Advocate Summary

Issue:  TANF reauthorization 
Advocate:  Association of University Centers on Disabilities – Donna Ledder Meltzer
Date of Interview: 6/5/02

Basic Background
We talked about my latest challenge, which would be the TANF bill, which overhauled the whole welfare system in 1996.  That bill is now up for reauthorization this year, which means that the new legislation should be completed by September 30 of this year.  The House has already passed its bill but the Senate is really where we're spending a great deal of time right now.  Those of us in the disability community, which is where my work is focused – I'm not happy with the House bill.  So we're looking to make some more substantive changes with the Senate.  
[What are the problems with the House bill?]
A number of problems.  In a very general sense, you could say that we just feel that the focus in the House bill is just on getting people to work but not really examining what are those barriers.  That the members are focusing on the 70 percent.  They hit about 50 percent in 1996 when they made the big sweeping changes.  So now they want to get to 70 percent, be able to say that 70 percent of the population is now working.  We feel that for people with disabilities, where the statistic we use is that 70 percent of people with disabilities are not employed, that to make this leap without really looking at what are the barriers, what's keeping these people from becoming employed, it's a system set up to fail. 
So we are working heavily with the Senate and looking at what are some of those very specific disability related issues.  So we're thinking of funding, training case workers, looking at how does a case worker assess adequately that the person sitting in their office who keeps coming back not employed might have a disability.  It might be something that you don't readily see.  We're not talking anymore about people with obvious physical disabilities, but we're talking about maybe individuals who have minor cognitive disabilities.  Not enough really to be designated by certain state agencies as disabled but they're also having a really hard time keeping a job or at least working thirty hours a week.  
In many cases, child care is the big issue.  If the person doesn't have adequate child care it is difficult for them to meet the number of hours specified, or if they have a child with a disability, the child care may not exist for that family.  Or if it is, it just doesn't serve the right number of hours or it can't really accommodate a child.  Anecdotally, you hear so many horror stories out there.
Our concern, and what we're saying to Senate staffers, is what we know statistically right now about the TANF population is that anywhere from the low end being 44 percent, that's the number that's going around, possibly up to even 60 percent, of the people left on the TANF rolls are people with disabilities.  So we've got to be looking at that population if they want to see success.  
So we're going to the staff and we're talking about a whole host of issues, from the idea of retraining to why are people with disabilities being sanctioned and how can we change some of the policies around sanctioning so they're not just dropped off the rolls.  The whole concept of sanctioning the family, I think when Congress wrote that in 1996 it was really meant for people who weren't even trying, not really thinking that people could be trying very hard and just don't meet the requirements.  So how do we look at that and say, we don't want to sanction somebody who was giving their best but the services just aren't there for that person.
So we've got a whole list of issues.  In fact, I was in a meeting yesterday with the staffer for the ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee.  She said, thank you for sitting around the table like this.  We must have gone through eight or so different issues in an hour's time.  She said, one of the things that really helps us is a lot of information I can present back to my boss as he's thinking about what would be most important.  She said, I know it's a terrible question to ask, but if you can't get everything that you want in this bill, could you prioritize?  So we were able to say these are our top two priorities.  Those would be assessment and training, that we need to look at, which is simply very important to my association.  That's an area in which we do a great deal of work.  The other would be revising the whole sanctioning process.  
The other issues are equally as important, but if we had to narrow it down to two, what do we think is going to have the greatest impact on the largest number of people with disabilities in the TANF system, we saw those two as probably the most important and really affecting the largest number of people.

Prior Activity on the Issue 
None mentioned.

