Christine Faltz Grassman was stunned when she received a layoff notice from the Department of Education on Oct. 11, 10 days after being furloughed due to the government shutdown.
Grassman, who is blind, helps oversee a federal program that offers government contracting opportunities to blind vendors. She wondered how she would cover her mortgage and bills — and who would make sure the government is following a New Deal-era law meant to boost employment among blind Americans.
Her shock quickly turned to anger as she thought about the Trump administration’s treatment of workers 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,” said 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 asked.
Her two other co-workers who oversee the Randolph-Sheppard vending program at the Education Department also received “reduction-in-force,” or RIF, notices, she attested in a court declaration. They, too, are blind, she said.
The Education Department did not answer questions from HuffPost about the layoffs. An automatic reply from the agency said its press team was furloughed during the shutdown, which the message blamed on Democrats.
“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.”
– Christine Grassman, federal worker
The Trump administration is trying to eliminate around 4,000 workers from the federal payroll during the lapse in appropriations. President Donald Trump has said expressly that he views the shutdown RIFs as an opportunity to cut “Democrat programs” and punish Democratic lawmakers for insisting that any funding deal extend health care subsidies.
A federal judge on Tuesday granted an injunction blocking the White House from proceeding with the layoffs while a court challenge from labor unions proceeds. 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 job in that lawsuit and wanted to clarify that she was speaking in her personal capacity, not as a federal employee.
Her work is part of a larger civil rights employment infrastructure that’s been decimated by the Trump administration as it has shed an estimated 200,000 federal jobs.
The president has gone after anything that contains a whiff of diversity or affirmative action, which means deep cuts to programs and enforcement efforts designed to aid minority workers and students and people with disabilities. The very word “disability” is among those the administration has been scrubbing from government websites and other materials.
Are you a federal worker impacted by the shutdown? You can contact our reporter on Signal at davejamieson.99 or email him at dave.jamieson@huffpost.com.
The Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, has said the first six months of this Trump administration would be remembered as “an all-out war against disabled people.” The White House has essentially wiped out civil rights offices at the Education, Justice and Labor departments through layoffs and attrition, leaving fewer staff to help enforce the law, while rolling back “disparate impact” policies meant to curb discrimination against disabled workers and other groups.
Watching it all 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,” said 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.”
Photo: Courtesy of Blind Muse Foundation
Blind since birth, Grassman said she’s been overcoming doubters her whole life, eventually getting her undergraduate degree from Princeton University and a law degree from Hofstra University. She was well aware of the Randolph-Sheppard program when she took a job in Washington, D.C., in 2019 to help oversee it. Her husband, who is legally blind, had been a vendor through the program for more than three decades.
The Randolph-Sheppard Act, signed into law by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936, gives blind vendors a contracting preference to run concessions shops and vending machines on federal properties, including military bases.
Grassman, a conflict resolution specialist, is part of a small team at the Education Department that helps make sure federal agencies comply with the law and resolves disputes between vendors and the state agencies that issue their licenses.
Grassman said the program’s contracts are sometimes wrongly viewed as handouts or government bloat. Daniel Driscoll, Trump’s secretary of the Army, appeared on a recent podcast and suggested that able-bodied vendors were gaming the program and forcing the Defense Department to overpay for chicken. The discussion 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 said.
“I’m a veteran of trauma. Russell Vought doesn’t scare me.”
– Grassman
Grassman said she was “appalled” at the portrayal of the program as wasteful.
“Complete nonsense,” she said.
Her husband, Gary Grassman, ran concessions operations on federal properties in New York for years, often rising at 4 a.m. for work, “not sitting at home and collecting a check,” as his wife put it. Gary Grassman said eliminating those overseeing the program could lead to abuses and shortchange vendors.
“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 said.
He closed his vending business during the pandemic and isn’t currently working, making his wife’s paycheck their only income.
She had hoped to work for the government until retirement and worries what the job market will offer a 56-year-old blind woman, especially when it’s been flooded with other out-of-work feds. She can’t waitress or drive for Uber to make ends meet. She is glad her children are grown, but if her layoff stands, she and her husband may have to sell their condo in pricey Northern Virginia and move away from her parents, who both have serious health issues.
According to her layoff notice, Grassman’s last day of work is supposed to be Dec. 9, though the court challenge may keep her employed longer. Whatever happens, Grassman said, she would not be put “in trauma” — the words Trump’s budget director, Russell Vought, used to describe his wish for the federal workforce. She said she’s been facing down bullies “my whole life.”
“I’m a veteran of trauma. Russell Vought doesn’t scare me,” she said. “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.”