The Forum with Josh Cowen Podcast

Josh Cowen
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  1. 2d ago

    Is your school near a toxic hazard site?

    Sometimes you read something that you just want to scream about from the rooftops. That happened to me a few days back when I read the first new report from SustainableED, the Sustainable Education Research Initiative at Brown University. That’s a relatively new center devoted to examining the impact of climate change on kids and families in schools. With just some basic statistics, the team has shown that huge numbers of kids learn everyday near environmental hazard sites—and exposure is highly uneven and inequitable. The new report is out in PNAS, one of the most highly cited scientific journals out there. So today we’re talking to Dr. Matthew A. Kraft, founder and director of SustainableED, and one of the authors of the new report. Dr. Kraft is also an expert on teacher labor markets and policy interventions like high-dose tutoring, and served in the Biden White House on the Council of Economic Advisors. Following field guidelines, Dr. Kraft’s team defines environmental hazards as Superfund (EPA-designated sites with significant legacy toxins), Brownfield (former industrial or commercial properties with real or suspected contamination), or Toxic Release Inventory (active facilities that process toxins). In terms of total number, my home state of Michigan is at the very top with more than 5,000 hazard sites, and near the top in sites (51.2) sites per 100,000 people. Nearly two-thirds of our schools are within 1 mile of an environmental hazard site, ranked behind only the tiny state of Rhode Island. With the exception of Minnesota, other standout states are in the northeast— Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York and Vermont—or the Mountain Plains. Across the country, students of color—especially Black students—are far more likely to attend school near a hazard site. As are lower income families. Highlighting this kind of problem is exactly why I started The Forum. And one of the best things about doing it is that I don’t have to summarize the issue much further beyond what you can casually dig up on your own. Instead, I can just reach out to the experts and let them walk us all through it. Let’s get into it. A Conversation with Matthew Kraft. Matt Kraft thanks for being here. We’ll get to the report in a second. But I want to orient folks to who you are, the kind of work you’re drawn to, the sort of work that you are involved in, and what brings you into the work you’re doing today. What have you been up to? Well, I’m an educator. I started my career as a substitute and taught middle and high school humanities in public schools in the Bay Area. And since then, have dedicated my academic career to thinking about how we can strengthen K to 12 public education. And I try to do that in a way that isn’t just about writing abstract academic treatises, but to really ask questions that matter for real families, real teachers, and connect to policy and practice on the ground. A lot of the folks that listen to this or read this series here are in the policy community, policy staff, education community, things like that. Those of you citing something that says that, yes, teacher experience matters to student outcomes, chances are you’re citing some work that Dr. Kraft here was a part of, and we’ll get to that in just a second. But let’s talk about this report. A lot of public schools in the United States—and private schools—are located near environmental hazard sites. That’s what your report here is showing. Tell me a little bit about this. I’ve been engaged in a pivot in my research. The privilege of academic careers is that I get to pursue things that I think are interesting and important. And in the last several years, it’s just been increasingly evident when I’m in schools, talking to teachers, talking to parents and families that environmental pressures, climate change, is impacting the daily work of teachers and the experiences of students. One need only look out at the, you know, orange-colored skies with fire season upon us to know that reality is here with us today. Or have a kid like I do who goes to a school that doesn’t have AC, and it’s sweltering hot with upwards of 90 degree temperatures inside the classroom. And so, part of what I’ve tried to do is just to learn more about what’s happening, what’s what’s the basic facts about how schools are impacted by environmental pressures, and what can they do to try to address them? And one of the things that we learned about early on was that schools are sometimes located shockingly close to toxic facilities. We had a sense that there were some really bad individual cases, you know, a few cities where some analysis is done, a few kind of snapshots that focus on one particular type of toxic site. But being newcomers to the space, we started to just ask the basic questions like, well, how big of a problem is this? How often does it occur? And it turned out we just didn’t have answers to these very basic fundamental questions. And so we set out to try to answer them by collecting data that we work with often on the universe of K-12, public and private schools in this country, and then let’s map that onto these other datasets that we had never worked with before, maintained by the Environmental Protection Agency, that catalog three different types of these registries of known environmental hazard sites. Black students in the U.S. are 86% more likely than their white peers to attend a school that is within a quarter-mile of a toxic site.