Gregory Svirnovskiy | Vox Our world has too much noise and too little context. Vox helps you understand what matters. 2021-07-15T15:19:47+00:00 https://www.vox.com/authors/gregory-svirnovskiy/rss https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/vox_logo_rss_light_mode.png?w=150&h=100&crop=1 Gregory Svirnovskiy Gabby Birenbaum <![CDATA[Child tax credit payments are going out. Here’s how to get yours.]]> https://www.vox.com/22388062/child-tax-credit-expanded-biden-2021-stimulus 2021-07-15T11:19:47-04:00 2021-07-15T10:11:59-04:00
A woman picks up school supplies with her sons on their first day of school in Los Angeles on August 18, 2020. | Josie Norris/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

Eligible families who selected to receive monthly payments will begin getting child tax credits Thursday due to a law Democrats passed in March.

The expanded child tax credit was passed into law as part of the American Rescue Plan, and similar to that bill’s stimulus checks, half of the enhanced benefits will be distributed to eligible parents as direct payments of up to $300 per month per child for six months (with the other half awarded in 2022).

All told, the law increases the annual child tax credit from $2,000 to $3,600 for kids under 6 and from $2,000 to $3,000 for kids between the ages of 6 and 17. Families have the option to accept the credit in monthly chunks — and it is entirely refundable, meaning even families that don’t make enough money to pay income tax will receive it.

The vast majority of children — about 88 percent, according to the IRS — are covered by the enhanced benefits, and by some estimates, the $110 billion program, currently set to expire after one year, is expected to cut child poverty in half. There have been some efforts to extend the benefit, including a plan from Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) that fizzled out due to a lack of support from either party.

An expanded, more permanent child tax credit is included in the $3.5 trillion Democratic infrastructure and budget reconciliation package, announced Tuesday, though specifics have not yet been released.

All told, the households of more than 65 million American children can expect to receive some of the American Rescue Plan’s $110 billion. Here’s what you need to know about whether you’re eligible, and when to expect to see money.

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Who qualifies for the enhanced child tax credit?

The short answer: almost every household with a child under 18.

But it’s not quite that simple. Income limitations exist for single, joint, and head-of-household filers.

Married filers with an adjusted gross income (AGI) under $150,000 will get the full credit. After that, the benefit phases out gradually, with the maximum income for partial benefits depending on how many children the household has.

For head-of-household filers, only those with an AGI less than $112,500 can receive the maximum benefit, after which the benefit begins to phase out gradually.

For the small number of single parents or guardians without head-of-household status, only those with an AGI less than $75,000 can receive the maximum benefit.

If your income level means you don’t typically file taxes, you’ll receive the full benefit. (Note that you must file a 2020 tax return or otherwise prove to the IRS your eligibility for the 2021 credit through an online form.)

Eligible households are paid a separate child tax credit for every qualifying child. A single filer with three children under the age of 6 could receive $10,800 through next spring, assuming their reported income falls under the qualifying limit.

Is there anything I need to do to get my credit?

Payments will be based on a filer’s 2020 tax return. If that hasn’t been processed, the IRS will use 2019 tax returns as a substitute.

The IRS has set two online portals to reach low-income families who don’t usually pay taxes. The first is similar to the form used for stimulus payments in 2020; it will allow filers to submit their family and income information and then claim any stimulus payments they may have missed since the beginning of the pandemic.

The second IRS portal will allow filers to update key information such as their address, income, and family size — all important indicators regarding how much money one can expect from the expanded child credit.

Can I choose how often I receive the credit?

Yes. There are two ways to receive the credit: as a lump sum, to be distributed in 2022 after filing your 2021 tax return, or as six advance monthly payments from July to December and the remainder in 2022. Families can use an IRS tool to indicate which option they prefer.

Every family that qualifies for payments will receive at least part of the expanded credit in a lump sum early next year. But filers can choose to start getting half of that money as early as July, with payments coming in around the 15th of each month. Families that choose the monthly option will receive the remainder of their credit in 2022, after filing their taxes. Those that go the other route will get the full amount in 2022.

For families with a child younger than 6, for example, that means they could receive either $300 a month for six months (starting in July) and another $1,800 early next year, or the full $3,600 in 2022. Families with a child older than 6 but younger than 17 could get $250 a month for six months and another $1,500 in 2022.

When will I receive my payment?

Most families opting to receive the credit in the form of monthly payments will get the first one from the IRS via direct deposit on or around July 15. (If your direct deposit information is not on file with the IRS, you’ll receive either a paper check or a debit card, though they could arrive slightly later than the 15th.) Payments will continue to arrive mid-month, barring weekends and federal holidays, through December.

Correction, May 19: An earlier version of this article misstated the dollar amount of the American Families Plan. It is $1.8 trillion.

]]> Gregory Svirnovskiy <![CDATA[The richest colleges didn’t need to cut their budgets in the pandemic — but they did]]> https://www.vox.com/22521935/austerity-university-college-covid-19-pandemic-service-workers-labor-unions 2021-06-14T10:03:10-04:00 2021-06-13T09:00:00-04:00
A jogger runs at the University of California Riverside campus on April 7, 2021. | Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

Jesse Hernandez, a senior cook at the University of California Riverside, started hearing rumors that layoffs were coming for the residence hall and dining staff just weeks after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic last March.

For a while, it seemed all talk.

But sure enough, he and much of the university’s dining staff found themselves out of work for the summer, joining the 650,000 higher education workers nationwide who were laid off due to collegiate austerity programs in the wake of pandemic-induced financial strife.

“We got blindsided, honestly,” Hernandez said.

Now — with the help of his labor union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees 3299 — Hernandez is trying to make sure mass layoffs never happen again. In his role as a member action team leader, he is organizing workers and meeting with administrators about issues that go beyond what happens on the job site. But while AFSCME 3299 has responded to the pandemic by taking a more expansive view of how to approach collective action, colleges as a whole appear to still be beholden to a financial paradigm that put Hernandez’s job, and thousands of jobs like his, in jeopardy.

In part, that may be because the endowment system many schools use to remain solvent brought colleges and universities significant financial rewards amid a rapid rise in stock prices. Those gains followed a major dip in the stock market immediately after the first US Covid-19 outbreaks — and quickly falling prices, in part, led to stark austerity measures.

Now, only a year after laying off hundreds of thousands of people, the higher education industry appears to be bouncing back.

The education and health services industry saw 87,000 people hired in the month of May, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, and 129,000 people hired in the two months prior. And there are signs of more hiring to come. For example, the University of Michigan just announced it would be ending a year-long hiring freeze at the beginning of the 2022 fiscal year in July.

But despite those strong numbers, the number of those hired hasn’t yet equaled the number who lost their jobs. And as thousands of collegiate workers wait to see whether their jobs will return, some have begun to question why austerity measures were put in place at all — particularly given the strong returns many schools saw on endowments and how much of schools’ emergency funds have now been shown to have gone unspent.

Endowments meant the richest public and private schools didn’t need austerity as much as they thought

It’s important to remember all the uncertainty around the coronavirus when the first outbreaks hit. Social distancing was a new concept to millions of people, the debate about whether to sanitize your groceries raged, and many experts scoffed at the idea that a vaccine would be available before 2022. No one knew when, or if, the pandemic would be over. And the stock market responded by going into freefall.

“The stock market was down,” said Seton Hall University professor and higher ed expert Robert Kelchen, and colleges “were unsure about their future.”

Unsure how long the pandemic would affect their finances and fearing a prolonged pandemic might mean years — if not decades — of falling enrollment, tuition collection, and damage to endowments, austerity budgeting very quickly became the norm for many schools, both public and private. Many laid off and furloughed faculty and staff, froze hiring for temporary workers, and put off capital projects that weren’t already underway, according to Andrew Comrie, professor at the University of Arizona. Many also turned off the air conditioning in unused buildings and stopped paying for food deliveries and classroom maintenance because so few students were still on campus.

State school revenues are at the mercy of state budgets, and by April 2020, states were anticipating budget shortfalls of a combined $500 billion, as budgets were slashed amid concerns about tax collection and lost tourism revenue. For instance, a steep drop in tourism in Hawaii forced Gov. David Ige to request a 15 percent reduction in the general account that funds the campuses in the state’s university system. The university systems of Alaska and Nevada also lost millions.

Elite private universities, on the other hand, often have larger budgets, due to the size of their endowments, but those budgets are usually funded by investment income, meaning they grow when the markets are doing well and shrink when they’re in a downturn. At schools like Johns Hopkins University, the initial market shock reduced the university’s investment income and concurrent budget by millions of dollars. Such losses, along with an expected decrease in tuition revenues and dorm fees, caused some schools to push the panic button.

Broadly speaking, an endowment is a kind of nest-egg investment fund, meant to provide stability, as a “bastion of the institution’s perpetuity,” as Francois Furstenberg, a professor at Johns Hopkins, told me.

At the nation’s largest private schools, these funds can range in value — $7.94 billion at Atlanta’s Emory University, $41.89 billion at Harvard — and are used to pay for everything from building projects to endowed scholarships. They have come to be seen as so central to a school’s continued existence that at many of the country’s largest private universities, boards of trustees spend millions of dollars on consulting fees to maximize their returns. Some institutions, like Yale, Stanford, and Princeton, spend more on consulting fees than on financial aid for an entire student body.

All this exposure to risk paid dividends for private schools last year, literally, as the stock market began an unexpected rapid rebound, gaining almost 32 percent in just three months.

