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EK: So since your work at ORA happened pretty early in your thirty-five plus years of federal government, both at Justice and your current role at HHS, how did your experience working at ORA impact you in your later roles in government?

JC: So I think I was always looking for that moment of working with a group of people, you didn't have say what your mission is. Like, they knew. We have people... you interviewed Aaron Zajic, and you're going to interview Martha Watanabe, but they worked overnight. They used to sleep in their offices in order to ensure someone was paid. We worked seven days a week, and I remember one summer when I first started, Bob Bratt actually got angry with me because he was like, "Why didn't you put any overtime in? I've got, the Department of Labor just said I have an employee, union employee, who was not compensated." I didn't even know I was part of the union. I was like, "I don't know, I had a mission," I worked seven days a week. And what happened was, other people were putting in for overtime, and I just remember getting this lump sum payment in my paycheck, going, wow. I was a GS-11 at the time when I started. So I think I was always looking for mission and people. Because you can have a great mission, but if you're not working with people who understand what your mission is, then it's not fun, and work can be fun. So I always was looking for that type of work, and my role after the redress program started sunsetting, I was like, what am I going to do with these great people? The contractors went on to other contracts, but I had over about twenty core federal employees. And some found other jobs within the government, but what we created in the Civil Rights Division at the time was the Litigation Support Group. Because there was a need for our civil rights work to be augmented by professionals who knew, and then technology started to come to be, thank god for the internet, and really knew how to identify, locate, knew how systems work, and we were able to convert those individuals into litigation support specialists. We created a business... like redress, we created something that didn't exist. So we knew what was needed to build that foundation. So I loved working, I directed Litigation Support, because again, we were finding individuals who were discriminated against, senior citizens, people with disabilities who were in institutions, a mission of helping people with the power of the federal government, it's pretty amazing.

And then I left Justice, and then they found us -- to go back a little bit -- Congress passed the reparations bill for Italian Americans, so they found me, "Would you like to work on this?" and I said, "Of course, I would love to." It was a report, there was no presidential apology reparations check, but again, going out to the community, and we found there, we found individuals whose husbands were taken away from them. Heartbreaking stories there as well, although they weren't interned, they had a loss. And again, it wasn't the volume of Japanese Americans, certainly, but you had people coming in from Ellis Island looking at the Statue of Liberty, then placed in an internment camp. Again, mostly men, it wasn't at that degree, but what I remember about that report, it was right after, right about the time... because the report was due in November, and then 9/11 happened in September. So think about the nuances of 9/11 after it happened, and the fear of Muslim Americans, and then you had this report going out with Italian Americans, and this fear, and then my background with Japanese Americans and that fear, so I thought, oh my god, it's like there are nuances of so many similarities. And thankfully our government handled it very differently than what they did in the past. So fast forward, I left the Justice Department in 2005 and I came to the Department of Health and Human Services to work in the Office of Civil Rights. And again, a program ensuring that Health and Human Services benefits are received from individuals, needy children, foster kids, people in, again, retirement homes, nursing homes, ensuring that they're receiving benefits free of discrimination.

And then in 2010 I came here in the Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services, and I thought I never would work in an inspector general's office, because typically your mission is internally within your department. But here what we do is we fight fraud, waste and abuse and we ensure efficiency and effectiveness and economy in our programs, but we touch one in five Americans, one in three children. And our role is to ensure that services provided to beneficiaries young and old are free of fraud, waste and abuse. And, of course, you can work out what's going on on the opioid epidemic, we're on the forefront of that, we have law enforcement here, and what we called the gun-toters, federal investigators, we have auditors, we have evaluators, we have attorneys, we have a small law firm, we have a huge, chief data office, again, something that would never exist. But it's the same thing, it's the same way of what I did in redress and what I do here. I go out and I talk to the community, I go out and who are the nonprofit organizations out there that can help me ring the bell to the communities that we touch, our dollars, it's a third of our economy. Think about FDA, NIH, CDC, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, how can we ensure that dollars are well spent, and that people are receiving quality of care. And unfortunately, elderly are still being taken advantage of, people with disabilities, so it almost brings back all of my knowledge and expertise into this program. It's a great way, my thirty-five-year career, and people here are so mission palatable. Again, they're a great group of people, and I'm like, oh my god, this is redress all over again, so it's been a great journey.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2019 Emi Kuboyama. All Rights Reserved.