STATEMENT TO THE SENATE COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE, NUTRITION AND FORESTRY

BY PAUL W. FIDDICK, ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR ADMINISTRATION,

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE

SEPTEMBER 12, 2000

(also submitted on behalf of USDA witnesses

Charles R. Rawls, General Counsel, and Rosalind Gray, Director, Office of Civil Rights)

Good morning, Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee. Thank you for inviting us to testify before you today on the promotion and enforcement of civil rights at the Department of Agriculture (USDA).

I am offering this testimony on behalf of Secretary Dan Glickman, as well as my colleagues here with me today - Charles R. Rawls, our General Counsel, and Rosalind Gray, Director of the Office of Civil Rights. In addition to this written testimony, Charlie, Rosalind, and I will each make brief remarks to the Committee and stand ready to answer any questions you may have.

It was almost exactly one year ago that I appeared before this Committee for my confirmation hearing. The Senate confirmed my appointment on November 10^th and I was sworn in as Assistant Secretary for Administration on November 16^th of last year. In this capacity, I oversee several Departmental staff offices, including our Office of Civil Rights (OCR) -- which brings me before you today.

When I arrived at USDA, Secretary Glickman made it clear that there is nothing more important to him than continuing to advance the Department's civil rights record. As in any venture, there's always room for improvement and more steps to take. However, we believe we've made significant progress in addressing the circumstances that give rise to complaints on one hand, and in processing the complaints we receive in a timely and efficient manner, on the other.

The USDA civil rights story is a story of struggle, of challenge, and of heartache and heartbreak. It is only in this Administration that USDA has really faced up to its history and acknowledged how much we need to do to eradicate inequality.

The Civil Rights Action Team (CRAT) report of February 1997 stated:

"Despite the fact that discrimination in program delivery and employment has been documented and discussed, it continues to exist to a large degree unabated….The comments [received by CRAT] reflected the depth of pain and betrayal felt by so many customers and employees."

We are not here to tell you that our problems are fixed. We're here to tell you that we take them seriously, and that we are doing everything we can to fix them. We appreciate the role of Congress, oversight agencies like GAO and our IG, and USDA customers and employees to point our shortcomings out to us. We've made progress, but there is still much work to do to make USDA a leader in civil rights.

Better Representation of Women and Minorities in USDA Employment

One part of this story that sometimes doesn't get told is how well we're doing at USDA in terms of overall representation in employment, and the progress we have made toward the President's goal of a workforce that looks like America. USDA's total workforce has decreased by more than 15% since 1993, but our representation of minorities and women has steadily improved. The percentage of women has marginally increased, from 41.1% to 41.9% since 1993. African American employment has grown from 9.4% to 10.8%; Hispanics have increased from 4.1% to 4.8%; Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders from 1.7% to 2.0%; and Native Americans from 2.4% to 2.6%. Our current hiring rates show that this progress will continue. It has been doubly difficult to make these gains in the environment of a shrinking workforce and fewer jobs. We have further to go, and I'll detail later some major initiatives to address employment of the most under-represented groups.

The Civil Rights Action Team

As you know, Secretary Glickman appointed the CRAT in late 1996, to thoroughly review USDA's civil rights record and recommend hard-hitting actions to address some long-standing problems. The CRAT report, issued in February 1997, stands as a landmark in Federal Government civil rights efforts. It represents a sober, impartial, and sometimes uncomfortable look at the institutional and underlying problems, and presents a roadmap for remediation and relief.

As you are aware, USDA moved decisively to implement the CRAT recommendations, and by now, the majority has been implemented. Of the 92 recommendations, implementation of 57 is complete, 27 are in progress, and 8 require Congressional action. One of the recommendations dealt with our Civil Rights office, which had been fragmented into a number of different units and functions, with no strong central oversight and accountability. In 1997, Secretary Glickman reassembled and empowered all civil rights functions at USDA in an independent office, and appointed noted civil rights attorney Rosalind Gray as Director in July 1998. And since my arrival ten months ago, the Civil Rights Office again reports to a Senate-confirmed official.

