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 too hot, too cold in the winter, or th problem of exposure to poorly ventilated systems obviously came up during COVID. But those are maybe a little structurally easier to fix through a grant process or whatever to redo an air filtering system. Here we’re talking about a bigger problem, physically, at least in that like you’ve got whole locations that are an issue. How are you thinking about talking about this as a problem with potential policy solutions?

It’s hard to fix a problem that you can’t see and you don’t measure. And so I think part of the solution has to be an increased effort to monitor air quality, soil quality out in the playground, water quality in drinking fountains at schools.

You know, we forget that kids spend upwards of 20% of their time in schools, and more when you add on extracurricular activities after school, the sports practices. Schools are really central hubs for community and family life, and so that makes them also potential sites of environmental exposure.

And we need to know what we’re exposed to in those places. Beyond that, we need to think about targeted investments in school infrastructure that help to mitigate those effects. You know, the high-quality HEPA or HVAC system filters that may help to reduce particulate matter that students inhale when they’re inside of school buildings, as one example.

And so we can make investments, but beyond that, I think it really the importance of the legislative process at a local level as much as anything, thinking about zoning, thinking about questions about site review processes. Are we aware of the surrounding facilities when we’re thinking about opening a school, or permitting for air pollution at different types of sites, so that we can make conscientious choices in trade-offs?

You know, the answer is simply not to stop all possible manufacturing and energy production. It’s that there are particularly young students whose bodies are still developing are highly vulnerable, both physiologically and neurologically, to these types of toxins from things like Superfunds and toxic release inventories, Brownfields that we measure—all collected and tracked by the Environmental Protection Agency.

I think, owe it to them to say, hey, your parents put you on the bus, they drop you off to school, you ride your bike. We expect that to be a safe and healthy place.

The more people that come to see that environmental issues are core education policy issues, I think the more progress we’ll be able to make. —Dr Matthew Kraft

Last question, sort of a wraparound question, and I don’t want to get too in the weeds here, but there’s a larger conversation right now going on at the federal level in some states about what education research can do in the policy space. And even some attacks on education research in general. We’ve got all kinds of stuff with Department of Ed funding and Institute for Education Science and all that business.

But you’re somebody who spends a lot of time working on teacher labor markets, on high-dose tutoring, on all kinds of really specific policy problems that there’s a lot of interest in. This issue on environmental conditions is something a little different.

What do you think the role that the research process in general, whether it’s academic, whether it’s at an agency, whatever it is, in trying to identify problems like this, and particularly in a cross-field, cross-disciplinary, cross-professional way, because it seems like we’re going to have to draw on a lot of different types of expertise to address problems like this, whether they’re coming from the environmental community, when they’re coming from the contracting and construction communities. I mean, there’s going to be like a lot of different sort of conversations that need to be had here. How do you think about where research fits into that type of conversation moving forward?

One of the things that’s become more and more apparent to me in my career is that the way that the academy kind of structures narrow focus and expertise doesn’t necessarily allow us to do our best work in work that most accurately reflects the complexity of the real world.

I’m increasingly convinced that the more that we can do interdisciplinary research that draws upon the expertise of, you know, scientists across disciplines and the more that we can leverage that expertise in partnership with folks in the real world or in state capitals or the federal government to inform ongoing conversations or frankly to shine a light on evidence that just hasn’t gotten the attention that research suggests that it should is really a critical role.

That, frankly, has something to do with the research production process, but it has just as much to do with how you talk about your research: who you talk about it with, how you share it.

I think it’s incumbent upon researchers to think: I found a question that in talking to folks, it feels like matters, for policy and practice. And we’ve done a rigorous, pressure-tested academic study. How then am I going to engage in a public-facing dialogue?

I know from my own experience serving in the White House to serving on my local school board that time is unbelievably short, and no one’s, you know, googling most recent academic research that’s behind a paywall that is too technical to read.

Instead, they’re saying, okay, like, what did the parent who stood up and, you know, give an impassioned plea for, like, how can I respond to that? And so, we as academics, I think, need to do excellent work, but we need to do excellent work that informs an ongoing and real conversation. And does so in a way thatrepresents the reality and complexity of the real world.

Dr. Matthew Kraft, Brown University and SustainableEd, the new center you’re building to address some of these research questions. Appreciate you taking the time with us today.

It’s a pleasure, and I’ll say that we at the SustainableEd organization are looking to bring people together who are interested in these topics about climate and education from all different angles, researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and so we welcome people to reach out.

We think that moving the conversation forward will really require us to help people to understand that this is just not about macro, global, planetary health. This is about the bottom line of budgets for families and for school districts.

This is about student health and student learning. And the more people that come to see that environmental issues are core education policy issues, I think the more progress we’ll be able to make. And a big shout out to my co-authors, uh, the lead on this study, Sohil Malik and Grace Falken.

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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.

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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 save some money at the end, invest it early, and let kids go get that college and career training as soon as they can at 17.

If you want to grow an economy where everyone’s got a shot, you have to make strategic national investments in children and families.—Congressman Greg Landsman

The administration has been cutting everything that touches kids and families — Head Start, Title I, IDEA funding. As someone who led a local ballot measure to fill gaps the state and federal government weren’t filling, what’s your honest assessment of how much of this damage cities and counties can actually absorb on their own?

I think they’re at their limit. And this has been going on. It’s been accelerated under Trump—the sort of pulling back of federal support, and quite frankly, in Ohio, state support. And so local communities have tried to patch and piece things together. And most communities, unfortunately, have had to turn to taxpayers and say the State is, or the Federal Government is, no longer working on these issues that we care deeply about, that matter to our community. So we’ve gotta we gotta put something on the ballot and raise people’s taxes.

