Centerfield

The private sector actually has some incentive in hiring the handicapped--tax breaks that make handicapped workers economically competitive at lower levels of productivity. The problem is that the federal government has no such incentive. There's no compensating subsidy. The government doesn't pay taxes to itself. So if the excuse is "efficiency" in economic terms, the handicapped will get screwed every time in government employment.

So it's certainly both fair and reasonable to upwardly "score" the productivity of the handicapped in government hiring and employment to compensate for at least that (and I'd argue more so) otherwise the government would always be much less likely to hire the handicapped than private industry, even as they were mandating that private industry do so and subsidizing the mandate.

And it's certainly both fair and reasonable for government to have to follow the same discrimination guidelines that private industry does.

I think it's reasonable and compassionate to give them access to low-productivity jobs, but only the government and non-profits can to that, not private companies that must satisfy investors.

if they want to do this (and the religious basis for their belief in outsourcing is surely a separate question), shouldn't an evaluation criteria be whether private employers performing similar functions hire disabled employees and how successful they are at accomodating their needs?

Considering the fact that there are thousands of disabled veterans and many new disabled veterans from the current conflict, should it not be that those who proclaim to "support our troops" be in the vanguard and really support them with at least a modicum of meaningful work?

We do owe it to them. We owe them more than a life of being just a drone.

I can actually answer a lot of these questions because I am a contracting officer in the federal government and have worked on these A-76 projects. First of all, about disabled veterans, there is actually a huge incentive and bonus firms who hire disabled veterans get in the process, and if the firm is owned by a disabled veteran the contracts can be sole sourced to them without competition. Namely, service-disabled veterans, within the last few years, are getting very good treatment in the system.

However, non-veteran regular disabled people are in fact getting screwed. The A-76 targets "commercial" jobs over "inherently governmental." And what's commercial? All the blue collar jobs like janitorial services, mailroom, building services, etc.. . .these are the jobs the disabled people work in, not the white-collar jobs that are "inherently governmental" (note: IT Services jobs are also very "commercial", so they are constantly outsourced, it's not just the people at the bottom of the income ladder).

So veterans get good treatment in this system, and service disabled and regular veterans actually get precedence over anyone else when they apply for a federal job (they get an enormous bonus in the application process known as veterans preference), but the regular disabled are really getting a raw deal.

I have a friend who's at the top of the civil service ladder in the GSA. They keep offering him that big step up to a shiny political appointment, and he keeps respectfully declining. As a disabled Vietnam vet with two Purple Hearts and the Bronze and Silver Stars, he pretty much can't be fired out of the civil service system (short of gross cause). He's set. But if he took an appointment he could be dismissed at whim, and he's not ready to retire yet.

But an autistic such as the man mentioned in the article is at the mercy of the system, and can have his job "outsourced" at any time on grounds of "improved efficiency." When it's impossible for the government to justify his work on efficiency grounds without that scoring up that he'd get in the private sector.