For example, by October 2020, Johns Hopkins reported a budget surplus of $75 million, a $126 million swing from the stark projections that led to austerity measures just months prior. Northwestern University announced an $83.4 million surplus for the fiscal year in January. Yale University reported an even more astounding $203 million surplus in November 2020.

“They obviously prepared for the worst back in the middle of last year,” Comrie said. “But once the market rebounded in the fall, it’s a whole lot tougher to defend that level of austerity when literally two months before, it wasn’t there.”

Elite private schools did fine, and so did the public schools with large endowments. As Lee Gardner, a senior writer at the Chronicle of Higher Education, told me, “Any school where you’ve got [billions] in the endowment qualifies.” Across the United States and Canada, that means more than 100 institutions managed the coronavirus-induced economic crisis in part by way of their endowments, from the University of Chicago to Virginia Commonwealth University.

But much of these gains were of little immediate help to schools navigating the other effects of the pandemic, or to those faculty and staff wondering about the fates of their jobs.

“In many cases, the endowment is restricted for particular purposes,” Kelchen said. “Seventy-five percent of the endowment may be restricted for using on student financial aid or paying for buildings or endowed faculty positions. The amount that’s unrestricted can be fairly small.”

Increased investment income could mean more spending on those restricted areas — scholarships, salaries, dining, and so on — in the years to come, but could not be moved to protect jobs. That’s because while colleges do turn the endowment into revenue every year, by taking tiny percentages of the interest, never the principal, to put into operating funds, they don’t like going over allotted percentage caps.

“It is generally considered a bad idea to do anything more than that,” Gardner, the Chronicle of Higher Education writer, said. “Because what you are doing is you are eating into the college’s future. I understand that you don’t want to hear that when people are losing jobs. But that is the charge you are given as a university administrator: Protect the institution, protect the next few years.”

Austerity measures weren’t worth it

But some labor unions, educators, and college experts are now arguing that — at least for the largest public and private collegiate institutions — emergency budget cuts weren’t worth it, given that many had prepared emergency funds for crises like a pandemic.

These massive funding pools, sometimes called “rainy day funds” by collegiate officials and activists, often come from endowments, and can be found in the UC system that employed Hernandez and at many other institutions. The University of Massachusetts network boasts an emergency stabilization fund of around $125 million. Board of Trustees member Michael V. O’Brien once joked that the money would only ever be spent in the event of “a completely unforeseen cataclysm,” an “asteroid strike,” for example.

Rutgers University, where media studies professor Todd Wolfson teaches, has a similar fund. Wolfson said he learned about the rainy day fund from the university’s chief financial officer.

“I was like, well, this is the largest health crisis in the history of this country,” Wolfson said. “Do you not consider this a moment to use your frickin’ rainy day fund? And they said, ‘We’re thinking about it.’ But they ultimately never ever did.”

Wolfson said schools shied away from pulling excess dollars from rainy day funds and endowments because of broad concerns that had little to do with their missions as educational institutions — including how such a move would look to creditors.

“To them, their rating from Moody’s” factored into schools’ reticence, Wolfson said. “And their ability to take out a loan in the future and not have slightly worse terms, and the desire to grow and grow and grow [the total value of their endowment] and get bigger and bigger, it feeds a logic in and of itself. Growing an endowment for the sake of growing an endowment.”

In general, schools offered little rationale for refusing to use their emergency funds, and their statements around layoffs tended to be vague. For example, in a precursor to announcing their own spate of layoffs, Northwestern’s president said reducing jobs was necessary because the pandemic had placed “extreme pressure on all our major functions and on associated revenue streams.” When asked about their financial strategies during the pandemic, many of the country’s wealthy private schools — including Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, and Yale — did not provide comment. 

Liz Perlman — the executive director of AFSCME 3299, the University of California labor union representing 28,000 service workers — told me that austerity in the face of such funds is “lazy policymaking.”

Perlman said AFSCME 3299 identified several alternatives to austerity that could have kept UC’s employees at their jobs, including drawing on some of the $14.8 billion the system possesses that is categorized as short-term or long-term investment funding, meaning it can be spent as the system sees fit. Instead, the university system, California’s third-largest employer, almost laid off 3,000 AFSCME 3299 workers in 2020; the number laid off was actually closer to 200, a reduction the union believes was due to its activism.

It wasn’t just the existence of rainy day funds or the rapid market turnaround that makes austerity questionable, however. There is also the fact that, particularly at the largest schools, advocates like workers unions began to develop new, more equitable alternatives to traditional austerity measures.

The pandemic revealed alternatives to traditional austerity. Schools aren’t sure they’ll need them.

Todd Wolfson, the Rutgers professor, is also president of the university’s largest educators’ union, and believes that there are alternatives to austerity that can still yield savings in a crisis, and that can be useful in situations with rapidly changing conditions, like the pandemic.

His union, for instance, presented Rutgers with a plan in which every unionized worker agreed to voluntary furloughs in exchange for no layoffs; Wolfson said it would have saved the university upward of $150 million.

“There’s a way to do this that’s collaborative, that really lifts up the university as a moral beacon for how to handle a crisis,” Wolfson said. “As opposed to a neoliberal-driven institution that punishes whomever it has to punish in thinking about its bottom line. To this day, it’s a mystery to me why they said no.”

The university ultimately went with its own plan, laying off 1,000 workers, disproportionately women and people of color; 400 adjunct professors were told they wouldn’t be returning the following year, saving Rutgers $4.5 million, which is roughly the yearly salary of head football coach Greg Schiano.

But the school’s strategy shifted with the arrival of a new president, Jonathan Holloway, in July. At a virtual summit in October, Holloway said that Rutgers would need to continue to find savings, given that, despite its endowment, Rutgers was not among the schools that profited during the pandemic — though its losses were revised down from an estimated $200 million to a much more manageable $54 million.

“We have a very large workforce, but when we don’t have jobs for them because our students aren’t here, like, ‘What do we do?’” Holloway said at the virtual summit. “We’ve worked very hard to find as many other kinds of jobs that they’ll be trained into, but at some point all that stops. And this has been the real frustration of the pandemic. You can try and try and try and all of a sudden, the math doesn’t work anymore and you have to make these really difficult decisions.”

In February 2021, Holloway and Wolfson’s union came together on a smaller work-sharing agreement that will keep the university from enacting further layoffs through the end of the Covid-19 crisis.

“I reached out to President Holloway, I said, ‘Hey, this is a moment. Let’s try to figure out if we can bargain a deal … we’re not gonna be able to get everything back but at least get on a better footing and try to figure out what’s next,’” Wolfson said.

The union at Rutgers wasn’t alone in finding creative solutions to keep workers employed; the University of California system agreed to a deal with AFSCME 2399 whereby workers at several universities could voluntarily transfer to UC hospitals so they could keep jobs within the university system.

Some workers made the move, guaranteeing a job for themselves. AFSCME said it fought hard to give them that option, and that the deal kept thousands more workers from being laid off.

Perlman, the AFSCME executive director, helped negotiate the agreement. But she said that while it helped, it wasn’t good enough, that a university system with $40 billion in funding shouldn’t be laying off the poorest members of its community.

“If you live in a bubble and you actually count beans and nuts, then that makes sense,” Perlman said. “But if you actually look at the real world, those humans are actual Black and brown low-wage service workers who were also the same humans and their family members who were showing up at UC hospitals with Covid and then dying from it.”

And Perlman noted that the first person who died of Covid-19 in California was an AFSCME union member, a truck driver at UC Santa Cruz.

While the pandemic has led to some changes — including more union activity — overall, little has changed with respect to schools’ financial underpinnings. For instance, Inside Higher Ed’s 2021 survey of university presidents found only 17 percent saying they would make larger than planned draws from their endowments to increase revenue in future economic crises.

That response may come from the fact that so many schools are entering this phase of the pandemic in strong shape. The same poll found 80 percent of presidents are confident their institution will be financially stable over the next 10 years, an increase from the 57 percent that said so before the pandemic hit in 2020.

“The sky did not fall,” Gardner said. “I hope that does not imbue false confidence for the people who run these institutions that they shouldn’t be as prepared as they possibly can be, or be as cautious as they can be, in the event that something like this comes up again.”

Hernandez feels the same way. Just weeks ago, he and the staff at Riverside got word that they’d be laid off again this summer. He’d never experienced that insecurity before last summer. Now, it’s a running theme.

“We’re cooks, we’re storekeepers, people who feed the students in our department,” Hernandez said. “And we’re trying to figure out, why is it that we suffer?”

Gregory Svirnovskiy is a student at Northwestern University and a politics and policy intern at Vox through the university’s journalism residency program.

]]> Gregory Svirnovskiy <![CDATA[Paid leave is incredibly popular — even with Republicans]]> https://www.vox.com/2021/6/7/22380427/poll-paid-leave-popular-democrats-republicans-covid-19 2021-06-07T11:22:01-04:00 2021-06-07T08:00:00-04:00
An ambulance parked outside the US Capitol on March 16, 2020. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Federal paid leave is overwhelmingly popular — so popular, according to a new poll, that people are willing to pay to keep it.

That poll, commissioned by Paid Leave for All Action, an advocacy group that promotes paid leave policies, surveyed 1,070 likely voters from seven battleground states (Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). It found that 84 percent of likely voters, including 74 percent of Republicans, support paid leave programs; 69 percent of those polled, including 55 percent of surveyed Republicans, would support a federal leave standard even if they’d have to pay more in taxes to sustain it.

The survey, which was taken from May 14 to 20, had results that are markedly similar to other recent polls on the issue.

For example, a YouGov poll from early April found 82 percent of Americans believe employees should be able to take paid maternity leave, and that 68 percent thought paid maternity and paternity leave ought to be offered.