And so people are paying more in taxes, even though federally, and here in Ohio, politicians are like, “well, we lowered taxes.” No, you didn’t. You lowered taxes for the super wealthy and these corporations. But, the everyday, Ohioan—this is true in most parts of America—Americans are paying more because their local property taxes went up because they have to fund the things that are no longer being supported by state and federal budgets, and that is hugely problematic for folks,

I think, at least here in this community, they’re running out of room in terms of the capacity of local taxpayers, and it’s a scary proposition because we have to provide healthcare and education and housing, and these local communities can’t do it on their own.

That’s why we’ve always invested in these things at the federal level, too. It’s not entirely at the federal level, but if you want to grow an economy where everyone’s got a shot, you have to make strategic national investments in children and families. And that’s childcare and preschool and schools and housing and health care, all of those things.

And when you pull back on it, it’s going to cost local communities more, and ultimately, they’re gonna run out of room and our economy is going to just fall off a cliff.

You’re a former teacher leading a bipartisan child care bill in one of the most dysfunctional Congresses in modern history. What’s the path for this kind of work to be sustained where, say, kids in Cincinnati and everywhere else are better off five years from now?

I think there’s a path in the sense that it’s still, you know, relatively bipartisan. I mean, there’s some partisan arguments about where the dollars go, but I think supporting children and families is something that should be bipartisan. The issue is lawmakers like me have to be able to like punch through this chaos and the dysfunction.

And, you know, we would be better served with a speaker that wants to see bipartisan work, and work that’s actually going to improve people’s lives, as opposed to the political, hyper-partisan political theater that we get day in and day out with this current crew.

Congessman Greg Landsman represents Ohio’s 1st District. You can read more about him here, or on his campaign page.

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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 threats were unlawful. The University of California was going to negotiate a settlement with the Trump administration, but the faculty and faculty unions got together and filed a preemptive lawsuit, and the court said that what the Trump administration was doing was unlawful there.

And what they’re doing is saying, look, you’re a university, you depend on hundreds of millions of dollars a year of federal funding for research programs. We’re going to cut that off until you do exactly what we want. This is plainly abusive and a violation of law.

But there are so many of these examples where what the Trump administration is doing is using the tools it has cut off federal funds to investigate or threaten investigations or prosecutions in order to coerce people to do their bidding and in order to punish people who seem to be on the wrong side of the administration for reasons having nothing to do with the laws that are being enforced.

Let’s talk more about one piece of this. OMB has recently announced it’s reviewing uniform guidance for federal awards. Which basically is bureaucracy speak for “it’s looking for new ways to hold back funding.” This is one (of many) potential changes that could in my world fundamentally alter the federal relationship to education. But can you just walk us through this particular piece, this uniform grant guidance, what they're trying to do mechanically, and why you think it’s wrong?

So there are across the entire federal government many, many programs that Congress has created to give grants to various entities. Sometimes it’s for scientific or medical research from NIH or National Science Foundation. Sometimes it’s for job training, which could be from the Department of Education or Department of Labor. Sometimes it’s for programs to support education from the Department of Education anywhere, housing programs, any kind of program, you name it.

And what this uniform grants guidance would do is it would adopt a uniform grants regulation to replace what we have now, which is a general set of guidance for each agency to make its own rules with a single uniform set of rules that govern all the grants.

And uniformity, you can have some arguments, is that good or bad? The problem is the specific rules that would be adopted, which would do things like, say, peer review can only be advisory.

And any grant determination whether to issue a grant and to whom has to be made by a political appointee and has to be made by a political appointee according to what demonstrably advances the president’s priorities.

Now, Congress has created a whole bunch of very specific grant programs to serve various kinds of interests and to pursue various goals, which may not be the president’s goals. In fact, we know they’re not the president’s goals.

Congress has specifically required peer review for grants from some agencies like NIH and NSF, where what we’re trying to do is advance the science, and so we want the scientific community to have a significant amount of control over where those grants go.

So that’s, I think, illegal. It’s flying in the face of a congressional determination, and it’s likely to lead to less development of knowledge and less development of useful knowledge, right? So it’s gonna harm the public. It’s gonna mean…people are gonna die, people aren’t gonna learn as much, I mean, you know, it’s really very serious stuff.

Also, there’s a set of forbidden topics in this rule that says, you know, we can’t be financing quote-unquote gender ideology, which means, you know, saying that LGBTQ people should be treated equally and with respect. We can’t finance quote-unquote, illegal DEI, which is a term that this administration throws around, that it’s never been clear what they mean by it, except efforts to promote equality on the basis of race or sex; ghat grants should not be used to promote illegal immigration. Again, nobody is using grants to actually pay for people to cross the border illegally. Promote illegal immigration seems to be used in a way that’s, like, to flag people talking about the value of immigrants, however they came into this country, to their communities.

So that’s a major concern. And then there’s also a very significant concern about adding a provision that would say that grants can be terminated at any time if they no longer serve the policy goals of the incumbent administration, which means if you get a multi-year grant, you know, to conduct a study that’s going to take 5, 6, 7 years, you have to purchase a lot of infrastructure, you have to hire a lot of people.

All of those investments can end up just in the garbage can at the whim of a political appointee who decides, yeah, politically, I don’t like where this study is going. Again, just deeply contrary to the idea of developing knowledge.

And to what Congress has repeatedly voted for. So it’s deeply contrary to our Republican democracy, where we don’t have one person who decides. We elect a set of representatives who pass laws, and the president has a duty to faithfully execute those laws.

On OMB more generally, one thing I hear about right now is “well we don’t trust Russ Vought not to say he just doesn’t like something and hold funding back.” That’s fear is across the board with education funding, but I want to ask where you think some of the real danger spots may be over the next, 30 months or so left in the administration.

