As we close out National Disability Employment Awareness Month, a top issue on the mind of many employment justice advocates is the rollback of federal civil rights protections, including efforts to increase employment opportunities for people with disabilities.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, only about 40% of disabled adults of working age are currently employed, compared to 75% of their non-disabled counterparts. This disparity speaks to the significant systemic barriers that keep disabled people out of the workforce, and why the education and advocacy that takes place around National Disability Employment Awareness Month is so vital.
Over the past 50 years, laws have been put into place on the national, state and local level to protect people with disabilities in the workplace and ensure that employers hire and promote disabled people. But just because a law hasn’t technically been repealed doesn’t mean its protections can’t be threatened.
Case in point: Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which is under attack now.
The bill was a hard-fought legislative victory for the disability rights movement because it requires employers to work proactively to bring more disabled people into the workforce. It was put into place to specifically address the disproportionate rates of unemployment for people with disabilities—and it was working. But those gains are now at risk of being undone.
What is Section 503
The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 was the first major federal civil rights law protecting people with disabilities. It prohibits disability-related discrimination in federally funded programs, as well as companies or organizations that do business with the federal government (known as federal contractors). The bill required removing access barriers in employment, public spaces, buildings, and transportation. This law predates the more well-known Americans with Disabilities Act, which was signed in 1990.
Each section of the Rehabilitation Act lays out different protections. Section 503 requires federal contractors to take proactive steps to employ people with disabilities. It also prohibits disability-based employment discrimination and requires reasonable accommodations for workers and job applicants.
In 2014, new Section 503 rules were put into place to address how little disability representation in the federal workforce had changed since 1973. The 2014 rules set a 7% affirmative action benchmark for people with disabilities in employers’ workforces and applicant pools and required companies to track and report this data to the federal government. The goal was not a quota, but contractors below the 7% were expected to investigate their barriers to disability representation and were subject to Department of Labor compliance audits.
Now just over a decade since these new rules went into place, disability representation in the federal workforce has improved, up from 34.6% in 2014 to more than 40% in September 2026. Many large employers held campaigns around disability pride to encourage employees to self-disclose their disability status and create a culture that openly talked about and even celebrated. In short, Section 503 was making progress.
The Loss of Hard-Fought Protections
In August, the U.S. Department of Labor changed how Section 503 is implemented. While anti-discrimination protections didn’t go away, federal contractors are no longer required to measure or report on their efforts to employ people with disabilities. No more tracking the disability status of employees and applicants, no analyzing that data on a company-level, and no more reporting this information to the government to be held accountable.
Advocates believe that because employers are no longer required to have a 7% hiring goal or track how many disabled people apply or work for their company, there will be no incentive to hire people with disabilities or work to build inclusive workplaces.
What We Can Do Now
While these regulatory rollbacks haven’t officially modified the law, they have changed how Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act will be carried out in practice. With roughly 3.7 million people employed by federal contractors nationwide, the “7% disabled” benchmark offered a huge opportunity for the community when it went into effect in 2014. Now over a decade later, this summer’s rollbacks mean that the law technically requires employers to work toward employing more people with disabilities—but offers no penalties or accountability if they don’t.
This article from Disability Belongs lays out ways to continue the work, including creating partnerships with disability-focused organizations, ensuring an accessible hiring process and honoring applicant and employee requests for accommodations, and more.
How Access Living is Responding
Our economic justice policy work focuses on removing barriers that keep people with disabilities from accessing employment and economic opportunity. Recently, Illinois House Bill 4758 was signed into law, an Access Living-supported initiative that prohibits employers from requiring a driver’s license in job postings when driving is not an essential function of the job. For people who do not drive because of a disability, unnecessary license requirements can shut them out of jobs they are otherwise qualified to perform. By removing this barrier, the law helps make hiring more equitable: applicants can be considered for their skills and ability to do the work, rather than whether they hold a driver’s license. This is one change that advances a more inclusive workforce and greater access to economic opportunity for people with disabilities in Illinois.
Building the coalitions and consensus necessary to create new protections takes years of effort. So it’s disheartening to see how quickly rule changes can undo that work. But our rights still exist. And we must continue to speak up and fight for the protections that every disabled person deserves.
References and further reading:
National Organization on Disability: Impending Changes to Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act
ADA National Network: Factsheet on Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act Rules