At your meeting with representatives of the higher education community February 19, you asked for specific recommendations to reduce the federal regulatory and reporting burdens on higher education. This letter is our response to that request. From the viewpoint of students and their parents throughout the country, the most important action the federal government can take is to improve the coordination and administration of student financial aid programs. The Department of Health, Education and Welfare has already taken an encouraging step in this direction with the reorganization recently announced by Secretary Califano, and we have met with Commissioner-designate Boyer to discuss further steps that are needed to simplify and improve student aid. A special problem we call to your attention concerns the burden of new regulations being imposed by the Veterans Administration. These onerous regulations are making it difficult for veteran students to make use of their educational entitlements, and are seriously impinging on the authority of colleges and universities to maintain their own academic and administrative policies. Although some of these problems arise from the Veterans Education and Employment Assistance Act passed last fall, the Administrator has broad discretionary authority to waive many of its provisions. Exercise of this authority to simplify VA regulations would allow greater numbers of Vietnam veterans to use the educational entitlements they have earned, and relieve institutions from an increasingly oppressive regulatory burden. While the solution of these problems will require extensive efforts over the coming months and years, there are a number of more specific regulatory issues which can be dealt with immediately by you or the Office of Management and Budget: 1. Federal enforcement of equal employment opportunity, civil rights, and affirmative action should be consolidated to end overlapping activities of the Department of Labor, HEW's Office for Civil Rights, the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Justice, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The Interagency Task Force on Higher Education Burden Reduction, in its December 14 report (attached), recommended that the President immediately appoint a group of higher education and agency representatives to submit an action plan within 90 days for the necessary administrative and legislative changes to achieve this objective. We are prepared with suggestions and recommendations for the consideration of such a group. The President March 25, 1977 2. A single "cognizant agency" should be designated to assume regulatory and administrative responsibilities in several areas where a number of federal agencies now have jurisdiction. The Interagency Task Force recommended that a single agency be identified for managing the federal interest in areas such as the protection of human subjects, care and use of laboratory animals, clean air, pure water, and patents. The Commission on Federal Paperwork has studied this topic intensively and has a report in preparation. 3. The Office of Management and Budget should reduce institutional recordkeeping requirements entailed in federal time and effort reporting and documentation of cost sharing, and should seek removal of cost-sharing requirements in appropriations legislation. These steps have been recommended by the Interagency Task Force, the Commission on Federal Paperwork, and the Commission on Government Procurement. 4. OMB Circular A-110, recently promulgated to reduce institutional recordkeeping and reporting for federal grants, should be modified as recommended by the Interagency Task Force to (a) extend its provisions to contracts for research, training, demonstration, and public service performed by colleges and universities, and (b) raise the minimum value of nonexpendable personal property purchases which must be accounted for from $300 to $1,000. The latter step, also recommended by the Commission on Federal Paperwork, would decrease by 66 percent the number of items institutions must keep records on, while retaining accountability for 84 percent of the total value of equipment. 5. The published recommendations of the Commission on Federal Paperwork for reducing reporting requirements of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 and the Employment Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 should be adopted. 6. The Interagency Task Force's recommendations should be adopted for improvement of data planning and collection; pretesting, screening, and sampling of data items involved in collection instruments; measuring the respondent burden and confirming the usefulness of data collected; and giving special attention to the workload imposed on small institutions (recommendations 1-13). Recommendations similar to these have also been made by the Commission on Federal Paperwork. All of the numbered recommendations above have been developed by federal bodies on the basis of careful documentation and consultation with the higher education community. Many of them have also been endorsed at the staff level in the Office of Management and Budget. They only need to be translated into action. We feel these steps would enable you to make prompt and significant progress in reducing the burdens of federal regulation on the nation's colleges and universities. We recognize that we share responsibility for this important effort, and stand ready to provide technical assistance, using the specialized knowledge of our constituent associations and member institutions across the country, to help your Administration achieve the objective. Sincerely yours, Roger W. Heyns Enclosure cc: Stuart Eizenstat Joseph A. Califano Max Cleland Ernest L. Boyer NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF STATE UNIVERSITIES AND LAND-GRANT COLLEGES, Hon. WILLIAM FORD, Of special concern to us was the opportunity to delineate our concerns over the manner