—Dr. Matthew Kraft How frequently? How common a problem is this? Way more common than I ever anticipated. We try to be conservative, like most academics, to say, hey, first off, we’re telling you proximity and that isn’t a guarantee of exposure but it’s certainly at a heightened risk and a lot of studies find exposure to different toxic sites up to a mile or more can have negative effects on children’s health and development. We found that even when we narrow in to a quarter of a mile, we’re talking 4 blocks at most, a lap around that track at the high school, that there are over 9,000 schools. We’re talking 8% of our U.S. K-12 public school buildings are within a quarter mile of a toxic site. And you found something like 44% are within a mile total? That’s right. And so this isn’t an isolated or unique phenomenon. This happens in every state and in more communities across this country than anyone, I think, fully perceives. Sometimes it’s really obvious. There’s a major, you know, industrial plant, and it’s got giant smokestacks, and it’s billowing smoke. Others are a little bit more kind of subtle, with different types of manufacturing plants that may spill chemicals that leach into the ground or old abandoned sites that in more of the earlier industrial air were using chemicals, lead, asbestos that are still there in the ground. And so we found that these numbers really belied a national problem about providing safe and healthy learning environments for kids. Are there some kids that are more affected than others? Like so many other examples of educational inequity in our country, we found that Native American students, Black students, Hispanic students, and students from low income backgrounds were substantially more likely to attend a school that was in close proximity to one of these toxic sites. And to put that more concretely, Black students in the U.S. are 86% more likely than their white peers to attend a school that is within a quarter-mile of a toxic site. It’s not just that schools have always existed in these sites sites show up or don’t. It’s that these sites often are legacy sites that operated, you know, decades and decades ago, and now school districts are trying to figure out, you know, where can we build affordably? And sometimes that means building in places where that hasn’t been attractive to develop other types of homes or other business areas.—Dr. Matthew Kraft Is that because—I want to ask you about the policy implications in a second, but is that because of where at-risk children are located, and where these hazard sites are located? I mean, it seems like it’s sort of a two-part problem: these environmental hazards are located far more widely than we might believe. Like you don’t have to be sitting next to Three Mile Island or whatever to be next to a dangerous site. And even given the widespread nature of these sites there is still differentially bad clustering in at-risk communities. Is that a fair way to put the result? I think that’s right. Frankly, it’s a complex social science phenomenon where we both have patterns such as these sites are more common in more urbanized areas, and students of color are often more likely to live in those urban centers. And so it’s a distributional thing, and it’s also a phenomenon that different industries are often, when they are producing these toxic emissions and working with hazardous chemicals, not welcome in communities, and so they have to find places where they can get a foothold, and it’s often communities with the least political capital, the communities with the most economic need, that end up kind of having the lack of ability to oppose these types of facilities to show up. You know, it’s a little bit of a two-way causal arrow as well. It’s not just that schools have always existed in these sites sites show up or don’t. It’s that these sites often are legacy sites that operated, you know, decades and decades ago, and now school districts are trying to figure out, you know, where can we build affordably? And sometimes that means building in places where that hasn’t been attractive to develop other types of homes or other business areas. So what are the implications for sort of policy? You mentioned the problem of the lack of AC. Folks in the research community are studying schools that are to

