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January 14, 2014 at 12:11 PM
Tight federal budgets and efforts to reduce federal agency employment reduced the number of people with serious disabilities who found federal Executive Branch jobs in 2012.
Because overall federal hiring fell sharply and hiring of people with serious disabilities fell only a little, the percentage of 2012 new hires who had serious disabilities increased.
The percentage of all federal employees with serious disabilities also increased.
The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) gives details about Executive Branch hiring in a report on efforts to meet the federal government’s hiring goals for people with disabilities.
In 2010, President Obama issued an executive order calling for Executive Branch agencies to make serious efforts to hire people with disabilities. He noted that there were 54 million Americans with disabilities, but only 2.5 million federal workers known to have any disability, and far fewer known to have a “targeted disability.”
The official list of targeted disabilities includes deafness, blindness, loss of an extremity, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, mental illness, distortion of a limb or spine, and mental illness.
OPM reports that the Executive Branch hired 9,750 people with any known disability in 2012 and 1,101 people with a targeted disability.