Russ Vought, the OMB director, is, I think, one of the most significant figures in this administration. And he is significant because, A, he’s totally bought into the Trump approach to the world, and B, he is very, very smart and skilled with moving the bureaucracy. And so it’s that combination that is incredibly dangerous here.

He knows, I mean, he was OMB director during Trump’s first term, at least toward the end, as well as working in the White House before that. And he’s been around Washington a long time. He understands the levers to pull and the most important lever that the Office of Management and Budget has is that it controls the purse strings.

So the B part of OMB, Office of Management and Budget, is really, really important. No agency can spend a dollar of the money that Congress has appropriated until OMB signs something called an apportionment. And what Russ… and this is, like, incredibly wonky stuff nobody knows about, and what Russ Vought knows is that that is the crucial lever for making agencies do what you want to do.

And, you know, in a well-run administration, what would happen, and an administration that cares about good government, what would happen is the apportionment power would be used as a tool to make sure the agency had a good plan for spending the money.

The whole reason it’s there is so agencies don’t spend too much too quickly, but are spending prudently and spending efficiently. And so you’d have a conversation, then you’d sign off and say, okay, go ahead, spend the money or spend this quarter’s amount of money and come back to me in a couple of months for next quarter.

And what Vought has done, pervasively, is use it to drill down to the most specific decisions and say, I’m not going to sign off on this unless you hammer these people and reward these other people.

One of the things we’re seeing him do now, and the pattern is very clear, is the president sends up to Congress a budget every year. That budget is not legally binding. That’s the president’s proposal. Congress has the power of the purse under our Constitution. Congress adopts a budget through a law. They pass a budget resolution and then they pass appropriations laws.

And those laws are binding on the president, and the president cannot refuse to spend money that Congress has passed through an appropriations law, which, of course, the president has signed. But what we’re seeing now is where Congress appropriates money that goes beyond what was in the president’s budget request.

What Russ Vought is doing is just saying to the agencies, you may not spend beyond the president’s budget request. And so he’s effectively treating Congress as having adopted the budget that they explicitly refused to adopt.

And so this is creating problems over and over and over again. And again, it’s harmful to effective governance, and it’s also fundamentally anti-democratic. I mean, you know, there is a long and unfortunate history that led to the legislature taking the power of the purse, first from the King of England, and then that carried over to our founding.

And, you know, what we’re seeing right now is reversing that in favor of allowing one man, Donald Trump, and his one man by his side, Russ Vought, to make these decisions.

Your expertise and experience are in really high demand right now. You’re all over the podcast circuit, I see you on socials commenting on things. What have you not been asked here or elsewhere? Get something off your chest that the good governance, the policy community should be thinking about moving forward.

Well, I think the thing people are thinking about too little is, you know, we obviously let’s hope, are gonna have a new day at some point where we’re gonna be in a position to rebuild what’s been torn down. And everybody knows that that’s gonna be a very difficult effort.

I think people are dramatically underestimating the scale of what’s going to be necessary, that it’s not just going to be, OK, that was a thing that happened those last four years. Let’s go back to normal. There is not going to be a normal anymore.

In order to rebuild the government, we’re going to have to, unfortunately, spend a lot more money than we would have expected because, again, we have to rehire people. People who have left government service, often because they were forced out, are not going to come back on the same terms as they did before.

You know, the reason why people serve in government jobs, in career civil service jobs, I mean, two reasons. One, they know that it’s a mission-focused job. And two, they know it has stability. And what we’ve learned in two successive Trump administrations is that we are one election away from losing both of those aspects of the public service bargain.

And so we’re going to have to do something to entice people to come back.

That’s gonna be expensive, that’s gonna be hard, that’s gonna require rethinking a whole lot about the way the government works. And I think people just need to get their minds around just how difficult a position we’re in. Now, I know there are a lot of people who are working very hard now to be prepared and who will be ready to jump in, but it’s going to be an enormous task.

Sam Bagenstos is a law professor at the University of Michigan, former general counsel at the Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Health and Human Services under Joe Biden, and former deputy at the Department of Justice under President Obama.

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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 dangerous from a funding point for our public schools. And also it’s embedded in Michigan’s constitution, so they’re not even legal in Michigan.

But let’s just sort of define what the problem is. We’re, what, 30 years from No Child Left Behind, where we put in this accountability system and these mandated testing of one specific test that was mandated, and that test does not inform the practice of teaching in any way, shape, or form.

The schools have no voice in when it’s administered and what test it is, and the consequences are very draconian. And parents don’t understand what any of that means.

So in that time, what we have seen is our educational outcomes drop, teacher salaries basically stagnate, and everybody is very concerned with the state of our education system. So I think what we have to think about is what do we do going forward?

Because the problem here is that our teachers are demoralized and struggling financially. Our kids, what we’re watching is that the access to things outside of those core things that are tested is almost non-existent unless you are from a wealthy family or in a wealthy community.

And when I was coming up, granted, I’m an old person now, right? But I took driver’s training at school. Sports were free. There were all kinds of things that helped me become who I am that were beyond my math skills. And that, I think, is where not just Democrats, but everybody should be focusing.

They would 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.

We have to stop being in a place where we’re looking at states that are getting to a 60% reading proficiency and a 20% math proficiency in high school, and calling that a miracle.—Congresswoman Kristen McDonald Rivet

Last question. It’s pretty clear that the federal role in education is changing—funding, oversight, governance, all of it. You have an Administration that is doing everything it can to dismantle the Department of Education. As someone who’s sat in local, state, and now national leadership positions, what do you see when you look ahead? Where do we go from here and what are some of the big priorities we need to focus on together?