    Is your school near a toxic hazard site?

  2. Aug 6

    Sitting down with MSNOW

    It’s been a busy week here in my home state of Michigan. On Monday, I wrote some notes about governing, politics, and policy ahead of what looked to be a divisive primary. ' And over the weekend, I sat down for an interview with Jacob Soboroff on Jacob Soboroff on MSNOW alongside Puck reporter Abby Livingson, to talk about what was at stake in that primary. We covered the ferocious battle over issues and ideology going on right now in Democratic politics, and Jacob managed to get a question to me about schools in Michigan and beyond. The primary’s over, and Abdul El-Sayed is moving on to the general. The conversation still stands. Take a look if you have a few minutes. We’ll be back with some more education news on Monday. -Josh PS if you don’t want to watch all 13 minutes, check out the transcript page link to this post. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshcowen.substack.com/subscribe

    Sitting down with MSNOW

  3. Jul 30

    "We have to make strategic national investments in children and families."

    This week, we’re continuing our series with elected officials and candidates prioritizing policy solutions for kids and families. Today is my conversation is with Congressman Greg Landsman, the Democrat representing Ohio’s 1st District. That’s basically Cincinnati, on the Ohio River, and the northeast suburbs. Before coming to Congress in 2023, Congressman Landsman served on the Cincinnati city council, and ran an organization that helped fund preschool for all three and four-year-olds in the city. He’s a former public school educator, teaching both Spanish and math at the high school level. In Congress, Rep. Landsman working on a bill called the Child Care Small Business Insight and Improvement Act, which would help support small businesses operating child care provision across the country. Like many districts across the midwest, Ohio’s 1st District is a swing seat, where broad appeal across the political spectrum is necessary not just to win elections but to help govern as well. Congressman Landsman is running in a tough re-election campaign to serve a third term for the district. A Conversation with Congressman Greg Landsman Congressman Landsman, welcome to The Forum, where we talk all things on kids and family policy. You come to this conversation differently than most members of Congress — you were actually in the classroom, and you grew up watching your parents do this work. When you’re sitting in a committee hearing or negotiating a bill, how much does that experience actually shape how you think about what’s in front of you? It’s a great question. I think it probably entirely shapes the way I’m understanding what’s being presented and thinking about the issues and the policy. One of my big issues or passions is the idea that we should be creating a community or society, or country where everyone gets a shot. And for me, that means that you look at policy from that angle: Does this help ensure that more and more people are getting opportunities? Or is this hindering folks and their ability to make progress? So this is one of the reasons why I’m so passionate about early childhood education education in general, because it’s, as has been said, the great equalizer, right? No matter where you’re born, or who or what kind of family you’re born into, or circumstances you’re born into. If every kid gets great prenatal care, or every expecting mom is much more likely to have an on time, healthy birth— developmentally that’s a huge deal. And then, if you get time with your parents because they have paid family leave that makes a huge difference. And then access to high quality childcare and preschool that helps a kid get totally ready for school. All of those things, you know, mean opportunity. And if you can extend those things to every child, then everyone has a shot. So I absolutely think about that, and then my experiences as a teacher. The way I was raised. My parents were teachers, just all of that comes into play, for sure. You got Cincinnati voters to fund two years of quality preschool — the first city in the country to do it. That’s a real proof of concept. But what did it take to actually make the quality part true, not just the access part? “Preschool” can mean a lot of things, and the difference between a good program and a mediocre one is enormous. Again, starting with the why, which we did a lot of when we were running the campaign. It was a lot of years of organizing house parties and just events all over. We got 10,000 people to sign this pledge that every child deserves two years of quality preschool. And that was such a big motivator. This was before I was on council. This was a ballot measure. So I was just a citizen and a parent. My kids were in preschool. I saw what a difference it made for them. They had quality preschool. And then I was living in a city, which is the case in most cities, all cities, where most kids don’t. And those kids are typically not ready for school, or they’re not ready enough. And so, you know, we wanted to make a major investment as a city in preschool—quality preschool in particular. And so the question was, how do you measure quality in Ohio? We have a rating system, and that rating system is based on the things that would be sort of intuitive, maybe maybe or maybe not. But I think they’re intuitive, which is: if you know class sizes, for example. If you’ve got a ton of kids and only one instructor, that’s going to be challenging for those kids. It’s not. It’s not as as good as it could be. And so you look at a