Americans with Disabilities Act. Did it help?
Classic story of well-intentioned bureaucrats screwing things up and making the problem "worse." The ADA was designed to help disabled Americans get jobs. It did the exact opposite.
Lots of examples of great intentions going awry. Like rent control. Don't get me started.
Claude
Why the ADA failed to increase (and likely reduced) disabled employment
The ADA was meant to expand job opportunities for people with disabilities by banning discrimination in hiring, firing, and pay, and by requiring employers to provide "reasonable accommodations." Instead, the strongest empirical research on the law found the opposite effect. Economists Daron Acemoglu and Joshua Angrist (MIT), in a landmark 2001 Journal of Political Economy study, found that employment of disabled men of all ages and disabled women under 40 dropped sharply the year after the ADA took effect in 1993 — a decline that couldn't be explained by rising disability-benefit rolls or changes in how people reported their disability status. Crucially, the drop came almost entirely through reduced hiring, not increased firing: employers weren't pushing disabled workers out, they were declining to bring them in. That pattern points to the real mechanism — the law's mandatory accommodation costs and its exposure to discrimination lawsuits made disabled applicants look riskier and more expensive to employ, so firms quietly avoided hiring them in the first place, especially at mid-sized companies too big to be exempt but too small to easily absorb legal risk.
This finding wasn't a fluke. Thomas DeLeire (2000), using a separate dataset (the Survey of Income and Program Participation), independently found the employment rate for men with disabilities fell about 8 percentage points relative to non-disabled men after the ADA, with the steepest declines among those with mental disabilities or less education — exactly the workers a "reasonable accommodation" mandate would make costliest and most legally fraught to employ. The broader irony economists point to is that the ADA functioned like other well-intentioned "employment protection" mandates (similar to age-discrimination or minimum-wage laws): by raising the cost and legal risk of employing a protected group without correspondingly raising their productivity, it discouraged the very hiring it was designed to promote. Later research is more mixed — some studies found neutral or positive effects, particularly after the 2008 ADA Amendments broadened coverage — but the original Acemoglu-Angrist and DeLeire findings remain the most-cited evidence that the ADA, in its first decade, hurt the job prospects of the people it was meant to help.
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