Disabilities, People With

United States Disability Policy

United States disability policy includes government programs that deliver benefits, as well as the relevant laws, their regulations, and their judicial interpretation. The earliest national disability programs provided pensions for disabled Civil War (1861–1865) veterans. These pensions were justified in terms of the moral obligation to those who sacrificed their lives for the country, and they have come to reflect a lasting trend in disability policy emphasizing moral worthiness of beneficiaries, as well as linking the disability to an inability to work. In contrast, the first European social insurance and pension programs offered categorical entitlements to broad categories of workers and the poor.

The post–World War II era saw two prominent disability amendments to the Social Security Act of 1935, 42 U.S.C. § 7 (2000). These were Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI, Title II of the act), a federal cash-benefit program for disabled workers, and Supplemental Security Income (SSI, Title XVI of the act), benefiting individuals with disabilities with very low income, regardless of their work history. Other disability policy initiatives have [Page 409]sought rehabilitation of disabled workers to facilitate return to paid employment. Congress enacted the Vocational Rehabilitation Act in 1918 to benefit World War I veterans and extended the veterans training program to a more general vocational rehabilitation (VR) program for disabled Americans in 1920. This program, offering vocational training, job placement, and job counseling provided by state agencies, exists with largely the same structure today, although with major additions and more fiscal responsibility on the part of the federal government. Some of these additions included a turn toward civil rights-based programs starting in the 1970s.

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