Advocacy Activities Undertaken
So how we go about doing that.  I find what works best for me, I work for AUCD, Association for University Centers on Disabilities.  We're a very small association office.  There are two of us that focus our work on government relations, advocacy activities.  So we sort of divide the pot.  I'm the legislative director and then we have a policy analyst.  
So I find that the best way to get my work accomplished is to work through coalitions with other groups.  The biggest disability related coalition that exists in Washington, and where my spend a lot of my time and efforts, is the Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities, or CCD.  I don't know if you've come across them travels and interviews, but CCD is an active coalition of over a hundred national disability related organizations.  I also sit on their board of directors, chair the membership committee and a couple of the members.  So we do our work with them.  There are no paid staff people who work for CCD, we all contribute a small amount of dues every year.  Then we set ourselves up to work by task force, and the task forces cover different areas.
So because of the TANF bill being up for reauthorization this year, we formed a TANF task force.  Many of our task forces are ongoing and exist from year to year.  Some of them, for example, education, health task force, transportation, these ongoing issues have always been around.  But TANF is something new, so we really needed to restructure a whole new task force.  There are two co-chairs and then there are a bunch of us that just serve on the task force.  We come together, I can't really say how often, it depends on the issue and how things heat up.  Some task forces only need to meet monthly.  
At times like this, when there could be a markup on the calendar as early as two weeks from now or throughout the whole summer, we're meeting a lot more frequently.  Sometimes as a task force just to talk to each other, and more frequently right now we're actually on the Hill meeting with staffers of the Senate Finance Committee, to talk about what's important for people with disabilities in this bill.

We're certainly working with a number of several different bills that have been introduced, some that are not in the Finance Committee, some that have been introduced by other members of the Senate Finance Committee but are not the actual Senate Finance Committee bill.  There is no Finance Committee bill as of yet, that's sort of what they're looking at.  
So we’ve been working with various staff who have come out with different bills.  We're trying to advise them what we think is, this piece from that bill is really good and we like this piece from that bill which is really good.  How do we come out with the best combination?  Sometimes we're actually asked to draft language.  The staffer yesterday said the more actual language you can float to me, the better.  So when we're asked to do that, we will.
[Do you draft language in-house?] 
Yes, we do it in-house.  Different people write different pieces.  There are times that various task forces make contract for some pro bono, usually it's pro bono help.  There are some people who are top attorneys and people in the welfare area who are willing to give up some of their time and really help us with their expertise.  Sometimes we don't actually draft the exact wordage but will write it out contextually for the staff.  
Certainly bring them folks from home to talk to.  That's a lot of what we do, making sure that they know what's happening in their home state and understand the ramifications for their constituency.  It can compel a member to change their tune and change their vote.  So we spend a great deal of time.  
I always look at myself as the middleman.  Part of my job is to say to the members of Congress and the staff and tell them what people with disabilities need.  The other side of what I do is go to my constituency and say here's what you need to be telling them.  They need to hear from you.  It's important that I go and talk to them.  There are times that I talk to them, but until they hear from you, people who are actually out there, living there, breathing this, eating and sleeping it every day of your life, they need to hear from you to better understand and to really bring home that impact of what's happening at the state level.
[Have you brought people in on the TANF issue?]
Absolutely.  Some we do in person, some we do by telephone call.  We do letters, we do case work.  There are a number of ways that we first of all develop our policies and positions.  Then how do we impact on Congress.  We do a web site.  One of the things we have on our web site is a legislative information center where folks can go and read letters that we post up there.  They can do something as simple as sending an e-mail message to their member of Congress, right through our information center.  If they want to do it that simply, if they want to play around with the letter we've designed they can download it.  They can put it on their own letterhead, they can add in a paragraph that's more specific to their hometown or their state or however they want to manipulate it and make it work for them.  
We certainly encourage – well, we encourage they do any of the above.  Obviously the more personal a letter is, the better.  But if all they can do is send an e-mail that we've basically written for them, sometimes that is your best tactic, especially on – like the day before a bill is going to be voted on, or that morning.  What you want is a sheer volume of numbers of responses.  We'll go for that route.  
At this point, where we know we have at least two weeks time, probably more we want people to write personal anecdotes, stories.  Especially with hearings, we try to bring people in if it's at all possible or to write our own press releases to be available at the hearings.  Sometimes we're lucky and get that opportunity and sometimes all we can do is have our material available.  But we try to work with staff to get opportunities to bring in people, whether it's a professional in the field who's doing the research or it's bringing in parents, a welfare mom with a disability, a welfare mom who has a kid with a disability.  We want to make sure that these people are heard from and they get their chance to make their point.
The tough part for us is, you can make all your points and you know that they're listening to you.  I think we're working with some excellent staff on the Hill who really would like to do right by us.  But sometimes it's out of their control as well.  For example, yesterday afternoon there was a meeting at the White House that the president held with the leadership of the Senate about welfare reform.  Clearly the president wants to push a bill through as quickly as possible.  He would like to have this wrapped up by September.  If you know anything about the congressional calendar, you know that that means very few working days between now and then to get something done.  It really does mean that they need to mark up a bill in the Senate within the next couple of weeks, preferably before the fourth of July, if they want to get something through the summer and have it finalized by September.  
My years of experience would say that's not going to happen, especially because it's a Republican president calling for this with the Senate, and the Senate is controlled by the Democrats.  Not that they necessarily want to purposefully slow down the process, but they want to come out with a good bill.  My theory, and I walked out of this meeting yesterday with Senate Finance Committee staff and said, my fear is that the pressure is going to be put on to pass a bill quickly no matter what that bill looks like.  That's not my goal.  My goal is to come out with the best bill possible.  So I'm hoping that they will do a slower, more thoughtful process.  
It's hard, you have to balance what you hear in the meeting versus what you know is realistic.  On the one hand, staff said to us yesterday it's possible that we could get our markup in two weeks.  Then later in the conversation she said, if you have any language you'd like me to look at next week on universal engagement, send that to me.  The following week we're going to be looking at the marriage penalty pieces.  The week after that we're talking about something else.  That might be two weeks, they're talking about, which means that's not going to happen.  So we're already at fourth of July recess, they're going to be gone for a week.  We know that the Finance calendar is already loaded with two or three other bills that we need to get out.  That means realistically we're not looking to have a markup until possibly mid-July.  So that gives me more time to bring information back, gives me more time to have more meetings with staff, to get my point across.  But then you worry.  When you see the article on page two of the Post this morning about this White House meeting yesterday.  
	So we do a lot of what we call hurry up and wait.  We jump and we try to act quickly because what if there is that markup in two weeks.  I have to live knowing that it could happen, even though realistically I don't think it will, I've got to be ready that it will.