The United States is the only wealthy nation in the world without a federal paid leave standard, and access to the benefit is rare. Currently, about 21 percent of US workers have access to paid family leave, and less than half (about 40 percent) have emergency medical leave.

The survey comes at a confluence of two critical moments for paid leave advocates and for working families: as the coronavirus pandemic has shed a light on the lack of paid family and medical leave, and as President Joe Biden’s American Families Plan proposes up to 12 weeks of paid leave for qualifying workers.

“The pandemic completely changed the game,” said Dawn Huckelbridge, director of the advocacy group Paid Leave for All. “What had been a hole in our infrastructure, what had been a crisis in the making for years and generations, suddenly now it is out on this really magnified scale. People realize how critical this is to our resilience, to our economic growth, to weathering crises, whether global pandemics or cancer diagnoses.”

Early studies have suggested tragic costs to current paid leave policies. An April report by Human Impact Partners found that the presence of an “adequate paid sick time policy” at Walmart could have prevented at least 7,618 Covid-19 cases and 133 Covid-19 deaths during the pandemic. Guaranteeing paid leave at the federal level would ideally allow for better outcomes in the future, while allowing families to care for Covid-19 long-haulers and other sick loved ones without worrying about losing their jobs in the short term.

Paid leave could be a factor in 2022 congressional races

The seven battleground states tabbed in the survey could in all likelihood decide which party controls the Senate, and perhaps the House of Representatives, in the 2022 midterm elections.

As Vox’s Li Zhou explained, “Historically, the implementation of paid leave programs has faced Republican opposition due to concerns about the additional taxes needed to pay for them and the potential burden they could pose to businesses.” Republican opposition to paid leave remains among elected officials, but the survey’s results suggest likely voters feel differently.

And that could provide Democrats with an opportunity — particularly when it comes to swaying independent voters.

To win a majority of the seven battleground seats up for grabs in 2022, Democrats and Republicans alike will need to appeal to the 20 percent of undecided voters across the states. The poll found that undecided likely voters in the states surveyed lean slightly toward the Republican Party but become willing to support a generic Democrat candidate who supports paid leave by 46 percentage points.

The poll found that voters would currently like to reelect Democratic Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (NV), Raphael Warnock (GA), and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ) by about 5 points each. But their leads rise by an average of 17 points when linking their work with paid leave efforts.

Voters’ support for Republican Sens. Marco Rubio (FL), Richard Burr (NC), Pat Toomey (PA), and Ron Johnson (WI), by contrast, goes down an average of 5 points when each senator’s opposition to federal paid leave is highlighted.

Obviously, paid leave won’t be the only issue on voters’ minds in 2022; economic considerations, cultural issues, public safety, and various other concerns will factor into their votes as well. But as Huckelbridge points out, paid leave is clearly a salient issue — and it’s one voters are primed to respond to coming out of the pandemic.

“For whatever party you are,” Huckelbridge said, “if you want to keep your seat, if you want to boost your popularity, paid leave is a no-brainer.”

]]> Gregory Svirnovskiy <![CDATA[How Biden could expand paid family leave to more Americans]]> https://www.vox.com/22421462/american-families-plan-to-expand-paid-leave-joe-biden-richard-neal 2021-05-10T19:29:30-04:00 2021-05-11T10:00:00-04:00
President Joe Biden promoting the American Jobs Plan in Norfolk, Virginia, on May 3. | Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

President Joe Biden recently unveiled his American Families Plan, a $1.8 trillion proposal that, among other things, would provide 12 weeks of paid leave to workers caring for new children or a sick family member. Perhaps as important, the proposal could also fundamentally change how the US government defines “family.”

The current law of the land is the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA), from 1993, which requires large employers to allow workers to take leave for qualified family or medical reasons, but does not require that employees be paid during the time off. And not everyone can take advantage of it. When it comes to unpaid leave, the federal government’s current definition of who counts as family is tied pretty closely to the idea of a nuclear one: married partners and children under the age of 18. That leaves out a massive percentage of the population; just 18.4 percent of Americans live in traditional nuclear-family households.

Nine states and the District of Columbia, representing a combined third of the country’s population, have government programs that fund or will soon begin funding paid leave, and each uses a definition of family that goes beyond the FMLA. But leave is governed by a patchwork of state and individual business policies, leaving most families out.

Many Americans rely on extended or chosen family for care. For example, fewer than half of LGBTQ Americans surveyed in 2020 said they were most likely to rely on support from biological family when they are sick, according to a survey conducted by the progressive Center for American Progress.

The American Families Plan currently does not explicitly include chosen and extended family in its paid leave protections, but it does say access will be expanded. As Sherry Leiwant and Jared Make, the leaders of A Better Balance, a paid family leave and reduced-cost child care programs advocacy group, told Vox, it will be up to groups like theirs to push lawmakers to ensure inclusivity in the congressional version of the plan. Any bill that extends who can take leave to care for loved ones could have massive implications; reframing how the federal government conceives of family could help level the economic playing field. Rep. Richard Neal’s (D-MA) Building an Economy for Families Act, a far more detailed paid leave plan introduced at the end of April, is another example.

Leiwant and Make briefly spoke with Vox about Biden’s and Neal’s plans, and the effect a new definition of family would have. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Gregory Svirnovskiy

Can you walk me through, in layman’s terms, how the federal government defines family? Does that manifest in the FMLA?

Sherry Leiwant

The federal government, in terms of the way they’ve defined sick leave for their own employees since the ’70s, really, when they began to think of family as other than just the nuclear family, has been very generous. It’s the federal government that coined the term “blood or affinity” as a relationship. And we’ve been using that, as Jared can attest, in all the states where we’ve written model sick leave laws or paid family leave laws. They are now just starting to also include those terms. So the federal government really was a leader here.

The FMLA, on the other hand, is extremely narrow. It only applies to spouses and parents, and only to children under 18, which has always been a thorn in my side, because my children are older. So, you know, that’s a very narrow definition.

Jared Make

As long as A Better Balance has been in existence, we’ve heard from workers that the definition of family under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act is incredibly narrow. And it doesn’t include not only core immediate family relationships — like adult children, domestic partners, siblings, grandparents, grandchildren — but also, you know, the broader chosen family that Sherry mentioned, that the federal government does recognize for its own workers.

So there’s a disconnect there, but it’s an area where we’ve seen states really lead the way, and it’s exciting to now see proposals and support federally for paid family and medical leave that will have an inclusive family definition.

Gregory Svirnovskiy

How have those narrow definitions in the FMLA impacted nontraditional families, particularly members of the LGBTQ community?

Jared Make

I think the unfortunate reality is it’s left most of those families out historically, and that continues to this day. You know, a major gap is that domestic partners, for example, are not covered. And this certainly before marriage equality was a complete exclusion of same-sex couples. Now that we have marriage equality, of course, married same-sex couples are covered, all spouses are. But the definition continues to leave out domestic partners.

Sherry Leiwant

Also the immigrant community. In many cases, you have people who are here and have left their most immediate family behind, but they are living with other family members who care for them and whom they care for. You have a lot of people living in extended families. And that can also have a disparate racial and ethnic impact. So it’s very important across the board. 

Gregory Svirnovskiy

Now we have two new proposals for family leave in President Biden’s American Families Plan and in Rep. Richard Neal’s Building an Economy for Families Act. Do these plans go beyond current nuclear family definitions?

Sherry Leiwant

The Biden team is completely committed to a broad family definition, including the blood or affinity. And that is true also of Rep. Neal, who’s head of the Ways and Means Committee, which is now looking at language for a possible paid family medical leave program for the nation. He has put out a discussion draft that also has a broad and inclusive definition of family. In fact, it kind of follows the FMLA on everything on purposes and weeks and so forth. But there is a specific exception for family definition so that it’s broader. And it’s basically what we’ve been using, and what we’ve been talking about here.

Gregory Svirnovskiy

I’m glad you brought that up, because one of the things that’s really troubled me is I’ve scoured the internet, and haven’t been able to find any defined language on exactly who can qualify to take leave under the Biden plan, other than these broad allusions to it being more inclusive.

Sherry Leiwant

Well, I mean, I think what we always expected from the president was a very broad-strokes program that would then be defined more specifically in Congress.

This is what he’s sending, he’s not sending detailed legislation. I think working with the committee or the various committees is really important in terms of seeing what actually comes through. And I’m sure that the White House will be involved in some way in what it looks like.

Gregory Svirnovskiy

Can you tell me more about Rep. Neal’s proposal? Does it differ at all from Biden’s AFP?

Sherry Leiwant

It expands the family definition. So FMLA, it’s just for parents with young children under 18. The Neal proposal would expand that to a variety of named relatives, as well as those who have the equivalent of a family relationship through blood or affinity.

All the nuts and bolts are in there. I’m not sure that, you know, the stakeholders, such as the advocates or the business community or the disabled community will agree with what they’ve done. And there’ll be pushback, and there’ll be conversation, and I’m sure things will be changed. But there are massive amounts of detail in that document. 

Gregory Svirnovskiy

Is there anything missing in the plans Biden or Neal are presenting to Congress right now? Will families that take paid leave be guaranteed their jobs on returning from leave, for instance?

Sherry Leiwant

The FMLA continues to be the only job protection statute or legal remedy. If you’re taking care of someone in your extended family, you could get benefits for that if Neal’s discussion draft were to pass, or Biden’s, but the FMLA continues to be the only job protection statute. We would have to expand the definition of family there.

