The Forum with Josh Cowen Podcast

Josh Cowen

Commentary and Conversations on Politics, Markets, and Schools joshcowen.substack.com

  1. 2d ago

    "The absolute antithesis of good governance."

    There have been so many changes within the federal government under Donald Trump that it can be difficult to keep track. Tariffs, DOGE, ICE, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the gutting of the U.S. Department of Education—all of these taking something of a wrecking ball to national politics and policy as we know it. With so much attention understandably on some of this big-ticket news, I’ve been worried that the public policy community, specifically in education, has been under-focused on some of the lower profile efforts to severely undermine decades of regulatory and administrative guidance that meaningfully impact families across the country. I can’t think of anyone better to speak to this than Sam Bagenstos. By day, Sam’s a professor of law down the road from me at the University of Michigan. He specializes in civil rights, labor and employment law, health law, and governance. That, my friends, is a lot of expertise across a variety of issue areas. But Sam is also a longtime veteran of the kind of legal and policy circles that Trump has tried to overthrow, and that we’re going to need to rely on again for any sort of rebuild. Sam served under President Biden, first as general counsel at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), then as general counsel at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). He also served under President Obama at the Department of Justice (DOJ), as the No. 2 official in the Civil Rights Division. He’s also been part of several statewide committees in Michigan and beyond. All of this is relevant to where we are today under Trump, but given how much of the current administration’s efforts are being directed by Ross Vought at the OMB, Sam Bagenstos has particularly unique insight into where we are and where we’re headed. A Conversation with Sam Bagenstos Welcome to the The Forum, Sam. Just to get started, tell us a bit about your legal and professional background and where that began to connect formally to government service. So as you said, I currently teach at the University of Michigan. I’ve been on the faculty there since about 2008, but I have taken a couple of leaves to serve in the federal government since my time there. I was, during the Obama administration, the principal deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Department of Justice. So in a leadership position there. And then for the entire Biden administration, I was on leave. I spent the first year and a half starting at the moment of inauguration as general counsel at the Office of Management and Budget. And then in June of ‘22, I moved over to the Department of Health and Human Services where I was the general counsel until pretty much the end. So that’s the work I’ve done, and I continue to do a lot of work relating to the government, although not in the government at this point. As somebody who works pretty closely with policymakers in states, and to some extent the federal government. I really… I can’t overstate how important the jobs that you just described are. What’s kind of a nuts and bolts piece of that before we get into some of the specifics? What’s the portfolio look like across kind of some of these agencies? Yeah, I mean, so they’re all sort of different. Probably the widest portfolio I ever had was working at the Office of Management and Budget. OMB is the sort of nerve center of the federal executive branch. They’re the folks who make sure that all of the agencies across the executive branch are doing what the president wants, consistent with the law. And we’ll talk a little bit about that balance in a minute, I’m sure. And so, what that meant was my responsibility as the general counsel for that agency in the White House was everything, everything that the executive branch did. So I didn’t know whether I’d be walking in and dealing with some environmental issue or obviously COVID was a huge issue when we started, or evacuating folks from Afghanistan was the thing we had to deal with. But it was literally anything that was going on in the federal government was something I dealt with, and the legality of all of those issues. And so that was every regulation across the federal government, making sure it was checked to be consistent with administrative law. All of our spending, the drafting of major legislation, like the COVID recovery bills, the American Rescue Plan, and the other bills that President Biden did. At HHS, sort of similar job, but narrower scope. But I will say the Department of Health and Human Services is the largest cabinet department by budget. So it was about $1.73 trillion when I was there. And about 40% of the regulations issued by the federal executive branch come from HHS, so it was again just a very wide ambit. At the Department of Justice, earlier in my career, it was much more focused on bringing enforcement actions to make sure that civil rights laws were complied with, so bringing and threatening lawsuits around the country, negotiating agreements with states and localities and businesses to make sure they complied. Can you give us a sense of what’s going on right now in these various agencies and what we should be most concerned about? I think at the highest level, the most important thing that’s going on is you have this pervasive effort to transform the federal executive branch into something that’s not implementing laws and policies enacted by Congress in an impartial way, but instead is using the tools of government as a weapon to serve the interests, not just of a political party and not just of a faction within the political party, but of a person and the people around him: Pervasive weaponization, politicization, and personalization of the government around Donald Trump and the folks around him, and the use of every tool of government to reward the friends of Donald Trump and punish the enemies of Donald Trump. That is the absolute antithesis of what a good government or a republican government should be. So that’s at the highest level. We can talk about what that means for particular policies and actions, but that’s the most important takeaway. I want to ask about the administrative and regulatory state here. Outside advocacy groups, including in education, are often understandably focused on legislation. But a lot of what Trump’s done has been more on the administrative side. Legally or not. Can you talk about some of the specific non-legislative tools that have been deployed? If you can think of one that’s maybe patently illegal and one that’s, at least, more legally questionable or defensible on the letter but seems plainly abusive? I think there are a few obvious ones to talk about here. And let me start, just because you started with education, what Donald Trump is doing to the Department of Education. So what you have is a department that was created by Congress. You have provisions adopted in appropriations bills by Congress that say you can’t eliminate the Department of Education, Mr. President. We are continuing to fund it and we are barring you from eliminating it. And yet what you have is this dismantlement of the department done entirely through administrative processes. So what they’re doing is essentially farming out as many of the responsibilities of the Department of Education as they can to other agencies. You know, legal tools that they point to there: so there’s a tool called the Economy Act. I worked with this a lot at the Office of Management and Budget, which is basically, if one agency has a responsibility to do something but doesn’t have the ability to do it, it can contract with another agency to do it. And so what they’ve done is said, aha, Department of Education is just gonna contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to do all the disability work. It’s gonna contract with the Department of Labor to do job training work. It’s gonna contract with the Department of Treasury to do all the student loan work. And pretty soon you have no Department of Education at all. And so that’s, you know, taking this existing legal tool that you can see a use for it in particular cases, using it in a way no one could ever have imagined. And, you know, I think that’s abusive. I would think there’s a plausible argument that that’s illegal. It’s certainly inconsistent with the judgment made by our elected representatives that we are supposed to have a Department of Education, that it’s good for the people to have a Department of Education. Okay, so that’s one thing. Take something that’s much more abusive, maybe, and certainly much more in the nature of rewarding friends, punishing enemies, um, and also much more clearly illegal. So, one of the things we’ve seen this whole administration do is use its power over money and particularly grant funding or federally funded programs where the money goes to states and localities and other entities, use that as a tool to attack people who are on the bad side of Donald Trump for whatever reason, right? I mean, we actually, you know, we’re recording this on Wednesday. We just saw yesterday the federal government say they’re going to withhold an enormous amount, I think a billion dollars, of Medicaid funds from two states. That all seems to be about punishing them because they’re blue states. We’ve seen lots of funding cutoffs that are all about punishing blue states, punishing them supposedly for violating terms and conditions of agreements. But violating them in ways that red states are probably doing the same thing and are not getting the same treatment. We’ve seen the shutting off of funds to institutions of higher education to force them to come to heel. I mean, look at what happened to Columbia, which ultimately did knuckle under. Look at what happened to Brown University, which did knuckle under. Harvard sued and actually prevailed in its lawsuit that these thr

    "The absolute antithesis of good governance."

  2. Jun 26

    "What I know to be true is that we are significantly underfunding our kids."

