For Alicia Deal, disability advocacy is deeply personal, forged through years of fighting the very workplace barriers she works to dismantle.
Deaf and hard of hearing since childhood, Deal later learned she has ADHD and is autistic. She says she has had to fight for basic workplace accommodations, such as caption phones, part-time remote work, and quiet workspaces with low lighting.
Her personal experience mirrors a broader crisis. After taking time off to recover from an illness nearly three years ago, she has been unable to find work despite holding advanced degrees.
"Disabled people are vastly and devastatingly underemployed and unemployed in numbers larger than the average population," said Deal, 44, who was recently appointed to the Texas
Council for Developmental Disabilities.
A sweeping regulatory overhaul launched by President Donald Trump's administration has eliminated disability hiring targets for federal contractors, rolling back longstanding guidelines designed to boost hiring among people with disabilities like Deal.
Under the Department of Labor’s final rule, contractors are no longer encouraged to meet a 7% workforce benchmark or required to track disability demographic data.
Deal says the federal hiring benchmarks were a critical lifeline for financial independence. Stripping away those targets, she warns, risks triggering a domino effect across the private sector, leaving disabled job seekers even more exposed to discrimination and threatening a decade of workplace progress.
"Providing accommodations and hiring us is not a handout or special treatment," Deal said. "The federal government leads by example and this sets a poor example of how to treat the disabled community."
Labor officials: 7% rule was illegal quota
Federal officials have said the core protections against workplace discrimination remain in place, framing the decision as part of a wider effort to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives deemed unlawful by the White House. Central to the decision is eliminating the 7% benchmark that they say functioned as an illegal quota.
Dropping mandatory self-identification forms also resolves legal friction, according to the Labor Department. Asking applicants about disabilities before making a job offer conflicted with federal civil rights law under the Americans with Disabilities Act – a contention that disability advocates dispute.
The federal government continues to investigate complaints, provides tools and resources to employers and remains committed to empowering "Americans with disabilities to be productive members of the workforce," the Labor Department told USA TODAY in a statement. What’s more, federal officials contend the new rule cuts government red tape and saves federal contractors more than $80 million a year.
Without mandatory targets and data tracking, federal contractors may scale back programs, warned Sriram Narayanan, a professor of supply chain management at Michigan State University.
"Eliminating this measurement will create challenges because it can be construed as a signal to deprioritize even if organizations were not penalized for not meeting the numbers," Narayanan said. "Without active monitoring on the radar and targets, I would expect disability hiring to lose priority inside many firms."
Keely Cat-Wells, founder of the disability inclusion platform Making Space, fears the move will increase systemic inequality by making it largely invisible in the workplace.
"If you cannot track something, it becomes much harder to demonstrate where systems are falling short or pinpoint where the problems are," Cat-Wells said. "What gets counted gets funded and no data can mean no disparity to point at."
Decades of steep employment barriers
From pervasive hiring bias and inaccessible workplaces to unemployment rates that historically remain twice as high as those of non-disabled adults, disabled workers have long confronted steep barriers to employment.
In recent years, the tight labor market and the widespread shift to remote and flexible work arrangements during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as technological advancements, boosted job prospects. But workplace challenges are mounting again with return-to-office mandates that reverse remote work accommodations.
Sophie-Anais Renois, 27, a speech-language pathologist from Long Island who lives with disabilities herself while dedicating her career to helping others navigate them, says the elimination of hiring goals for contractors could further isolate one of the nation’s most vulnerable populations. More than 35 million people in the United States labor force identify as disabled, according to federal statistics.
Working with clients across their entire lifespan, she witnesses daily the challenges disabled individuals face when job hunting.
"There will be companies who will continue to hire people without these guidelines," Renois said. "But whenever we lose rules, guidelines, or parameters from the government, companies will run with it. It’s one less thing they have to do."
Obama 7% disabled hiring goal
Since the 1960s, federal contractors – which employ one in five American workers – have been held to higher standards for equal opportunity in hiring, training and promotion.
The federal policy requiring government contractors to aim for a 7% workforce participation rate among workers with disabilities was a major shift when it was introduced over a decade ago.
Its roots date back to Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which mandated that companies holding federal contracts or subcontracts take proactive, affirmative steps to recruit, hire, promote and retain qualified individuals with disabilities. But for decades, it did not specify a target.
"We know people would like to work. We’ve been confirming that for ages. And many people are qualified, but they get stopped at the door," said Susanne Bruyère, academic director of the Yang-Tan Institute on Employment and Disability at Cornell.
