Labor Department moves to end disability hiring goal for federal contractors

Back in 2013, the Obama administration introduced a low-profile but deeply impactful rule for federal contractors: to remain compliant with Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act, the legions of firms contracting with the federal government would have to work towards a staff that was at least 7 percent disabled. That target, which went into effect in March 2014, was designed to address hiring disparities and biases that factored into disabled people’s disproportionate unemployment rate.

For more than a decade, those Obama-era targets led to more hiring of disabled employees, countering wage and employment gaps and bringing disabled workers more economic independence. Now, that’s likely to change.

On July 1, the Department of Labor under Lori Chavez-DeRemer introduced a proposed rule that would both end the disability hiring goal for federal contractors and the practice of collecting information about it—supposedly on the basis that those practices violate Americans with Disabilities Act “restrictions on pre-conditional job offer disability inquiries.”

The public comment period for the Labor Department’s proposed rule ends on September 2, after which the department appears likely to put it in practice.

Anupa Iyer Geevarghese, who was the deputy director of policy in the Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contractor Compliance Programs until January, disagrees with the Trump Labor Department’s assessment, calling the move “tragic.” “Instead of expanding opportunities for people with disabilities, we’re rescinding them,” she said.

“When you strip those two provisions away, what is left of [Section] 503, and what are they actually enforcing?,” Geevarghese said. “Anything that gives you a strong basis for enforcement is sort of whittled away.”

Geevarghese’s other question: where this rule is coming from, given the lack of lobbying against it. “The contractor community wasn’t coming out there and opposing 503,” she said.

A 7 percent goal for workers with disabilities is reasonable, not burdensome, Geevarghese said, and hasn’t drawn wide objections from employers—especially given the growing number of people with disabilities who work.

But the Trump administration, especially in its second term, has been persistently hostile to disabled people across the board, from immigration and education to labor and civil rights, sometimes in high-profile attacks but often through procedural changes that slip under the radar. The rule to end disability contracting goals was introduced during a frenetic period when disability advocates were trying to prevent major cuts to Medicaid. (Nor was it lost on Geevarghese that the department’s proposed rule was introduced on the first day of Disability Pride Month.)

Sarah von Schrader, of Cornell University’s Yang-Tan Institute on Employment and Disability, surveyed the implementation of Section 503 rules in a 2018 report, finding that it led to the expansion of disability-focused hiring and recruitment programs, partly through new partnerships with community organizations.

That also incentivized workers to acknowledge disabilities, a valuable step in securing accommodations and better working conditions—otherwise a challenge in an environment where “there’s really no benefit to the individual to self-identifying,” von Schrader noted.

Other Trump administration attacks that harm disabled people, like its plans to gut Medicaid, are longstanding goals that date back to the president’s first term; attacks such as the current one, targeting hiring opportunity programs, have become a more defining characteristic of his second. During Trump’s first term, Geevarghese said, the Department of Labor Office of Federal Contractor Compliance Programs director Craig Leen “did these in-depth assessments of employer practices,” even including “areas where compliance needs to be improved.”

There’s nothing stopping federal contractors from continuing to try to meet such targets. “I would think a smart employer would want to continue with some of those with some of those practices that they’ve seen be successful,” said Cornell’s von Schrader.

Such programs, von Schrader contends, are “always about merit.” “Nobody’s hiring people just out of the goodness of their heart,” she continued. “They’re doing it because they want really good, qualified employees.”