Future Advocacy Activities Planned
Typically this is a really busy time in Washington, because they know that two major recesses are coming, a week at July 4 and of course Congress would like to be gone all of August.  This happens every year.  It's going to be an interesting year, but I think this in particular, because it's a congressional election year, which means members would like to be home in their districts by October for campaigning.  Yet they have huge pieces of legislation across the whole range of things. 
You hear them say one thing, we're going to do mark up by the end of the year, but you know what that really means.  If you count the number of legislative days, you know they're going to come back in September if they don't have appropriations done, that's first.  They have to meet a deadline with that.  Can they go over the deadline, yes, almost every year they go over their deadline of September 30.  Last year they didn't have their appropriations bill finished until December.  But when it's an appropriations year, that's not necessarily the best way to go, because the members go home, they can go to constituents saying you haven't even passed a bill, why should I vote for you?  So there's more incentive for them to get their work done quickly maybe getting there any too quickly.  
So this tends to be one of the busy times.  June and July in this town can be brutal.  Then they will go on recess in August, but September can just be madness, because they come back and they've got to get it all done.

Key Congressional Contact(s)/Champions
John D. Rockefeller (D-WV)
Senator Max. S. Baucus (D-MT)
Charles E. Grassley (R-IA)

Certainly Senator Snow from Maine is very active, Senator Breaux from Louisiana is very active, Senator Kennedy is going to be leading into being a major player.  There's certainly a number of others.  Senator Jeffords, who plays an interesting role as now an independent.  Typically aligns with the Democrats but now we have what we call tripartisan issues on the Senate side because of his being an independent.

Targets of Direct Lobbying
None mentioned.

Targets of Grassroots Lobbying
None mentioned.