    We’re capping off a half-year of conversations with members of elected officials and candidates about the politics and policy of serving kids and families. There will be more over the next few months, and look for a special recap next week. Today’s guest is an especially important leader in all things child and family policy: early education, child care, K-12 schooling, and access to higher education. I’m talking with Congresswoman Kristen McDonald Rivet, representing Michigan’s 8th District. Congresswoman Rivet is finishing up her first term in Washington, after serving in Michigan’s state senate. Both her state and national legislative districts are about as swing as they come: voters routinely back both political parties not only in different election cycles but even on the same ballot. So she knows how win tough elections. In both the legislature and in Congress, Kristen McDonald Rivet has been a leader on child care, access to early education, and improving K-12 schools—while fighting for public investment in all of those areas as well. Before elected office, the congresswoman served in a variety of roles inside and outside government. She was the executive director of Michigan Head Start, chief of staff at the Michigan Department of Education, and on staff at the Department of Health and Human Services. So basically, if you’re into public policy, and you’re especially interested in the idea that public policy professionals can and serve in some of the most consequential elected offices in your state and in Congress, Kristen McDonald Rivet is for you. Give this a read or a listen. A Conversation with Congresswoman Kristen McDonald Rivet Welcome and thanks for joining me here. Just to get started, tell us a bit about your background, how you got involved in electoral politics and about the Michigan 8th Congressional District you represent. Let me try to sum that all up really quickly. Fifty-six years of my life, right, in this little section. I actually spent most of my career working in this public policy space around kids and families. Started that career running the Michigan Head Start Association. The thing that I want to tell you about that, that was so life-changing for me, is that in Head Start programs, as well as the Head Start Association, half of the board of directors are parents. And when you’re trying to put together a policy agenda for small children, and you’re doing it alongside a mom or a dad who lives at the federal poverty level and is actively parenting a toddler: your lens changes just fundamentally changes. And so that became for me, it was a really good instruction for how this work should be done, how we should be relating to people, how we, you know, things when we determine who whose voice has value in a room and it’s all fraught with those decisions. So in that time I started, you know, having my own children. My husband and I have raised six kids. What I know to be true is that we are significantly underfunding our kids. We are not supporting families in their attempts to, you know, raise their kids and just really have a stable, thriving household. And I saw that when I was the chief of staff at the Michigan Department of Education, and was a senior advisor to Governor Granholm, and all of these, all of these pieces, even when I was working on the ground in Detroit for the Skillman Foundation. Across demographics, across rural, urban. It’s harder and harder to raise a child, and there are big things that have to change if we are going to change that trajectory. I ended up getting into electoral politics for the first time in 2022, when I ran for the Michigan State Senate. And, I said no, quite honestly, the first couple times they asked me, because it just felt like, politics has gotten ugly and unproductive, and I really thought…You know what? We need to change our child care system. We need to change our education system. We need to change the way we talk to parents and community members. We need to change how programs are run and how we talk to people. It felt to me like being in the State Senate was a good place to do that. So, I ran for the Senate, flipped a Republican seat, and a year later, uh, was recruited to run for Congress. And here I am. We need to change our child care system. We need to change our education system. We need to change the way we talk to parents and community members. We need to change how programs are run and how we talk to people.—Congresswoman Kristen McDonald Rivet Before we get into some policy details, let’s talk a bit about the job. You’re in Congress, you’ve been in the state legislature. You’ve worked in leadership roles at state agencies. What are you finding that’s different about Congress, specifically? Anything your past leadership roles have helped prepare you for in DC now? It’s been an interesting 18 months. First about my district. I represent Genesee County, where the city of Flint is. Saginaw County, Bay County, half of Midland County. What’s really interesting about the 8th Congressional is, it’s a microcosm for the whole Midwest. We have farmers, we have manufacturing, we have abandoned industrial. We’ve got the home to Dow chemical semi conductor. All of these things that are when you look to Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana. This is what the Midwest looks like. But 70% of the jobs in my district pay less than $60,000 a year. So you think about what take-home pay looks like on 60 grand a year, and then start to think about the cost of groceries, and keeping your heat on in the winter, and childcare, which is around $450 a week for an infant. People can’t make it. People can’t make it. So, that is what I get up every day and think about, and get up every day and try to make a difference. And so, when I got to Congress, this is a wild, unruly place. A lot of people are very cynical about it, and there’s reason for that. But where I’ve been able to actually find success is going into that common ground and finding other people, I don’t care what side of the aisle they’re on, who are also getting up every day and thinking about that, because it’s not just the Michigan 8th, right? It’s the same thing in congressional districts in Pennsylvania, in Iowa, in places where people are hearing it from their constituents. And that’s where we’ve been able to partner, and I’ve partnered with other Democrats and Republicans, and been able to actually get some real stuff done. Even though people think that’s not possible in Washington anymore. Let’s turn to schools, kids, and families. You’ve been a leader in the early education and education reform spaces. Tell me a bit about what you’re working on these days. I just recently introduced a major tax cut for working families. And it’s part of building on the working families tax cut that I authored in the state senate that we were able to pass in the first six months of the trifecta that has been so meaningful and actually brought thousands of kids out of poverty in Michigan. But it’s also rooted in my own experience of having — there’s a moment in time where as a single mom with two kids, I knew exactly what it feels like to run out of milk on a Wednesday, and no, you’re not getting paid until Friday. The secret to that is you add a little water to the milk to make it go farther. But we shouldn’t really have to be doing that, and if you look at who’s paying what in our tax system, it’s an important question. So, what we’ve proposed is a large tax cut for families making less than $100,000 a year, and who have children under the age of three. So, what this would be is a $5,500 refundable tax credit for every child under the age of three. So it’s building on that work that we did in the state senate. But mostly what this does is put more cash in people’s hands, more money in your pocket to be able to buy formula and diapers and help pay for childcare, trusting parents with these dollars to make those decisions that we know we’ve got 40 years of research that says that that makes an enormous amount of difference. On K-12: we have to call the question on these things that we just defend with such rigidity when we have overwhelming evidence that we’re failing our kids and our teachers on pretty fundamental levels.—Congresswoman Kristen McDonald Rivet I worry a bit that Democrats have kind of lost the plot a bit when it comes to K-12—and polling is starting to pick this up. We’ve seemingly got a clear plan on early childhood, and momentum around what it means to set students up for success in higher education, but there’s still some work to be done to come together on K-12. You’ve been working on all this for so long and wearing so many different hats, how do you make sense of what’s needed right now in K-12 relative to the other policy spaces? So let’s just level set about where we’ve made success. So we are in Michigan right now. Most four-year-olds are in preschool. So we’ve really gotten very close to achieving universal preschool, and it’s wildly successful. We can see it in all kinds of different ways. We’ve been able to help shore up our sort of birth-through-three space, lot of support for that, and, we’re almost at free community college for everyone, which is great. And the way we’ve been able to do that is just by putting a lot of choice out there, and a lot of roads, and a lot of access. But when it comes to K-12: we get into these very prescriptive, very nuanced, this is how you have to do it, this is what it has to look like, this is the test to see whether or not you’re doing it well, and this is the morass of bureaucracy and red tape that you have to wade through in order to reach goals that you were not a part of setting. And I think that that actually is a big part of the problem. Now, I’m not a pro-voucher person. I think that vouchers are

  3. Jun 17

    Politics by Addition, Not Subtraction.

