I understand that at the June 27 hearing held by the Subcommittee on
the Handicapped you expressed to Under Secretary Carlucci your concern
over the Department's failure to comply with Committee rules by trans-
mitting to the Committee copies of Departmental testimony twenty-four
hours in advance of the hearing. Let me state at the outsat that I
fully share your concern over this failure on our part to comply with
Committee rules. I have repeatedly emphasized to my staff that the
preparation of testimony and other materials requested by Congressional
Comittees must receive the highest priority possible.

Unfortunately, there are a number of difficulties that we face in preparing testimony for hearings which make it extremely difficult to meet advance submission demilines. First, this Department with its vast array of programs is called upon to testify before a variety of Congressional Committees and Subcommittees on the average of three times a week. While we try to arrange these so that we can accommodate all of the requests, clearly this is an enormous undertaking.

Second, preparation of testimony is a complex process, which usually requires
the formulation of Departmental positions on legislative issues and there-
fore inescapably involves significant amounts of time from key policy-making
personnel, including program directors, agency heads, Assistant Secretaries,
the Under Secretary, myself, and sometimes other agencies involved in
establishing Administration policy. Of necessity, these Department officials
are also engaged in the day-to-day conduct of the Department's administrative
responsibilities and in policy formulation not related to proposed legislation.
To address the demand for preparation of testimony, we must reorder the
priorities of key management officials. We must decide what other tasks
can be deferred without defaulting on our statutory obligations.

Finally, adding to these internal impediments to the timely preparation
of testimony is the fact that we frequently receive insufficient advance
notice of upcoming hearings and/or an imprecise description of the subject
matter which we will be expected to address. For example, we never received

a written invitation to testify at the June 27 hearing on H.R. 14225 and S. 3108, and the scope of the hearing was broadened considerably immediately before it occurred.

In summary, I sometimes marvel that we manage to meet the Congressional demands for testimony, positions on legislation, and prompt and responsive replies to the flood of Congressional mail and telephone inquiries as well as the Department now does. But there is certainly room for improvement in all these categories, and I assure you that I am continually stressing with top Departmental Staff the importance of meeting these timetables. As to your specific request, I will re-emphasize the need to make every effort to meet Committee pre-submission deadlines for testimony. But I would also ask your help and that of your colleagues by giving us as much notice of upcoming hearings as possible, preferably in writing, and specifying the issues to be addressed. If we had three weeks' written notice specifying the scope and nature of the hearing, we would be able to meet the 24-hour advance deadline except in the most unusual of circumstances.

I hope that we can, by working cooperatively on this problem, resolve it to the mutual satisfaction of your Committee and the Department.

Sincerely,

Ts/Cap

Secretary

Mr. CARLUCCI. Let me add, that with us also we have Mr. Martin Gerry, who is Deputy Director of our Office for Civil Rights.

Mr. Chairman, Senator Stafford. I thank you for the opportunity to appear here today to testify on S. 3108, a bill to amend the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 by transfer of the Rehabilitation Services Administration from the Social and Rehabilitation Service (SRS) to the Office of Human Development (OHD) and H.R. 14225, a bill "to amend and extend the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 for 1 additional year."

More specifically, section 2 of H.R. 14225, as passed by the House, would transfer RSA to the Office of the Secretary.

Section 3, in its most significant provisions, would extend for 1 additional year, through fiscal year 1976, the authorizations for appropriations for the act's two State formula grant programs for basic vocational rehabilitation services and innovation and expansion grants. The new authorization levels would be $720 million and $40 million, respectively.

Sections 4 through 11 would similarly extend at fixed dollar amounts the remaining portions of the act.

Finally, section 12 would extend the due date of the comprehensive service needs study from February 1 through June 30, 1975.

With reference to H.R. 14225, we believe that the authorization of $720 million for the formula grant program for fiscal year 1976 is unwise at this time. Since the authorization level in the Rehabilitation Act is the basis for State allotments, this provision in effect preempts the necessary consideration of overall budget policy and resource allocation decisions which will need to be made as the 1976 budget is developed later this year.

Accordingly, we recommend that section 110 (a) of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 be amended to base the allotment of each State on the amount appropriated, rather than the amount authorized. Alternatively, the amount authorized should be limited to the amount requested in the 1975 budget-$680 million. If the latter approach here is taken, the level of funding for 1976 would be established as being at least equal to that for 1975 and could be subsequently increased if circumstances warrant such action in the context of the 1976 budget. Finally, the House-approved measure would establish a June 30, 1975, reporting date for the comprehensive needs study called for under section 130 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. As you know, the act set a February 1, 1975, reporting date, a deadline which, because of the comprehensive nature of the study, is impossible to meet. For this reason, and because of difficulties encountered in locating a contractor suitable for the conduct of a study of this type, the Department strongly recommends that September 30, 1975, be established as the study's completion date.