I’m just going to give it a little bit of an optimistic twist, which I know is unusual in these times. But let me say this. The president can’t eliminate the Department of Education. He’s got to go to Congress with that, and there aren’t the votes.

He’s farming out all of the different pieces of it to make it basically a shallow shell. But I think we can all agree that the Federal Department of Education needed a massive overhaul.

And so, now we’re in a place where we are going to have to rebuild. So for me, it’s not a question of we’ll see what it looks like when it’s rebuilt. I wanna be a part of rebuilding it. And what we actually need to do is to think about, so the one I’m most worried about in the right now is our kids that need special education services.

Because that is highly alarming to have that entire program put under Health and Human Services in a department that is completely rejecting all science of all kinds, and there’s just so many concerns there.

We also — what if we could build a Department of Education that said, listen: we need every single kid who graduates from our public school system to be proficient in reading and functional in math.

And when I say every single kid, we have to stop being in a place where we’re looking at states that are getting to a 60% reading proficiency and a 20% math proficiency in high school, and calling that a miracle.

That is bananas! So, if the Federal Department of Education suddenly became a place that was trying new things, an education R&D, where we are looking at places where we can get to 90%, not 60%, that is something worth investing in, and I think that we all need to commit to being a part of the rebuild of the Department of Ed, and make it really work towards this goal of every kid and not just the rich kids and then some small other part of the country.

Congresswoman Rivet is also running for re-election in the competitive 8th District—a seat that Democrats have to hold to retake the majority in Congress. You can learn more about her campaign here.

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

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 Emanuel making this a big thing but that’s about it right now. How if at all do you think education—K12 specifically but also across the board—should fit into a larger vision for where progressives ought to be and where we’re going?

This is a fantastic question, and I really appreciate it, because I think a lot about education. I hate aging myself like this, but I came up in the 90s, One of my first jobs, I was privileged to work in the Clinton White House. Bill Clinton talked a lot about education. You know, he had a whole theory of what you earn will depend on what you learn.

That’s why we have to make college more affordable to people. We have to give more people access to college. Maybe we overdid it on college, but he had a conversation with the country about education on a regular basis,

As did Barack Obama. Now, I think a real challenge over the last several years is, No Child Left Behind did not deliver the level of school improvement it basically promised.

And then as a result of NCLB not really delivering enough school improvement, we then kind of moved away from it, but didn’t replace it with much. Like, to be totally candid, in the Biden administration, we were focused on mental health, and we did focus on absenteeism in the last few years, because that was a big problem.

But I think the fundamental issue the public is interested in, from parents, to community leaders, to people who don’t have kids in school is: how are schools improving? How are schools ensuring that students academic performance is increasing. And how, what is the system in which schools are improving themselves?

And at CAP, you know, we are evidence-based. We’ve looked at around the country and you do see innovations in places like Mississippi, Alabama. When I was the domestic policy advisor to the president, we had the superintendent of Alabama at the White House. Bipartisan learning from what they did. And fundamentally, what states are doing that are succeeding, these southern states, is they have a pretty state-based, top-down push on accountability.

And the accountability isn’t here’s this cookie-cutter way that you should improve your schools. I mean, they are investing in tutors and other things, but they’re basically trying to drive school systems, and then school systems are driving superintendents, superintendents are driving principals to improve year to year.

And yes we should have a broad based discussion of each policy that works and we should invest in tutoring and we should get make school interesting to people with lots of different kind of experiences and not just, you know, career-connected learning.

But 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 as much really pushing the ball forward with ideas of how the whole country benefits from a good education system.

It should be a national priority, not just a state priority. But I also think when it’s a national priority, that also ends up driving school improvement in a way that is hard to measure but does seem to have a real impact.

What we should really be aiming for is a broad, resilient majority in the country that is so large that Republicans doubt whether MAGAism is a electoral success strategy for them. There’s lots of issues in which I might have a different view from someone, but I think we have to give space to welcome independents and even some Republicans. It’s really crucial. —Neera Tanden

I had Run for Something’s Amanda Litman on a few weeks ago and she’s really pushed this line I’ve been quoting constantly and that’s something like “be flexible with policy, consistent on values.” How do you think about a guidepost like that? Are there some policies on the Democratic side where compromise actually would be a betrayal of values? I think probably reproductive freedom is one. Marriage equality. Where are some places for you where the values are the policy, and where should we be more flexible?

So let me say how I see the next 3 years. I’ll answer this question, but I think it’s really important for people to think about the possibilities and what’s at stake.

So, I think it’s important to win elections, absolutely. But I would like this nightmare of the last 10 years to be over. I would like to wake up days and not think of Trump, or MAGAism. There is a MAGA movement in the country, it’s not just Trump. So, that’s what we have to defeat.

To me, the real problem in our politics is that we are in 50-50 election cycles. Joe Biden’s election, he won seven more million more votes for sure. And he won a bunch of swing states over Trump. But those seven swing states were decided by like 250,000 votes. What got him to over the hump was relatively close.

But it shouldn’t be close. The way I orient my life and our work here is, it’s the job is to win elections, for sure. But what we should really be aiming for is a broad, resilient majority in the country that is so large that Republicans doubt whether MAGAism is a electoral success strategy for them.

And that only happens where you defeat or expand movements with broad election sweeps. So, from our perspective, there’s lots of issues in which I have a different view, but I think we have to give space to welcome independents and even some Republicans. It’s really crucial.

And these issues are debated back and forth in all these primaries. There are Democratic candidates today who are winning, you know, 7, 8, 9% of their vote from Republicans who voted for Trump. Like, last year, Abigail Spanberger, Mikie Sherrill. This candidate who won in Texas 9 in January: they were able to put together a broad coalition that include liberal Democrats, moderate Democrats, moderates, independent voters, and a sliver of Republicans, non-MAGA Republicans.