Coalition Partners: Names/Participants
The groups that are active in my coalition would be other groups such as ARC,  Center on Mental Health, National Mental Health Association.  We've even got within our coalition some of the homeless groups.  We're actually pulled together some groups that don't traditionally participate with the disability groups but when it comes to the TANF issue are very integral.  The homeless population, people with substance abuse issues, mental illness or mental health issues, are also a lot of the TANF population.  A lot of homeless people, a lot of people with mental illness, a lot of poverty, there are people with disabilities.  So in this case we're really all one and the same.  
	So we sort of branched our scope a little bit from the traditional disability community, which tends to be – while it is the physical as well as mental or cognitive, we tend to focus often more on the physical.  In this case, we really needed to be looking more at the poverty community, homeless community, the mental illness, mental health conditions and other such impairments.  As I said, for the most part people with physical disabilities in the TANF system have been taken care of or they're in a program.  They can be part of vocational rehabilitation, they have a very visible disability, so treatment or the right kind of program for them becomes more obvious.  It's the people with cognitive disabilities and other mental health conditions that are less easy to spot and to know what to do with.

[Is there a single person representing, like at this meeting with the Senate Finance Committee, just one person representing all of the CCD?]
No, at this meeting yesterday we had ten people.  How many come on a given day to given meetings depends on everybody's schedules and who's available when – meetings are always set to meet the schedules of staff on the Hill.  If the staffer you need to meet with says I'm only available Tuesday at two, we put out a notice to everybody who might be interested.  We use a lot of e-mailing system, listservs, say we've got a meeting at two o'clock with so and so in this office, if you can be there, please be there.  Whoever shows up, shows up.  It's impossible to try to work around everybody's schedule.

I would give you three names of people, that are heavily at work on the TANF bill, if that's what you're looking for information on.  One would be in Senator Rockefeller's office, she's a policy fellow.  Her name is Johnette Hartnett.  She's working on the TANF bill from a disability perspective for Senator Rockefeller, he actually submitted his own bill earlier this spring.  We're sort of looking at what parts of that bill might feed into the Senate Finance Committee bill.
From the Senate Finance Committee chair, who is Senator Baucus, would be Alaine Perry.  She's at the Committee office and she'd be the person to talk with.  From the ranking member's office, which is Senator Grassley, that person is Hope Cooper.

Other Participants in the Issue Debate
I think that there's actually a lot of agreement that certainly more money needs to be put into child care.  The House bill did not do that, but I think there's definitely agreement in the Senate.  More money is needed for child care.  If you're going to ask people to work forty hours a week instead of thirty, that means work for somebody else.
[There are organizations or associations specifically focusing on that?]  
I'm sure Children's Defense Fund is doing that, Child Welfare League of America is doing that.  It's certainly part of our message, it's not the whole pie, it's part of the pie.  Probably Children’s Defense Fund, Family Voices, Families USA.  Those are child-related advocacy organizations that I'm sure are very focused.  The Association for Maternal and Child Health Program, I'm sure that there are dozens that their top focus is on the child care piece.  
	But I think that's something that's probably quite winnable.  There seems to be pretty widespread agreement that more money has to be put into child care.  Where you might have disagreements is how much.  Each bill that's been introduced has proposed a different amount of funding.  So what will be the end product, I don't know.  I think typically we would go with the strategy of support the highest number, because the House has the lowest number.  If you're going to come out somewhere in the middle – that's what's going to work best.

