Real Safety AI Foundation / Research

Disability, Accessibility, and Civil Rights

The Check That Cannot Collect: Disability Rights, Remedial Retrenchment, and the Limits of the Federal Executive

Publisher: Real Safety AI Foundation

Working draft. Not peer reviewed.

Written
August 2026
Version
v0.6
Pages
36
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Abstract

A new answer is circulating in separation of powers scholarship. To the fear that the demise of agency independence concentrates all federal enforcement in the President, the answer points to the enforcers Congress has always kept outside Article II: state governments and private attorneys general. On this account, most recently developed by Ernest Young, the implementation and enforcement of national law were never the President's alone, and the actors who hold the residual authority can check an executive that stands down. This Article tests that answer against the field where it should work best, and shows that it fails there for a reason the account's own diagnostic cannot detect. Disability rights is among the most privatized enforcement fields in federal law, yet its private channel has been defunded from the remedies side while its standing side stayed open: no damages at all under ADA Title III, no catalyst fees after Buckhannon, no emotional distress damages under Section 504 and Section 1557 after Cummings, and the Cummings rule extended to Title II by the Second, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits. Because the diffusion account measures the health of private enforcement through standing doctrine alone, it reports a healthy channel where the channel is starved. The state channel fares no better: Congress has deputized state attorneys general across consumer protection statutes, and never in the ADA. The federal channel, meanwhile, traded a mandatory complaint-processing duty for prosecutorial discretion in the 2026 reorganization. The Article proposes three repairs within the diffusion account's own logic, and offers the 2012 disability treaty ratification record as interpretive support for the first of them.

Keywords

  • civil rights
  • administrative law
  • private enforcement
  • private attorney general
  • parens patriae
  • enforcement discretion
  • statutory damages
  • Cummings v. Premier Rehab Keller
  • disability discrimination
  • accessibility
  • separation of powers
  • cooperative federalism

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Suggested citation

Gilly, Travis. "The Check That Cannot Collect: Disability Rights, Remedial Retrenchment, and the Limits of the Federal Executive." Real Safety AI Foundation Working Draft, August 2026. https://realsafetyai.org/research/check-cannot-collect/

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SSRN version

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