Do I know that will defeat MAGAism? I do not. But I do know we will never defeat MAGAism if we are in, like, 50-50 elections. Because if the elections are so close, they will always have a story that they were cheated, not defeated. And that’s my orientation.

I think we should think about issues like: if we want Republicans or moderate Republicans to come into a coalition where they have to be flexible, we have to be flexible, too.

Now, there are some issues, again, like civil rights for people. I think for the Democratic Party, a core value, is basic civil rights for all people. I’m against racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia and I’m against anti-Semitism. I don’t find that to be a complicated thought for me,

But I think a big challenge in the Democratic Party that is weaponized by the right, for sure, and unfairly weaponized, is the sense of judgment: you are being judged by this elite who looks down on you. That is, like, a constant message of Republicans.

So, more than just issues, I think we have to have the orientation towards people, which is you’re not stupid for disagreeing with me. We have a disagreement. Let’s talk it out. And I think that’s something we can all measure, we can all work on and none of us are perfect on this.

Politics is about addition, it’s not about subtraction. And, you know, and I will say, I will give credit to Mamdani, who was a pretty, you know, pretty left guy, but had an ethos in his campaign of trying to welcome people who disagree with him: Trump voters, everybody. And I think that, beyond particular issues, is a really important ethos.

Neera Tanden is President and CEO of the Center for American Progress.

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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 financializing education to that point.

And cutting and cutting and cutting is the name of the game.

The idea of financializing things that are fundamentally about child development, I think, is just especially worrisome. Anything you can think of that is a service that your kids use, if you are a parent, probably private equity is either in it or coming in.—Megan Greenwell

How about youth sports? Black Bear owns all these leagues. Arenas and rinks now. I think this is a huge source of stress for families and they don’t even know private equity is involved. Can you explain why this is happening in the youth sports space? Any other areas for kids and families we really need to watch for when it comes to private equity?

Yeah, youth sports is a newer area of investment for private equity and it’s very surprising to me that it took so long because once you start thinking about how private equity works and how youth sports works from the perspective of a private equity firm, it does seem really perfect.

So again, there’s like a subscription model thing at play and there are a lot of parents who will pay because they want their kids to be competitive for scholarships, for college admissions, and that now requires year-round training, going to all the travel tournaments, private coaching. And so those are the areas where you’ve seen private equity get really involved.

So you mentioned Black Bear. Their model is on some level, incredibly impressive to me, because they did buy up all the rinks. They bought up a lot of the, like, training programs, online training programs, but also the, like, staffing agencies for private coaches.

I think I read that you now have to pay $37 a month for these video services that mean you can’t just like pull out your iPhone at the youth hockey game and record your kid. It’s a pretty remarkable pipeline that they’ve built.

And you know, there are all sorts of problems here if private equity runs as much of the youth sports industry as it does. The cost escalation is going to continue to get more and more out of hand, right? And there aren’t going to be lower cost alternatives.

And then, of course, you’re pricing out lower income kids. You end up with a situation where the only kids who can afford to play at an elite level and thus compete for those athletic scholarships, etc, are the wealthier ones.

And so the idea of financializing things that are fundamentally about child development, I think, is just especially worrisome. And it’s also one of the biggest areas of investment. Right?

So you see, not only youth sports, not only education, but a lot of, like, autism therapy providers, preschools—private equity is huge in preschools. Anything where private equity firms can kind of take advantage of parents’ deep-seated desire to take good care of their kids.

So basically, anything you can think of that is a service that your kids use, if you are a parent, probably private equity is either in it or coming in.

What can be done about any of this? Let’s say I’m the sort of listener who is alarmed by what you say but also doesn’t use words like “a billionaire shouldn’t exist!” I just want things to be fair. You write about closing the carried interest loophole as one pretty sensible short term fix. Can you explain that and take us into the future here?

So the carried interest loophole basically means that profits in private equity firms and other kinds of big financial firms are taxed as theoretical rather than real profits.

The history of this is super interesting. It comes from actually what you carried on a ship. I got really fascinated by that history, but what it means is that the top tax rate is 22% compared to 37% for ordinary businesses.

The idea of closing the carried interest loophole has been relatively popular with both Democrats and Republicans for years.

George W. Bush proposed closing the loophole. Obama, Trump in his first term proposed closing the loophole. Joe Biden, and Trump has now mentioned it again in his second term. And yet, it has never gone through, in large part because 88% of members of the House and Senate take private equity donations, and they just have no interest in pissing off that industry.

And so the last time it came close to being closed was in 2021 as part of one of the pandemic relief bills and Kristen Sinema, who at the time was a Democrat, and at the time was a Senator almost single-handedly made sure that got stripped from the bill in exchange for her vote.

So [closing] that would be a great start. On the other end of the spectrum, Elizabeth Warren has proposed what she calls the “Stop Wall Street Looting” bill over and over and over again since 2018, and that would fundamentally undermine how the private equity world operates.

That’s never going to get through without a pretty dramatic change in the composition of Congress. And I don’t actually think it has to. If I could wave a magic wand and make one change, I probably wouldn’t even start with the carried interest loophole.

I would just say, if you’re a private equity firm and you take out loans, you have to share responsibility for those loans. I have talked to so many people in private equity land who have never really been able to articulate an objection to that other than that, you know, it would cut into our profits, which is itself not really an objection.

I’ve talked to many people who without reading my book, sort of think that it’s like a socialist screed. My argument would be a change like that would actually get us back much closer to what free market capitalism was supposed to be.

What’s next for you? Like, what are you up to now?

