The Compliance Gap

Depending upon the point of view, the civil rights legislation of the '60s was either the salvation or the ruin of American democracy. Fact is, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission charged in a report scheduled for release this week, the statutes have fulfilled neither prophecy. The Government has not enforced the laws vigorously enough to make them matter. Instead, it has been discriminatory business as usual for federal contractors and licensees.

In a 1,115-page study, the principal governmental watchdog body in the civil rights field concluded that 40 federal departments and agencies, regulating everything from housing to broadcasting, have been delinquent in pressing for an end to racial exclusion. So lackadaisical has been enforcement that such landmark bills as the Fair Housing Law of 1968 and the 1964 Civil Rights Act are practically null in some instances. The commission leveled particularly stiff criticism at agencies that regulate some of the country's largest industries, including the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the Civil Aeronautics Board and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Poor Thing. Compliance has been hampered by understaffed enforcement offices scattered across the federal bureaucracy with no central, activist organization to coordinate legal penalties. "Equal employment opportunity in Government contract employment has not been achieved," the report said. "Sanctions rarely have been used, and the federal monitoring mechanisms have not proved effective."

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the single umbrella agency empowered to deal with discrimination in hiring, is short on power as well as personnel. It is forced to play the passive role of "a poor, enfeebled thing." The EEOC has made little use of its "initiatory capabilities," opting instead for processing individual complaints when they are received. The Civil Rights Commission recommended broadening the EEOC's policing role, allowing EEOC rulings to supplant Justice Department lawsuits in complaints about discrimination. The report also said that the Department of Housing and Urban Development has hardly begun to use the enforcement authority granted under the Fair Housing Law.

The commission was circumspect in assigning blame to high places. But it did point out that Congress has the responsibility for funding the EEOC adequately. Commission studies did not discern "any substantial period in the past when enforcement was at a uniformly high level of effectiveness." The Nixon Administration, despite promises to make existing laws work rather than seek new civil rights statutes, has not improved upon the record.

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