Artificial Intelligence (AI), which over the last year has swept through American workplaces, widely disrupting the entry-level job market and leaving an especially big question mark over what the future holds for people with disabilities.

“What does [AI] mean overall for our work and the things that we can do in terms of employment opportunities? I think we have that in common with people that don’t have disabilities,” said Mat. “But I think it could be even potentially more devastating for us, if you have somebody who has a work from home job, for example, doing customer service, and now he has an AI agent that’s going to come in and take that work.”

At the same time, James and Mat noted that AI has been a major asset for people with disabilities in the workplace, helping organizations staffed by people with disabilities––such as People On the Go––refine documents and complete other tasks.

“I really appreciate the access that AI brings,” acknowledged James. “There is the idea of us being able to use the tool and to be able to have the education to be able to use it.”

Studies by disability rights groups have identified benefits and downsides to AI’s integration for people with disabilities in healthcare, employment, and other realms, capturing the community’s dual apprehension and excitement toward the technology. But as AI perforates American industries at whirlwind speed with relatively little oversight, advocates like Mat, Tracy, and James worry that people with disabilities will, once again, be excluded from a policy conversation with significant potential to both help and hurt their community.

“We need a more compassionate system,” emphasized Mat. “We need a system that works at what is the role of people with disabilities, not only in the workplace, but what is their role with things like AI and emerging technologies. We’re not doing that right now, at least in my view.”

Community Engagement

Self-advocacy, said Mat, Tracy, and James, is at the heart of People On the Go’s mission to create a more compassionate system. From providing STIR training to community members, to influencing policy at the Maryland State House, their work embraces the idea that uplifting the voices of people with disabilities is the most important tool to achieve both personal wellbeing and systemic change.

“The community that does for itself will always do it best, better than a community that doesn’t do for itself,” said James. “I like the idea that we get to stand up and say, we're doing it. We're showing what it looks like when we do take charge of ourselves, when we do things on our own.”

People On the Go, which began as a grassroots advisory panel in 1989, recently received federal recognition as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, an exciting next step that the group’s leadership anticipates will allow them to employ more staff with disabilities. Going forward, they plan to use their nonprofit status to help other organizations integrate people with disabilities into their workforces and to continue spreading the values that People On the Go taught them throughout Maryland.

“As People On the Go taught me, labels are for jars, not people,” said Tracy. “And people really should be allowed to grow and become whoever they want to be with the right support.”

“I came to People On the Go thinking perfection was the ideal and learning that not only is perfection not achievable, it's not even the real goal,” reflected James. “It's to go out there and do and try and make mistakes and learn and to do better again. And we could learn a lot as a society from People On the Go from that.”

To learn more about People On the Go, visit their website at https://www.pogmd.org/.

James Orman is also the founder of Autism On the Go, an advocacy and support group for Autistic and neurodivergent individuals, which you can learn more about by visiting https://autismonthego.org/.