So I’m a contributing writer at Bloomberg Businessweek. I have a brand new story out this week about community health workers and how they save the economy a lot of money, but are being threatened by public health funding cuts.

So I remain interested in these questions of how systems affect people, and I’m canvassing around. I think I might have a next book idea. But I’m still working on it.

Megan Greenwell, the author of Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream, thanks so much for having this conversation today.

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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. Does Betrayed connect that thread to the current moment? Is what we’re seeing in this administration just more of that, or is there something structurally different happening?

There’s definitely some commonality in themes. The book you’re referring to is Poverty for Profit, and that really looked at the privatization of public services and how for-profit actors have really taken advantage of government programs that were intended to help the poor, but instead are profiting from themselves. And that is definitely happening today in real time.

I’ll just give you a couple of instances. First of all, we’ve had this long-going privatization of criminal justice, private prisons. So, who is running the immigration detention camps? Well, it’s GEO Group, it’s CoreCivic, it’s these companies that have been running private prisons for decades now.

If you just look up GEO Group and look at their stock price, they’re profiting from the $80 billion that’s expected to be coming their way from the One Big Beautiful Bill on immigration enforcement. So these contractors are being hired at enormous expense, often without competitive bids to carry out the administration’s agenda.

So that is one way in which there is this group of corporate middlemen. And another example of that is the Medicaid work reporting requirements. So there’s been a lot of reporting lately, actually, by contractors who have been hired by the states to actually stand up the compliance regimes that will have to be in place for people to report their work effort in order to qualify for Medicaid.

Now, I have to clarify that most working age people who are on Medicaid are working already, you know. In fact, like Walmart, McDonald’s—these employers have huge numbers of people on their payrolls who get Medicaid because their wages are not high enough to qualify for any kinds of other kinds of insurance. They’re working. These are the folks who are going to have to be logging every hour that they’re working at Walmart in order to qualify.

Who is going to be monitoring those benefits? The contractors that the states have brought in at enormous expense, and millions of people are going to lose their Medicaid rolls. And that’s something that I talk about in Poverty for Profit too, like just a really human impact of having these companies in there administering programs, profiting from the programs, and taking advantage, triaging or arbitraging little inefficiencies in their programs to profit for themselves.

And 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. Right? I mean you can count multiple ways every day covered in news of the ways in which the Trump administration has tipped the scales in favor of friends and allies, and using the government as an instrument of corruption.

Even small things like, you know, repainting the reflecting pool in front of the monument. That was a no-bid contract that cost way more than it’s supposed to, and it looks bad too.

We have to drag ourselves back into a space where we can try to find common ground. As well as common sense, and rebuild the republic that we are in danger of losing. And we have to do so in as measured a way as possible, to reach out to those who may have been in a different space from us.—Anne Kim

You and I can both write about what went wrong. But I think about this a lot with my own readers — the question isn’t just “what happened” but “what do we do.” Given the political environment, what does meaningful accountability look like, and is “common sense” — the thing your coalition is named for — actually available to us right now as a political resource?

That’s a tough question. It’s not an easy question. I think it really is up to each one of us, you and I, and anyone listening to this to make common sense available as a resource to themselves.

To their friends and family, you know, and that’s kind of the purpose of the book, to take down the temperature, go back to facts.

What we don’t want to see, I think is really dangerous, is numbness, is apathy. A lot of people are in this “I just can’t tune in right now” kind of space, even as kind of democracy is crumbling before our eyes.

And I for one worry that this kind of willful blindness is going to enable everything we hold dear as Americans slip away.

But let’s take down the temperature a little bit, and try to rebuild those bridges that others out there are trying so hard to tear apart. And in terms of practical things to do. The conversations have to happen.

Voting has to happen.

You know, civic engagement has to happen. And I think even volunteering within the community will happen, you know, and rebuild some of that civic engagement that we’ve seen dissolve as a result of what’s been happening over the last decade.

Hear, hear. Well, let’s let that be the last word.

Anne Kim is the co-editor of this new book, Betrayed: America Didn’t Vote for This, and executive director of the Common Sense Coalition.

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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 benefits we’ve seen from a decision like Plyler. So I want to be honest with viewers that it got more complicated after the Biden border crisis.

They are sending the message globally that immigrants will be treated horribly here.—Andrea Flores

If immigration levels keep falling, or enforcement chills migration even without formal legal changes like Plyler or whatever else, what sectors or communities do you think feel it first, especially with respect to the argument you’re making about the economic issue, like, is this just a big city issue? Is this a rural issue? Is this just a southern border issue? How do you think about—I don’t want to say message targeting geographically, but—who feels this kind of thing first?

Well, we can even just unpack this current administration and one of the first impacts everyone will really see is the World Cup. We’ve seen that that should be a major economic event for the cities hosting games. And what is happening right now is they have empty hotel rooms, right?

That is a chilling effect from foreign travel, because this administration is sharing that if you come here just even on a tourist visa, you could end up in detention for 20 days. And so they are sending the message globally that immigrants will be treated horribly here.

And we’ll see that in the World Cup, and that’ll be less of an economic driver. Look at Nevada: Las Vegas tourism rates are down. That is always an early economic warning sign that we have or we’re losing our competitive edge, bringing tourists into the country. But then let’s go further.

When you have states like Texas, they’re attacking in-state tuition for undocumented students. They’re trying to criminalize going to the hospital for immigrants. I mean, that chills everything from small businesses. People stop leaving their houses. We’ve seen where there have been big deployments. Businesses are starting to close because people don’t leave their houses anymore. I think for every state, they will start to feel the impact at a different time, which sometimes makes it hard for a national argument.

I grew up in a border community where people were coming from Mexico just to shop as part of our, you know, daily economy. And those numbers are starting to be impacted as well.