The AFP is silent [on job protection], isn’t really addressing that issue. Neal’s proposal, also silent. There’s nothing in there. It doesn’t mean that the Biden proposal wouldn’t include something. But I don’t believe they said anything one way or the other.

Gregory Svirnovskiy

In the end, though, looking at Biden’s proposal and Rep. Neal’s plan for paid leave, can you speak to the symbolic importance of that for the American family?

Sherry Leiwant

Yes, it’s extremely important. I mean, I think it’s time. The time has long passed, really, for us to recognize that American families are not just mother, father, child, and parents. People rely on loved ones for their care. And many of our particular communities like the LGBT community, disability community, a lot of immigrant families, are extended families that care for each other, and we need to start recognizing that. This is a huge step in that direction.

]]> Gregory Svirnovskiy <![CDATA[The Senate just took a step toward actually lowering US greenhouse gas emissions]]> https://www.vox.com/22404194/methane-emissions-greenhouse-gases-senate-reverses-trump-order 2021-04-29T18:41:08-04:00 2021-04-29T17:40:57-04:00
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (left) and Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) speak at a press conference prior to a Senate vote to reinstate Obama-era methane emissions standards, April 28, 2021. | Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images

The Senate on Wednesday took an important step forward on limiting emissions — and meeting its commitments to curb global warming — by voting to limit the unbridled release of methane molecules, often a byproduct of natural gas production, into the atmosphere.

The 52-42 vote reinstates the Oil and Natural Gas New Source Performance Standards, a handful of Obama-era regulations on methane emissions rolled back by former President Donald Trump in August 2020. The measure drew support from every Senate Democrat, as well as Republican Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME), who has opposed GOP efforts to deregulate methane emissions in the past; Lindsey Graham (R-SC); and Rob Portman (R-OH). The rule is expected to be taken up and passed by the House of Representatives in May.

The standards alone won’t be sufficient to meet President Joe Biden’s pledge to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 52 percent compared with 2005 levels by 2030 — a goal meant to help keep global warming this century to 1.5 degrees Celsius — but it represents an important step toward meeting that commitment, given that methane is increasingly seen as a driver of climate change. The vote did not receive the support of 10 Republicans — the number Democrats need, barring any changes to the filibuster, to pass more sweeping climate legislation — but the fact three GOP senators signed on suggests Democrats have at least some hope of winning over Republicans on at least some climate-related issues.

This rule change required only 51 “yes” votes, as Democrats took advantage of the Congressional Review Act, which allows legislators to undo laws passed by previous administrations in their lame-duck periods with a simple majority in each chamber of Congress. It’s filibuster-proof. Trump’s methane regulation, adopted by the EPA last summer, is the first rule for which Democrats are using the legislative procedure, which Republicans used 14 times in the first 16 weeks of Trump’s presidency four years ago.

When it comes to oil and natural gas pipelines, methane leaks are disconcertingly common and a major contributor to the methane currently in the atmosphere. Obama’s regulations, passed in 2016, were meant to change that; they required energy companies to monitor pipelines for leaks and plug any they found. Bringing those regulations back is “absolutely common sense,” Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM), a member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and a cosponsor of the resolution, said at a Tuesday press conference.

Notably, some energy companies, including BP, Shell, and Exxon, are on record as being on board with increased methane regulation. Heinrich said that’s because complying with its rules would actually save money: Pristine pipes and plugged-up leaks lead to higher yields and greater profits, enough that the costs of securing infrastructure are offset.

And Dan Zimmerle, a senior research associate in the Energy Institute at Colorado State University, said companies also appreciate methane regulations because they lead to increased accountability, making methane — a major component of natural gas, which is often promoted as an alternative to coal — seem safer to consume than it actually is.

“The largest threat to natural gas is not the cost of regulation, it’s the reputation of natural gas,” Zimmerle said.

Republicans, with the noted exception of Collins, Graham, and Portman, have thus far opposed any attempts at energy regulation, including this one, arguing that there are other, less regulatory and more business-friendly ways to take care of the climate. But Democrats argue that regulation of greenhouse gases is critical — and that without it, the United States will fail to ward off the dangers of climate change.

Why reducing methane emissions is critical, briefly explained

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer cast the Senate’s move as “one of the most important votes, not only that this Congress has cast but has been cast in the last decade, in terms of our fight against global warming.”

In a lot of ways, Schumer is right.

Greenhouse gases work by inhibiting the free movement of the sun’s rays that heat the Earth. Gasses such as carbon dioxide and methane absorb the radiation that comes up from the Earth’s surface toward space, trapping it. If emissions continue to increase at the current rate, the atmosphere could warm by 3 to 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. The results could be catastrophic.

The problem with methane is that it traps heat incredibly effectively — about 25 times more effectively than carbon dioxide, according to the EPA. While it accounts for only about 16 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, the manner in which it traps heat means any significant reduction would likely have a positive impact on climate change.

Limiting emissions, as the rules change would, helps address the fact that methane’s presence in the atmosphere is increasing exponentially as a byproduct of human activities such as farming and energy production. In fact, even as the world locked down amid the Covid-19 pandemic, carbon dioxide and methane emissions hit record highs. And it’s possible they could rise further as countries begin to reopen.

All that makes methane reduction key to keeping global warming as low as possible. A 2021 report in Environmental Research Letters found that concerted efforts to reduce man-made methane emissions could decrease global warming by as much as 30 percent.

More methane regulation is needed

Given the current severity of methane emissions, many scientists worry the Obama-era regulations will never be enough to tangibly curb methane emissions.

Robert Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University, was one of the scientists invited to give a briefing on methane emissions to senior White House staff in May 2016, just before the regulations were drawn up. Howarth said one issue with the Obama rules is that they’re missing mechanisms to verify that energy companies are complying with the regulations.

“Methane is a colorless, odorless gas; you can’t see it with the naked eye,” Howarth said. “A layperson can’t see — I can’t see — if the facility is leaking or not. If you don’t have an independent means by skilled people who are verifying what the emissions are, then you’re simply relying on industry to say ‘we’re taking care of it.’ That doesn’t work for me.”

Howarth argued it’s a loophole that can be closed with today’s technology. Microsatellites tuned to measure methane, managed and owned by global governments and private companies, can look for unchecked and unplugged methane emissions. That technology didn’t exist four years ago.

Zimmerle, the Colorado researcher, called the development promising but said that “there are other places, like gas schematics or a whole variety of other specific sources, where everybody knows the emissions are larger, but for whatever reason, they’re not the point of attention.”

There have been other, similar critiques about the limits of the Obama-era rules. For instance, some experts have noted the rules apply only to new extraction sites, leaving older, leaky sites to continue operating.

As senior Vox reporter Rebecca Leber has written, the Biden administration has acknowledged that just bringing back old regulations that don’t go far enough won’t suffice. Exactly how it plans to address the loopholes and reach its target is unclear, but the White House has promised to release details by September. In the meantime, however, the rules change represents a small step forward — and a little less methane in the air.

]]> Gregory Svirnovskiy <![CDATA[What to expect from Biden’s first address to Congress]]> https://www.vox.com/2021/4/27/22404275/biden-congress-address-state-of-the-union-policing-infrastructure-wednesday 2021-04-28T21:17:52-04:00 2021-04-28T21:02:59-04:00 President Joe Biden is giving his first address to Congress on Wednesday, and will lay out his agenda for pandemic recovery and economic development. In his speech, he’s expected to tout the administration’s successful effort to vaccinate 200 million people in its first 100 days, comment on legislation to curtail police violence, and push his massive infrastructure proposal.

Biden’s address will take place Wednesday, April 28, at 9 pm ET. It will be broadcast live on major networks such as PBS, CNN, Fox, and NBC, on C-SPAN, and streamed on the White House’s official YouTube page.

Biden’s speech is not a State of the Union address, however. Those happen every January. Biden, like every other president in the first year of their first term, will give what is known as an address before a joint session of Congress.

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This year’s joint address will be different from those that came before — in part due to the continuing coronavirus pandemic. Only 200 members of Congress are set to attend due to Covid-19 restrictions recommended by the Capitol physician, far fewer than in normal years, when nearly every lawmaker and their guests typically take part. The secretaries of state and defense are the only Cabinet members expected, while only Chief Justice John Roberts will be in attendance from the Supreme Court.

Also of note will be the people behind Biden as he gives his address. For the first time, two women, Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, will be seated behind the president.

The address also comes later than most: Every president since Ronald Reagan has delivered his first address in February, including President Donald Trump, who used his February 28, 2017, speech to declare an end to the “trivial fights” that dominated the first month of his administration — and that ended up continuing for the next four years.

Biden said he wanted to spend his first weeks in office focusing first on addressing the coronavirus pandemic. But the delay gives him an opportunity to tout his first legislative victory: the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief package that has provided millions of Americans with stimulus checks, extended the federal government’s employment insurance program, and provided funding for vaccine distribution, among other things.

And a later speech gives Biden a chance to highlight progress on vaccination: 200 million shots have now made it into American arms. Nearly 54 percent of adults have received at least one dose, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But Biden’s speech won’t be just about what’s happened; it is also intended to build support for legislation still to come. And that means a focus on infrastructure.

Biden has two major infrastructure proposals to sell during his joint address

The White House envisioned the American Rescue Plan as the first step in the federal response to the pandemic — it was seen as a tool to stop short-term economic damage and pave the way for a return to normal life. The actual recovery was meant to be taken care of by future plans, the first of which Biden unveiled in early April: the American Jobs Plan.