    I’ve been wanting to sit down with Neera Tanden for quite awhile now. She’s currently the president and CEO of the Center for American Progress—the premier policy institute in D.C. focused on standing up policy and political strategy from the center-left. Neera Tanden has a long history in Democratic politics. She served in Joe Biden’s White House in several different roles, was most recently as head of the Domestic Policy Council. She served in the Obama Administration and worked on both Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns. She remains a close friend and advisor to the Clintons. She’s also an attorney, with degrees from UCLA and Yale. We connected recently to talk about the state of play for the Democratic Party heading into November—and both the politics and the policy of putting forward an alternative vision to leadership in the Trump era. A Conversation with Neera Tanden Welcome and thanks for being here. Just to set ourselves up here: I think most of the folks in the policy and politics communities generally have a sense of the work the Center for American Progress does, but tell me a bit about what CAP is up to right now in terms of mission and strategic priorities. Sure. The Center for American Progress is an action-oriented think tank. We’re really kind of located on the broad center-left. We work a lot on issues that can appeal to what we hope is a broad majority in the country. We have policy teams on almost every major issue, national security, economic policy, domestic policy, climate, you know, healthcare. Just every significant issue in the country, we have people who are experts in those areas. Right now, we’ve developed ideas to address affordability, so specific ideas to address the cost of living crisis in the country. Specific ideas to lower health care costs, to address premiums. Premiums have risen 25% in the last five years. I think people are hungry for lower costs in health care. We’ve developed ideas to lower housing costs, food costs, utility costs. Utility costs have risen the sharpest of any major cost over the last decade, other than gas, over the last year. So I think from our perspective, working class people, middle class people are finding it really hard to make ends meet in this economy. The economy does really feel kind of K-shaped to most people. The top 30, 40% are doing pretty well. The top 1%, obviously, doing really, really well. The bottom, you know, 60, 70%, are anxious. Anxious about being able to afford things that they used to be able to afford easily. We’ve developed a whole series of ideas for leaders to take up. And I think one thing that we’re very focused on is how you can specifically assure this public through actual policies that you will deliver lower cost for them. My overarching lesson here is for people who particularly believe in government, you need to ensure that government is working and will solve problems. And it’s not up to us what the problems are. It’s up to the public. And sometimes I think people forget that.—Neera Tanden We’re about six months out from the midterm. Give me a status check or a landscape analysis from your vantage point on the Democratic Party: where are we, where should we be optimistic, where are some of the dangers? You know, elections are always a choice, and I think a kind of crucial issue here is that voters are frustrated. Many of them are angry at the direction of the Trump administration. And we’ve seen a lot of polling—we have a research arm—there have been really three shocks, downward shocks to Trump’s approval. One was the tariffs. Two was the murder of Alex Pretti and Renee Goode, and the third has been the Iran War. And I guess I would say I think the political discourse basically discounts the power of losing a war. You know, Americans don’t lose that many wars, and the fact that the president is in this very weakened position with the Iranians is an element. I think a crucial part of this is people have been wondering why they’re paying for this war with higher gas prices. So, I think a really big part of this election is how how voters are seeing the incumbents, and they have a pretty negative view of incumbents. We’re seeing now that Trump has lost the people who voted for him once. The real question is now he’s seeing some losses amongst people who voted for him three times, which is a big change for him. So, that is, like, a central element to what’s gonna happen in these elections. On the other side of it we have party primaries happening on the Democratic side, and there are a lot of competitive races. When I look at elections I ask is the map expanding or contracting? The map for Democrats is expanding. Every couple of weeks, you’ll see more people put races on the board. But I have been in election cycles that were supposed to be big sweeps and puttered out, at least in particular races, because they need, you know, people didn’t think they had a credible alternative. So from my perspective, it’s really important—I say this all the time, I’ve said it on TV, I say it online—the job of the voters in the primary is to select someone who can actually win the general. Now, if you’re in New York City, whoever Democrats pick will win, but if you’re in Wisconsin, or Michigan, or Texas, or Iowa, or Alaska, or maybe Montana, or Mississippi or Missouri, you have to think about putting together a coalition because Democrats aren’t enough. So I think if we have if there are credible Democrats in all these races, Democrats can take the House and Senate. And crucially, win governor’s races that are going to be very important to 2028 in just being a block to election interference. But that’s a big question going forward. Now, I feel overly very optimistic if the election were held today, Democrats would take the Senate, which I think is, you know, no one thought that was gonna happen a year ago, so I’m fairly bullish. But, we have to think about the end result here. Donald Trump doesn’t speak in policy or four-page policy briefings, but he has policies. He had tariffs. He had building the wall. He had, you know, mass deportation. These are things that communicated policies to people or ideas to people. And the real problem for Donald Trump is his policies have failed.—Neera Tanden There’s an old joke in some of the political staff communities about what happens in campaigns or for electeds when “comms forgets to check with policy” before rolling out something new. How do you think about the interplay between politics and policy right now for Democrats, when it comes to a path to victory not just in November but further into the future? Do we have an ideas problem? A message problem? All of the above? I think a lot of people, and a lot of Democrats, look at Donald Trump and say, well, policy doesn’t really matter, because, obviously, this guy’s…Donald Trump. But I think that is a pretty significant error. Donald Trump doesn’t speak in policy or four-page policy briefings, but he has policies. He had tariffs. He had building the wall. He had, you know, mass deportation. These are things that communicated policies to people or ideas to people. And I think a real problem with Trump today: everyone’s always like, “everything’s messaging,” etc, but the real problem for Donald Trump is his policies have failed. You know, he came in to office, he’s had a pretty radical policy agenda, and it is actually raising costs for people instead of lowering costs. And that is why he’s seeing significant erosion of working-class white voters for the first time in any election that he’s ever faced. So, I look at reality, I look at America today, and I say, you know, it’s actually good that people are looking at the facts of their lives and deciding they are turned off from this guy. My own view about policy is…you know, people will go for a bad answer over no answer. And our job is to give people better answers, better solutions. I mean, I’m very scarred by the Biden administration’s work on immigration. I was not in charge of the border, but I was dealing with domestic immigration, so I sat on our, on our immigration council, and I think that’s an issue where we saw a big problem at the border, and we should have tackled it earlier, and we really tackled it only after Trump was a nominee, I think a lot of people thought, well, if we only did it because of Trump, and if I really care about immigration, I will vote for Trump. So my overarching lesson here is for people who particularly believe in government, you need to ensure that government is working and will solve problems. And it’s not up to us what the problems are. It’s up to the public. And sometimes I think people forget that. They think if we talk about an issue a lot, that’s what makes it matter. And actually, voters have their own views on what’s important to I think the fundamental issue the public is interested in: Parents. Community leaders. People who don’t have kids in school. It’s: how are schools improving? How are schools ensuring that students academic performance is increasing. And what is the system in which schools are improving themselves? them. At the end of the day, I think one of the reasons why our schools in some way feel like they’re standing still is because we don’t have national leaders really pushing the ball forward with ideas of how the whole country benefits from a good education system.—Neera Tanden I focus a lot here in this series on issues affecting kids and families. I came up in education policy. There’s new polling out there showing Democrats have completely lost an edge on education—including among folks who voted for Kamala in 2024. And since 2020, Democratic candidates have simply stopped talking about schools as often as Republicans. You see guys like Rahm

  4. Jun 11

    "Cutting and cutting and cutting is the name of the game."

