This is an opinion column.

It’s an imperfectly perfect storm for vulnerable children and families in Alabama right now.

Alabama’s only known investigator in the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights got the axe last week from a dreaded email in the night.

Not because Victoria DeLano did anything wrong, as far as we can tell. She was just a probationary employee who started in December, working in an office with a name that would surely irk the bullDOGEr-in-chief. She was new enough to her job that she could be excised without qualm, or consideration, or concern over consequences.

OCR is an easy one for the slashers and burners, a gimme for chaos-bringers who think the world will be fair and right when people who work to assure fairness and rightness are torn like tumors from the governmental body.

Yippee Ky-yay little DOGEy.

But man, at what cost do we save a little cash?

Alabama is tough enough for children and adults with special needs, and for those who advocate for them.

DeLano’s office was already overwhelmed, hearing and trying to respond to complaints and questions in schools and colleges, libraries and trade schools, anywhere that gets money from the U.S. Department of Education.

On any given day DeLano said she was the federal voice who tried to make sure a school, say, checked blood sugar in a kid with diabetes. She was the one you complained to if a school failed to live up to Individualized Education Programs to teach students with disabilities and keep them safe.

She was the one you’d call if you or your child was harassed for being … whoever they are.

She said she is still fighting her firing, and is represented by the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252. But she said she is gutted about losing a job she loved, and worried about what will happen in Alabama.

She spent years at the Alabama Disabilities Advocacy Program and blew the whistle on problems she saw there before taking the federal OCR job.

“I’m horrified. I’m really horrified, because I’ve seen the lack of oversight we have in our state,” she said.

It is an imperfectly perfect storm, swirling toward Alabama’s most vulnerable people.

Let’s face it. OCR itself is understaffed and too slow to act. And with its lone Alabama investigator gone, an already pressed Atlanta office that serves four states will be pressed further.

ADAP, the federally funded agency that is supposed to perform similar functions for Alabama, is struggling to keep up. It has been flagged by the Administration on Disabilities for its own failures to communicate with clients, among other things.

Even with both agencies staffed and trying, parents often wait years for results, and sometimes get none.

Dealing with Alabama schools is enough of a struggle, Demopolis parent Nikki Carter, an experienced special education advocate, told my colleague Rebecca Griesbach: “When it comes to discrimination, retaliation, and failure to provide services, we are routinely ignored or referred to agencies that take years to act—if they act at all.”

Maybe that’s the goal. Instead of providing more resources to an undermanned effort to support people with disabilities, we tear it all down. Brick by brick, person by person.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall is already on the side of overturning a law that demands certain disabled students get a shot at public education. State lawmakers are contemplating bills that scare the bejeezus out of parents who fear they could make it hard-to-get services for children even harder to get.

And, of course, the U.S. Department of Education, which has funded and watched over efforts to serve all students, may not even be around for long.

We are so quick to save a buck that we can’t even fathom what we, and who, we might lose. Including ourselves.

John Archibald is a two-time Pulitzer winner.