Another key CRAT recommendation was to expand our civil rights training and make it mandatory and universal. We selected important topics that should be covered over a three-year period (ending in FY 2000) in training provided for every employee of USDA. You can imagine what an undertaking this has been in a Department the size of USDA.

Most USDA agencies completed training on several of the topics during FY 1998 and 1999. Last September, the Office of Civil Rights entered into an agreement with the USDA Graduate School to leverage modern technology and develop an automated on-line training course covering the remaining topics. Our employees are in 15,000 locations worldwide. This is a state-of-the-art, interactive, low-cost way of reaching them, and represents the Federal Government's first comprehensive, Department-wide on-line training, consistent with Executive Order 13111, "Using Technology to Improve Training Opportunities for Federal Government Employees." The training is custom-designed for USDA and uses agency-specific exercises and examples to make the training relevant. The training went live on July 31, 2000. A hard copy version is available for those employees without sufficient computer support to take the on-line training.

African American Farmers Class Action Lawsuit

With our colleagues in the Justice Department, we entered into negotiations - ultimately successful - to settle the Pigford v. Glickman class action lawsuit by African American farmers concerning the Department's farm loan programs. We agreed to an objective third-party adjudication of claims and the use of outside parties, not employed by USDA, to monitor and oversee the process. Since the April 1999 settlement, over 20,000 persons have filed claims under the Consent Decree, and more than 18,000 claims have been decided. A little over 60% of the claims have been resolved in favor of the claimant. Through the end of August, the Government has paid out more than $357 million in liquidated damages, mostly paid out through the Department of Justice's Judgment Fund. We've also forgiven another $8 million in principal and interest owed on farm loans. We're providing plain-English information and status updates to the public through a special web site, www.usda.gov/da/consent.htm.

Holding Managers Accountable

Accountability has been at the heart of the Secretary's civil rights commitment. Accountability comes in two forms - establishing objective standards of conduct, and taking appropriate disciplinary or corrective actions.

Under CRAT, a separate civil rights element was added to every USDA manager's performance standards. Civil rights criteria were also inserted into the existing standards for non-supervisory employees. We've since taken the process a step further, by insisting on tough, plain-English, quantifiable standards outlining each agency head's responsibility. OCR Director Rosalind Gray and I have required each agency head to report his or her accomplishments, and we will be providing performance ratings based on demonstrated accomplishments at the end of the fiscal year.

On June 30 of this year, the Secretary issued a new Departmental Regulation addressing the "consequence" side of accountability. As recommended in the CRAT report, we've already stepped up enforcement: 39 disciplinary actions (including 4 removals) were taken for discrimination in calendar year 1998; 40 (including 6 removals) in 1999; and 18 (including 4 removals) during the first half of calendar year 2000.

The Secretary's latest action makes the policy even stronger. Now, every time an EEO complaint is closed either with a finding of discrimination or by a settlement agreement, Human Resources staff will review the complaint file. They will determine whether and what disciplinary or corrective action is appropriate. This does not mean that every settlement agreement will result in someone being disciplined. But it does close a loophole in the system. Before, disciplinary action was rare in cases that were closed with a "no-fault" settlement agreement.

As you know, USDA is highly decentralized, and component agencies have their own civil rights staffs that are responsible for managing, subject to Department-wide procedures, their internal equal employment opportunity programs. This year, we are requiring each USDA agency to do a full compliance review of its civil rights employment program. To ensure impartiality, these reviews are being conducted by outside contractors, rather than by internal staffs, using a standard set of Department compliance review guidelines. Some USDA agencies have already completed their reviews, and all agency reviews will be under way by the end of this month.

Employee Input

Beginning with the Secretary, USDA strives to hear the message that employees and customers are sending us. The Secretary, those of us here, and the administrators of our agencies have maintained an ongoing dialogue with groups and individuals representing employees, customers, and other stakeholders. We have honestly endeavored to maintain an "open door" policy.