    Over the past several decades, one of the big developments in the American economy has been the growth of private equity: an investment strategy in which wealthy individuals and managed funds get together to buy out companies, strip them of costs, and sell them for a profit. It’s a complicated scheme, and it depends on favorable treatment in both state and the federal tax code. It’s also led to untold heartache and—in some cases—local catastrophe, as family businesses and historic firms have shut down, workers lose jobs, and communities are devastated as a result. The growth of private equity in public service provision—especially health care, education, and services for children like youth sports—is especially troubling. It’s tough stuff, and I wanted to talk to an expert about it all. So I reached out to the journalist Megan Greenwell, author of Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream. Megan has written for most of the prestige outlets of American journalism—including the New York Times and the Washington Post, has been an editor at Wired, and is the former editor of Deadspin, the influential sports site that itself fell victim to the private equity model. We chatted about a variety of topics—what private equity is, what it does, and where it’s all going. A Conversation with Megan Greenwell Tell me a bit about your own background. You were editor of the sports site Deadspin for awhile, you’re a journalist and author. What are the kinds of stories that interest you? I spent a lot of my career as a magazine editor at various places: Deadspin, ESPN, Wired Magazine, New York Magazine, bunch of places. More recently, I’m a freelance writer, so I wrote this book [Bad Company]. And I’m in the early stages of working on another book. I like to define what I do by saying that I write articles and books about how systems affect people, and that was very much my interest in this topic. I had worked for Deadspin, which had a fairly disastrous private equity takeover. But it really just made me interested in like, okay, how does this affect other people in other industries—industries that are frankly more important to the functioning of our society than snarky sports blogs? So, yeah, that was really why I got into it. It felt like there was a lot of writing about private equity and not a lot of writing about the people who are affected, so I really wanted to take a narrative nonfiction approach and tell the stories of actual people whose lives were upended after one of these PE acquisitions. The thing that I think most people don’t really understand about how private equity works, even though it is fundamental, is that when they take out those loans, the debt is assigned only to the portfolio company. That means if you’re the firm, you can drive a company out of business and even if there are billions of dollars in loans, you don’t have to pay those loans back.—Megan Greenwell I want to ask you about some of those lives in just a second, but just from a level-setting, definitional perspective: a lot of the folks who read me, listen to this type of conversation, have a lot of thoughts about privatization of public services and lots of other different things, but private equity is a pretty specific thing. Can you just give us a working definition for our purposes for the conversation. This is exactly who I was before I started the reporting for this book. I had never covered business before, and so it felt really important to me to reach an audience who is well-educated enough to know that private equity is big and important in our economy and maybe having some negative effects. But they don’t necessarily know exactly how that works. So you are my target audience if you are one of those people. The way I define private equity is it is a funding mechanism through which private equity firms bundle together money from all sorts of outside investors to buy companies and the outsized investors can include pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, ultra wealthy individuals, etc. But all of that money put together only makes up 20 to 30% of the average private equity deal. The rest of it is straight bank loans. And the thing that I think most people don’t really understand about how private equity works, even though it is fundamental to how it works, is that when they take out those loans, the debt is assigned only to the portfolio company. The private equity firm itself has no responsibility for that debt, which means it screws up the incentive structure, right? It means if you’re the firm, you can drive a company out of business and still not lose very much money, because even if there are billions of dollars in loans, you don’t have to pay those loans back. That was the piece that really kind of woke me up going back over your book a second time. The fact that the loans stick with the original company seems like that’s the linchpin that makes some of this all work. Now getting back to your book Bad Company: Walk us through the four sets of stories there in the damage private equity can cause and why folks should be alarmed moving ahead. I think what you see from these four stories is just how many people truly have their lives tossed into chaos, and not just individual people, but entire communities. So I’ll talk about one of the examples from the book. I love them all, but this one might be my favorite. It’s a rural hospital in Wyoming, and it’s the only hospital for 30 miles, and it had always been a for-profit hospital, right? It’s Wyoming, it’s a very red county in a very red state. And so, you don’t have a lot of people marching in the streets for Medicare for All. They were perfectly happy to have a for-profit hospital, and it worked! It, like, made a little bit of money, it was a pretty functional system. Then it got rolled up into a chain of rural hospitals that were taken over by Apollo Global Management. And what you saw happen was all of the services were just stripped and stripped and stripped until there was essentially nothing left. They were in no real sense a hospital, so they stripped general surgery, they stripped the ability to give birth at that hospital. At one point, somebody in the community took his little kid in because he was dancing on the coffee table and split his forehead, and they couldn’t give a kid a couple of stitches after 5 o’clock. So this was in no real sense a hospital. And so what you see there is not only the lost jobs, not only, you know, people getting sicker and more likely to die because of this, but the ripple effects that a hospital plays throughout a community. Right? So I was talking to the CEO of a small company in town. And he was saying, “I can’t hire anymore because who’s going to move their family here if there’s nowhere to get basic hospital treatment? The nearest hospital is 30 miles away through a very treacherous canyon in the best of circumstances, much less a Wyoming winter.” So what ended up happening was the number of air ambulance flights out of that county increased over 600%. Air ambulances are very, very expensive for patients—and also a big takeover target for private equity. So what you see is step by step by step. This community is just devastated. Not only by the disappearance of the actual healthcare, but then by all of the ripple effects that come from it. The private equity ethos is consolidate at all costs, and do as much as you can with as little as you can. That’s not usually what parents want from education, right? Private equity wants to centralize everything and spend as little money on human people as possible, and that doesn’t work very well with education.—Megan Greenwell Can we talk a bit about private equity and public services? You wrote about an example with health care. And a big thing right now is private equity getting into the business with universities, especially athletic departments. You’re seeing private equity get into the charter school and the tutoring game. What are the top concerns here, what should we watch for? As you point out, private equity has become huge in education. And there are a couple of big attractors for private equity in that space. One is just—it’s a captive market, right? Parents want to spend money getting their children the best education possible, and the more money they have, the more money they’re willing to spend. That dovetails with private equity, which loves a subscription model, right? Because it’s just like easy recurring revenue. And so if you can have something like a tutoring service like an Ed tech platform that requires a monthly subscription fee: those all just feel like absolute easy money from an audience that’s really willing to pay. One thing I thought about a lot while writing the book is Milton Friedman. Milton Friedman is, you know, his ideology is very much at the heart of the private equity industry. But even Milton Friedman, in his famous essay about shareholder value theory, specifically carved out exemptions for hospitals and for education. He said those are charitable enterprises. Those should not be something where shareholder value theory is in the market. So I think what you see is real threat because the private equity ethos is consolidate at all costs, and do as much as you can with as little as you can. That’s not usually what parents want from education, right? Private equity wants to centralize everything and spend as little money on human people as possible, and that doesn’t work very well with education. So yes, I certainly think there are like social justice factors at play here. But private equity is by definition a short term game. You know, they’re looking to get in and get out within 5 to 7 years. And so, when they are in a space like education, and profit is the only goal, you just end up with a real mismatch when you’re finan

