Sponsors (16)
Official title: To amend Federal law to remove the terms "mentally retarded" and "mental retardation", and for other purposes.
Introduced May 15, 2025 by Pete Sessions · Last progress May 15, 2025
The bill modernizes federal language to reduce stigma and improve dignity for people with disabilities and clarifies statutory wording, but it mainly makes semantic changes that impose administrative costs, risk temporary confusion or litigation during implementation, and do not create new substantive legal protections.
People with intellectual and other disabilities will be referred to using modern, respectful, person-first terminology across multiple federal statutes and regulations, reducing stigma and improving dignity in federal law.
Federal agencies and programs will have clearer, updated statutory language and more consistent definitions across regulations, reducing legal ambiguity for administrators and beneficiaries.
The amendments are framed as semantic/terminology changes so existing benefits, eligibility, and legal rights remain unchanged, helping protect recipients from unintended loss of benefits.
Federal agencies, states, and local entities will incur administrative costs to revise regulations, forms, guidance, and training to reflect the new terminology.
If agencies and states do not update implementing rules uniformly, inconsistent terminology across programs could create temporary confusion for providers, beneficiaries, and administrators.
Because the changes are limited to terminology, people with disabilities will not gain new substantive legal protections or benefits that could have come from substantive definition changes.
Based on analysis of 4 sections of legislative text.
Replaces outdated terms like "mental retardation" with "intellectual disability" across multiple federal statutes and directs agencies to update regulations; states no substantive legal change.
Replaces outdated, stigmatizing phrases such as "mental retardation" and "mentally retarded" in multiple federal statutes with modern, person-first language like "intellectual disability" and "individuals with intellectual disabilities." The bill requires federal agencies to treat prior statutory and regulatory language as referring to the updated terms when they amend implementing regulations, and it clarifies these edits are strictly terminology changes that do not alter coverage, eligibility, rights, responsibilities, or program definitions.