The Expertise Outside the Room

What a parking lot in Denver has in common with the White House Situation Room - and why Colorado law sees neither.

The Expertise Outside the Room: In this part of our series, we put the microscope on the profound, unacknowledged expertise held by those waiting just outside the decision-making "room." While the person in the car reads celebrity gossip, the one caring for them is often the person with the most expertise, but they are rarely the one in the HR meeting-or the Situation Room.

By Mark Fukae - Director of Advocacy | Professionals Who Care

A few years ago, a policy changed at work.

An accommodation that had made it possible for me to sustain both my professional life and my role as a caregiver was not extended. I pushed back with everything I had - the ADA, associational discrimination, the moral weight of caring for my mother, who had been living with us since 2016 and whose end-stage dementia did not pause for a return-to-office mandate. I had two documented accommodations behind me, granted in 2022 and 2023, when the institution had understood that the relay required flexibility to hold. I cited them. I argued. I sent the emails.

There was no room, no table, no face across from me when the answer came. There was a thread that ended when someone stopped replying. The answer was that caregiving is something everyone manages. That the weight I was carrying was not categorically different.

They were not wrong about the law. There was no statute that said otherwise.

I closed the laptop and told my wife: I will change the law.

She did not believe me. She has watched institutions fail the people most affected by their decisions too many times. She knows how the silence gets absorbed. She has been paying it.

She is watching now.

The Parking Lot

I take my mother Rose food shopping on weekends. Rose has end-stage progressive dementia. She likes to come with me - or she did. Lately she says she is a little tired and asks if it is okay to wait in the car. The first time she asked, I brought her in anyway. When we got home, she needed a nap longer than usual, and I understood what the morning had cost her.

I adjusted.

There is now a magazine in the car. Subscriptions we keep specifically because Rose has always read them - the kind that feel familiar in her hands. She waits in the passenger seat. She reads. When I come back, she looks up and says, in the voice that sounds like herself before the dementia:

"Mission Accomplished?"

Yes, Rose. Mission Accomplished.

The magazine has her name on the label. She notices this every time. Every time, the discovery is real.

The Room

This week the New York Times published its reconstruction of how Operation Epic Fury began. On February 11, Netanyahu made an hour-long case in the White House Situation Room. Trump: "Sounds good to me." The CIA director the next day called it "farcical." Every prediction Netanyahu made was wrong. Every warning the intelligence community made was right.

The people who would manage the consequences were not fully in the room where the decision was made.

In a parking lot in Denver on any given Saturday, the person who has built the deepest expertise in the world on one specific human being's evolving geography - who figured out the magazine, who learned what the grocery store cost her, who has been relearning Rose's map for years as the disease reshapes it - is not in any room where it counts. Not in HR. Not in the Colorado Joint Budget Committee. Not in the 661-page Long Bill the House began debating this week. Not in any statute in the state of Colorado.

The constitutional guardrail failed because the people most affected were outside the room. The caregiving protection fails for the same reason.

This is not a metaphor. It is the same structural failure operating at different scales.

What the Statute Would Do

The Colorado CARE Act - proposed for the 2027 legislative session - would add family caregiver status as a protected class under the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act. It would require reasonable workplace accommodations through an interactive process, using the POWR Act as its zero-cost precedent. It would prohibit creative dismissal. It would put the person in the parking lot into the statute for the first time.

Zero general fund cost. $9 to $18 million in annual Medicaid savings. Effective July 1, 2028.

My wife said something to me after I closed that laptop, in the words she uses when she means something exactly.

They will rue the day they told Mark Fukae he has no leg to stand on.

She was right. We are building the coalition now.

Read the full piece at The Revenue Neutral Caregiver on Substack: therevenueneutralcaregiver.substack.com

https://open.substack.com/pub/therevenueneutralcaregiver/p/our-lives-on-hold?r=6a52ih&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Sign the Colorado CARE Act petition: https://chng.it/DLWncS9wtT 757 signatures, 677 supporters. The goal is 1,000.

Your story is the evidence: mark_fukae@casiadvocacy.org | (303) 817-6995

Mark Fukae is Director of Advocacy for Professionals Who Care and Founder of CASI. He is a registered Colorado volunteer lobbyist developing the Colorado CARE Act for the 2027 session.