The federal government is striving to be a model for employing people with disabilities, but retention is a problem

Larysa Kautz said that both of her parents, in addition to being immigrants, had “invisible disabilities” that limited their workplace opportunities. 

“My dad probably would have been diagnosed with Asperger's [syndrome] if he had grown up 20 years later,” she said. 

When his job required more digital skills, Kautz said, “nobody wanted to invest in training in the guy that was weird and that had tics.” 

Likewise, her mom, who has borderline personality disorder, was a registered nurse in Poland. 

“But [she] was never allowed a chance to sort of figure out how to do that here,” Kautz said. “And part of that was because nobody would look at accommodations or inclusion or accessibility.” 

Today, Kautz is the president and CEO of Melwood, a nonprofit that aims to expand work opportunities for people with disabilities, particularly in the federal government. 

In her experience, everybody agrees that hiring people with disabilities is the right thing to do, but organizations are uncertain about how to do it effectively. 

Despite numerous laws and requirements for agencies to promote equal employment opportunities for federal employees with disabilities, the government’s own data show that such employees’ workplace experiences lag behind their counterparts without disabilities. 

Additionally, stakeholders argue that a lack of awareness among federal leaders about policies regarding disabilities in the government workforce, especially in contracting, hurts their implementation. 

Retention

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has found that people with disabilities are more likely to voluntarily and involuntarily leave federal service than people without disabilities.  

EEOC in 2017 issued a final rule titled Affirmative Action for Individuals with Disabilities in the Federal Government that requires agencies to take steps to incrementally increase the number of their employees with disabilities. 

In fiscal 2018, the first full year of data under the rule, the agency found that the federal voluntary separation rate for people with targeted disabilities (generally those with “manifest disabilities,” e.g. deafness, blindness, significant mobility impairments, intellectual disabilities) was about 8.8% and for PWD in general it was approximately 8.1%. In comparison, the retention rate for PWOD was roughly 6.5%, which means PWD were 27% and PWTD were 37% more likely to separate than PWOD.

Similarly, PWTD were more than twice as likely and PWD were 53% more likely to involuntarily separate compared to PWOD. 

The Government Accountability Office also reported in 2020 that, of the 223,000 individuals with disabilities that agencies hired between 2011 and 2017, nearly 40% stayed less than one year and another 19% left within two years.

“There's this perception that if you could help a person with a disability get into the door, that you've done the best you can do. And there's not a focus on retention,” Kautz said. 

EEOC found in a September report that having procedures for disability reasonable accommodations and requests for personal assistance services, as well as posting online procedures regarding PAS requests, were “significantly associated” with fewer voluntary separations of PWD at federal agencies in fiscal 2020. 

“These results suggest that agencies with high PWD voluntary separations should ensure that they have compliant RA and PAS request processing procedures and that the PAS request processing procedures are posted on their public websites,” EEOC wrote. 

A reasonable accommodation is “any change or adjustment to a job or work environment” that enables a person with a disability to perform a job. Personal assistance services help PWTD “[perform] activities of daily living that an individual would typically perform if [they] did not have a disability” (e.g. assistance with removing and putting on clothing, eating and using the restroom). 

Kautz argued that managers should proactively offer accommodations, which could reduce the stigma of disclosing a disability in the workplace. 

“It's not enough to just put a process out that says ‘Hey, if you have a disability or if you have a need for an accommodation, these are the steps you have to do,’” she said. “If you’re even more proactive than that, and you have a list of commonly requested accommodations, you make it easy for an employee to click on it and request it.” 

Dwight Davis — the president of Global Connections to Employment, which recruits individuals with disabilities to perform work under contracts with partners including the federal government — said retention of workers with disabilities comes down to accommodations and the culture of where they work. 

“If you’re somebody with a disability and people act strange around you or just are not as accepting as you’d like…that might drive [you] to leave federal service,” he said. “It’s not just the accommodation, it is the atmosphere around the work space.” 

AbilityOne

One of the largest sources of employment in the U.S. for people who are blind or have significant disabilities is the AbilityOne program. Under the program, nonprofits employ workers with disabilities to provide products and services to the federal government. The program has resulted in jobs for nearly 37,000 people with disabilities and provided more than $4 billion in products and services to the federal government in fiscal 2023. 

Davis said that some of the services his organization provides include custodial, food, facilities management and IT. As one specific example, he said more than half the employees on the contract for Mirador, a legacy system that’s used for continuous vetting of federal employee background checks, are individuals with a significant disability. 

The U.S. AbilityOne Commission, which is an independent federal agency led by individuals from government agencies and private citizens appointed by the president, maintains a procurement list of products and services that agencies must purchase from participating nonprofits at prices set by the commission. 

Davis — who also heads the Alliance for Expanding America’s Workforce, an organization that advocates for increased employment opportunities for people with disabilities through the federal government — said AbilityOne’s process doesn’t always operate smoothly. 

“When a contracting officer is looking at a procurement strategy for a product or service, they're supposed to consider whether there is an AbilityOne contractor or nonprofit that could do that,” he said. “That's technically the way it's supposed to work. It doesn't always do that. There’s a lot of education that’s still required for contracting officers to truly understand the program.” 

According to the federal government, the labor force participation rate for people with disabilities is 24.5%. Such a rate for people without disabilities is 68.1%. 

Davis argued that it’s in the federal government’s interest to directly employ more individuals with disabilities. 

“We call it procurement with a purpose. In other words, you're going to be spending dollars in these contracts regardless of who it goes to. So if it goes to an AbilityOne [organization], what you're doing is maybe paying two cents more per hour. But what you're not seeing is the socio-economic impact of it,” he said. “These people are now earning salaries and paying taxes. That's a reduction in them taking services from the government because now they're on my insurance. So maybe they don't need to be on Social Security disability insurance — using federal dollars that have a greater impact than just on the contract.”