Federal legislative history of independent living programs.

In some respects, passage by the US Congress of the 1978 Amendments to the Rehabilitation Act (PL95-602) marked the beginning of federal involvement in the independent-living movement. For the 1st time a program was created whose primary goal is to help disabled persons to live independently; previous programs have been designed to help such persons become employable. This paper briefly examines the roots of PL95-602 and identifies how this new law represents a major new direction in the rehabilitation movement. The purposes and goals of the advocates of independent living have changed in the past decade and the new law reflects those changes.