In June, Secretary Glickman announced that he is establishing a portfolio of employee civil rights advisory councils. We already have two such employee advisory councils -- one for Hispanic employees and one for employees with disabilities. Now, we're chartering councils for five other groups -- African Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, women, and gays and lesbians. These councils will give each protected group a means to share concerns and provide advice directly to the Secretary, and a way for the Secretary to make policy that takes into account the perspectives of each group. The Secretary is also creating an overarching Diversity Council, comprised of two representatives from each of these employee councils, to harmonize the advice of the councils and provide consistent policy direction. We expect to have the chairs and co-chairs of the councils named before the end of this month.

Affirmative Steps

I also wanted to share with you three specific initiatives that are targeted to the needs of specific groups that are underserved or under-represented - employees with disabilities, Hispanics, and Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

Even before the President's recent Executive Order that the Government hire a total of 100,000 new disabled employees over the next five years, USDA was moving into the forefront in this area. The Secretary established an advisory committee to focus attention on the unique needs of employees and applicants with disabilities, and to improve our hiring record. Two years ago, the committee issued a report entitled "A Time for Change," making a series of comprehensive recommendations. Last year, it conducted a broad survey of employees (30,000 voluntary responses) to determine where we needed to concentrate specific efforts. This year, it worked with the Office of Civil Rights to issue a Department-wide policy on reasonable accommodations to help employees with disabilities function at peak efficiency and to fully utilize their potential. The Committee also instituted a pilot mentoring program for disabled employees, to provide support in meeting the special challenges they face. Our state-of-the-art TARGET Centers are leaders and acknowledged Government-wide resources for accessible technology.

We are also a leader in reaching out to the Hispanic community. This May, the Secretary invited leaders of the 15 largest national Hispanic organizations to meet with him and key staff, to hear how we could do better in employee recruitment and retention, and forge partnerships and alliances with Hispanic groups. Led by the Secretary's Hispanic Advisory Council, we developed a far-reaching Hispanic Employment Plan. We are expanding the number of positions for which we recruit from all sources, rather than just internally, and increasing the use of bilingual/bicultural certification for appropriate positions, as the groups requested. We've created a unique Hispanic Recruitment Cadre that will work with six newly selected Hispanic-Serving Institution Liaisons stationed around the country. The Recruitment Cadre will receive its orientation and training later this month, and then hit the road in our quest for the best candidates. We're expanding use of targeted student employment and establishing mentoring and leadership development programs. The leaders of the Hispanic organizations were impressed with our determination, but wanted to ensure that this was no one-shot deal. They asked for a follow-up "proof of performance" meeting that, in fact, will occur tomorrow.

We are actively implementing the President's Executive Order on increasing outreach to underserved communities of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI's). I convened a work group with representatives from every USDA mission area and from the three AAPI employee organizations to prepare an action plan under the Executive Order. We issued that plan July 15, and we look forward to a host of creative actions in this area in FY 2001, including targeted college recruitment, more USDA publications in languages such as Chinese, Hmong, and Vietnamese, and expanded outreach and partnerships with AAPI community organizations and educational institutions. I've been an active member of the working group put together by the White House Initiative on AAPI's, and I'll be in New York next week with the President's Commission on AAPI's to hear testimony from community groups and AAPI organizations on improving service to them.

Complaint Processing

Let me turn now in detail to discrimination complaint processing. In light of the findings of the General Accounting Office (GAO) and our Inspector General (IG), we think it would provide useful perspective to compare the work and workload of USDA's civil rights office with that of other Federal agencies.

As this Committee knows, the Department of Agriculture is a very large and dispersed organization. With almost 100,000 permanent and temporary employees, it is the fifth largest Cabinet agency by employment. However, on a per capita basis, it is in the middle of the pack in the rate of EEO complaints filed. We're exactly at the Government-wide average of 1.0% per year in the rate at which Federal employees file discrimination complaints, according to the EEOC's 1998 report, the latest data available. In other words, because our Department is so large, the complaint volume is numerically high. But on an equalized basis, the rate of complaint filing is average.

