Advocates for blind fight reorganization of Education agency

The restructuring of a federal agency, if it registers at all outside the bureaucracy, usually produces a stifled yawn.

But on May 26, a thousand or more blind and disabled people -- some with guide dogs, others in wheelchairs -- circled on the sidewalk in front of the Education Department's headquarters in southwest Washington. The protesters came to vilify the assistant secretary responsible for the planned reorganization of a 125-person branch of the department, the little-known Rehabilitation Services Administration.

"If you listen to John Hager, you are bound to be a beggar," the sign-wielding crowd chanted at the behest of James Gashel, head lobbyist for the National Federation of the Blind.

Protesters pushed a 7-foot-tall Grim Reaper, festooned with a "Department of Education" label, into a casket and then six protesters in top hats served as pallbearers to carry him away. "This must be the vestige of John Hager," Gashel said. "We can take him down."

The melodramatic display and the singling out of Hager -- a former lieutenant governor of Virginia who has been bound to a wheelchair since he contracted polio from a vaccine in the 1970s -- shows the lengths to which advocates for the blind will go to protect obscure programs that deliver hundreds of millions of dollars a year in services.

In this fight, the Bush administration says the scheduled changes are just necessary streamlining, but the blind have pulled out all the stops to prevent what they call a concerted effort to diminish a program built specifically to help them. Most Americans with disabilities are served by broad federal programs administered for all categories of disabled people, not by disability-specific efforts. But "there's a long-standing precedent" for blind-specific programs," Gashel said in an interview.

At issue is Hager's announced plan to close the RSA's 10 regional offices and to cut half of the agency's staff. The agency oversees 80 state vocational rehabilitation programs -- about 25 administering only to the blind -- which dispense about $2.7 billion a year in federal grants to help the disabled live independently and get jobs. Hager, a Republican, wants the remainder of the RSA staff to oversee the programs from Washington.

Hager also told disability advocates at a May 24 meeting that the administration plans to eliminate the RSA's Division for the Blind and Visually Impaired, rolling its responsibilities into offices that oversee programs for people with other disabilities. "The blind are only 4 percent of all disabilities," Hager said in an interview. "We're restructuring in a functional manner ... to adopt a standard approach."

The reorganization will free up $8 million in administrative expenses that can be used to provide more direct services to people with disabilities, Hager argued. The changes will also ensure standard practices across the country and eliminate regional offices as the "middlemen" between state rehabilitation agencies and RSA headquarters, according to an Education Department fact sheet. Hager is also pushing Congress to demote the RSA commissioner's post from one that requires Senate confirmation, and instead make the position an executive branch appointment.

As assistant secretary for special education and rehabilitative services, Hager oversees the RSA as well as $11 billion a year in grants that Uncle Sam gives to states for special-education programs in public schools. Eliminating Senate confirmation would make the line of authority at the RSA clearer, Hager said. RSA commissioners have tended to clash with their superiors; in a recent example, RSA Commissioner Joanne Wilson, a Bush appointee, resigned in March in opposition to the proposed changes.

Wilson has since gone to work for the Baltimore-based National Federation of the Blind to lobby against Hager's plans.

Speaking at the protest outside her former office, Wilson said the proposal is part of a strategy to diminish specialized services, not just for the blind, but for all people with disabilities. Her fears are partly based on another administration proposal that would give governors the power to lump vocational rehabilitation grants into a larger pool of federal job-training money. That proposal, pushed primarily by the Labor Department, has failed to gain traction in Congress, which is currently working on a reauthorization of federal job-training programs, including the RSA, through the Workforce Investment Act.

The federation for the blind and other disability advocacy groups have lobbied against the job-training consolidation plan, telling members of Congress that the disabled need a special, dedicated program. The Labor Department's arguments that folding the disability program into the larger job-training budget would give the disabled access to a larger pool of employers and that special services would be protected have thus far not proved persuasive. Labor's proposal has not been included in either the House-passed or the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee-approved versions of authorizing legislation.

While disabled groups have been largely united against the Labor Department proposal, less consensus exists about the blind federation's view of the threat from the RSA changes. The disabled lobby includes more than 100 groups, about 40 of which co-sponsored the federation's protest outside the Education Department.

But the Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities, the largest umbrella group for disabled advocates, did not endorse the event, because some of its member organizations are willing to give the Education Department the benefit of the doubt that its plans for the RSA are designed to improve operations. Charles Harles, executive director of the Inter-National Association of Business, Industry, and Rehabilitation, who also does work for the consortium, said, "We have avoided taking a position, because there were divergent views on that issue." Nancy Starnes, vice president for the National Organization on Disability, another generally conservative group, said her group supports the administration. "If they're telling me this is the most efficient way to deliver equitable services, I'm willing to give them a chance," Starnes said.

But the protest did garner the support of several important groups, including the National Association of the Deaf and the American Association of People with Disabilities. In addition, four former RSA commissioners -- Wilson, Fredric Schroeder of the Clinton administration, Robert Humphreys of the Carter administration, and Edward Newman of the Nixon administration -- spoke at the rally against Hager's plans. The four also signed a protest letter sponsored by the federation that appeared as a full-page ad in The Washington Times on May 26.

In the letter, the four said that eliminating Senate confirmation of their former position would weaken disability advocacy within the executive branch. "The voice of the executive branch's advocate for people with disabilities will be silenced, and Congress's long-standing involvement in the selection of the program's leadership will be undermined," the letter read.

The federation also persuaded Rep. Tom Osborne, R-Neb., to circulate a letter calling on Education Secretary Margaret Spellings to explain in detail the administration's rationale for the RSA restructuring. "We're in the dark," Osborne said in an interview. "We're just asking for clarification from the administration on its plans. We're concerned if its planning was insufficient and if they would let people fall through the cracks."

The federation and other disabled advocates upset by the proposed RSA restructuring are urging lawmakers to adopt language in appropriations legislation to block the Education Department plans. At the grassroots level, activists are contacting members of Congress to fight the changes. The House version of the Workforce Investment Act reauthorization includes a provision eliminating Senate confirmation of the RSA commissioner position. A compromise pushed by Osborne would grandfather in a Senate-confirmed RSA commissioner already serving when the act is signed into law, but so far the Bush administration has not nominated a successor to Wilson. The Senate version of the bill does not change the RSA commissioner's status.

Hager criticized the protesters for linking the RSA changes to the Labor Department's job-training consolidation proposal, saying the two are unrelated. The job-training plan "is a Department of Labor proposal," he said, "and most people don't think it's necessarily going to pass this year. And if it did, they're not taking into account all the hoops governors would have to jump through" to consolidate programs, Hager continued. "They mixed their issues and got people confused about what they were talking about."

Gashel said the timing of the RSA changes and the Labor Department proposal make Hager's assertion impossible to believe. "It strains credulity," Gashel said.

Asked if the federation-led protest had any effect on his plans, Hager said, "Not really."

Many advocates say their main complaint is that Hager didn't consult with them sufficiently on his plans. "Dept. of Ed ignores the voice of the disabled," read one of the signs at the recent protest. Hager said he will take the advocates' concerns into account. But the federation of the blind isn't buying it, and the fight now moves to Capitol Hill.