Personnel is policy. Why then is Claudia Schlosberg, a language-rights extremist hired during the Clinton years, still deciding language policy for a Bush administration?

Claudia Schlosberg serves as the senior civil-rights analyst in the Department of Health and Human Service's Office for Civil Rights (HHS OCR) and has done so since being hired in 2000.

Prior to joining HHS OCR, Schlosberg served as a staff attorney for the National Health Law Program (NHeLP). In that job, she encouraged the Department of Health and Human Services to make language choice a protected civil right.

In 1998, Schlosberg coordinated "Model Comments on Linguistic Access to Medicaid Managed Care." She is the author of Immigrant Access to Health Benefits, 189-pages on "how to demonstrate language discrimination." It includes a 14-page checklist of potential language-rights violations, published in 2001.

Basically, Schlosberg has gone from advocating an extreme interpretation of civil-rights law to a government job that allows her to impose her radical views on the rest of the country.

August 11, 2002, marked the two-year anniversary of Clinton Executive Order 13166. E.O. 13166 , which requires any recipient of federal funds to function in any language anyone prefers to speak at any time.

HHS OCR is expected to reissue its own E.O. 13166 compliance guidelines this fall. Those guidelines will undoubtedly be covered with Schlosberg's fingerprints.

On July 10, I contacted Schlosberg by telephone and asked her how HHS OCR was progressing with "the new LEP [limited-English proficient] regs." She told me they were in progress, that she didn't know when they would be issued, and she couldn't say any more.

Given the scope of E.O. 13166, Schlosberg's potential impact on state and federal budgets is potentially extraordinary. HHS is the most strategically and fiscally important government department on language matters. And HHS OCR is aggressively enforcing E.O. 13166.

A visitor to the HHS OCR website learns of at least 20 language complaints filed across the country.

Schlosberg's boss, Robinsue Frohboese, herself a former Clinton staffer at the Department of Justice who only became a career HHS employee in November, 2000, even boasted at a congressional hearing earlier this year of HHS OCR's stringent language-enforcement policies in, of all places, Idaho.

On August 5, the citizens of Tucson, Arizona, learned they were the latest victims of Frohboese and Schlosberg.

Thanks to a complaint filed with HHS OCR, Tucson's school system must now comply with a laundry list of language requirements, including: "post[ing] and maintain[ing] multilanguage signs stating that interpreters are available upon request at no cost for any of their services" and "develop[ing] multilanguage posters, cards or other tools to allow LEP students to identify themselves and request an interpreter." The school system must also "[p]rohibit the use of adult family members or friends as interpreters."

What will this cost? HHS OCR doesn't care. Its in-house newsletter commended Washington State's Department of Social and Health Services for "ensur[ing] that LEP clients receive all written notices and other major written communications in their own language" — at a cost of at least $50,000 per month for written translations alone.

Last year, HHS OCR even filed a legal complaint against the University of Utah Health Science Center even though the center had spent $300,000 on translation services during the preceding year.

Thankfully, HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson has just named Richard Campanelli as the new director of the department's Office for Civil Rights.

Campanelli should ask Frohboese and Schlosberg to clean out their desks. Next he should reopen public comment on his agency's E.O. 13166 policies so that both he and President Bush can receive an unbiased view of the real costs of these divisive language mandates.