Ubiquitous Argument(s) and Evidence
	In this case, there are several.  But the bottom line would be, we need you to pass a bill that is going to assist people with disabilities and not leave them out in the cold.
There are multiple arguments underneath that.  How do you do that?  That's we need strong funding, we think there needs to be more funding in the TANF program.  Definitely more funding for child care makes that happen.  We need to look at tools and language within the bill that's going to get at better assessment of people with disabilities, so that case workers can more readily identify who is a person with a disability versus somebody who just isn't serious about finding a job.  Then knowing how to interact with that person, how do you find work the right situation for that person.  Then our next issue that will be a top priority is the sanctioning process.  
They put out all these things, we want to have 70 percent, we want to make sure people – in the House bill, they want people to be working forty hours a week.  Then what qualifies as work?  Going to school might qualify, being in a specific training program.  But we're trying to make some points that that works for some people.  But when you look at the population that you've got left on the TANF rolls – first of all, forty hours, even if some of it's work-related, like education or vocational rehabilitation, for certain people it's a serious effort to work and to cut it.  
We've got people in our group from the substance abuse community who say, we know that people who are in substance abuse rehabilitation programs, those programs can be twelve months, they can last up to a year or ten months.  But they're within a treatment program.  They're trying to make the point that for people with mild mental retardation, there's no treatment programs.  You have it, it's not going to go away.  So have you looked at that person?  
When the state has achieved their goal of getting 70 percent of their population back to work, what are you going to do with those other people that are just either never going to get there, so what's your cap going to look like?  If they're allowed to exempt 20 percent, what happens when your next person walks into a caseworker's office and truly honestly can't meet that?  Then what do you do?  So we're looking at these kinds of issues.  Just trying to help staff understand that these people exist and that they are legitimate.  There are people who are mentally retarded who can work fifteen hours a week.  But they really can't do beyond that.  They're never going to.  What category do you put those people in?  If the state wants to say they're complying, how many exemptions should they get?  How many waivers can a state have?
We're trying to bring them as much statistical information as we can.  Anecdotal information, what we collect from the states and people that – I'm not out there in the states, but I have people who are out there in the states who are talking to real people in the system.  What are their needs?  What are their goals?  What do they want?  What are their barriers?  What is stopping them from becoming gainfully employed?  
Of course, what you also don't want is the people with disabilities to be left in jobs where they earn $4.50 an hour.  Might be employed, but that's not gainfully employed.  That's never going to take them out of poverty.  If the whole idea of this reauthorization is to get more people out of poverty, having them flipping burgers at McDonalds for ten hours a week isn't going to do it.
	So our main goal is to get in there with the staff, make sure that they understand what the issues are, what the population is about, sort of putting a face on.  Because these are people who really can't come to the Hill themselves and talk.  We're not going to get welfare moms up to the Hill.  We're certainly not going to get people with disabilities easily up there to talk to the staff.  So we have to do it for them.  It's sort of trying in our own way to paint the face, paint the picture for them of what does that mom look like.  I say mom, obviously some of them are men too.  But a lot of what we're dealing with are women, particularly women who are dealing with child care issues.

Secondary Argument(s) and Evidence
None mentioned.

Targeted Arguments, Targets, and Evidence
None mentioned.

Nature of the Opposition
The major opposition is the House passed a bill that we don't like.  There’s not anything good in there that changes the system for people with disabilities.  I think it just makes it worse, because not only are there all these new requirements and fewer exemptions for those cases.  The impediments would be that we don't want the Senate to pass a similar bill.  We want the strongest bill possible, we want the best funding possible.  Because in the end, you're going to have to have a negotiation between the House and the Senate.  Certainly that's another impediment that we see coming up, so even if we do get a Senate bill before the end of the summer, and then September they've got to go to conference so they can come out with a final product.  If these things are so disparate and look so different, that could hold up the entire passage of the bill.  Then we have to fight to get into a final product the provisions that we think are better.  
	So there are a lot of steps along the way.  I personally just feel right now that we have a long way to go.  To try and push through a bill in two weeks time, to get something out there in two weeks and before the end of the summer, I just don't see it as very realistic.  I think there's too much that still needs to be negotiated and too much information that needs to be gathered.  I just feel they're trying to ram something through to say that it's done.  My personal hope is that the Senate Democrats will hold it back a little.

Ubiquitous Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition 
Not applicable. 
Secondary Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition
Not applicable. 

Targeted Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition (and Targets)
Not applicable. 

Described as a Partisan Issue
No.

Venue(s) of Activity
Senate Finance
House Ways & Means
House Education and the Workforce

Action Pending or Taken by Relevant Decision Makers
See advocacy activities and future advocacy – bill may be marked in the early weeks of July or may be held off for much longer

Policy Objective(s) and Support for/Opposition to the Status Quo
[Working to ensure the interests of the disabled are recognized in the TANF reauthorization, especially with respect to work requirements and barriers to entering the work place for disabled recipients.] 

Advocate’s Experience: Tenure in Current Job/Previous Experience
I've been here for seven and a half years.  I've been working in the disability advocacy community for fourteen, fifteen years.  I came to this particular group sort of by chance.  I was looking to leave where I was.  A woman who had my job prior to me here was leaving, she called me to say I'm moving on to another organization, are you interested in this position, I think it would be a good job for you.  So I interviewed for the job and got it.  I've been in this field for quite some years.