  5. Jun 4

    Finding Common Ground After Trump's Political Betrayal

    This week I’m talking to Anne Kim, co-editor of a new book called Betrayed: America Didn’t Vote for This. It’s a compilation of chapters by seasoned policy experts, and longtime policymakers and advisors at senior levels of the federal government. It’s basically a damage assessment that takes a look at where we are midway through Trump’s second term, what’s been done and what’s coming ahead. Betrayed is published by the bipartisan Common Sense Coalition, of which Anne is also executive director. Anne Kim is a journalist, lawyer, former senior staffer on Capitol Hill, and veteran of several D.C.-based think tanks. She’s also the author of Poverty for Profit: How Corporations Get Rich Off America’s Poor (The New Press, 2024) and Abandoned: America’s Lost Youth and the Crisis of Disconnection (The New Press, 2020). A Conversation with Anne Kim Thanks for being here. Before we get into the questions, tell me a little bit about your own background professionally, and the background you’re bringing to the work we’re about to talk about. Sure. As you mentioned, I’m a journalist, a lawyer. I worked on the Hill. I worked in a couple of DC think tanks. And I’ve worked in private sector. I was actually a corporate securities lawyer before I went on to public policy. So I feel like I’ve had a little bit of a 360 view from the government side, from the public policy side. And from the media side. All of these things have come into play in our writing this volume with my co-editor and contributors for the Common Sense Coalition. The title is a provocation — Betrayed. That’s a strong word. Who exactly does this book argue was betrayed, and is it making a claim about bad outcomes or something more specific — that voters were actively misled about what they were getting? So the book is, it says on the cover, it’s a damage assessment. And what we are is a coalition of about, you know, 45 policy experts, former government, former military, who all got together to put together a fact-based analysis of what Trump administration policies have done. And that’s where we get to the concept of betrayal. And you did mention that it’s a strong word. Yeah, it’s a strong word. It’s an emotional word, it’s an evocative word, it’s also a deliberate word. And I think it has different meanings for different audiences. For those who may have supported Trump in the past, it really could be kind of a personal betrayal. He did promise that he would bring down prices on day one. He also promised that he would not take the U.S. into unnecessary wars. That promise has been broken too. I mean, for those who have had this very personal relationship, loyalty to Trump, it really may be a visceral reaction to them that does qualify as betrayal. For others, some of us who kind of knew what might be happening with the second Trump administration, the betrayal is a little bit different. It’s about this administration’s betrayal of the values and the foundational principles of our democracy. And we go into that with 12 chapters in our book. The rule of law, the collapse of civil discourse, an economy that’s become unaffordable. You know, there are a lot of things upon about which the things that we have counted on for generations have been eroded. The Common Sense Coalition isn’t a progressive outfit — this is a centrist, cross-aisle project. How do you get people from different political traditions to agree on what a betrayal even looks like, when they may disagree about what the promise was in the first place? Betrayal, I guess, you could argue is in the eye of the beholder. You know, as I mentioned, it means different things to different people. What we try to do in this book, though, is just to make the argument about the depth and the breadth of the destruction. And we have chosen to do so with facts, and we have synthesized these facts into an argument. You know, I mentioned that we have footnotes, 643 footnotes, so this is not conjecture, it’s not hyperbole, it’s a fact-filled synthesis, and it’s 12 chapters. We’re not trying to do this, like, florid rhetorical exercise. You know, we try to make it as accessible and readable as possible. In that way, we’re kind of inspired by the original Common Sense, written by Thomas Paine, because that was a 47-page pamphlet that was really intended for regular people, you know, to make the case against the monarchy, to make the case that here’s the stakes of a revolution. That’s not what we’re calling for in this case, but Paine laid out in a very accessible way the damage that’d been done by the king at that time, and the political stakes if regular people didn’t act. And that was an inspiration for both the name of the coalition, but also for the argument that we try to make within the book. Future generations have no reason at this point to believe what their government is telling them, because there is active misinformation being pumped out by multiple agencies on multiple platforms.—Anne Kim My work and writing is mostly focused on the politics of schools, kids and families. Your previous book Abandoned was really about what happens when systems fail young people who have already fallen through the cracks. How does the damage you document in Betrayed land on kids specifically — whether that’s schools, nutrition programs, health coverage, or something else — and is any of it reversible before a generation gets lost? Thank you for that question. My 2020 book, Abandoned, was about youth disconnection. It’s about the 4.5 million, probably more now after the COVID pandemic, of young adults who are neither in school nor working and how they had been abandoned by the various government systems. They’re supposed to be helping them, whether it’s foster care, justice system, or education. With this book, Betrayed, if you read the introduction to the book, there is a reference to kids and grandkids. You know, that was, future generations were very much on the minds of all of us who contributed to this volume. And the argument in the book is not only that this Trump administration has just kind of wrecked our present, but they’ve really destroyed our future, too. And to your point, I do think some of this could be irreversible, because in the space of 16 months this administration has managed to destroy institutions and structures that have taken decades to build, and there are a few specific impacts like right now that are going to have, you know, long-term implications for kids. For instance, I just saw, I think, Kaiser—KFF—put out a stat the other day that more than 1.7 million low-income kids have lost Medicaid as a result of various cutbacks that are taking place. I mean, these kids growing up without access to health care now are going to be suffering immense long-term health consequences as a result of not getting preventive care, not getting acute things taken care of, not getting vaccinations, you name it. So there’s that. The Department of Education, you know well what’s happened there. And then, next month, we’re going to be seeing huge changes in access to higher ed, because of enormous changes in higher ed financing, right? So, people who are getting nursing degrees can no longer finance their education if they can’t afford to do so, thanks to the changes in the Graduate Plus program for graduate loans. So yeah, that’s going to have an enormous impact on careers, on economic mobility of future generations. We have a chapter on climate change. You know, this administration has completely walked back prior administration’s commitment to a clean energy future, allowing China to leap ahead. So not only are we putting climate at risk for future future generations, but our ability to compete in the clean energy space as a result of that. And then, kind of the big picture view is faith in government. Future generations have no reason at this point to believe what their government is telling them, because there is active misinformation being pumped out by multiple agencies on multiple platforms. And a lot of what this government has done right now has been against the interests of children and the families, and it’s going to be very, very, very hard to rebuild that trust. Irreversible? Possibly. Where in this book did the evidence or argument genuinely surprise you — where did what voters actually wanted diverge most sharply from what the political conversation suggested they wanted? Well, if you mean, you know, where did the nation and voters get way more than they bargained for, it probably would have to be immigration enforcement. I mean, it really has been much more destructive than I think anyone would have predicted. That chapter lays out in very stark terms the actual hazards to public safety that have resulted as a result of these immigration crackdowns, and I think the scale of that is much more than anyone anticipated. And, you know, nobody expected that U.S. citizens would also be at risk of death. You know, it’s bad enough what’s happening to people generally, but the level of violation of civil rights, human rights, the deaths and the injuries that are happening in detention centers. The economic impact, also, of the immigration enforcement surge has probably much starker than anyone expected as well. There’s a great Brookings report that just came out this week estimating that the United States has lost 688,000 jobs as a result of the 2025 immigration surge. Their analysis found that for every “excess arrest,” 13 jobs were affected. And so, I mean…it has been catastrophic. This hijacking of government to serve the profit interests of companies that make their living from government money is a huge theme of the Trump Administration.—Anne Kim You’ve written extensively about how corporations profit off poverty — the poverty industry, as you’ve called it. Do

  6. May 28

    Immigration is a pocketbook issue, too.