The plan could stimulate the economy in the long term, while fixing crumbling infrastructure and aiding the transition to green energy. If passed, it would dedicate $621 billion in infrastructure to repairing the country’s dilapidated roads, bridges, ports, and railway systems, while allocating another $300 billion to bolster manufacturing, among other things. It’s a plan Biden wants to pay for by raising the corporate tax rate to 28 percent and closing loopholes on offshore banks and international corporations.

Biden can be expected to make a pitch for this plan Wednesday night, and will also detail the proposal’s counterpart, the American Families Plan. It’s a $1.8 trillion proposal focused on “human infrastructure” that would provide child care funding, universal prekindergarten programming, tuition-free community colleges, and paid family leave, along with extending the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit.

“The core of that [speech] will be him laying out the specifics of the American Families Plan, his commitment to child care, to education, and to delivering on those priorities,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters last Thursday.

Both plans would represent a fundamental shift in the federal government’s role in providing for Americans. As Vox’s Ella Nilsen writes:

Biden’s jobs plan also reveals an administration that is fundamentally rethinking the role of government in America. Rather than the anti-government ethos that has permeated both Democratic and Republican administrations since Ronald Reagan, the Biden administration is embracing the big-government mantle of historic Democratic Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson.

The Biden administration is attempting to reclassify social welfare programs like medical leave and universal education access as a type of human infrastructure. He’ll hit on both of those points in his speech Wednesday as he attempts to drum up support from moderate Republicans in Congress and from Democrats who are wary of proposals veering from the political center.

The administration is seeking to win bipartisan support for its jobs plan, given that Democrats need 10 Republican senators to overcome the filibuster in the Senate. Republicans and corporate figures have acknowledged the country needs to rebuild its highways and bridges, but have thus far signaled a wariness to spend too much to do so — as well as an outright rejection of Biden’s plan for paying for the initiative.

Democrats could attempt to pass the plan using budget reconciliation — under this process, only a simple majority is needed to pass legislation in the Senate, although there are limits on what can be in that legislation, as Vox’s Dylan Scott has explained. Democrats currently have 51 votes in the Senate (counting the tiebreaking vote of Vice President Harris) and could conceivably pass the infrastructure plans through reconciliation.

But to do so, they’ll need to keep all Democrats — including Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), who has called for bipartisanship in crafting the infrastructure package — in line. And Biden’s speech will, in part, be a case for why they should follow his lead.

Biden will also address the problems with policing

Speaking just over a week after a Minneapolis jury’s decision to convict former police officer Derek Chauvin of murder for the killing of George Floyd, Biden will call on Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, Psaki said.

“I think he’s promising to the Floyd family that he will use the power of his presidency — the bully pulpit, as he intends to do during his joint address next week; the role of senior leaders in his government — to help push the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act forward,” Psaki said at a press briefing last Wednesday.

The Justice in Policing Act calls for a number of reforms at the federal level, including demilitarizing police departments, increasing data collection on police misconduct, and expanding access to body cameras. And Biden is expected to highlight how the bill might help reduce police killings, as well as how it could help address the problems of racial bias in policing.

Sen. Tim Scott will give the GOP response to Biden’s joint address

Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) — a GOP rising star who has taken the lead for his party in congressional talks on policing policy — will give the Republican rebuttal to Biden’s speech.

Scott is notably the only Black Republican in the Senate. Of the 124 lawmakers in Congress who identify as nonwhite, just 17 percent are Republicans. Diversity, while rising gradually in GOP circles in recent years, is still low. Scott’s speech could be aimed at changing that — and on building on the gains Trump made with some Americans of color.

“I’m looking forward to having the chance to speak to the American people about what’s in my heart and about the conservative values that have led to some of the greatest accomplishments the world has ever known,” Scott said in a video posted to his Twitter account Monday.

Speeches made by Republican responders have yielded mixed results in recent years. Nikki Haley’s 2016 response helped catapult her into the national spotlight, and she is now reportedly contemplating a 2024 presidential run. Bobby Jindal, Bob McDonnell, and Paul Ryan, who spoke in 2009, 2010, and 2011, respectively, now all have a greatly reduced public presence.

The Working Families Party will give a progressive response

Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) will deliver the progressive response on behalf of the Working Families Party (WFP), marking the fourth time the group has responded to a presidential address before Congress. Bowman, a first-term representative who was backed by the WFP throughout a contentious primary campaign against incumbent Eliot Engel last year, is regarded as a rising star on the progressive side of the party.

“As we approach the first hundred days of the president’s term, we should celebrate our victories, take stock of where we’ve fallen short, and be crystal clear about what it will take to truly build back better and deliver the recovery and the democracy our people deserve,” Bowman said last week in a press release.

Last year, the Working Families Party response was given by Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), whose national profile has only risen since.

Above all, Biden wants to unify the country

Biden has made unity a key part of his message, and it’s likely he’ll touch on this theme Wednesday evening. He’ll need to explain why Democrats should stay united on infrastructure to keep the reconciliation path open, while also making a pitch to Republicans to negotiate with Democrats in good faith. And he’ll attempt to solidify public support. He’s pitching the proposals as a litmus test for the American government.

The stakes are certainly high. For Biden, the plans represent the way forward out of the pandemic, but also pose an important question, as he said when pitching the jobs plan earlier this month: “Can democracies still deliver for their people?”

]]> Gregory Svirnovskiy <![CDATA[9 ideas to solve the broken institution of policing]]> https://www.vox.com/22396400/defunding-abolishing-police-among-ideas-derek-chauvin-verdict 2021-04-24T15:06:22-04:00 2021-04-25T09:30:00-04:00
Daunte Wright’s family and community members at a memorial for him in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, on April 22. | Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

From 16-year-old Ma’khia Bryant in Columbus to 13-year-old Adam Toledo in Chicago to 20-year-old Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, it is clear that the systemic problems with policing are widespread.

And the problems don’t just include shootings. Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd not with his gun but with his knee — and reportedly had seriously injured one other Black person using similar tactics previously.

There is a racial aspect to this misconduct. Black men are 2.5 times more likely than white men to be killed by police. And Black people who are fatally shot by police are twice as likely to be unarmed than white people.

And there is an accountability issue as well. When Chauvin’s conviction was announced on broadcast television, people cheered and chanted in part because the verdict was hard to believe. Only seven police officers have been convicted of murder for their involvement in fatal shootings since 2005. No convictions came in the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Philando Castile, or Trayvon Martin.

If nothing is changed about the way policing is done, there will continue to be deaths, continue to be serious injuries, continue to be racial bias. And few officers will face the accountability of a court.

Following the Chauvin verdict, President Joe Biden called for changing policing by “acknowledging and confronting, head-on, systemic racism and the racial disparities that exist in policing and in our criminal justice system more broadly.”

Below are nine ideas — some promoted by activists and community leaders, some backed by lawmakers, and some with the support of a wide range of people — to do just that. 

1) Employ more oversight

Some police oversight already exists at the federal level; the Department of Justice has the ability to investigate departments that show “pattern or practice” of misconduct.

This is happening now. On Wednesday, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced a Justice Department probe into the Minneapolis Police Department that will investigate whether the department routinely breaks the law or violates the Constitution in its work. But as Vox’s Ian Millhiser has explained, such investigations are rare, and they’re not always well-funded. And they fall out of favor under certain presidents — the Trump administration was very much against them.

The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, House Democrats’ marquee police reform proposal, attempts to, as Vox’s Sean Collins reports, expand “the Justice Department’s investigative powers, increasing the department’s ability to pursue misconduct cases.”

There are lots of other oversight ideas — including a proposal for oversight legislation modeled on the Voting Rights Act — but the Justice in Policing Act is notable because it has already passed the House of Representatives, twice. It is backed by Biden but is currently stalled in the Senate, where it needs “yes” votes from 10 Republicans to become law. As Vox’s Li Zhou has reported, that’s highly unlikely (though there are some signs a bipartisan compromise bill could be forthcoming). 

But even if the federal government was given more oversight powers, it still has a relatively poor understanding of how state and local departments operate — investigations like the one recently launched in Minneapolis are the product of publicly available information as much as they are government intelligence. To fix oversight also means fixing data collection.

2) Improve data collection

The federal government has no idea how many allegations of misconduct are levied against the nation’s 18,000 police departments each year. It does not keep track of police killings, and it has no way of knowing how much is spent by law enforcement agencies on civil settlements made to victims of police wrongdoing or their families.

That makes understanding the scope of the problem — and weighing potential remedies — difficult.

But there are a number of proposals to change that, as well as bipartisan agreements.

Both the Justice in Policing Act and the JUSTICE Act, the policing bill the GOP unveiled in 2020, could fundamentally change the way information on police misconduct is collected and stored on a federal level.

If passed, the Justice in Policing Act would set up a national database on incidents of police misconduct, to prevent officers fired for misconduct from being hired in one locality after being fired for cause elsewhere. Both the Justice in Policing and JUSTICE acts would mandate that all use-of-force reports be submitted into a national database. And another proposal, co-sponsored by Virginia Democrats Rep. Don Beyer and Sen. Tim Kaine, would mandate the tracking of civil settlements.

There are a few challenges with these proposals. For one, there are questions about how accurate the data would be. Philip Matthew Stinson, a criminal justice professor at Bowling Green State University and former police officer, previously told Vox that officers often lie in their reports.

And another issue is that the government has long struggled to get basic information from police departments; the FBI has had difficulty collecting use-of-force data, for instance. It remains to be seen what tangible steps could compel them to be more transparent.

