THE SECRET INTERFERENCE BY THE VICE PRESIDENT'S STAFF WITH HUD'S GUIDELINES FOR ACCESS BY HANDICAPPED PERSONS TO MULTIFAMILY DWELLINGS

TUESDAY, JUNE 30, 1992

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

LEGISLATION AND NATIONAL SECURITY SUBCOMMITTEE
OF THE COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT OPERATIONS,

Washington, DC. The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10 a.m., in room 2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. John Conyers, Jr. (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.

Members present: Representatives John Conyers, Jr., Glenn English, Frank Horton, Jon L. Kyl, and Christopher Shays.

Subcommittee staff present: Robert J. Kurz, deputy staff director, and Cheryl G. Matcho, clerk.

Full committee staff present: Julian Epstein, staff director; Benjamin I. Cohen, assistant counsel; Donald W. Upson, minority staff director; and Matthew R. Fletcher, minority deputy staff director.

OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN CONYERS

Mr. CONYERS. The hearings will please come to order. Today's hearing is a case study of how the Vice President's senior staff collaborates with certain private groups to block or modify proposed regulations that Congress has directed an executive agency to issue. The Government Operations Committee began its investigation of the Vice President's Council on Competitiveness more than 1 year ago, to be specific, in April 1991. At every step, we have been blocked by the Council.

The details of this stonewalling are set forth in my June 25 letter to the Appropriations Committee chairman, Jamie Whitten, which has been distributed to the subcommittee. Suffice it to say that the Council has refused to give information about its activities to the committee and has instructed various Federal agencies not to supply documents relating to the Council that are in the agency's possession.

Last fall, we served a subpoena on the Food and Drug Administration after FDA failed to turn over to the Subcommittee on Human Resources and Intergovernmental Relations numerous FDA documents dealing with the Council's interference in FDA regulations. I sincerely hope it will not be necessary to issue additional subpoenas as we pursue this investigation.

Today's hearing focuses on how Vice President Quayle's senior staff secretly collaborated with the National Association of Home Builders and its allies to make it more difficult for handicapped Americans to have access to multifamily dwellings.

While the date of this hearing was set more than 3 weeks ago and was dictated solely by the speed with which we could obtain information, this hearing is very relevant to the debate that will occur in the House of Representatives on the proposal by the Committee on Appropriations to defund the Council in fiscal year 1993. In the summer of 1989, the Department of Housing and Urban Development began developing the architectural guidelines required by the Fair Housing Amendments Act of 1988. These guidelines determine how many multifamily dwellings are actually accessible to physically handicapped persons, and compliance with these guidelines provides a safe harbor for compliance with the

1988 law.

In December 1990, after reviewing more than 500 public comments and holding numerous meetings of interested parties, including the home builders and the Paralyzed Veterans of America, HUD's Assistant Secretary for Housing and Equal Opportunity, Mr. Gordon Mansfield, then made his decision on the final guidelines.

I should note that Assistant Secretary Mansfield was nominated by President Bush and confirmed by the Senate in November 1989. Prior to his nomination, he had worked for the Paralyzed Veterans of America. The version of the guidelines that Mansfield had approved in late 1990 was not the version that was published 3 months later. What happened? Well, the documents tell the tale.

The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs of OMB refused to allow HUD to publish the version of the guidelines that Mansfield had decided best complied with the law. Meanwhile, the home builders and the veterans, who had been unable to persuade Mansfield to accept everything they wanted, met secretly in January and February 1991 with Allan Hubbard, Executive Director of the Council on Competitiveness and Deputy Chief of Staff to the Vice President.

Hubbard met with Mansfield in December 1990 and January 1991 and told him to compromise. The compromise version of the guidelines was published by HUD in March of last year. The home builders thanked both Hubbard and the Vice President for their help in changing HUD's position. NAHB told Hubbard that HUD would not have changed its position without the active intervention of the Council on Competitiveness.

After telling the committee in January 1992 that it would not identify which regulations Hubbard had reviewed, the Council has recently publicly admitted that it played a role in modifying the guidelines. Mr. Hubbard has, however, unsurprisingly, declined our invitation to testify today.

In conclusion, what we have here as the basis of the hearing this morning is a secret door to the Vice President's office that is open to one side of a controversy, and in this instance sunshine is always the best disinfectant. Millions of handicapped persons and their families are entitled to know just whose interests the Vice

President's senior staff are promoting. We will continue to expose to public scrutiny their secret bullying.

The American people are overwhelmingly rejecting the concept of closed decisionmaking in Washington based on wheeling, dealing, and financial cronyism. These are the kinds of conditions that breed decisions against the public interest, and it is time to enforce sunshine in the Council's activities.

That concludes my statement.

I am pleased to recognize the senior member of Government Operations, the gentleman from New York, Mr. Frank Horton.

Mr. HORTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Let me begin my statement by publicly commending Vice President Quayle and the outstanding men and women who serve him on the Competitiveness Council.

This small handful of individuals-and I emphasize small handful-have got the moxie and the courage to defy powerful congressional committee chairmen, to put aside beltway special interest organizations, to withstand unfounded, inflammatory, and unsubstantiated criticism, and to be one institution of government that keeps as its philosophical guideposts the farmer in New York-and I have a personal acquaintance with the problems they have had with regard to mud farming-the taxi driver in Los Angeles, the beef producer in Montana, and the plumber in Louisiana; in short, the taxpaying American citizen.

The Competitiveness Council puts the public interest first as it wades its way through a regulatory sludge swamp that is drowning State and local governments, American business, and the American taxpayer. The Council attempts to reconcile differences in regulatory disputes and to bring some measure of reason.

The Competitiveness Council is a successful and important organization. Its open door policy serves as a welcome ear to those individuals, organizations, and businesses that are frustrated by the Federal bureaucratic juggernaut.

