Trump takes his vendetta against DEI to a sickening new low

Christine Faltz Grassman was stunned when she received a layoff notice from the Department of Education on Oct. 11, 10 days after she was suspended due to the government shutdown.

Grassman, who is blind, helps supervise a federal program which offers government contracting opportunities to blind providers. He wondered how he would cover his mortgage and bills, and who would make sure the government followed a New Deal-era law intended to boost employment among blind Americans.

Her surprise quickly turned to anger as she thought about the Trump administration’s treatment of workers with disabilities.

“The mentality of these people is that if we have a disability and we have a job, we are taking it away from a healthy person,” Grassman, 56, said. “It’s not enough that you went to an Ivy League school, that you went to law school, and that you can circle around half the cabinet… It doesn’t matter, because we’re blind.”

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

His two other coworkers who oversee the Randolph-Sheppard sales program at the Department of Education also received “reduction in force,” or RIF, notices, he testified in a judicial statement. They are blind too, he said.

The Department of Education did not respond to News themezone’s questions about the layoffs. An automated response from the agency said its press team was suspended during the shutdown, which the message attributed to Democrats.

“The mentality of these people is that if we have a disability and we have a job, we are taking it away from a healthy person.”

– Christine Grassman, federal worker

The Trump administration is trying to cut about 4,000 workers from the federal payroll during the appropriations gap. President Donald Trump has expressly said he views the RIF shutdown as an opportunity to cut “Democratic programs” and punish Democratic lawmakers for insisting that any funding deal expand health care subsidies.

A federal judge on Tuesday granted a mandate block the White House from proceeding with the layoffs while a court challenge by the unions takes place. But Trump could still prevail in the underlying case, as the Supreme Court has largely paved the way for his job cuts so far.

Grassman is fighting for her position in that lawsuit and wanted to clarify that she was speaking in her personal capacity, not as a federal employee.

Their work is part of a broader civil rights labor infrastructure that has been decimated by the Trump administration, as it has eliminated approximately 200,000 federal jobs.

The president has pursued anything that contains a hint of diversity or affirmative action, meaning deep cuts to programs and law enforcement efforts designed to help minority workers, students and people with disabilities. The same worddisability” is one that the administration has been removing from government websites and other materials.

The Center for American Progress, a left-wing think tank, has said that the first six months of this Trump administration would be remembered as “an all-out war on disabled people.” “The White House has basically eliminated civil rights offices in the Education, Justice and Labor departments through layoffs and attrition, leaving fewer staff to help enforce the law, while also moving backwards.”disparate impact“Policies aimed at stopping discrimination against disabled workers and other groups.

Watching it all unfold has been devastating for Grassman.

“When I was a kid, my parents had a place to go if they needed it. They had a strong law. They had federal forces they could count on if my school didn’t provide me with the accommodations I needed,” said Grassman, who is from Brooklyn. “That’s no longer true for children with disabilities, adults with disabilities, or people who become disabled later in life.”

Photo: Courtesy of the Blind Muse Foundation

Blind since birth, Grassman said he has been overcoming skeptics his entire life, eventually earning his undergraduate degree from Princeton University and his law degree from Hofstra University. He knew the Randolph-Sheppard program well when he accepted a job in Washington, D.C., in 2019, to help oversee it. Her husband, who is legally blind, had been a salesperson through the program for more than three decades.

The Randolph-Sheppard Act, signed into law by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936, gives blind salespeople a contractual preference to operate concession stores and vending machines on federal property, including military bases.

Grassman, a conflict resolution specialist, is part of a small Department of Education team that helps ensure federal agencies comply with the law and resolves disputes between providers and the state agencies that issue their licenses.

Grassman said the program’s contracts are sometimes mistakenly viewed as government handouts or hype. Daniel Driscoll, Trump’s Army secretary, appeared on a recent podcast and suggested that healthy vendors were gaming the program and forcing the Department of Defense to overpay for chicken. The discussion led to laughter.

“Over the years that has been interpreted to basically mean that we have to give blind people priority when we apply for our chicken contracts,” Driscoll said.

“I’m a trauma veteran. Russell Vought doesn’t scare me.”

– grass man

Grassman said she was “horrified” by the description of the program as wasteful.

“Complete nonsense,” he said.

Her husband, Gary Grassman, ran concessions operations on federal property in New York for years, often getting up at 4 a.m. to go to work, “not sitting at home cashing a check,” as his wife put it. Gary Grassman said removing those who oversee the program could lead to abuse and defraud providers.

“If you lose oversight, then that gives free rein to federal agencies and states to decide how they want to do things, and they may not be following the law,” he said.

He closed his sales business during the pandemic and is currently not working, so his wife’s salary is his only income.

She hoped to work for the government until she retired and is worried about what the job market will offer a 56-year-old blind woman, especially when it is inundated with other unemployed feds. She can’t work as a waitress or drive for Uber to make ends meet. She’s glad her children are grown, but if her layoff continues, she and her husband may have to sell their condo in expensive Northern Virginia and move away from her parents, who have serious health problems.

According to her layoff notice, Grassman’s last day of work is supposed to be Dec. 9, although the court challenge may keep her employed longer. Whatever happens, Grassman said, she won’t be left “traumatized,” the words Trump’s budget director, Russell Vought, used to describe his desire for the federal workforce. He said he’s been standing up to bullies “my whole life.”

“I’m a trauma veteran. Russell Vought doesn’t scare me,” she said. “I will always be at the 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.”