Trump’s Shutdown Layoffs Hit Blind Workers Who Help The Blind | EUROtoday

Christine Faltz Grassman was surprised when she acquired a layoff discover from the Department of Education on Oct. 11, 10 days after being furloughed as a result of authorities shutdown.

Grassman, who’s blind, helps oversee a federal program that gives authorities contracting alternatives to blind distributors. She puzzled how she would cowl her mortgage and payments — and who would make sure that the federal government is following a New Deal-era legislation meant to spice up employment amongst blind Americans.

Her shock shortly turned to anger as she thought in regards to the Trump administration’s therapy of staff with disabilities.

“The mentality of these people is if we have a disability and we have a job, we’re taking it away from an able-bodied person,” mentioned Grassman, 56. “It’s not enough that I went to an Ivy League school, that I went to law school and can run circles around half the Cabinet… It doesn’t matter, because we’re blind.”

“Where is the humanity in so much of what is happening with this administration?” she requested.

Her two different co-workers who oversee the Randolph-Sheppard merchandising program on the Education Department additionally acquired “reduction-in-force,” or RIF, notices, she attested in a court docket declaration. They, too, are blind, she mentioned.

The Education Department didn’t reply questions from HuffPost in regards to the layoffs. An automated reply from the company mentioned its press staff was furloughed in the course of the shutdown, which the message blamed on Democrats.

The Trump administration is making an attempt to eradicate round 4,000 staff from the federal payroll in the course of the lapse in appropriations. President Donald Trump has mentioned expressly that he views the shutdown RIFs as a possibility to chop “Democrat programs” and punish Democratic lawmakers for insisting that any funding deal prolong well being care subsidies.

A federal decide on Tuesday granted an injunction blocking the White House from continuing with the layoffs whereas a court docket problem from labor unions proceeds. But Trump might nonetheless prevail within the underlying case, because the Supreme Court has largely paved the best way for his job cuts up to now.

Grassman is preventing for her job in that lawsuit and wished to make clear that she was talking in her private capability, not as a federal worker.

Her work is a component of a bigger civil rights employment infrastructure that’s been decimated by the Trump administration because it has shed an estimated 200,000 federal jobs.

The president has gone after something that incorporates a whiff of range or affirmative motion, which implies deep cuts to packages and enforcement efforts designed to help minority staff and college students and other people with disabilities. The very phrase “disability” is amongst these the administration has been scrubbing from authorities web sites and different supplies.

Are you a federal employee impacted by the shutdown? You can contact our reporter on Signal at davejamieson.99 or e mail him at dave.jamieson@huffpost.com.

The Center for American Progress, a left-leaning assume tank, has mentioned the primary six months of this Trump administration could be remembered as “an all-out war against disabled people.” The White House has basically worn out civil rights workplaces on the Education, Justice and Labor departments by way of layoffs and attrition, leaving fewer workers to assist implement the legislation, whereas rolling again “disparate impact” insurance policies meant to curb discrimination towards disabled staff and different teams.

Watching all of it unfold has been devastating for Grassman.

“When I was growing up, my parents had a place to turn to if they needed it. They had a law with teeth. They had federal enforcement they could count on if my school didn’t provide me with the accommodations I needed,” mentioned Grassman, who’s from Brooklyn. “That is not now true for kids with disabilities, adults with disabilities, or people who become disabled later in life.”

Blind since start, Grassman mentioned she’s been overcoming doubters her complete life, ultimately getting her undergraduate diploma from Princeton University and a legislation diploma from Hofstra University. She was nicely conscious of the Randolph-Sheppard program when she took a job in Washington, D.C., in 2019 to assist oversee it. Her husband, who’s legally blind, had been a vendor by way of this system for greater than three a long time.

The Randolph-Sheppard Act, signed into legislation by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936, offers blind distributors a contracting choice to run concessions outlets and merchandising machines on federal properties, together with army bases.

Grassman, a battle decision specialist, is a part of a small staff on the Education Department that helps make sure that federal companies adjust to the legislation and resolves disputes between distributors and the state companies that subject their licenses.

Grassman mentioned this system’s contracts are typically wrongly considered as handouts or authorities bloat. Daniel Driscoll, Trump’s secretary of the Army, appeared on a latest podcast and recommended that able-bodied distributors had been gaming this system and forcing the Defense Department to overpay for hen. The dialogue devolved into laughter.

“It’s been interpreted over the years to basically mean we have to prioritize blind people when we go out for our chicken contracts,” Driscoll mentioned.

Grassman mentioned she was “appalled” on the portrayal of this system as wasteful.

“Complete nonsense,” she mentioned.

Her husband, Gary Grassman, ran concessions operations on federal properties in New York for years, usually rising at 4 a.m. for work, “not sitting at home and collecting a check,” as his spouse put it. Gary Grassman mentioned eliminating these overseeing this system might result in abuses and shortchange distributors.

“If the oversight is lost, then that gives free rein to the federal agencies and to the states to decide how they want to do things, and they possibly could not be following the law,” he mentioned.

He closed his merchandising enterprise in the course of the pandemic and isn’t presently working, making his spouse’s paycheck their solely earnings.

She had hoped to work for the federal government till retirement and worries what the job market will provide a 56-year-old blind girl, particularly when it’s been flooded with different out-of-work feds. She can’t waitress or drive for Uber to make ends meet. She is glad her youngsters are grown, but when her layoff stands, she and her husband could must promote their condominium in dear Northern Virginia and transfer away from her mother and father, who each have critical well being points.

According to her layoff discover, Grassman’s final day of labor is meant to be Dec. 9, although the court docket problem could hold her employed longer. Whatever occurs, Grassman mentioned, she wouldn’t be put “in trauma” — the phrases Trump’s funds director, Russell Vought, used to explain his want for the federal workforce. She mentioned she’s been dealing with down bullies “my whole life.”

“I’m a veteran of trauma. Russell Vought doesn’t scare me,” she mentioned. “I will always be on top of my game, no matter what I’m doing, and he will never take that away from me. This administration can never take that away from me.”