3) Address racial bias

Our racial biases are inherent. And the pressure cooker that is contemporary policing only exacerbates them, Phillip Atiba Goff, co-founder of the Center for Policing Equity and a professor of African American studies and psychology at Yale, told Ezra Klein for Vox last September:

If you’re multitasking, if you’re cognitively depleted, if your adrenaline is off, if you’re in a new situation, if you’re being negatively stereotyped because of your membership within a visible group that matters to you — all of those things are really robust predictors [of discriminatory behavior]. You can manipulate them in a laboratory and you will get people to discriminate against Black folks and not white folks across a whole host of different dimensions.

But also all of those things are literally the job description for law enforcement. So it is not surprising that we see some pretty significant racial disparities on the other side. It’s exactly what we would predict. In fact, most social psychologists would consider that to be cheating. You just added all the things you knew were going to produce bias and you put them all together.

Except it’s not an experiment — it’s with people’s lives.

Goff’s assertions are backed up by data. Black Americans are twice as likely as white Americans to be shot by police relative to their share of the population.

Government officials at the federal, state, and local levels have long been aware of this problem, and some began enacting implicit bias training after the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014. Now, a majority do, and the Justice in Policing Act would make it mandatory for federal officers to participate in such trainings.

The problem with these trainings, however, is that it’s not clear that they work.

As Vox’s Julia Belluz has reported:

In a fascinating roundup of the evidence on diversity programs published in the Harvard Business Review, [Harvard sociologist Frank] Dobbin and co-author Alexandra Kalev looked at 30 years of data as well as data from more than 800 US firms and interviews with hundreds of managers and executives. Here’s a quick summary of their findings on anti-bias trainings: 

“It turns out that while people are easily taught to respond correctly to a questionnaire about bias, they soon forget the right answers. The positive effects of diversity training rarely last beyond a day or two, and a number of studies suggest that it can activate bias or spark a backlash. Nonetheless, nearly half of midsize companies use it, as do nearly all the Fortune 500.”

And in NYPD surveys conducted in 2020 before and after bias training seminars, police officers expressed awareness of the nature of implicit bias and a desire to manage, rather than change, their own. But that purported increase in self-awareness didn’t manifest itself in any tangible changes to the racial or ethnic breakdown of the people officers arrested or interacted with in the aftermath.

4) End qualified immunity

Qualified immunity emerged at the forefront of the collective consciousness last year after the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor — broadly, it protects individual officers from legal liability.

For a successful lawsuit, an officer must knowingly be breaking a law that previously resulted in the sanctioning of another officer. In other words, the police have the broad legal authority to do anything they want — so long as a court hasn’t explicitly told an officer not to.

As Vox’s Ian Millhiser explains, qualified immunity isn’t a law; it’s an idea that was created by the Supreme Court. But there are efforts for the doctrine to be overturned with legislation.

Democrats have made ending qualified immunity a feature in their efforts to enact police reform, including in the Justice in Policing Act. Republicans have called doing so a nonstarter, though Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) is reportedly working on a proposal that would continue to shield individual officers from lawsuits while exposing departments to more legal risk. But while qualified immunity has proved a sticking point in national negotiations, Colorado, New Mexico, Massachusetts, and Connecticut have either ended or restricted the practice in their state legal systems. Overall, 25 states have — or are considering — such measures.

5) Change use-of-force policies

The Justice in Policing Act would also ban police officers from using chokeholds and issuing no-knock warrants in drug cases. These measures are direct responses to practices that have already resulted in the loss of Black lives: George Floyd and Eric Garner were killed after their breathing had been restricted by police; Breonna Taylor was killed as police executed a no-knock warrant in her home last year.

State governments are also acting to restrict the use of force by police. On Wednesday, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D) signed an executive order compelling the State Patrol, State Capitol Police, and other agencies to prohibit chokeholds unless as a last resort.

And a new Minnesota statute governing the use of deadly force for police went into effect on March 1. At least 41 states now have laws regarding the use of deadly force.

6) Demilitarize the police

Police militarization is deeply controversial, raising questions about whether officers are properly trained on the military equipment available to them and whether local officers having this access exacerbates tensions during peaceful protests.

The solution often proposed to this problem is to end the federal initiatives known as programs 1033 and 1102, which allow police departments to purchase federal military equipment, and states to use federal sources to purchase anti-drug trafficking equipment, respectively.

For the first 20 years of 1033, its implications were little known by the public. That all changed after the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, as Vox’s German Lopez explains:

The criticisms blew up during the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over the police shooting of Michael Brown. Police often deployed military-grade equipment — such as tear gas, rubber bullets, sound cannons, and mine-resistant armored trucks — against largely peaceful protesters, sometimes agitating the situation and causing demonstrations to unnecessarily escalate into tense and even violent conflicts.

Similar criticisms were often raised during 2020’s protests — particularly after peaceful protesters were tear-gassed in front of the White House.

The Justice in Policing Act would end 1033, prohibiting the distribution of “controlled” military equipment from the Department of Justice’s hands into police departments. Activists have called for the militarization programs to end as well: The BREATHE Act — a police reform proposal created by activists at the Movement for Black Lives — would target both 1033 and 1102.

7) Defund the police

Police aren’t supposed to be mental health professionals. They’re rarely trained in counseling or conflict mediation. They’re always armed. Throughout the country, there’s a growing consensus that money ought to be taken away from police departments and reinvested toward targeted community needs. This is known as defunding the police.

It also means taking responsibilities away from the police and giving them to more specialized workers, like mental health professionals and crisis counselors.

As Vox’s Sean Collins writes:

Money taken from police departments would be used in part to build up cities’ capacity for crisis care, but also to hire public servants better suited to many of the tasks that consume police officers’ time, from dealing with traffic problems to assisting with substance dependency issues. While giving departments more money hasn’t increased the clearance rate, by redistributing officer duties, more crimes could perhaps be solved.

While the BREATHE Act would demilitarize the police, it is more broadly a defunding proposal. If adopted by lawmakers, the bill would close down most federal law enforcement agencies and use the money saved by doing so to fund other services — including economic programs, mental health services, and new educational initiatives.

But while that proposal is — at least at the moment — aspirational, a number of cities have already started along the path of defunding. Austin, Texas, just cut its police budget by $150 million, a third of the budget; that money will go to social welfare programs that expand city access to food and health care. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Baltimore, Washington, DC, and Salt Lake City are among the places where city councils voted to cut police budgets in some capacity.

8) Abolish the police

Abolishing the police might sound like a radical solution. But its proponents think communities can work together to regulate themselves without “anti-Black, white supremacist institutions,” like the American criminal justice system and policing — which got its start with slave patrols — according to Jenn Jackson, a political scientist at Syracuse University.

Under an abolishment framework, rather than using the police, problems would be handled through community care networks and justice systems rooted in decarceration and rehabilitation.

Isaac Bryan, director of public policy at UCLA’s Ralph J. Bunche Center, explained it for Vox:

We are talking about both reallocating funds and imagining a future beyond the institutions of policing that we currently have. Our current model of policing and accountability is rooted in punishment and was constructed as a mechanism to maintain slavery, segregation, and the protection of property rights. All of policing’s historic and contemporary functions have been harmful to communities of color and especially the Black community.

In a lot of ways, abolition is the logical conclusion of efforts to defund police — the gradual shifting of resources away from police departments that have brought violence upon people of color and have generally been incapable of adjusting to meet people’s diverse and changing needs.

If it is difficult to imagine full-scale abolition actually taking place, that’s because officers’ role as solution-makers has been codified into our collective social ethos, Rachel Herzing, executive director of the Center for Political Education, told Vox:

There’s a cat in a tree: cop. There’s a murder down the street: cop. And these things are not equivalent. The idea that we can live without that is very, very hard for people to understand, not because it’s complicated, but because there are so many constraints placed on our ability to even think beyond that. Those constraints include training we get as kids, such as, “Don’t talk to strangers,” but, “Look for a cop.” Or we bring Officer Friendly into elementary schools. Or every piece of media that you film needs to have some kind of cop attached to it in some way. Or the normalization of cops at the mall or in your school. We’re up against a lot to shift that. And it’s possible to shift that, but I do think that it’s one of the things that makes thinking about abolitionist politics challenging.

Abolitionists argue that trust is a key factor behind their position. They believe reforms like those in the Justice in Policing Act mean very little if we can’t trust officers to be transparent or to uphold them.

9) Initiate broad systemic reforms

Some activists argue that focusing on policing itself isn’t enough to solve the concerted difficulties people of color, and particularly Black people, often face within the criminal justice system. Instead, they argue that the root causes of racial bias in the system ought to be enforced.

The BREATHE Act, for instance, calls for solving the problems of policing by — among other things — creating a baby bonds program to help close the racial wealth gap. Such a program would, in theory, create more opportunity for Americans of color, and in so doing, reduce perceptions that Black Americans are more likely to commit crimes while, at the same time, reducing the need for the disenfranchised to consider crime as an avenue for economic sustainability. This proposal and others call for taking a similar approach to areas like education and housing.

There are also calls to rethink the way the criminal justice system works — for example, curtailing prosecutorial discretion.

As Vox’s German Lopez puts it, prosecutors “are enormously powerful in the US criminal justice system, in large part because they are given so much discretion to prosecute however they see fit.” In choosing the kinds of charges they bring, prosecutors have a choice of triggering mandatory minimum sentences, for instance, or striking plea deals. On a macro level, they’re the ones who set the precedents for how people get charged in big cities:

John Pfaff, a criminal justice expert at Fordham University, has found evidence that prosecutors have been the key drivers of mass incarceration in the past couple of decades. Analyzing data from state judiciaries, he compared the number of crimes, arrests, and prosecutions from 1994 to 2008. He found that reported violent and property crime fell, and arrests for almost all crimes also fell. But one thing went up: the number of felony cases filed in court.