In 2013, the Labor Department took steps to combat disproportionately high unemployment rates among working-age disabled adults and to ensure qualified candidates got an equal shot at jobs underwritten by federal tax dollars.
When President Barack Obama's administration established an "aspirational utilization" goal of 7% across each federal contractor’s workforce, it "felt like a compromise," said Charles-Edouard Catherine, vice president of corporate and government relations at the National Organization on Disability.
"We all know that people with disabilities represent much more of the population. It felt very soft, but it was a step in the right direction," Catherine said. "As someone who is blind, I can tell you that it is significantly harder to get job interviews, to get a job, to get all those opportunities. And once we have them, we – people with disabilities – tend to stay longer and work harder than the average worker because of that lack of opportunity."
Employers that fell short of the 7% target were required to outline a plan to reach it. Over time, what was once a good-faith effort turned into a corporate objective, researchers say.
Technology companies launched hiring initiatives tailored to neurodivergent job seekers. Microsoft, for example, removed typical interview hurdles that often disqualify autistic and other neurodivergent applicants by assessing hands-on and problem-solving skills.
Soon after opening, one Walgreens distribution center reported more than a third of employees had a disability, such as Down syndrome or speech impairments. The accommodations in hiring and job procedures spread to other facilities as part of a yearslong initiative.
The federal hiring goal that took effect in March 2014 delivered results across the board, said Maria Town, president and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities who formerly served as a disability employment advisor in the Obama administration.
Employers offered a voluntary self-disclosure option for applicants and existing employees, resulting in a greater understanding of how many people with disabilities are in the workforce, Town said.
"Federal contractors began tracking disability data in a more earnest way and could gain insights into how to improve their labor force," she said.
While the 7% goal was never a rigid quota, it prompted employers to identify potential barriers to employment, said Michael Brogioli, executive director of the nonprofit advocacy organization TASH.
"We are concerned about what happens when employers are no longer required to collect the data or measure themselves against a common benchmark," Brogioli said. "Without data, it becomes much harder to know whether efforts are actually resulting in applicants and hires of individuals with disabilities."
Disability advocates say the Obama-era policy once had broad bipartisan backing, with Republicans advocating for greater workplace support for employees with disabilities, particularly military veterans.
"This administration is fundamentally hostile to the idea that there are people who need extra emphasis in order to experience equity and equality," said Andy Imparato, a former federal advisor who now leads Disability Rights California, the nation’s largest disability rights group. "In the disability context, I feel like we get swept up in a broader effort across the administration to treat everybody the same."
Did federal goals boost disabled hiring?
While disability employment rates saw modest but steady gains since 2014, the influence of the federal government’s 7% rule is widely debated. There is little evidence that it made a difference. Researchers say isolating the impact is difficult as many factors helped drive growing workforce participation.
But what is clear? Government mandates "can help move the needle" by driving greater awareness and accountability, leading employers to focus resources on recruiting, hiring, and retaining disabled workers, said John O'Neill, director of the Center for Employment and Disability Research at the Kessler Foundation.
Closing the persistent gap between disabled and non-disabled employment depends on sustained, intentional corporate policies, said Douglas Kruse, co-director of Rutgers University’s Program for Disability Research.
His recent research on large U.S. employers found that targeted recruiting, structured mentorship and formal accommodation programs led to gains in hiring and retention.
"We have good evidence that federal contractors are more likely to implement policies to increase opportunities for people with disabilities," Kruse said.
For Sonny Wasilowski, federal hiring initiatives served as a turning point.
A 45-year-old compliance analyst from Minnesota who is profoundly deaf and uses American Sign Language, Wasilowski credits a targeted hiring drive with landing his role at the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service in 2011. One of his early assignments was driving self-identification among thousands of food inspectors.
"I have experienced significantly more difficulty getting through the hiring process than succeeding once I am employed," Wasilowski said. "Once an employer hires me, they are generally prepared to provide appropriate accommodations. The bigger challenge is getting through the door in the first place."
While Wasilowski supports targeted efforts for communities facing steep employment barriers, he advocates for regular evaluations to keep programs effective.
"For me, the question is whether eliminating these guidelines is actually an improvement," he said. "If there is a more effective way to achieve the same goals, I'm open to that. I would simply want to understand what is replacing it and whether the new approach will continue to create meaningful opportunities."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump rolls back federal hiring rules. Are disabled workers at risk?
