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On January 22, Josh Josa, who is deaf, was put on administrative leave from his job at the United States Agency for International Development. Josa worked in USAID’s office of DEIA, or Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility, helping in part to make sure that the work supported by the agency’s $40 billion in global development aid—prior to the Trump administration’s destruction of USAID—was inclusive to prospective and current workers with disabilities.
“Our access to our government systems was severed, so we were basically in the dark for a few months, and we kept getting different memos with different [reduction in force] dates,” Josa said.
By the time he was laid off in April, it was expected.
But Josa is still unemployed. “Since this new administration took office, the unemployment rate for people with disabilities has increased at triple the normal rate of unemployment,” said Josa, who worked for the federal government for over a decade. “People with disabilities, it’s harder for them to find jobs.”
Under Trump, “the unemployment rate for people with disabilities has increased at triple the normal rate.”
In my conversations with more than a dozen former federal employees with disabilities who were laid off under the second Trump administration, a common theme emerged: They found the federal government to be an extremely accommodating employer. That added an extra layer of grief to their terminations—would their next job actually support them?
That’s especially true amid intense White House pushes for deregulation and against workers’ rights. October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month, but where they might have been participating in celebratory events at their former federal jobs in a normal year, laid-off disabled federal workers are wondering what’s next for them—and reminiscing on what it was like to work for an accessible employer.
Until the new administration came to power, Vanessa McMains’ job “was perfect.” McMains started working for the National Institutes of Health as a science writer in February 2024, after developing disabilities including fibromyalgia, following repeated Covid infections. At NIH, where McMains enjoyed writing pieces on topics like the molecular and cellular mechanisms behind bodily systems, accommodations for remote work helped her manage her symptoms—and the agency’s work culture, she said, was very understanding.
“They were just like, ‘We want you to be your best, and if you don’t feel well enough to come in, don’t come in,’” McMains recalled.
But McMains was terminated in February—and so were her bosses.
Sara Fernandez, who was the acting deputy chief of staff for the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, received a reduction-in-force notice in late May. Fernandez, who has dwarfism and ADHD, felt anger and shock—and relief.
“The first few months of the new administration, it was hard to get things done,” said Fernandez, who worked for the federal government for a decade, at both DHS and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. “It was hard to see a lot of our work being rolled back.” She used the summer following her layoff to spend time with her five and eight-year-old kids, but now plans to seek work again.
Brianne Burger, who is Deaf, worked for the federal government for close to two decades including jobs with the Department of Transportation and the Department of Health and Human Services. Before September, Burger oversaw congressionally funded special programs in the Department of Education that serve Deaf, Blind, DeafBlind and hard-of-hearing students.
Among its accommodations, Burger said, the Department of Education “made sure that all deaf employees had a government-issued tablet” that could be used for captioning and video relay phone calls, and provided ASL interpreters for meetings, which Josa also had access to at USAID.
“It was hard to see a lot of our work being rolled back.”
Fernandez, at DHS, was provided a specialized ergonomic chair that fit her stature. She did not have formal accommodations for her ADHD and mental health conditions—but she also didn’t need them, she said, because her supervisors “just had an open dialogue.”
With its mass terminations of disabled employees, Fernandez and Josa said, the federal government isn’t just harming workers but losing out on the creativity that disabled people bring to the workforce.
“People with disabilities also bring a unique way of looking at things and thinking, because we already don’t fit what is considered normal,” Josa said, “So we always have to be thinking, ‘How do I do this differently?’”
Disabled people in government tend, for one thing, to emphasize the importance of accessibility where non-disabled people might not. “A public event with interpreters or captioning,” Fernandez said, “is probably going to be an afterthought”—and may not happen at all without disabled staff, especially given right-wing attacks on those services.
That’s part of maintaining a representative federal workforce: some 70 million American adults live with disabilities, and it’s “important for the government to show that they’re just as diverse as the people they serve,” Burger said.
“It’s sad—the federal government was a leader for many years in hiring people with disabilities,” Fernandez said. “The disabled population is where you’ll [find] such bright, successful, creative people, and we change the world.”