in which the Veterans Administration has conducted its affairs with our institutions over the past two years. As requested, under separate cover, we are sending to you information and comments on problems resulting from the "85/15" and "two-year" rules, the problems with the Buckley amendment, and other issues which were raised at the hearing. I am taking advantage of this communication to suggest a question which we would like to hear addressed by the Veterans Administration when asked by the Chairman of a House Committee, since our asking the question for the past year has elicted no response whatsoever. We all have heard a great deal about abuses of veterans benefits. We are not quibbling with the argument that important abuses have been committed and a good deal of taxpayer's money was involved. That is not an issue. We are concerned when we hear Members of Congress, including Members of the Veterans Affairs Committee, stating as accepted dogma, that institutions of all kinds, private, public, four-year, two-year—each of these categories has had its culprits guilty of deliberate violations of law and regulation. We have asked the Veterans Administration to identify institutions which have been footloose with the law or VA regulations. We have stressed further, that peer pressure could be used to assure that any such institutions in our own membership, for example, would not continue to perpetuate such wrongs once they had been identified. In response, we have received statements concerning "matters still under adjudication," "processes still under way" and other forms of bureaucratic gobbledegook, which are not responses and which we find unacceptable. Therefore, I would like to go on record in behalf of my membership as stating that no member, no one of the 136 members of my Association, has ever in any way whatsoever deliberately violated any law or regulation involving veterans benefits. If this statement is invalid, then the head of the Veterans Administration should have no difficulty in pinpointing the institution which is guilty and the nature of the guilt. We, in fact, know of abuse, e.g., failure to enforce institutional standards, but the VA has not categorized, quantified, nor identified abuses. The VA has made academic judgments by fiscal intimidation— they don't think highly of a program, ergo, it should not be supported. We do not accept as an infraction a dunning notice to an institution claiming institutional liability for overpayments to students when the institution has provided notification as soon as it had information of student dropouts. Our schools have rejected such billings. Nor do we accept minor administrative oversights easily correctible and less than minuscule in number and cost as “culpability.” The VÀ sends bills and cannot collect because the bills are nonsensical, as in the case of the alleged "billion dollar rip-off"-80 percent or more of which has been collected since there never was any conspiracy by veterans to "rip off." To have the press and spokesmen for Members of Congress parroting the inanities of allegations by the Veterans Administration just does not seem to be appropriate any longer. (I should note that while I am free to speak solely for the membership of my own Association, I would venture to guess that the same arguments would hold for all other institutions, since to my knowledge the VA has not identified any institutions at all as culpable in the so-called "billion dollar rip-off.") One other matter relevant to this is the question of "rip-off" versus solution. During your hearing on June 1, Congressman Cornell referred to the abuses and to the alleged fact that the institutions did nothing during and after the period of the abuse to try to stem it or assist the VA in their responsibilities. What Mr. Cornell is proposing, if I heard his statement correctly, is a kind of mutual admission of guilt, in which all the parties concerned-the students, the universities, the VA and even the Congress-admit to their responsibility in creating this terrible situation, and now join forces in correcting the problem. The latter idea makes sense-but VA behavior denies its interest in such cooperation. Speaking for the membership of this Association, I would like to have us excluded from that circle. When it became apparent that the pre-payment and advance payment situation had created and was continuing to create a situation just inviting students to abuse the veterans benefit program, at least temporarily, we suggested re-institution of the monthly sign-in procedure to assure that students would not be able for many months to disappear from campuses and still receive their checks from the Veterans Administration. We discussed other remedies which would involve the assistance of the institution and its officials in keeping track of students better. The VA was not interested then, it continues not to be interested. Since allegations are being tossed about freely, perhaps it would be interesting to conjecture that the reason the VA has not accepted the offer of the institutions, nor been willing to work with the institutions, is that, in fact, the VA does not want to have too many veterans taking advantage of veterans benefits. When veterans drop out of institutions, funds now committed to education benefits, could be transferred to hospitals, pensions, and other programs. There is no doubt that these are important programs, and as you have noted publicly yourself, the current behavior of the VA seems to suggest a greater concern in taking care of the interests of the veterans who earned their benefits in the Second World War, than taking care of their sons and daughters who are Vietnam veterans and whose interests are heavily oriented toward education. I hope the above is of some value. Please let me know if I can provide any information or assistance. With best regards. Sincerely yours, JEROLD ROSCHWALB, Director of Governmental Relations. |