It was the Council's intervention that brought us an expedited drug approval process that today is benefiting the terminally ill, including, if not especially, those suffering from the dreaded AIDS virus. Just last week this process brought an AIDS drug to the market in 3 months, to offer some degree of hope to those trying to fight this indiscriminate killer. Without the Council's involvement, this expedited process would not be achieved, and the drug approval process would have taken years.

It was the Council's intervention that slowed an EPA regulation that literally would have had half the back yards in America declared "woodlands."

And, yes, Mr. Chairman, it was the Council's intervention that brought organizations, whose membership is composed of disabled Americans, together with home builders, architects, engineers, and others, in a common effort to achieve compliance with Fair Housing Act Amendment guidelines that require access by disabled Americans to newly constructed multifamily dwellings. And it sought to produce guidelines that would not be so expensive that they would eliminate from the market the usually low-income disabled community these guidelines were to serve, which brings us to this hearing.

I have been concerned from time to time recently that the gap between our committee's portrayal of reality and reality itself is quite large. Today I am especially troubled. The rubber just doesn't meet the road. I read the committee briefing memo alleging secret meetings, and I read the committee press release entitled, "Congress Announces Hearing of the Secret Interference by the Vice President's Staff with the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Guidelines for Access by Handicapped Persons to Multifamily Dwellings."

I think even the media is recognizing that the gap between some of the committee's press hype and reality is way out of kilter.

There were no secret meetings on these guidelines, no interference. There was, however, an attempt to create a workable solution to some complex design and construction problems. The Council's role, while small, was constructive. OMB's role, somewhat more significant, also was constructive. I must confess, I am a little bit disturbed by what I consider some very biased staff work on this hearing and on the investigation of the Council and its staff as well in preparation for this hearing. Facts, truth, and objectivity simply were not evident in the work that brings us here today.

A witness letter sent to OMB requested an individual that hasn't worked there in more than a year. The most fundamental staff work would have shown that the requested individual, Scott Jacobs, has been working in Europe for the Organization of Economic Development and Cooperation since early 1991.

The widely publicized invitation to former Competitiveness Council Executive Director Allan Hubbard was made with full knowledge that neither he nor any staff member of the President or the Vice President appear before Congress, according to longstanding and recognized practice by both parties, and I might say that that is not just with this President, but this is all Presidents, Republican and Democrat.

And until my insistence last week, and despite, dare I say, unsuccessful interference, the witness list was unbalanced. This hearing is a not-so-thinly veiled attempt to discredit the Competitiveness Council at any and all cost. The manufactured image for today's hearing is the disabled community that has been trampled by the Competitiveness Council acting secretly and in accord with powerful home building interests. This is as far from the truth as Pluto is from the Earth.

What happened, really, with these guidelines? In January 1989, HUD published a draft proposal for the construction guidelines. Organizations whose membership consists of disabled Americans thought the guidelines left too many loopholes, were deficient in changes that they did make, and that the implementation would require such cost that the disabled community could not afford the housing that would result.

Home builders also thought the guidelines were too vague. Their concern was that the guidelines would subject them to endless disputes and litigation over whether they were or were not in compliance with Fair Housing Act standards.

To his credit, Victor McCoy, president of the Paralyzed Veterans of America, a Distinguished Service Cross holder from Vietnam, himself dependent on a wheelchair for mobility, decided to play a

key role in the joint effort with the National Association of Home Builders to produce reasonable guidelines that accomplish the stated objective in the most cost effective manner.

The PVA-that's the Paralyzed Veterans of America-was one of many organizations working under the larger umbrella of the National Coordinating Council for Spinal Cord Injury, NCCSCI. This NCCSI-National American Home Builders [NAHB] Coalition succeeded in is objective. It submitted to HUD a comprehensive draft proposal in September 1989, 9 months after the HUD proposal was published.

The proposal included detailed cost analyses, architectural designs, a wealth of information. The Paralyzed Veterans of America spearheaded the work that produced the proposal. Following HUD's August 1990 publication of its proposed final guidelines, the coalition prepared a final proposal.

Both of these are here today, and, Mr. Chairman, I ask that they be included in the record, or included with the record. I don't want to publish them all, but just so that they are with the record.

Mr. CONYERS. Well, let me ask my friend, the ranking member, is he proposing that we include this in the record?

Mr. HORTON. No, I just say that we include I don't want it printed in the record, but just that it would be included with the record so that we know that we have it here. That's all.

Mr. CONYERS. All right. The Chair will take note of that observation by the gentleman from New York.

Mr. HORTON. The Competitiveness Council and OMB both were contacted on numerous occasions by many of the member organizations of the coalition on this matter. Of course members of this committee have been provided with an alleged record of conversations between only the home builders and the Competitiveness Council. I should add, too, that I consider the proposal that the Council record every phone conversation, every meeting, every oral conversation is as absurd for the Council as it would be for the Congress.

Many organizations communicated the concerns that they had about these guidelines to OMB, if not to the Council. OMB and the Council listened. OMB and the Council officials met with coalition representatives in a productive January 1991 meeting to discuss some of the outstanding issues.

Changes to the final regulations were made, but they were made by HUD willingly and after discussions with a number of parties, including OMB. Most importantly, however, and consistent with law, they were made based on the public record. The changes made sense. They will be discussed here today by one party who helped develop them and by another who chose to sit on the sidelines and be a critic.

We have two organizations representing the disabled community here today. One, the National Association of Protection and Advocacy Systems, deliberately chose not to participate in a common effort to reach a workable solution. This organization's membership consists of organizations interested in all forms of disability, from mental to physical. The particular guidelines in question were targeted especially to those disabled Americans dependent on wheel

chairs.