This document presents additional results of GAO’s survey of federal programs that provide assistance to people with disabilities. The purpose of our survey was to 1) identify the many federal programs that play a role in supporting people with disabilities and 2) identify some of the major challenges that federal programs face in supporting people with disabilities in the 21st century. We developed a Web-based questionnaire to obtain this information and made it available to the appropriate contact officials we identified at 299 programs. We obtained survey responses from 258 programs (for an overall response rate of 86 percent) but ultimately used the results from 192 programs (comprising 64 percent of all programs surveyed) that met our criteria for defining programs as either wholly or partially targeted towards serving individuals with disabilities.

This document presents only those survey results dealing with the second objective (program challenges and the related issues of information sharing and program coordination) because we extensively discuss other survey results in our report entitled “Federal Disability Assistance: Wide Array of Programs Needs to be Examined in Light of 21st Century Challenges” GAO-05-626. This report also provides a more detailed discussion of our scope and methodology.

In presenting the survey results in this document, we divided the presentation into two sections: one section dealing with programs that primarily make grants to other organizations or individuals and another section dealing with non-grant making programs. In addition, our results are broken down by the primary type of assistance provided by programs, which the programs identified in their survey responses. We do not present the results for any open-ended questions because these results varied widely and could not be easily categorized. In addition, we do not present the results for two “rank-order” questions because the numbers of programs responding to these questions were generally too small to provide meaningful information. We conducted our survey work from March 2004 through December 2004 in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards.

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