The Congress enacted major legislation concerning the employment of people with disabilities as early as the 1930s through the establishment of wage rates for such individuals below the federal minimum wage. This and subsequent laws share a focus on individuals with disabilities as current or potential workers. Learning whether public policy is on the right track is particularly important at the current time because of the positive relationship between age and disability. As the incidence of disabling health conditions rises with age (e.g., hearing impairments, arthritis, and limitations on activities due to heart disease) and as the large baby-boom generation has been entering the mid-to-late working years, disability is likely to become increasingly common and, potentially, increasingly costly to society (e.g., increased utilization of medical and rehabilitative services as well as decreased receipt of income and payroll taxes from forgone individual earnings). Moreover, new advances in medicine have allowed people to live with previously life-threatening impairments. And, among students—who typically are expected to go from school into the workplace—those served by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), Part B have increased over time. This report begins with a summary of federal actions taken during the 20 th century related to the employment of people with disabilities. It then describes in detail the existing data sources of government agencies that cover disability and employment status as well as reviews the activities of the Presidential Task Force on Employment of Adults with Disabilities aimed at remedying statistical shortcomings. The report closes with an examination of the limited trend statistics on the employment situation of working-age adults with disabilities to determine how they fared in recent decades and mentions policies that have been suggested. The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933-1935 addressed the employment disadvantages of disabled individuals by establishing a productivity-based sub-minimum wage arranged through a system of certificates. With time, these individuals came to be identified in one of three classifications: employees of sheltered workshops where the wage floor was set by a charitable institution, employees in the private for-profit sector where the wage floor could not be "less than 75 percent of the minimum wage" in the industry, and employees who by virtue of disability were employed in industrial homework. The NIRA was declared unconstitutional in May 1935, and the above requirements were no longer operative. In 1938, the Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Section 14 of the act established a reduced wage for the employment of individuals, under special certificates issued by the U.S. Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Administrator, whose earning capacity was impaired by age or physical or mental deficiency or injury. No statutory floor was established, but the wage floor for disabled workers at private for-profit firms was administratively set at not less than 75% of the standard federal minimum wage. Workers in sheltered workshops run by a charitable organization were to be paid on the basis of their earning capacity. Under the 1966 FLSA amendments, the wage rate for persons with disabilities was statutorily set at not less than 50% of the basic FLSA minimum for both competitive industry and sheltered workshops, with an exception for work activity centers (P.L 89-601). In 1986, section 14(c) was again amended, removing the distinction between workshops and work activity centers and eliminating the statutory minimum wage for the disabled ( P.L. 99-486 ). Instead, the wage rate was to be "commensurate with those paid to nonhandicapped workers, employed in the vicinity ... for essentially the same type, quality, and quantity of work," and that was "related to the individual's productivity." The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA, P.L. 101-336 ) bans discrimination in the workplace and elsewhere (e.g., in public accommodations and services operated by private entities, transportation, and in telecommunications) on the basis of disability. Title I primarily is intended to equalize access to employment opportunities for otherwise qualified workers with disabilities by requiring employers of 15 or more employees to make reasonable accommodations that would not cause undue hardship to their operations. (The provisions banning employment discrimination by employers with at least 25 employees went into effect in July 1992. The ban's extension to firms with 15 to 25 employees became effective in July 1994.) In addition, the Civil Rights Act of 1991 (CRA, P.L. 102-166 ) allows people bringing employment discrimination suits to seek compensatory and punitive damages under the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 ( P.L. 93-112 ). The FLSA makes disabled individuals more attractive to hire by creating a lower wage rate for them. The ADA and CRA regard private and public employers who fail to hire, retain, and promote members of the population with disabilities, at rates comparable to other equally qualified workers, as contributors to the group's poor employment and earnings outcomes. Some believe that the success of the laws' employment provisions is best determined by whether the employment rate of working-age adults with disabilities increases, because lack of job opportunities appears to be an even bigger problem than wage discrimination for this protected class. Yet, it is no easy matter to separate the impact of legislation from a host of other factors that are operating simultaneously (e.g., changes in economic conditions, in private sector provision of health benefits, and in job requirements away from manual labor and toward higher levels of educational attainment as well as toward team-oriented workplaces). Toward the close of the decade, the Congress turned its attention to the supply side of the labor market in the Ticket to Work and Work Incentives Improvement Act of 1999. Among other things, P.L. 106-170 is intended to encourage persons with severely limiting health conditions or impairments to increase their work effort by alleviating a dilemma of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) beneficiaries, namely, choosing between a job which may not have employer-provided health benefits and continuation of government-provided health care coverage through Medicare or Medicaid. These provisions became effective in October 2000. The legislation also creates a voucher program, to be phased in over a three-year period beginning in 2001, that allows SSDI and SSI beneficiaries to obtain employment, rehabilitation and other services from providers of their own choice to assist them to get jobs or increase their earnings. Recent Administrations also have undertaken various initiatives that focus on the poor labor market outcomes of individuals with disabilities. Executive Order 13078, issued by President Clinton on March 13, 1998, created the Presidential Task Force on Employment of Adults with Disabilities. It was charged with seeking ways to increase the share of the adult population with disabilities that has a job, among other things. That same year, the U.S. Department of Education's National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR) announced funding, under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, for six new Rehabilitation Research and Training Centers to develop information that addresses the employment-related issues of persons with disabilities. In 2000, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) requested applications for work incentive grants to assist states creating their One-Stop delivery systems under the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 ( P.L. 105-220 ) to provide comprehensive employment and training services to people with disabilities. And, the following year, the Office on Disability Policy was established within the DOL. The relatively recent implementation of these policies and programs makes it difficult to gauge how successful they have been at enhancing the employment prospects of persons with disabilities. The varying definitions of disability contained in programs and surveys compound the problem. Perhaps most importantly, so, too, does the lack of accurate statistics on individuals with disabilities derived from surveys that have asked consistent questions over time. The National Council on Disability noted in 1996 that despite considerable discussion in the last decade about the limitations of ... databases and the need for a database specifically designed to answer policy-relevant questions about people with disabilities ... little improvement ... has been evident... In 2004, the Council effectively concluded that the situation had not much changed. One of the charges of E.O. 13078 recognized the data shortcomings related to the labor force status of persons with disabilities. It required the Presidential Task Force on Employment of Adults with Disabilities to design and implement a statistically reliable and accurate method to measure the employment rate of adults with disabilities as soon as possible, but no later than the date of termination of the Task Force [30 days after submitting its final report on July 26, 2002, the 10 th anniversary of initial implementation of the ADA's employment provisions]. Data derived from this methodology shall be published on as frequent a basis as possible. The Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census Bureau, in cooperation with the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services, the National Council on Disability, and the President's Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities, have been among the numerous organizations working toward this end. The accomplishment of this charge has been complicated by the fact that: (1) a universally agreed-upon definition of disability does not exist, and (2) a data source is lacking that incorporates both labor force and disability questions which have undergone testing to determine whether people understand what is being asked (i.e., validity) and to which people respond in a consistent manner over time (i.e., reliability). At the present time, the U.S. Bureau of the Census collects self-reported information from individuals on the disability and labor force status of household members through the decennial census, American Community Survey, Current Population Survey, Survey of Income and Program Participation, and National Health Interview Survey. Disability typically is not the primary focus of these surveys. Disability questions are included on the long-form of the decennial census of population. The number and nature of disability questions have differed over time.