    I’ve wanted to talk here about immigration policy for awhile now. But I’ve been waiting to connect with an expert on the topic who could offer some insights into both the policy and politics. Andrea R. Flores is an attorney, policy expert, and media commentator with more than 15 years of experience trying to reform U.S. immigration law and domestic policy at the highest levels of government. She has served at the White House, the National Security Council, the Department of Homeland Security, and in the U.S. Senate, where she advanced legislation and executive actions to modernize the immigration system, strengthen border security, and implement judicial reforms. Beyond government, Flores has led national immigration policy teams at the ACLU and FWD.us, advised Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, and began her career in New Mexico working on border security issues. She regularly comments on immigration and national security on outlets such as CNN and MSNBC, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and The New York Review of Books. She is also co-author of the New York Times bestseller Yes She Can. The issue of immigration is obviously critically important in its own right. But for those of you who are regular readers or listeners, see if you can spot some parallels between what Andrea’s saying about immigration—particularly with respect to the way Democrats have to offer an alternative—and some of the conversations we’ve had here about education policy. A Conversation with Andrea Flores Welcome to The Forum. I’m Josh Cowen, and I am happy today to have Andrea Flores here as an immigration expert, an attorney, a media commentator. I have been wanting to do a conversation or a newsletter on immigration policy for a while now. I was just sort of waiting for the right chance to have the right conversation. I think this is it, so I’m really, really glad to have Andrea here. Thank you so much. You have served at the White House, the National Security Council, Department of Homeland Security, the Senate staff. You’ve done a whole bunch of different things on this issue. Just before we get into the conversation, just tell us a little bit about yourself that’s sort of not in the top line bio. Absolutely. So one, thank you for having me. I am an attorney. I live in Washington, DC. But I actually got into this issue for both kind of personal reasons and academic interests. I grew up on the southwest border, so I’m from southern New Mexico, a city called Las Cruces. And I really sort of grew up at a time when border security and the question of immigration reform was a big national issue right after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. And really, ever since 2006 when I went off to college, I have been studying immigration and thinking a lot about how our country approaches that. I’m really interested in questions of reform, what it means to our future, both economically and politically. So I have been working in the immigration space since 2010, and really love to talk about it and help explain to people why they should also get excited and interested in it as well. The Republican Party has come away from thinking of immigration as something good for the country. With the rise of President Trump, we’ve seen a period where Republicans have really adopted the idea that immigration is actually bad for the country.—Andrea Flores Immigration reform keeps failing, in my view, even though parts of it poll well. Do you think maybe both parties kind of misunderstand about how ordinary voters actually think about immigration? What kinds of arguments have reformers overused, or underused? I have a Substack called Securing America’s Promise, and the entire premise is to explore why Washington keeps failing on this issue. I do really look at both parties. And if you just look at what has happened since 2010 is that prior to that point, you did have both parties at least say that immigration reform was a priority for them. They thought it was good for the economy, they thought it was good for national security, and you saw both President George W. Bush and President Obama actually put forth very similar big immigration reform proposals. And one of the things I’ve been exploring is, well, if you hear those facts, you think, why didn’t it work? And what has been an interesting phenomenon for the Republican Party is how they’ve come away from thinking of immigration reform as something good for the country With the rise of President Trump, we’ve seen a period where Republicans have really adopted the idea that immigration is actually bad for the country. And what I don’t think many people maybe appreciate is just what a break from past Republican politics that was So when you’ve had a party now since, I would say, 2015, saying immigration is bad, what you’ve had on the Democratic side is an inability to adjust to that new political reality. They don’t have another party that wants to really work with them on this issue, but they have also not offered a reason why they still think it’s really important to reform the immigration system. So I think one of the reasons it keeps failing is I don’t think any party is making the case for why immigration reform benefits your average American right now. Neither party is making the case for why immigration reform benefits your average American right now.—Andrea Flores To this point about benefits: you’ve argued that immigration is not just a border issue, it’s a pocketbook issue. Can you walk us through that a little bit more about just kind of the everyday ways that immigration shows up in family budgets and housing and elder care, child care, food prices, you name it. Like, how are these things showing up in the economy that, like, really does land at the kitchen table? Historically, in times of growth for the American economy, we have really relied on immigrants for that growth, right? So you could even think in the COVID economy, like when we were recovering from COVID, an influx in immigration—we can get to why that was complicated—actually helped us recover faster than other nations because more people wanted to work us jobs than not. So take it to today. President Trump has argued, and many voters, understandably, kind of believed him: which is that fewer immigrants mean that my life gets better because it’ll be easier to get a job, or housing will be more affordable, but what you’ve seen is that when you disrupt how our economy has always worked, which has always had about 13% immigrant sort of population in the country, what it means that there’s fewer construction workers to make affordable housing. It means that there are fewer caregivers in rural states to help with elder care and child care, it means that food gets more expensive, because so many of our critical industries say dairy, say your milk prices, right? Almost half of the workforce in Wisconsin dairy farms are undocumented immigrants. So this has always been a fact of our economy, and I like to say, like, immigration has always made us richer and more prosperous. And when you reduce it really drastically, you have hospitals closing, schools closing, population shrinking, and that makes life more expensive for everyone. It’s not actually creating more jobs or creating more consumer demand. But once again, we need a party to actually explain those facts. And I understand why people may think immigration is just a public safety issue, a border issue, because that’s the only way they ever hear about it. A lot of my work and the focal point for this series here is on schools and kids and families. I want to ask about the immigration issue in the school space. The 1982 Supreme Court decision Plyler v. Doe, which says that public schools basically can’t deny services based on immigration status. How important do you think that decision is today? We know that conservatives are actually targeting this right now. It’s a big priority for the Heritage Foundation. I want to ask broadly about serving immigrants who are children, but also the political or the legal coalition behind that. Is it weaker now? Is this just another target for some of the same sort of Trump-era party politics that you’re describing? I think I’m very scared of that case being revisited, especially because Chief Justice John Roberts has written in the past about how he believes Plyler was wrongly decided. And it’s really not just the Heritage Foundation. I think people question: when immigrants come here, what services and benefits should they have? So once again, if you’re missing a party that could make an argument as to why Plyler was decided and why it’s important that we don’t ostracize immigrant children, that undocumented kids actually they create numbers in school that impact funding for American kids. There’s all these reasons why you don’t want to discriminate against children in the education system. But my fear is that we don’t even have an argument on immigration in the Democratic Party side right now. And so you can imagine Plyler coming up and people simply thinking, you know, that’s just taking resources away from kids. And so it’s why I think it’s so important that even saying the words “immigration reform” I’m not attached to. It’s just talking about: this is a way that our communities already function—you’re not losing a lot. But I want to raise one issue because I think it’s important, which was when you had what I have argued is a very mismanaged border under President Biden, then you saw what happened when kids were coming into schools very quickly, and there were real resource questions. And integration questions. And because that administration couldn’t meet and, you know, get emergency funding out, and call it a crisis, all these things. We’re going to have a harder time arguing some of the b