However, the reorganization provisions of the bills under discussion are symptomatic of a serious problem which continually arises as the Congress considers legislation affecting the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Fundamentally, the problem is that every interest group associated with a program administered by the Department would like that program to be located organizationally in the Office of the Secretary and to report directly to the Secretary.

Every interest group would like its favorite program to be as independent as possible of any intermediate management levels within the Department. If every one of these demands were met as they are presented, one by one, every program in the Department would report directly to the Secretary, and the traditional role of the Office of the Secretary would be destroyed. Indeed, if every demand for independence were met as it was presented, the historic concept of a Department would be destroyed.

Departmental organization cannot and should not be affected on a piecemeal, program-by-program basis. Rather, a coordinated approach is necessary. This is the case because the more than 300 programs in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare are all similarly oriented toward some aspect of human development. One cannot separate the human development of an individual, whatever his age or physical or mental condition may be, from the myriad of considerations of educational, health, social service, and income needs which affect that person.

Accordingly, when one focuses on the organizational placement of any one component of the Department, a logical case can be made for placing it virtually anywhere within the Department. It was for this very reason that President Nixon proposed the creation of a Department of Human Resources to merge all related Federal human development programs into a single Cabinet-level Department. We would strongly urge that the Congress consider organizational change as a whole in this way, rather than in the piecemeal, "hopscotch" fashion that is evident in these bills and in other legislation.

S. 3108 has been described as a further logical step in rounding out the newly created Office of Human Development. That description is fundamentally incorrect. Secretary Weinberger and I created the Office of Human Development under Assistant Secretary Thomas in April 1973, in order to bring together a series of relatively small programs which were then scattered with no particular logic throughout the Department and administered by the larger operational agencies and the Office of the Secretary. For example, the Office of Child Development, administering the Head Start program and the Children's Bureau, was floating free in the Office of the Secretary, nominally reporting to the Assistant Secretary for Administration and Management. The Administration on Aging and the Youth Development Administration could appropriately serve as focal points for all the Department's agencies serving the elderly and youth, respectively. The President's Committee on Mental Retardation reported to the Assistant Secretary for Community and Field Services, and the various functions relating to native Americans were located throughout the Department with no single coordinating office.

What all these agencies now in the Office of Human Development have in common is that they act as advocates on behalf of specific target populations. The Office of Human Development was designed to bring these advocacy agencies together to insure that these special populations the elderly, children and youth, native Americans, and the handicapped-are adequately served by the larger operational agencies of the Department. The transfer of the vocational rehabilitation program, which is one of the principal service agencies of the De

partment, is neither consistent with nor supportive of this goal of the Office of Human Development.

From what I have said, the same arguments used to justify the transfer of the vocational rehabilitation program to the Office of Human Development, could also be used to justify moving the medicaid program to the Office of Human Development. Medicaid provides. medical services to the needy, whose human development would clearly be severely harmed were they not served; a poor child who lacks needed vision care cannot function effectively in school, and without adequate schooling is doomed to an inadequate adulthood. The same rationale could be applied to placing in the Office of Human Development, the Office of Education, or the Social Security Administration, or any other operating service agency of the Department.

Interestingly, in the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, this committee pioneered, and the Department has implemented, a new concept-the Office of the Handicapped, placed under the Assistant Secretary for Human Development. The function of this new Office is illustrative of the kind of function that Secretary Weinberger and I had in mind when establishing the Office of Human Development last year. The Office of the Handicapped was designed to be a coordinating and advocacy unit for a target population-the handicapped. Its goal is to insure that the service needs of this group are more effectively met by the functional programs of the Department. In other words, to draw together, not in one place in the Department, but by means of a coordinating mechanism useful to the Secretary and the Congress, the Office of Education, with its programs for the handicapped; the Social Security Administration, with its programs of income maintenance for the handicapped; the health components of the Department, with their biomedical research and health service delivery functions affecting the handicapped; and the Social and Rehabilitation Service, with its vocational rehabilitation and medicaid programs involving the handicapped.

In this respect, the Office of Human Development, through its new Office of the Handicapped, would have the same kind of coordinative responsibilities that the Congress has given the Administration on Aging, which has been charged, among other things, with stimulating "more effective use of existing resources and available services for the aged and aging" and providing "for the coordination of Federal programs and activities" related to the aging. This same type of coordinative role has been assigned to the Office of Child Development with regard to children, to the Office of Youth Development with regard to youth, and to the office of Native Americans with regard to Indians. The establishment of none of these other components within the Office of Human Development involved removing large-scale service programs from their functional homes elsewhere in the Department. The Congress, led by this committee, recognized that this feature of the Office of the Handicapped fitted it well for placement within the Office of Human Development.

To shift the Rehabilitation Services Administration to the Office of Human Development or the Office of the Secretary, as the current bills would do, would destroy that basic notion of the purpose of the Office of Human Development as an advocacy and coordinative entity.