It’s about changing the policy tools and telling a story with those changes, because that is what Trump is so good at doing. Every policy he pursues tells a story to Americans about why they should either be afraid of immigrants or why they may benefit from what he’s doing. And on the Democratic side, there’s none of that. It’s just “this is a human rights issue and it’s right to do and therefore support it.”—Andrea Flores

What would a better pro-immigration argument sound like, that’s comprehensive in, say, 2026, or moving ahead? Not just the moral argument alone, not just the Chamber of Commerce argument alone, but integrating all these things together, connecting immigration reform to families’ lives?

I think it’s being honest with exactly how immigration impacts the lives of American citizens. And that’s going to be a switch for the immigrant rights movement, right? Where I’ve worked in it for a long time, and our audience is generally immigrants who are impacted by the very broken system, or it’s been an audience in Washington, right? Because it’s a federal issue, you have to change it on the federal level. You can’t really go to a state and fix immigration and fix the visa system. It has to be a game in Congress.

But a way that you could start to change that is being really honest and saying, all right, so Congress just passed a big bipartisan housing bill. It’s going to be signed into law. It’s supposed to build a certain amount of housing in the next few years. It won’t be able to, right? Because it has no provision to make sure that the immigrant workers who would normally build those houses will be here.

So I think we have to be…we don’t have to talk about it in the same way. I always think about [for example] a path to citizenship. You mentioned polling. That always polls really well with Americans. But where we get stuck is, we often say, “well, we want to pass something that legalizes 11 million people.” And then people get really lost, right?

Why don’t we say “we have a caregiver visa, why can’t undocumented workers who are already caregiving qualify for that instead?” That’s a path to citizenship, potentially.

It’s about changing the policy tools and telling a story with those changes, because that is what Trump is so good at doing. Every policy he pursues tells a story to Americans about why they should either be afraid of immigrants or why they may benefit from what he’s doing. And on the Democratic side, there’s none of that. It’s just “this is a human rights issue and it’s right to do and therefore support it.” You’re never going to build a coalition.

Alright, last question. So building off of this point about Trump. The Trump enforcement politics are built around fear, spectacle, deterrence. I think that’s maybe even giving too much credit. I’m not sure they’re as organized to even deserve the word deterrent, honestly. But do you think that these kind of general tactics are still effective, even in the last few months? We obviously saw what happened in Minneapolis. Just yesterday a sitting senator, Andy Kim, got tear gassed outside of an ICE facility. Do you think this is still politically effective? Is immigration going to be a Teflon issue for Trump, even as the economy and everything just goes into the toilet? Or is it starting to create a backlash, especially kind of when voters see all this, when people see on their televisions and screens now. What’s it going to kind of take to move this issue into a more positive space moving forward?

I think it’s going to take Democrats offering an alternative vision. So let’s take Minneapolis, right? That was the most extreme [anti-immigration] deployment I’ve ever seen. That was something we’ve never seen before, but everything that comes after that looks like a de-escalation because that was so extreme.

Or take birthright citizenship, right? That was a fringe view that had been in the legal community treated as completely absurd, right?

And yet it’s at the Supreme Court. Trump probably will lose that case. But then that same week, he’ll probably win a case to terminate legal status for like 1.3 million people who have temporary protected status. So they kind of pair really big spectacle moves with things that are actually going to have even a bigger impact many times.

So yeah, stay at the overreach moments like a US senator should not be tear gassed when he’s just doing his oversight duty. But you need, to your point, candidates who can talk about that in real time and say, this is what mass deportation is. This is why it’s extreme. This is why it’s not good for the country, and here’s what we’ll do instead.

There’s so many other issues competing for Americans time, right? I think cost of living, the war, and for Trump, I always point out immigration is still the strongest of his low issues, right? His approval rating may be going down, but he’s still seen as having some advantage on it. And you can tell he feels that way based on the announcements and how they use it to distract.

Andrea Flores is the author of the Securing America’s Promise Substack. She’s widely read and cited across the board on this issue. Andrea, thanks so much for giving me a little bit of your time today. And let’s stay in touch and revisit this soon.

Yes, absolutely. Thanks for having me. Of course. Take care.

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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, you know, there was a lot of question and pushback around the speaker, and who was going to be speaker.

And Nancy Pelosi ended up running unopposed, right? And I don’t know if something like that’s going to be the case in the Senate. I really don’t. 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?

I am a lawmaker’s lawmaker. I love to write bills and move them to the floor and see them get passed. I am going to continue to, you know, maintain my good relationships in the House of Representatives because we need those relationships to pass the bills, right?

And then I think in terms of campaign finance reform. Yeah, look, we’re at a boiling point. We haven’t had reform in decades now, and we’re paying the price for it. I have proudly co-sponsored and voted for comprehensive campaign finance reform every single chance I have gotten.

I’m in my fourth year in the minority party, and I will tell you, Republicans aren’t lifting a finger on this front. They do not care about dark money or transparency or, you know, just this, you know, spend a bunch of money on Meta to raise a bunch of money.

Look. Mike Rogers will block campaign finance reform in the United States Senate.

I saw that when I was in the house. We voted for it in the House, and, you know, the Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell crew didn’t lift a finger on this front. We’ve got to reform, and so this is why, you know, I’ve got an A grading from the leading campaign finance reform organization End Citizens United.

I fundraise very similarly to how Gary Peters and Debbie Stabenow have. I’m really proud to have Debbie Stabenow’s endorsement in this race, which came a couple of weeks ago and has been really quite transformative

And I remain very deeply committed to my non-millionaire status, you know, in this race right now and getting campaign finance reform done and, you know, being of the people for the people and by the people.