  7. May 21

    A Chat with Congresswoman Haley Stevens

    Late last year, and early into this year, I began sitting down with a number of congressional candidates and candidates for governor in battleground races across the country. I wanted to talk to them about their campaigns, but also—because of our focus here at The Forum— how they saw policy issues related to kids and families. And especially schools—pre-K through higher education. So this week I’m particularly happy to sit down with Congresswoman Haley Stevens from Michigan’s 11th District, who serves on the House Education and Workforce Committee. Haley was first elected to the U.S. House in 2018 at the age of 35, and won tough re-election races in 2020, 2022, and 2024. Before running for office, she had a variety of roles in policy and political staff positions—most notably serving as Chief-of-Staff to Steven Rattner for President Obama’s Auto Rescue Task Force. Haley Stevens is now running against Abdul El-Sayed and State Senator Mallory McMorrow in a hotly contested primary for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate. She’s been endorsed by a number of unions, several fellow members of Congress, former Governor Jennifer Granholm, and the state’s legendary former Senator Debbie Stabenow. We were supposed to talk last week, but we had to reschedule for the House Education Committee meeting that featured U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon. During the hearing, Haley Stevens grilled McMahon on a variety of issues, especially the growing teacher shortage in Michigan and beyond. Here’s Our Conversation JOSH: I’m happy today to have Congresswoman Haley Stevens from Michigan’s 11th District on talk about a couple of different things here. Congresswoman Stevens is running for the Senate right now, but also serves in the House Education Committee. So we’re going to talk a little bit about all of that. What’s going on, Haley Stevens? HALEY: Hey, it’s great to be talking with you. I’m glad to be doing this. Obviously, it’s a pretty serious time out there right now. It’s a time of uncertainty and a lot of that and all of it, frankly, is coming down from Donald Trump’s chaos and abuses of power. JOSH: Before we get to your current campaign, tell us a bit about your background. I’m interested in what you did both before getting to Congress and even before that--what was your first job out of college? HALEY: Well, look, I was born here in Michigan—in Southeast Michigan. My dad was actually born in the city of Detroit, grew up in Detroit till he was about 10 years old, and moved to Warren. My parents, when I was growing up, had a small business. It was a landscaping business. My dad was also a public school teacher, though, too. So I just grew up around really hardworking parents who wanted to give us the best, you know, late- 20th century life that they could. I grew up just seeing all that and that kind of motivated my approach to public service and how I started getting involved in, you know, government and political campaigns. It was just about working really hard. But you did ask about one of my first jobs, I think it was out of college, but I had a really, really good first job when I was in high school. I worked at Blockbuster Video. I didn’t last too long. It was like a late summer job, but I went through their training program. That Blockbuster video is long gone now. JOSH: I actually really wanted a job at Blockbuster. They wouldn’t have me. I applied all over to, like, 7 different Blockbusters, so you’re one up on me there. HALEY: I bet if I looked hard enough, I could probably find one of their old pieces of paraphernalia or something like the card or whatnot for you. But look, I would say this. I graduated college right before the Great Recession hit. And when the Great Recession hit, that obviously whacked the place that we call home here in Michigan hardest. So the question for me became, how can I help Michigan? You know, I thought about going and working at a car dealership, but I had also been working on the Obama campaign, and was kind of right there as he was getting ready to transition into office, and I heard that they were going to do something with the auto industry. And so I put up my hand, you know, just kind of right place, right time. Steve Ratner was going to be tapped for that, and Steve needed a chief of staff. I’m pretty sure my thick Midwestern accent just convinced him that I would do a great job. And I was the person from Michigan on that team, you know, taking those phone calls, getting everything set up, making the wheels turn. And it was unbelievable. And obviously we made it through that tough time. But man, oh man, was that an example of good federal policy making, meeting the moment for who we are as Michiganders. Now is not the time in Michigan to be comfortable and to have comfortable leadership. Now is the time to step up and to fight back.—Rep. Haley Stevens JOSH: You’re leaving a House seat you’d be heavily favored to win in, to run for the Senate. Walk me through that process: tell me one reason why you might have stayed in that House seat, and one reason that really determined that you’d make the Senate run. HALEY: I will tell you this because I have a feeling that some of your viewers are younger people who are looking forward to a life of making big decisions. One piece of advice I have on that front is when you make a decision, don’t look back. Don’t talk about the alternative, because it doesn’t exist anymore, and you’re just spinning your wheels. And so I’ll say this to what you’re asking me, which is a really great question. I love the work I do for Michigan. I am so grateful and honored and humbled to be in my fourth term in the United States House of Representatives, you know, fighting for us, being recognized as the most effective Democrat for Michigan in the Congress. The most effective Democrat for science and tech issues, actually, alongside Gary Peters in the Senate. Not clear what the California folks are doing, but, you know, Gary and I are writing bills and getting them passed. So, you know, that works. When I ran for Congress, I flipped a seat. And very similarly to when I worked on the auto rescue, I saw Michigan needing something and I wanted to run at it. So I held Michigan’s 11th district in 2018 and 2020. The district now is redrawn. It is a different district. And you’re right, it tends to be, you know, more of what they call a safer seat for Democrats. And I love the work that I do on the Science committee and on the Education Committee, which I know we’re going to talk about. But last year, when a fully paralyzed veteran reached out to me through a mutual friend asking if he was still going to get his benefit check because he saw Elon Musk prancing around a stage with a chainsaw—that really broke me and it just jarred me. And I thought, you know, now is not the time in Michigan to be comfortable and to have comfortable leadership. Now is the time to step up and to fight back. And I can tell you that I am doing more today, you know, serving in the House of Representatives, running for a statewide role to serve Michigan in the United States Senate and to offer ideas and solutions to some of these challenges that we are facing. Mike Rogers [the GOP nominee], who, you know, I know you’re familiar with him, but he’s made it really clear what his priorities are. And I… I’m writing a love letter to Michigan. Mike Rogers, he wants to rubber stamp Donald Trump. I’m out here saying I want to work to lower your costs. Mike Rogers is saying, hey, let’s keep the Gordie Howe Bridge permanently closed, like, and go along with these erratic tariffs at every turn. I mean, give me a break. This isn’t working for Michigan and our manufacturing sector is paying a price. And as someone who is in a big race that’s still going to be playing out, and there’s a lot of different polls, you know, given the day of the week that it is, but every single poll shows the same thing. Which is that I am in the best and strongest position to go and beat Mike Rogers and continue to stand up for Michigan at the law-making table. To continue to make sure that we have, you know, a good, strong auto industry with good federal policies around it, that we have an enshrined 21st century labor movement, and that consumers are getting relief around these gas prices, these utility bills, the health care costs, and of course the cost of food. We don’t even know who’s running for Senate Democratic leadership right now. And I’m not even in the Senate right now. And my deal is just, let’s get there, let’s see who’s going to be running, and my goodness, let me just do the work for Michigan, right?—Rep. Haley Stevens JOSH: I've had quite a number of different candidates on. Different Members of Congress, a couple of your colleagues. I'll be honest—and I'm not trying to sub-tweet anyone or troll anyone—but I am losing track of all of the litmus tests Democratic candidates are getting to run for office these days. Who you would vote for, for caucus leader. Which campaign funds are “okay” to accept, which aren’t, and which pledges you’re supposed to take or make. Let me just ask you a broad question: How do you think about all of these problems and questions when it comes to campaign donations, when it comes to potential leadership votes down the line? Just in terms of your own values and what you want to watch out for when you make decisions? HALEY: So look, next year we’re going to reorganize government. We’re going to see, you know, elections happen and a new legislative session of Congress. And there is a lot of speculation about Democratic leadership But the thing is, is we don’t even know who’s running right now. And I’m not even in that role right now. And I’ve had a little bit of experience with this, because when I came into the house, yo

