The Trump Administration proposes eliminating longstanding regulations promoting the employment of people with disabilities.
In early July, the Trump Administration proposed rescinding a long-standing regulation that requires federal contractors to establish a 7 percent utilization goal for the employment of qualified individuals with disabilities for each of their job groups—or their entire workforce if they have 100 or fewer employees. Job groups are the combined job titles for workers with similar duties, wage rates, and opportunities. When the public comment period on the proposal closed on September 17, just over 600 comments had been proposed.
The program the Administration wants to repeal without replacement has operated since 2013, following years of development. As early as 1979, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), an agency within the U.S. Department of Labor, considered adding numerical goals to the regulations implementing section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which directs the OFCCP to require that government contractors “take affirmative action to employ and advance in employment qualified individuals with disabilities.”
The OFCCP initially delayed issuing a regulation providing for numerical goals. The idea percolated until 2010, when the OFCCP observed that even though section 503 had been in effect since 1973, workforce participation by people with disabilities remained low, and unemployment of disabled workers remained disproportionately high. The OFCCP declared that according to data from the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, just 21.8 percent of working-age people with certain functional disabilities were in the workforce in 2010, compared to 70.1 percent of working-age individuals without those disabilities. And the unemployment rate for working-age individuals with these disabilities was 14.8 percent, compared to 9.4 percent for working-age individuals without disabilities.
After soliciting comments from the public, the OFCCP proposed aspirational job targets in 2011, then considered still more comments before issuing a final rule in 2013. The rule did not go into effect until 2014.
The 7 percent utilization goal in the rule figure was not randomly chosen. The OFCCP based it on an analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey. The survey indicated that 5.7 percent of the civilian labor force has a disability. The OFCCP added 1.7 percentage points based on the survey’s count of individuals with a disability who identified themselves as having an occupation but not currently working, then rounded the 7.4 percent sum down to avoid a false impression of precision.
Since its implementation, the utilization goal program survived a lawsuit in federal court by the Associated Builders and Contractors, a government contractor trade group, claiming that the program was arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act. Early survey data established that contractors were successfully complying with the program. The Trump Administration did not try to evaluate the program’s effectiveness before undertaking to end it.
The need for the program has not diminished. In 2024, only 22.7 percent of disabled, working-age people were employed, compared to 65.5 percent of non-disabled working-age people.
Unsurprisingly, people with disabilities are disproportionately poor. The University of New Hampshire Center for Research on Disability reported that, in 2022, 24.9 percent of people with disabilities ages 18 to 64 years were living in poverty, while in contrast, 10.1 percent of individuals without disabilities were living in poverty.
The Trump Administration justifies the proposed rescission by arguing that the current program interferes with job applicants’ and employees’ confidentiality rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) by asking whether they wish to voluntarily identify themselves as having a disability, so that employers can determine whether they are meeting the utilization goals and provide accommodations where needed. More than ten years ago, however, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Office of Legal Counsel rejected the idea that giving the option to self-identify violates privacy protections in the ADA.
More tellingly, the Trump Administration’s proposal relies on the Administration’s attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in areas other than disability law. The proposal notes that, in January 2025, President Trump issued an executive order on “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” which revoked President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1965 executive order that “prohibited covered contractors from discriminating in employment based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and national origin and required them to take affirmative action.”
Controversy surrounds affirmative action on the basis of race and sex, but similar controversy never developed surrounding programs that promote employment of people with disabilities. The courts have applied rational-basis review to disability-specific government rules, unlike the stricter review they apply to race- and sex-specific provisions, and the U.S. Congress has recognized the need to take positive steps to bring people who have disabilities into the workforce by requiring employers to afford reasonable accommodations in Title I of the ADA. Congress directly ordered the OFCCP to require contractors to take affirmative action to employ people with disabilities when it passed section 503. The utilization goals are the most logical way to enforce the contractors’ duties.
In its effort to eradicate DEI efforts related to race, sex, and other classifications, the Trump Administration appears to have focused on, and decided to destroy, a program to promote employment for people who have disabilities. The utilization goals program stands to become collateral damage in the Administration’s war on DEI.
Ill-considered attacks on needed disability initiatives do no one any credit. If the proposed rescission goes through, it will be up to Congress to tell the Administration to restore the disability utilization targets that have operated successfully for a dozen years.
