When President Obama signed Executive Order 13548 on July 26, 2010, he specifically set a goal of hiring 100,000 people with disabilities by 2015. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) not only lead federal agencies in the first two quarters of 2012 with 4.2 percent of all new hires being people with disabilities, the agency also trained 3,000 federal employees from more than 56 agencies on recruitment techniques for finding and hiring people with disabilities.
“People with disabilities are welcome in the federal family,” said OPM Director John Berry. “We need the talents and creativity of all people—including people with disabilities—to help do the work of the American people. We are doing anything possible to remove barriers to their employment, and the good news is that we’re moving in the right direction, and you can see it in the numbers.”
The OPM recently released a report that it says “shows significant increases in new hires of persons with disabilities.” Here are some statistics from the report:
- People with disabilities made up 7.41% of the overall federal government workforce in fiscal year (FY) 2011.
- When the figures include veterans who are classified as 30% or more disabled, 11% of federal workers have disabilities.
- In FY 2011, people with disabilities represented 7.96% of all new hires in the federal workforce and 14.7% of all new hires when veterans classified as 30% or more disabled were included―the highest percentage in 20 years.
- In total, more than 200,000 people with disabilities now work for the federal government.
- In FY 2011, 22.4 percent of all hires at OPM were people with disabilities, including those veterans who were 30 percent or more disabled.