  8. May 14

    Building for the Next 100 Years

    I’ve been looking forward to chatting with Amanda Litman for a few weeks now. She’s the co-founder and president of Run for Something—the wildly successful grassroots organizing group that helps recruit and train thousands of progressive political candidates across the country. If you admire a progressive state or local leader in your community, there’s a good chance they’ve worked with Run for Something. A year ago yesterday, Amanda published When We’re in Charge: The Next Generation’s Guide to Leadership. It’s a highly readable approach to building out personal and professional values for decision-making, managing an organization, and seeing it all through for results. Amanda Litman has also worked at the highest levels of American politics—presidential and major statewide campaigns—and appears regularly across the country to weigh in current political events. JOSH: Amanda Litman thanks for being here. So let’s get started with some basics. I have a pretty politically engaged following here and I know you’re going to be familiar to some of those folks, but walk me through Run for Something and how you got started with that work. AMANDA: So I’m Amanda Litman, born and raised in Northern Virginia, went to Northwestern for college, and I was a senior in college, I started interning on the Obama campaign. I was hired before I graduated. And we won. That was so fun. I was doing online fundraising and volunteer recruitment. And I stayed working in Chicago for Organizing for Action for a year. I moved down to Florida to work on the governor’s race in 2014, where I was the digital director for the Democrat running for governor that year. And then I moved to New York, where I now live, to work for Secretary Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2015. I was her email director, so again, online fundraising and volunteer recruitment. And then we lost, and that was really sad. About a week after election day, I started hearing from people I’d gone to high school and college with who are like, “Hey, Amanda, I’m a public school teacher in Chicago. I’m thinking about running for office because if Trump can do this, seems like anybody can do this. What do I do? Who do I call? You’re the only person I know that works in politics. I don’t know where to go.” And at the time, if you were young and newly excited about politics, you wanted to do more than vote and more than volunteer, there was no way you could go that would answer your call. And that, to me felt like a symptom of really big problems, both in our democracy, but also in the Democratic Party. So I reached out to a whole bunch of people with an idea. What if we started an organization to solve this problem? One of those folks became my co-founder, Ross Morales Rocketto, and we wrote a plan, and we built a website, and then we launched Run for Something on Trump’s first inauguration day back in 2017. I thought it’d be really small. We’d get a hundred people in the first year. We had a thousand people sign up in the first week, and as of today, we have more than 260,000 young people all across the country who’ve raised their hands to run for office. We’ve endorsed more than 4,000. We’ve helped elect more than 1,653 across 49 states plus DC, and we’re the largest candidate pipeline in politics. “Policies as a candidate are less important than what they reflect about your values and who you’re fighting for.”—Amanda Litman JOSH: So a year ago this week your book comes out: When We’re in Charge. It’s more a book about leadership than politics per se. But obviously you started that work during Biden years. Then Trump wins. Tell me what you were trying to do with the book at first, and now how it feels a year out. AMANDA: It’s an interesting question. So I started working on the book really at some point throughout 2023, because I started hearing from a bunch of reporters who were like, “Hey, seems like all of your candidates,” Mallory McMorrow, Zooey Zephyr in Montana, even the Justins in Tennessee who—while they were not our candidates—were part of the broader conversation around, in particular, millennial and Gen Z politicians who kept like making national headlines. And these reporters asked me, like, “what do these people have in common? Besides, you know, a bunch of them work with you all.” And I realized actually there was something really interesting going on, which is Millennial and Gen Z leaders were entering systems and structures not built for people like us and doing things differently. And that wasn’t just in politics, it was something I’d experienced running a company for most of the last decade. It was something I was hearing from my peers, from my colleagues. I was seeing it in, you know, on my TikTok or over on Instagram: people talking about Millennial bosses doing things a little bit differently. So I thought maybe there’s something here. The more that I read, the more that I talked to folks, the more I realized maybe there’s a book here. So we sold the book actually on my daughter’s 1st birthday, which is very monumental for me, because I was like, “Oh, right, motherhood doesn’t actually have to kill who I am as a professional,” which is really nice. And I wrote it throughout 2024. I ended up doing interviews with more than 130 leaders across a bunch of different sectors. You know, yes, members of Congress and politicians, but also the CEO of Snapchat and rabbis, and teachers, and doctors, and, you know, corporate executives. I kept hearing the same echoes of themes across all those conversations. So the book came out in last May, and I’ve been thinking back about what that moment was like. It was a month before Mamdani won the mayoral primary here in New York. It was a couple of weeks before these stories started coming out, a survey that Glassdoor did that said Millennials now make up a majority of all managers and Gen Z make up about one in 10. It was a conversation about generational change, about a need for a new group of leaders to take over in politics, in business, in media. I’m hearing from people over the last year who’ve read the book or listened to the book or skimmed it at the library. They’ve said, “this gave me a language to talk about a thing I didn’t know I was struggling with.” Or “it gave me this really hopeful, concrete advice,” or from Gen Xers were pissed that they were entirely left out of the book, which…Classic Gen X response. It’s just been so cool to hear and to feel really gratified that I was really speaking to something people were challenged by. “Be very clear about what your values are as an individual or as a leader, and then what your organization’s values are. And what is the difference between the two?”—Amanda Litman JOSH: Well I think I’m on the tail end of Gen X. I turn 48 in August, and actually saw a lot of folks in my half generation above mid-Millennial in this book, so I appreciated it. Switching gears: put me down as some who thinks we’re in uncharted territory in American politics—and that includes in the ways expect the business community and the legal community interact with government. What’s your advice to people trying to build out a career—maybe not directly in politics necessarily but at least in politics- adjacent work like policy advocacy, consulting, and so on—in this really volatile and difficult-to-predict moment? AMANDA: I think there’s a couple ways to think about it. One is personally, like, make sure that your job is not your political home. Which is a really hard thing to do, especially if you work even quasi-related or mission-related work. If you have a job that feels like a calling, like you’re in education, or, you know, if you’re in media, where it feels like this is the thing you’re meant to do, and it’s how you want to make a difference in the world, that’s important. It’s good, but don’t make that the only place you do your politics, because if you expect your job to fulfill both your political and sort of like moral obligations, as well as your actual economic ones, you’re going to be screwed. You need to have a political home outside of your job, and that’s really important. Now, professionally, you know, I think, and related to this: Be really clear about what are your values as an individual or as a leader, and then what are the organization’s values? And what is the difference between the two? Because often, even if you’re starting your own thing, there is some distinction between the two. And then: where are the places where you can push the organization or the team or the company’s activity to be a little bit more values-forward? Because some of the frustration that people have with their workplaces is when they talk about believing in one thing and then behave differently. So when as much as possible, you can sort of close the distance between those, knowing that they’re never going to mesh perfectly with where you are as an individual. I think that can help deal with some of the cognitive dissonance people feel and the frustration they feel with their employer. “What are we actually trying to build in our public education system that meets the moment and is sustainable for the next 100 years?”—Amanda Litman JOSH: I reached out to you because of two messages I’ve seen you drive in your public engagement. The first is on family policy and politics. You’ve posted about family leave and other priorities Democrats need to embrace. I got involved sort of accidentally in politics as maybe the most visible critic of school vouchers short of Randi Weingarten, who’s a friend of mine. But everywhere I go—23 states now—I hear the same thing. Voter don’t like right-wing plans like vouchers, but what the hell is the Dem plan for schools? What’s the message for kids and families? I don

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