USDA program complaints -- which normally involve farm loans and rural housing benefits, but can involve any one of our dozens of programs -- are unique to USDA's mission and therefore do not easily lend themselves to comparison. Again, however, the denominator of USDA customers is very large. In 1999, for example, we made almost 38,000 farm loans and serviced an inventory of over 214,000 farm loans. We also provided financial assistance to 60,000 families for new or improved housing. We logged over 109,000 calls to our Meat and Poultry Hotline, and about 350 million visitor days to our National Forests. We have inspectors every day in 6,400 privately owned meat and poultry plants. About 1 in 6 Americans, or about 46 million people, are touched by our Food and Consumer programs, such as Food Stamps or the WIC Program.

For the same period, FY 1999, we received 1,261 program discrimination complaints, and we are projecting a total of less than 650 complaints for FY 2000, based on the run rate through August.

Let me be clear. This is not meant to minimize or excuse any acts of discrimination -- which are anathema and unacceptable in any number. It is meant to place the volume of our civil rights complaints in context. A consequence of being an agency with tens of thousands of employees and millions of customers is that there is a lot of work to do. And as the GAO and our IG have pointed out, we have not been keeping up with our work.

Over the past five fiscal years, USDA has closed an average of 744 EEO complaints a year. This is more than all but three other Cabinet agencies. Unfortunately, we have been receiving an average of 835 EEO complaints a year for the same period. Let me tell you what we have done this year to close this gap.

We know we have our work cut out for us. Our average complaint processing time is not acceptable to me or to the Secretary. We will devote the resources necessary to reduce it, meaningfully, and we have a carefully developed management plan, which I'll share with you in a moment, to do it.

Action Plan for Improvement

To address the standing inventory of employment complaints at the intake stage awaiting acceptance or dismissal, we engaged contractors to review 360 complaints, recommend action, and draft appropriate letters for our ratification. So far, we've received 316 of the cases back from the contractors and expect to have the last of these cases moved forward into the investigation stage within a few weeks. Also under consideration is a comprehensive complaint-reduction initiative, expected to last a year, to eliminate the remaining inventory of program and employment complaints, as well as new complaints received during the twelve-month period. In other words, it's not enough to tackle individual problem areas as they occur, but we must ensure that we fix the entire process "end-to-end" once and for all.

As you may remember from my confirmation hearing, Mr. Chairman, I am new to Government. I spent more than 25 years of my career in private industry, most of that time as president of three different companies. When I arrived at USDA, Secretary Glickman instructed me to use my business experience to develop an enduring solution to the inefficiencies of our civil rights operations. I approached this assignment as I would a business problem, one where an operating unit was not performing up to expectations. I concluded that:

1. The Office of Civil Rights, as presently organized, was not able to process complaints at the same rate as complaints were being filed;

2. The problem was unlikely to correct itself simply with the passage of time, or without modification to the "business plan";

3. For the solution to be survivable, it would need to be led by a career officer (as opposed to a political official); and

4. Any changes would have to be made from the "inside out" rather than the "outside in".

In this last regard, I've observed that Government's "default setting" is often the "outside in" approach -- in other words, the hiring of consultants or the creation of a task force. These techniques work well for acute problems and crises, but in my experience are less effective in fixing chronic, structural problems.

I recommended and the Secretary approved a plan to create a new position in OCR that I borrowed from the private sector -- that of Chief Operating Officer (COO - officially, Deputy Director) -- with delegated authority for the complaints processing and administrative functions of the office. This bifurcates OCR into two distinct areas -- complaints processing and administration headed by a career senior executive, and the policy, regulatory, and legislative functions led by a senior political official. The latter role is filled by our Director of the Office of Civil Rights, Rosalind Gray. Five months ago, I named David Winningham, a 28-year USDA employee with extensive management experience, to the COO position. Both of these talented individuals report directly to me as Assistant Secretary.

The Secretary and I directed Mr. Winningham to immediately set about the task of developing a long-term improvement plan (LTIP) to address the actions and resources necessary to fundamentally and permanently improve the operations of OCR. To our knowledge, this is the first business engineering plan that has been undertaken since the creation of the office in 1997.