Prosecutors were filing more charges even as crime and arrests dropped, throwing more people into the prison system. Prosecutors were driving mass incarceration.

Recently, activists and philanthropists have become more aware of the outsize role prosecutors often play in the criminal process. They’ve begun pouring money into district attorney races against “tough on crime” candidates, fighting to elect those with a more nuanced understanding of the interplay between race, crime, and policing.

But to truly achieve progress, some argue that reforms ought to be even more structural, and that they need to be aimed at the very heart of our democracy: voting.

The deck is stacked against Democratic voters, and people of color in particular, in making electoral change. As Roge Karma wrote for Vox, the Electoral College and Senate are skewed in ways that give Republicans fundamental advantages every November. Given GOP opposition to sweeping police reform, this makes it difficult to make changes to policing on both the national and local levels.

Red states with tiny populations but inflated electoral influence mean that Republicans can expect to win an astounding 65 percent of elections in which they “narrowly lose the popular vote,” according to researchers at the University of Texas. The Senate is even more skewed. In 2018, Democrats won 54 percent of the vote across the Senate map and still lost two seats.

Karma explained:

The Electoral College’s Republican tilt is driven, in part, by racial bias. Analyzing the results of the 2016 presidential election, statisticians Andrew Gelman and Pierre-Antoine Kremp found that “per voter, whites have 16 percent more power than blacks once the Electoral College is taken into consideration, 28 percent more power than Latinos, and 57 percent more power than those who fall into the other category.”

These structural fixes might be the most difficult of all. But some activists argue that change needs to be structural, and not piecemeal, to be effective.

]]> Gregory Svirnovskiy <![CDATA[Half of US adults will soon be fully vaccinated. Convincing everyone else will be more difficult.]]> https://www.vox.com/2021/4/19/22392234/fauci-biden-covid-vaccines-herd-immunity 2021-04-19T18:40:18-04:00 2021-04-19T18:10:00-04:00
Amilcar Montanez waits for his Covid-19 shot on April 19 in Reading, Pennsylvania. | Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle/Getty Images

More than half of US adults have received their first Covid-19 vaccine dose, a remarkable achievement for a country that only began ramping up vaccine distribution at the beginning of 2021.

That comes as the United States is celebrating another important milestone. As of Monday, adults across every state are now eligible to book a vaccine appointment. Mass availability of vaccines ought to bring life closer to normal; and indeed, there are signs of the economy being in recovery. But what is less clear is whether everyone eligible for a vaccine will get one.

A national Monmouth University Poll released last week, but taken before the federal government paused distribution of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, found that 21 percent of all US adults “claim they will never get the vaccine if they can avoid it,” a number relatively unchanged from previous months, indicating that President Joe Biden’s messaging around vaccine safety and importance isn’t resonating with the desired populations.

The pollsters found that age is a factor: Adults under 65 are consistently less likely to say they want the vaccine. But the partisan split is greater. The Monmouth poll found 43 percent of Republicans opposed to getting the vaccine, alongside just 5 percent of Democrats.

An Associated Press analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data found similar numbers: The six states with the most people having received at least one shot (in terms of percentage of the population) were all states Biden won in the 2020 election. The five states with the fewest vaccinated people — where less than 40 percent of the population had received a shot as of last Wednesday — have historically all leaned Republican. The implication being: Republican states and supporters of former President Donald Trump are less likely to get the shot for political reasons.

The president’s chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, called that idea “disturbing.”

“It’s very disturbing that on the basis of political persuasion, people are not willing to get vaccinated,” Fauci said Monday on CBS This Morning. “I find that really extraordinary because those are the ones that keep saying you’re encroaching on our liberties by asking us to wear masks and to do the kinds of restrictions that are public health issues. The easiest way to get out of that is to get vaccinated. It’s almost paradoxical.”

This comes even after Trump last month publicly encouraged his supporters to get vaccinated, telling Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo that the vaccines were ”great” and “safe.” In a study conducted by Republican pollster Frank Luntz, surveyed Republicans were found to be more likely to be open to vaccination when reminded that all available vaccines were created while Trump was in the Oval Office and that the former president himself is vaccinated.

But the partisan split isn’t all that it seems. Luntz also found that, while Trump’s messaging helped convince certain participants, far more were convinced when given information of the shots’ safety and efficacy from medical professionals. And residents of the GOP-led southern states that have lagged behind in vaccine inoculation are, in some cases, struggling to access shots. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told Axios that conflating political affiliation with vaccination likelihood is often “not correct” and “really harmful.”

When looking at the state level — as the AP did — Axios’s Caitlin Owens noted Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, the states doing the worst in terms of vaccine distribution, all have sizable Black populations, a group that has for several months been more likely to say they want to “wait and see” before getting vaccinated (although this seems to be changing).

There’s a pressing need to ensure nearly everyone is vaccinated. Ending the pandemic is likely incumbent on the US reaching herd immunity (generally seen as when 70 to 85 percent of the public has some immunity to Covid-19). If the number needed is closer to 85 percent, 21 percent of the public refusing to get a shot could become a problem, causing the pandemic to stretch on and potentially creating more opportunities for dangerous variants to arise.

Because of this pressing need, the Biden administration has signaled its plans to place a renewed focus on vaccine accessibility as it works to convince all Americans that being vaccinated is a good idea.

The vaccination rate remains high

At the moment, vaccinations are proceeding at a really encouraging pace. The United States now administers roughly 3.2 million of them a day, up from 2.5 million a day in March. That rate may soon be bolstered by the reintroduction of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, whose distribution was put on hold last week by the CDC and FDA after six women had severe blood-clotting reactions.

“Hopefully, by Friday, we’ll get back on track one way or the other,” Fauci said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union.  

There is some concern that halting distribution of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine may have an effect on the level of trust the public has in it. Fauci said Sunday that the federal government is preparing a campaign to explain federal experts’ findings about the shot, and why it is safe, should it be deemed so.

A similar but broader campaign is being prepared to convince those still hesitant to be inoculated, Axios first reported Sunday. As part of that effort, the White House is expected to give educational resources to thousands of community leaders, including information and materials to distribute that will encourage people to get their shots and show them the places to go.

The Biden administration also plans to partner with social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to send users push notifications informing them of vaccine eligibility and getting doctors in television studios for interviews. Biden is also expected to film a new public service announcement that will continue to promote vaccine uptake.

Overall, hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent by the federal government on a public relations push to get Americans into pharmacies and doctor’s offices.

That’s important, not only so the US can eventually reach herd immunity, but because Covid-19 cases are continuing to rise throughout the country in what experts fear could lead to a fourth wave of cases. The country currently averages 71,000 new cases per day, up from 55,000 last month, according to the New York Times. For the Biden administration and the rest of the country, it’s a race against the clock.

]]> Gregory Svirnovskiy <![CDATA[The economy is improving — but the pandemic isn’t over yet]]> https://www.vox.com/2021/4/15/22385989/april-unemployment-numbers-economy-improving-pandemic 2021-04-15T17:14:02-04:00 2021-04-15T17:00:00-04:00
US jobless claims totaled 576,000 last week, the lowest number since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020 | Paul Weaver/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Economic data released Thursday shows some hopeful signs of a strong post-pandemic recovery, five weeks after the federal government implemented a sweeping Covid-19 recovery bill — and as increased rates of vaccinations continue to push more Americans back into their local economies.

According to the Department of Labor, US jobless claims totaled 576,000 last week, the lowest number since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020. That’s far below the 710,000 jobless claims economists polled by the Wall Street Journal expected to see this week, and the first time the Labor Department has reported under 600,000 unemployment claims in over a year. It’s a sign that the economy is recovering after months spent languishing in pandemic-induced recession.

“We’re gaining momentum here, which is just unquestionable,” Grant Thornton chief economist Diane Swonk told the New York Times, while also noting that so many unemployed people is no cause for celebration. “You’re still not popping champagne corks.”

Nevertheless, the numbers are vastly different from those that came at the beginning of the pandemic. When the US locked down for the first time last March, jobless claims skyrocketed, peaking at 3.3 million a week. Before that, the highest total was 700,000 in 1982. In 2021, 700,000 jobless claims has been taken as a good sign, down from 900,000 in early January.

Other economic indicators are also pointing to a potential recovery. For instance, retail spending rose nearly 10 percent in March. Double-digit gains in restaurants and bars suggest that the distribution of vaccines is at least partially responsible for the economic growth, as more people return to public settings with coronavirus protections in place. 

But other economists and business leaders attribute much of this economic growth to the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan signed by President Joe Biden in March. While the rollout of a massive child tax credit and billions spent on housing assistance are aiding the overall economy, the $1,400 stimulus checks sent out to many Americans are seen as having led directly to the current retail spending boom, now at its highest point since May 2020. Shoppers spent more on clothing, sporting goods, and electronics in March than in any month in 2021, the Commerce Department found. 

“Spending will almost certainly drop back in April as some of the stimulus boost wears off,” Michael Pearce, senior US economist at Capital Economics, told NBC News. “But with the vaccination rollout proceeding at a rapid pace and household finances in strong shape, we expect overall consumption growth to continue rebounding rapidly in the second quarter too.”

The economy is still a long way from the heights of February 2020, when 8.5 million more Americans had jobs than do today. A full recovery could take up to three years, though it’ll likely happen sooner, according to the Pew Research Center — getting there will require curbing the Covid-19 epidemic, a goal the US is making progress toward but has not yet reached.