low teacher-to-student ratio that helps with quality that the the teacher does. Then, does he or she have the training in early childhood? And if they have that training, that’s that’s the difference between high quality and and less. Then, the curriculum, is it evidence-based curriculum? And those are 3 of the biggest things. And you can do that achieve that in a in a center based program or home based. And so. We decided to invest—as we assumed voters would want—their dollars going to quality preschool. And so, one, the tuition assistance that families get here, they can use it in any quality preschool, public or community-based, center-based or home- based. And then there are additional grants for those providers to help them get that curriculum, or hire additional staff, or get them trained so that they can achieve higher quality. Both parties really need to prioritize child care for our economy, for our kids, for our families. It’s got to be at the top of the list.—Congressman Greg Landsman Walk me through your bipartisan child care bill. Who are your Republican partners, and what did you have to give up — or hold firm on — to get them there? I want to understand what bipartisan actually looks like in practice right now, not just as a talking point. The first thing, for those folks who aren’t as familiar with this world: a lot of these childcare providers and and preschools childcare is usually the 1st couple of years infant and toddlers. Essentially 0 to 3. Preschool is 3 and 4 year olds, and that’s a particular kind of curriculum. Some of these are public entities, but a lot of them are private centers or programs, meaning, you know, they’re for profit. And they don’t make a lot of money, and in some instances it’s really hard to make any. And so a lot of these small businesses need additional help. And the Small Business Administration is supposed to help all of us. All of our small businesses. Childcare was not at the top of their list when it came to be, and so we are pushing really hard for the SBA, the Small Business Administration, to invest more in helping childcare businesses, those folks that are providing childcare, giving them the technical assistance and additional resources so that they can grow. And this happens to be bipartisan. It’s not exactly a top priority, quite honestly, in my opinion, for either party. Both parties really need to prioritize it for our economy, for our kids, for our families. It’s got to be at the top of the list. But a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, [Dan] Meuser, he is my partner on this. I served on the Small Business Committee with him. And we’ve got a lot of bipartisan support. The key is just getting the chair of the committee to mark it up and get it to the floor. I ask a version of this to a lot of Members, governors, and candidates. I worry that Democrats have struggled to find a coherent K-12 message, and the polling backs that up. You’ve got real credibility here as a former educator. Do you think the party has earned back teachers’ trust — and separately, parents’ trust — or is there still work to do? We haven’t had a national vision for education in 25, 30 years. Someone has to lead on it, and my hope is that in the next [year] there are members of Congress like me and others who are leading on this. But you really need this to be something that those who have really high profiles, and in particular, the next [presidential] nominee should say I’m going to lead on this. Like, this is not just something we’re gonna leave to the states when we need a national strategy to ensure that our kids, every single one of our kids is getting the best possible education. I would love to see that be a major part of the debate as Democrats pick a nominee. And I have laid out what I think is a major education reform bill that would ensure every kid has what they need. My argument is a little different than most. I believe that the vision has to be one that includes or expands education so that it includes brain development and early childhood so that we’re not just stuck in sort of thinking about education in that sort of myopic K-12 way, even though it’s incredibly important and we need to have a better strategy and I’m happy to talk about it. But I would love to see us say: look, we’re going to reboot the Department of Education, and we’re going to have it follow brain development and make sure that kids get what they need, which means that we’re going to include prenatal care in our system of education, because it’s key to a kid who’s developmentally on track the same with quality childcare and preschool. I’d argue, paid family leave needs to be a part of that. Even if it’s just what we’re measuring. And then, when you get to K-12, the first goal has to be every kid shows up prepared, because if every kid shows up prepared, you’re gonna see better outcomes. Then you have to invest in teachers and classrooms and curriculum. And then I would argue that there should be some adjusting of high school so that kids can get into careers much faster. I don’t think we have to continue to accept the idea that everyone needs to have that that senior year. If, in fact they want to go to college or they want to go right into career training. We should be able to s

  4. Jul 23

    "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."

  5. 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

  6. 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

  7. 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

  8. 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

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