Employee’s Rehabilitation Act Money Damages Claim Against State Agency Is Upheld

A split D.C. Circuit has held that Congress has the power under the Spending Clause to condition acceptance of federal public transit funds on a waiver of sovereign immunity for discrimination against the disabled in violation of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

Barbour v. Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Auth’y,___F.3d___, 2004 WL 1531945 (D.C. Cir. July 9, 2004). The court joins the First, Third and Ninth Circuits in so holding.

The Civil Rights Remedies Equalization Act of 1986 (CRREA), conditions a state agency’s acceptance of federal funds on its waiver of Eleventh Amendment immunity for violations of disability, age, gender, race and other federal antidiscrimination statutes. 42 U.S.C. §§ 2000d-7(a)(1). The D.C. court found that this condition was unambiguous and that the state’s purported belief in 1998 that it had no sovereign immunity to waive was immaterial. Thus, the D.C. Circuit is now the fourth court of appeals to reject the Second Circuit’s 2001 holding in Garcia v. S.U.N.Y. Health Sciences Center, 280 F. 3d 98.

The court also rejected the argument that the waiver condition was outside of Congress’ Spending Clause power because it was unrelated to the federal interest in transportation funds. The court noted that the Supreme Court has never overturned Spending Clause legislation on relatedness grounds. Congress “made clear that it did not want any federal funds to be used to facilitate disability discrimination, and that exposing recipient entities to the threat of federal damage actions was an effective deterrent.” Congress could reasonably insist that decisions on the use of federal funds not be based on or “frittered away” on irrational discrimination, just as with the graft prohibitions upheld this term in Sabri v. United States, 124 S.Ct. 1941 (2004).

Judge Sentelle in dissent argued that the connection between the federal interest in promoting public transportation and its interest in preventing discrimination against the disabled is too attenuated. He emphasized that the federal Spending Clause power is limited to conditions that bear some relationship to the federal interest in the spending program. “Prohibiting disability discrimination in employment is simply not ‘Necessary and Proper’ …to spending money for mass transit.” He argued that “there is nothing magical about disability discrimination that makes the ‘interest’ in preventing it distinctively federal.” Sentelle distinguished Sabri on the grounds that rampant bribery of the transit officials “would make it more difficult for federal funds to do the job of providing mass transit…[D]iscrimination against WMATA’s employees on the basis of disability would not.”

Judge Sentelle also argued that the waiver condition was not a valid exercise of Congress’ Fourteenth Amendment powers.