{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.bluntrochester.senate.gov/news/press-releases/news-senator-blunt-rochester-slams-trump-administration-attempt-to-dismantle-department-of-education/", "NEWS: Senator Blunt Rochester Slams Trump Administration Attempt to Dismantle Department of Education", "2026-08-04", "2026", "2026-08", "Democrat", "Senate", "DE", "Lisa Blunt Rochester", "B001303", "www.bluntrochester.senate.gov", "bluntrochester", "https://www.bluntrochester.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/", "scraper", "\u201cThis administration\u2019s interagency agreements will harm students with disabilities.\u201d\n\nClick here to watch Senator Blunt Rochester\u2019s remarks.\n\nU.S. Senator Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.), a member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, today participated in a spotlight hearing on the Trump administration\u2019s attempts to dismantle the Department of Education and efforts to move the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS) and Office for Civil Rights (OCR) to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). Blunt Rochester questioned witnesses on how these attempts will harm students with disabilities.\n\nIn a recent HELP Committee Executive Session, Blunt Rochester offered an amendment to prevent the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) of the Department of Education from being transferred to another Federal Agency. Republicans blocked consideration of the amendment.\n\nWitnesses:\n\nLaurie VanderPloeg \u2013 Associate Executive Director for Professional Affairs, Council for Exceptional Children\n\nKaty Neas \u2013 Chief Executive Officer, The Arc of the United States\n\nValerie C. Williams \u2013 Former Director, Office of Special Education Programs, U.S. Department of Education\n\nSeth Galanter \u2013 Senior Fellow, Edley Center on Law & Democracy\n\nElizabeth Tang \u2013 Senior Counsel for Education and Workplace Justice, National Women\u2019s Law Center\n\nStephanie Smith Lee \u2013 Co-Director of Policy and Advocacy, National Down Syndrome Congress\n\nSenator Blunt Rochester\u2019s questions can be found here, and a key excerpt can be found below:\n\nSenator Blunt Rochester: \u201cCan you compare OCR\u2019s model to how the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division processes discrimination cases and say why that difference matters, and specifically why it matters for students with disabilities?\u201d\n\nMr. Galanter: \u201cBoth the roles that DOJ and OCR play are incredibly important, but they are quite distinct. The special role that OCR plays is particularly valuable for parents and students who don\u2019t have access to resources, who don\u2019t have access to lawyers, or who simply have a complaint and need help, and the OCR complaint process is one of the few places in the federal government that they can go in an education setting and get an individualized response.\n\n\u201cDOJ performs an incredibly valuable function at a systems level. They look and they get lots of complaints, and they sift through them, looking for patterns, looking for you know great great facts or you know novel questions of law that they want to establish a new rule on, and they work aggressively to vindicate the rights of kids.\n\n\u201cBut they do it at a macro level. They do it in cases that takes years that lead to settlements that say 90% of kids should get X within you know two years, or you know we want substantial compliance with this by 2030, and that\u2019s great for the system. But for an individual parent who\u2019s part of the 10% who\u2019s not getting the immediate relief, they could always come to OCR.\n\n\u201cThere\u2019s no plan that they\u2019ve revealed to explain how they\u2019re going to transfer these functions, which requires hundreds of investigators and attorneys experienced in education law, and move it to an agency that, as we know, has already itself been depleted of a lot of its existing expertise, and bringing in a whole new function with a whole different mindset, a different culture that\u2019s needed to reach these individual resolutions in so many individual fact-specific cases.\u201d", 1, "2026-08-05T07:37:37Z", "2026-08-05T07:38:44Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.bluntrochester.senate.gov/news/press-releases/news-senator-blunt-rochester-slams-trump-administration-attempt-to-dismantle-department-of-education/"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.839626882225275, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}