During the Great Depression of the 1930's, Vocational Rehabilitation services expanded in a minor but important way. A law called the Randolph-Sheppard Act gave persons with severe vision problems the priority to operate vending booths (snacks, cigarettes, etc.) on federal property. This meant that people with vision problems got chosen over anyone else who applied to run the booths in places like post offices, government buildings, and federal parks. Even though this was a limited opportunity for people with visual disabilities, it was the government's first attempt at "affirmative action" - special privileges given as compensation and help for people who have been deprived in other ways. Today's affirmative action laws for minorities are based on ideas first used in the Randolph-Sheppard Act.

During WW II the opportunities for people with disabilities expanded again. When millions of men (and some women) went off to war, they left behind jobs that still needed to be done. At the time, most women in the U.S. were housewives. During the war they left their homes to fill skilled jobs in factories and offices. But many unskilled jobs were still empty - building maintenance, food preparation, transportation jobs and other jobs that only took basic abilities. The Rehabilitation Act of 1943 helped fill these jobs by expanding eligibility to persons with mental disorders - mental illness and mental retardation. This doubled the number of participants overnight.

It also changed the type of services the government provided for vocational rehabilitation. In addition to training and guidance, VR started paying for certain types of treatments to correct disabilities. People who needed cataracts surgery on their eyes, for example, or orthopedic (bone) surgery to correct deformations in their limbs, or physical therapy to restore movement to damaged limbs, or even money to buy hearing aids and wheelchairs. Although some people had health insurance to pay for things like this, many people did not and at the time there was no Medicare or Medicaid yet. VR agencies stepped in as a back-up resource to cover medical bills as long the medical problems related to employment.

Like World War I, the end of World War II changed VR when it flooded the nation with wounded veterans. More progress in medicine meant not only that more people survived the war, but also they survived with greater variety of disabilities. New varieties meant new VR service needs. In addition to veterans with loss of limbs, vision or hearing, there were now people in wheelchairs, people with head injuries, people with epilepsy, and people with seizure disorders, among others. At the same time, the booming economy after the war created thousands of new kinds of jobs. Suddenly VR staff needed to understand both the new job possibilities and the new kinds of disabilities.

The Rehabilitation Act of 1954 started federal funding of research on vocational rehabilitation and funding of advanced college training programs in rehabilitation counseling. Rehabilitation counselors became trained professionals, and research offices sprang up. This eventually led to of the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR) in the U.S. Department of Education.

By the 1950's, people admired vocational rehabilitation as an example of what federal social programs should be. VR had a clear definition of who could receive services - people with documented mental and physical disabilities that kept them from working and for whom VR services would allow them to work. The program also had a clear definition of success (employment of "rehabilitants") so administrators could keep track of staff efficiency. VR administrators could document success by calculating the cost of services, wages earned by rehabilitants, and taxes paid back into the U.S. Government. Professionals from VR began transferring into leadership positions in other federal and state programs to help them.

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