After decades and decades and decades of not funding special education at the federal level, we’re leaving school districts and families holding the bag.—Rep. Haley Stevens

JOSH: I have many followers from the education community here. You serve on the House Education committee right now--you grilled Linda McMahon last week. What’s one big issue that’s come up in your time on that committee that you’d like folks to know about--that maybe we wouldn’t know or know less about had I not asked?

HALEY: One issue that I’ve really taken up and have led around has been the full funding for special education. There’s a member of Congress who has the pen on the bill. His name is Jared Huffman. He came into Congress before me, so I co-sponsor Jared’s bill to fully fund special education

But what I’ve also done has been very deep back here in Michigan, working with Bob McCann, who runs the K-12 Alliance. You know, working very closely with our heads of county school-wide systems, you know, our head of Oakland schools, Wayne RESA [the intermediate school district surrounding Detroit]. I know my superintendents very well. I got to know them really well during COVID, of course, school principals and educators and alike.

And the reason why I’ve really taken up the statewide mantle to achieve the full funding for this unfunded mandate is it is just squeezing us dry. It has been 50 years of, you know, the requirement, thankfully, to say that every child, no matter the ability, can go and get a public education.

In my district, we’ve got Wing Lake, which is a special needs school. I know some of the families who send their children there with very, very severe medically complex challenges. And thank goodness they’ve got that school and that they have Medicaid, even though Donald Trump has slashed it, because again, you know, if your kid doesn’t have full walking abilities or language abilities, you’re relying on that good public school. You’re relying on that Medicaid too.

[ed. note: a portion of Medicaid can be used to fund children’s health expenses specifically at schools. Roughly $8 billion in Medicaid funding went to kids for school-based services last year, around $200 million to Michigan]

But what has happened is it’s been kind of a robbing Peter to pay Paul. And in talking with some of the families, I know that, you know, they have to really, you know, look within the budget systems, make sure that their schools, you know, are getting, you know, the full funding, even students with, you know, some reading comprehension challenges, you know, IEPs and having the right educators around that.

And after decades and decades and decades of not funding special education at the federal level, we’re leaving school districts and families holding the bag.

This isn’t just one issue for me. It is my North Star. You know, Josh, 2020 hit, okay, the beginning of 2020. I said, this is going to be the year. I’m going to beat the drum on special ed. I had literally in January, a big community event. It was kind of like a town hall type of forum. I had community leaders, special education leaders, families talking. I was going to make that whole year for this push to do special ed.

Obviously, then Covid hit. But I think when you, you know, mirror good policymaking with the political, which sometimes ties into how we campaign or how we communicate with voters: I’m out here talking about this. I have made this a part of what I do because I really believe in these children and their parents, and we owe it to them. We really do.

So I’ll stop because I could go on and on, and there’s other things I’ve worked on, particularly around the Addressing Teacher Shortages Act, you know, the very frustrating reality that they have completely gutted the Department of Education.

We don’t have an Office of Civil Rights—and on and on. I mentioned my dad briefly. He taught public school in Detroit. For the last 15 years of his career, he was first grade. He was at Bethune Elementary School in Pontiac the day Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. He was a student teacher. He was part of the Jonathan Kozol desegregation, equal access movement on education.

So this has just been a policy issue that I just all around want to take up and continue to lead on education in the United States Senate. And you better believe me when I say I’m going to do that, I will.

We need good, effective partnership to meet goals and to meet national priorities.—Rep. Haley Stevens.

JOSH: Last week I had Amanda Litman on from Run for Something. We talked a little bit about federal education and all this stuff. You mentioned the Department of Ed. And one of the things Amanda said was, you know, Trump wrecked this thing, and I think those of us who’ve been in this space for a long time know that there’s a major change coming in sort of the federal approach to education moving forward. How do you think about this as somebody actually in Congress right now thinking about the future? How do you see the federal role changing when it comes to kids and families?

HALEY: We’ve got to fully support families with an equitable and fair tax code. You know, we’ve got to look at who’s paying what marginal tax rate and why the middle class family is oftentimes paying more than the big corporations or the billionaires.

We’ve got to stand up for the earned benefits and guarantee those earned benefits for Social Security and Medicare. And here in Michigan, and with regard to our Department of Education: We need partnership.

You know, a lot of times Republicans shape this as bureaucracy or the need for limited government. We need good, effective partnership to meet goals and to meet national priorities.

JOSH: I want to ask one final question about being a person. You put out a tweet a little while ago about all the attacks that have come your way. Being a person is hard even when you’re not in the public eye and I want to know how you take care of yourself, what’s one thing you do just for you that keeps you grounded and gets you up in the morning.

HALEY: Well, this morning I got up and went for a nice jog. Time outside is really a blessing, even in those cold winter days, you know, just taking a couple round walks around the block, you know, stopping to smell the flowers, as they say.

But also, you know, I mentioned my parents had the landscape business. So we always take time to send each other pictures of cool trees that we see, which I know sounds kind of dorky, but it’s just really, you know, being in awe of Mother Nature. And we all know that the science is right around that, you know, when you’re in Mother Nature, your blood pressure is lowering, your stress levels are going down, and that’s an easy reset for anybody, right?

Because, gosh, you know, whether you’re single or raising a family, you know, you’re working full time, finishing off your degree or your apprenticeship training program: we all need just to find the pleasure in little things. The easy and accessible things like going outside, getting a walk in or a jog. And that’s certainly what I do.

Haley Stevens is the Congresswoman from the 11th District in Michigan running for the US Senate in a really crucial race. Congresswoman, thanks so much for giving me a little bit of time today. Thanks for putting your hand up. We’ll talk soon, okay?

HALEY: Yes, we will. Thank you.

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