The LTIP is truly a collaborative work -- approximately one-third of our civil rights staff has been involved in its production. It is comprehensive in design, and covers all functional areas of complaint processing. Specifically, the LTIP focuses on:

· staffing levels needed,

· types of knowledge, skills, and abilities needed,

· performance expectations and accountability,

· staff training needs and proper job placements,

· systems and process engineering, and

· automation and database support needs.

The process for developing the LTIP involved four stages:

· Impediment Survey to ask employees of OCR to identify what they felt to be impediments to performing their jobs.

· Fact-finding to get input from USDA agency civil rights managers and key USDA officials.

· Benchmarking to determine how OCR compares to similar sized outside agencies.

· Time Study to determine the time it takes to perform each task in complaint processing.

During the benchmarking phase, we compared our staffing, organization, and processes to the best practices of our analogs in Federal Government, the Department of the Treasury and the Air Force. At the same time, we have taken a zero-based approach to determining the staff and time resources necessary at every stage of the complaint process. A draft of the plan was delivered in August and we should be ready to roll within 30 days.

In the Field and On the Front Lines

Before I close, let me say a word or two about how our civil rights initiatives are having a real effect throughout the organization. I want you to know that the Secretary's message is not just " getting through," it's making a difference. Just two months ago, Secretary Glickman summoned all Subcabinet members and agency heads to hear him reiterate - in no uncertain terms - how important civil rights are, and that he expects results.

What you've heard today is mostly about initiatives we've taken at the Departmental level. To be fair and complete, though, we should credit the diligent work USDA agencies are doing. They are making the kinds of changes that will result in better service and fewer complaints being filed. Just a couple of quick - but representative - examples:

In just five years, the Farm Service Agency (FSA) increased its lending to African American farmers by 67 percent, making 893 loans in FY 1999 (up from 530 in FY 1995), totaling $32.3 million (up from $19.4 million in FY 1995). In the states where there are the highest number of claims under the Pigford consent decree, the percentage of total direct borrowers who are African American has grown to 13.4% of all borrowers in Alabama and 20.1% in Mississippi. Although African American farmers comprise 1% of American farmers, they comprise 3% of loan recipients in FSA's direct loan portfolio, and more than 4% of the loan recipients in fiscal year 2000.

In an attempt to ensure that USDA's vital message of food safety and advice on safe food handling reaches all segments of the public, the Food Safety and Inspection Service is now providing information in Spanish, Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese, and sent information packets to 183 African American newspapers.

The Forest Service has hired a full-time Native American liaison in its Southwest region and a full-time national recruiter for employees and summer interns with disabilities. The Natural Resources Conservation Service trained 750 employees on working effectively with Native Americans on the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, assisted 19 American Indian tribes in assessing the water quality in their watersheds, and is placing 77 employees on tribal lands to assist tribes in improving soil and water quality.

Our Research, Education and Economics mission area is providing practical assistance and training to farmers with disabilities through our unique AgrAbility program and through the Education and Assistance Program partnership with Purdue University.

These are but a few examples to give you a flavor of the good work being done around USDA. There are many more we could share. For the sake of the thousands of hard-working, caring employees, it's important we not overlook their day-to-day contributions to the civil rights effort.

The commitment of our Secretary, Dan Glickman, to the promotion and enforcement of civil rights at USDA is a matter of record. I can assure you that we take this commitment most seriously. We have been hard at work crafting an institutional solution that will endure beyond this Administration, and that will provide responsible social justice for USDA employees and the public today and in the future. As the Secretary said in his June 29 speech to all USDA employees,

"We need to set a benchmark, a baseline to which future managers, future Secretaries and future Administrations will be held accountable. I want you to know I'm going to sit down with my successor and I'm going to lay it out -- exactly what we've done, exactly where USDA is headed and the institutional structure that we've put in place to deal with civil rights. There is no turning back. That is the standard we've set against which all future managers will be measured. But it is also a standard that every employee of the department and the next Administration must carry on."