Cite as: 527 U. S. 555 (1999)
Opinion of the Court
Nothing in the waiver regulation, of course, required an employer of commercial drivers to accept the hypothesis and participate in the Government's experiment. The only question, then, is whether the ADA should be read to require such an employer to defend a decision to decline the experiment. Is it reasonable, that is, to read the ADA as requiring an employer like Albertson's to shoulder the general statutory burden to justify a job qualification that would tend to exclude the disabled, whenever the employer chooses to abide by the otherwise clearly applicable, unamended substantive regulatory standard despite the Government's willingness to waive it experimentally and without any finding of its being inappropriate? If the answer were yes, an employer would in fact have an obligation of which we can think of no comparable example in our law. The employer would be required in effect to justify de novo an existing and otherwise applicable safety regulation issued by the Government itself. The employer would be required on a case-by-case basis to reinvent the Government's own wheel when the Government had merely begun an experiment to provide data to consider changing the underlying specifications. And what is even more, the employer would be required to do so when the Government had made an affirmative record indicating that contemporary empirical evidence was hard to come by. It is simply not credible that Congress enacted the ADA (before there was any waiver program) with the understanding that employers choosing to respect the Government's sole substantive visual acuity regulation in the
tion, FHWA, 95 F. 3d 715, 723 (1996), the agency began taking new applicants for waivers, see, e. g., 63 Fed. Reg. 66226 (1998). The agency has now initiated a program under the authority granted in the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century, Pub. L. 105-178, 112 Stat. 107, to grant exemptions on a more regular basis, see 63 Fed. Reg. 67600 (1998) (interim final rule implementing the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century). The effect of the current exemption program has not been challenged in this case, and we have no occasion to consider it.
577
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