Reliance on Research: In-House/External (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
[Do you draft language in-house?] Yes, we do it in-house.  Different people write different pieces.  There are times that various task forces make contract for some pro bono, usually it's pro bono help.  There are some people who are top attorneys and some in the welfare area who are willing to give up some of their time and really help us with their expertise.  Sometimes we don't actually draft the exact wordage but will write it out contextually for the staff.  

One of the problems with TANF in general is that there's a huge lack of good solid data and information.  Where we would get our data from, some of our programs, some of our university centers do some data collection.  For example, our center in Michigan at Wayne State University has done some very good work, the center in Vermont has done some statistical data collection.  But there's not a whole lot.  We tend, at least in this issue, to gather our data from other groups.  
For example, this sort of answers the other question you had about who is getting some of the broad Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which is a think tank that works with a lot of budget-relates issues, has been working this up, this particular bill.  So they're not necessarily a disability group, they're not a member of the Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities, but they offer some of their services to us.  So they're highly involved in the TANF issue and they're one of the groups, you can look at their web site and see that they do mainly publications, do a lot of reports.  They're probably one of the best data sources that we have when it comes to welfare.
Certainly the government collects them.  So we work through HHS, Administration for Children and Families, that houses the welfare system.  We'll collect some of our data from there.  So we don't do data collection in-house.

Number of Individuals Involved in Advocacy (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
Two

Units in Organization Involved in Public Affairs/Policy (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
We have two lobbyists.  We are set up, we have within the association an executive director, then we have our legislative department.  Director and then a policy analyst who works with me.  Occasionally some support help.  From time to time we have a policy fellow, we do run a policy fellowship.  So when we have a fellow, we do not right now, that certainly adds to our ability to get more work done.  We have a legislative affairs committee that guides our work, it's a committee of our board of directors.  So we have two co-chairs of that committee, one is a member of our board, and the other comes from within our membership.  Currently we have twenty-five members of our legislative affairs committee.  The committee meets by phone call monthly, in fact they meet later today, the first Wednesday of every month by phone.  Then they do a lot of work by e-mail.  
	So that is the group that I work with.  At the end of every year, to start the new year, we develop a legislative agenda and lay out the scope of our work for the coming year.  But I do is I advise them on what I see coming up.  
What issues did we not complete from the previous year that are going to carry over.  We have some issues that are ongoing.  For example, we spend a great deal of time on appropriation every year.  Appropriation for this association is bread and butter.  We are funded, we have a line item in the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill.  That's actually my primary issue area is appropriations.  Then we look at what reauthorizations are coming up in the next calendar year, what new legislation might be coming up, we start working on a proposal.  
So we develop a legislative agenda for the year.  Doesn't mean that we can't alter that or change that as time advances.  Sometimes Congress is going to dictate which issue is going to take a back seat and which stuff becomes a top priority.  So we might have to shift our focus.  But we pretty much know where we're going to devote our time and energy.
Then my legislative affairs committee will divide up into work groups.  They work on the TANF work group that was developed this year.  So I give them information once or twice a week, send out an e-mail, this is the latest, this is what's happening.  Then they work with me to provide information that I'm going to need to get back to the Hill, if I need folks to come in for meetings on the Hill.  That might be the group that I go to first, because they're the most engaged on that particular issue.  They have an IDEA work group, we have assisted technology work group.  So that's where their work is centered at their various universities.  
They feed information into us and vice versa, so we have that smaller group within the larger group that is going to work with me on a day to day basis in developing our recommendations, being able to look at language from somebody on the Hill and draft language on a proposal around sanctions language for TANF, can you take a look at it, let me know what you think.  I'm going to share it with my work group, get some feedback from them before I take it back to the staff on the Hill.

Advocate’s Outstanding Skills/Assets (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
None mentioned.

Type of Membership: None, Institutions, Individuals, Both (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
Institutions 

Membership Size (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)

Organizational Age (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)

Miscellaneous