The economy likely needs herd immunity to fully recover

Good economic news doesn’t mean the pandemic — and all the problems it has created — are over. A full economic recovery is likely incumbent on the US reaching herd immunity (generally seen as when 70 to 85 percent of the public has some immunity to Covid-19), ensuring the country is no longer at the mercy of coronavirus-induced shutdowns.

At the moment, Covid-19 cases nationally are on the rise, especially in Michigan, where children and adults under age 30 now make up 30 percent of Covid-infected patients statewide and hospitalizations are at highs not seen since last fall. Overall, the US is averaging more than 70,000 cases per day. The rate of vaccinations has also been increasing, with the CDC regularly reporting record-breaking days; at the moment, the US is vaccinating an average of 3.3 million people per day, according to the New York Times. This has led to a situation that Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the president, has described as “a race between the vaccine and the virus.” 

Despite this, there is some concern herd immunity may be further off than it could be, especially in regions with low levels of vaccine confidence and demand. A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday found that roughly 45 percent of Republicans do not plan on getting vaccinated, suggesting the inroads Biden has tried to make to depoliticize the vaccine haven’t worked. Some states are already seeing a surplus of vaccines relative to demand. As of early April, Alabama had administered just 61.4 percent of its doses, an Axios analysis found.

If that lack of uptake is due to concern about the vaccine’s safety or efficacy, those numbers may change. Some research, including polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation, has found the number of Americans who want to see how the vaccine affects others before taking it declining as the pandemic goes on — and the number of people willing to take it increasing. As of March 2021, Kaiser’s pollsters found 62 percent of adults saying they’d gotten the vaccine or would as soon as possible, up from 55 percent in February.

Like the economic numbers, these figures are promising, and could usher in even further economic gains. These are badly needed, as unemployment remains elevated at 6 percent, as of March, (though less than half of its pandemic high of 14.8 percent). Within that unemployment figure is a reminder that the absence of a total economic recovery is affecting workers of color the most.

The unemployment rate for Hispanic workers is almost 2 percentage points higher than the overall unemployment rate, currently standing at 7.9 percent. For Black workers, it’s even higher, 3.6 percentage points above the overall unemployment rate at 9.6 percent. White workers, meanwhile, were under the topline number, at 5.4 percent.

Overall, however, economists remain bullish. Morgan Stanley is forecasting a 6.4 percent increase in global GDP this year, and a slightly more modest 5.9 percent increase in the US. It would be a stunning reversal of fortunes for a world economy that plunged to record depths in 2020. 

“This was the deepest, swiftest recession ever, but it’s also turning into the fastest recovery, ZipRecruiter labor economist Julia Pollak told the New York Times. “And I don’t think we should lose sight of that just because some of the measures are a little stubborn.”

]]> Gregory Svirnovskiy <![CDATA[A bill on studying reparations is getting a House vote 30 years in the making]]> https://www.vox.com/2021/4/14/22384080/hr-40-black-reparations-vote-house-judiciary-committee 2021-04-14T18:15:54-04:00 2021-04-14T18:20:00-04:00
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), the sponsor of HR 40, at a Judiciary Committee hearing in March 2021. | Alex Wong/Getty Images

The House Judiciary Committee is preparing for a vote on reparations that has been 32 years in the making. 

Wednesday, the committee will mark up and vote on HR 40 — a bill sponsored by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) that would create a 13-person federal commission to study American slavery, its effects, and what the government might do to mitigate those effects. After completing its study, the commission would be required to issue recommendations on possible “forms of rehabilitation or restitution” — essentially, reparations — to Congress.

Reparations, generally interpreted as financial compensation to descendants of enslaved people, have historically received little support. According to a July 2020 Washington Post/ABC News poll, reparations aren’t overwhelmingly supported by Democrats: 53 percent of Democrats approve of them. And there’s almost no support for reparations — just 6 percent — in the GOP.

Generally, critics (including many GOP lawmakers) have argued reparations are prohibitively expensive, with Duke University economist William Darity Jr. and Artefactual founder Kirsten Mullen estimating they would cost the federal government between $10 trillion and $12 trillion. Other opponents claim they would force Americans with no history of benefiting from enslavement to pay for the moral crimes of others.

Supporters argue the federal government would be capable of making such a large payment, and say this latter view ignores the benefits created by generational wealth and the negative effects of present-day systemic racism that has its roots in slavery. Specifically, advocates for HR 40 are promoting the idea of reparations as an important tool, not only to finally atone for the moral ills of slavery, but also to close current gaps between white and Black Americans in things like wealth and homeownership.

For instance, the average white family is more than 10 times wealthier than an average Black family, and white non-college graduates have more wealth than Black college graduates, according an April 2020 report from the Brookings Institution on the need for reparations. As the Economic Policy Institute has explained, there is a similar gap between the wages of Black and white workers — making it extremely difficult for labor alone to close that wealth gap.

Some policy experts and lawmakers see reparations as an effective way around this problem — and have for some time. The earliest version of HR 40 was first introduced in the House by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) in 1989, before the youngest current member of the House was even born. The Korean War veteran and civil rights icon brought his proposal back up for consideration every year until he retired in 2017.

Now, Lee is leading the charge to push it through Congress. It is expected to face Republican opposition in committee, and — given that not all members of the slim Democratic House majority support the idea of reparations — it’s uncertain whether the bill will make it to a vote. Should a successful floor vote happen, Senate Democrats seem unlikely to find the 10 Republican votes they would need to pass it in the Senate, given the fact that GOP leaders like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have been open about their opposition to reparations in the past.

Still, that HR 40 will receive a committee vote for the first time in its history is a reflection of how attitudes toward reparations, and racial justice more broadly, are changing.

In 1999, just 19 percent of Americans in an ABC News poll approved of compensation for Black Americans. The July 2020 Washington Post/ABC News poll showed that 31 percent of respondents now support reparations. As worldwide civil rights protests erupted following the killing of George Floyd, renewed interest was paid to the issue — and it became a topic of debate during the 2020 presidential race, with President Joe Biden’s campaign platform including the creation of a commission to study reparations.

That interest has been sustained. And now, after more than three decades spent languishing in the House, HR 40 will get a committee vote. 

Briefly, what’s in HR 40, the House’s bill to study reparations

If passed, HR 40 would establish a “Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans,” composed of 13 members, with three to be chosen by the president, three by the speaker of the House, one by the president pro tempore of the Senate, and another six by “major” civil rights groups “that have historically championed the cause of reparatory justice.”

The commission would be charged with determining institutional culpability against former enslaved Africans and their American descendants across the public and private sector. It would also be required to interrogate how practices such as redlining, educational funding discrepancies, and predatory financial practices — alongside enslavement — have exacerbated racial opportunity and wealth gaps.

At the conclusion of their work, the commission would then report “appropriate remedies” to Congress, based on its findings on institutional enslavement and racism. 

Lee, the bill’s sponsor, told the New York Times she sees it as a step forward in addressing America’s problematic and racist past.

“We think it will be cleansing for this nation, and we think that it will be a step moving America forward to see us debate this question on the floor of the House,” Lee said.

HR 40 hopes to clarify the debate over whether reparations are a good idea

Ideological notions against reparations are still the norm. As HR 40 came up for a committee hearing in 2019, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said he opposed reparations because “none of us currently living are responsible” for slavery. He further said landmark civil rights legislation in the 1960s and the election of President Barack Obama were examples of the US dealing with its “original sin of slavery.”

That’s where most Americans seem to be on the issue. Sixty-three percent of Americans oppose reparations, including a whopping 93 percent of Republicans, the Post/ABC poll found. It’s not popular.

But many supporters of reparations, and lawmakers like Lee, have argued that reparations are less about correcting a past wrong, and more about negating the past’s effect on the present. They tie the exclusion of Black people from the GI Bill, and the racist ways the construction of the highway system broke up Black communities, with present-day issues, including the use of cash bail and policing being overwhelmingly concentrated in majority-minority areas. The argument is that by compensating the Black population for a long history of exclusionary government policy, they can gain better housing, educational, and financial footholds to have full access to opportunity. 

It’s important to note that HR 40 would not institute reparations — and that even if a commission were to recommend them, the federal government might not act on that recommendation. But its backers see it as a first step in the right direction.

“The centuries-long injustices of slavery and its legacy, fueling the persistence of racial inequality today, remain largely unaccounted for,” said Human Rights Watch advocate Dreisen Heath in a press release. “As states, cities, and other institutions pursue reckonings, Congress should step up to lead the nation in accounting and atoning for the ongoing impact of slavery. The committee vote on H.R. 40 is a crucial step in that direction.”

Some reparations advocates — including Duke University’s William Darity Jr. — have called for HR 40 to be further refined so that it might constitute a larger step toward reparations. Darity told the Washington Post the bill should specify exactly who would be eligible for any possible reparations, and should include the creation of a plan to narrow the racial wealth gap.

“Unless the markup process results in major revision of the bill, it will not propel our nation toward true reparations,” Darity told the Post.

At the moment, Biden has not outlined any further vision for reparations beyond what was in his platform; however, Lee said HR 40 has an ally in the president. After leaders from the Congressional Black Caucus met with Biden Tuesday, Lee told reporters that Biden indicated support for HR 40 and its study on reparations.

“We have heard from not only the president but the White House, and his team, that he is committed to this concept,” Lee said. “We are grateful for that because we are now doing something historically tomorrow that’s never been done.”

Overall, it’s clear that there remains — and will remain — a lot of debate as to whether reparations are a good idea, both in regard to their moral virtue and implementation. HR 40 aims to change that, by arming lawmakers with actionable data and research on the direct causes of historical racial opportunity gaps and the impacts they have on society today. 

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