vox--2020-09-03--How Trump made it that much harder to become a US citizen

Immigrants have applied to become US citizens in increasing numbers since Donald Trump took office , which some policy analysts say is the effect of the president ’ s anti-immigrant rhetoric .
But the path hasn ’ t been easy .
They ’ re facing ballooning processing times , higher fees , more intensive vetting , and even the possibility of later losing their citizenship at the hands of the Department of Justice ’ s newly created “ denaturalization section , ” which it announced in February 2020 .
US Citizenship and Immigration Services ( USCIS ) , the agency @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has reopened its offices , but it ’ s also grappling with a budget crisis amid the coronavirus pandemic and struggling to keep up with the naturalization backlog .
As he seeks reelection , Trump is trying to portray himself as favoring legal immigration .
On August 25 , he held a naturalization ceremony at the White House for citizens of five different countries .
The ceremony , broadcast during the Republican National Convention , likely violated federal law prohibiting taxpayer funds from being used for political campaigns .
It also exploited the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t know the ceremony would be part of the president ’ s reelection pitch .
But his actual immigration policies have primarily aimed to keep even legal immigrants out .
The Covid-19 pandemic has added another layer of complications : More than 300,000 people stuck in a naturalization backlog could lose out on their chance to vote in the November election , in which new US citizens were previously projected to be among the fastest-growing voting blocs .
Doug Rand , a former White House official who worked on immigration policy in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Immigration , a tech company that helps immigrants apply for green cards and citizenship , said it ’ s hard not to see the obstacles to naturalization as being tinged with politics at the leadership level , even though rank-and-file employees are rushing to process naturalizations .
“ This administration will do anything it can do to prevent people from achieving all of the milestones up to and including citizenship , ” Rand said .
“ There ’ s certainly no evidence that this administration has been in a hurry to give people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ re legally entitled to it.
” The Trump administration has made it harder to naturalize Under Trump , naturalization — the process of becoming an American citizen — is taking longer than it has in the recent past .
Generally , only people who are over the age of 18 and have been a permanent resident for at least five years ( or three years if they are married to a US citizen ) are eligible to naturalize .
Once they file a naturalization application , they can expect to wait another 8.8 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ citizen , according to the latest USCIS data available — an increase of more than 50 percent since before Trump took office .
In some areas , such as Seattle and Miami , wait times can exceed two years .
The increasing delays are due in part to Trump ’ s policy of “ extreme vetting.
” As a result , USCIS has increased its scrutiny of all immigration applications on the premise of rooting out fraud .
People applying for citizenship have already been vetted at least once to obtain a green @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if they first came to the US on a temporary visa .
Officials typically screen green card applicants , for example , for tax compliance , criminal history , US residence , and family ties .
Immigration attorneys have argued that additional in-depth screening isn ’ t necessary and only makes the process more cumbersome .
But Ken Cuccinelli , then the acting director of USCIS , made his priorities clear in a July 2019 interview with the Wall Street Journal .
“ We are not a benefit agency , we are a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In Minnesota , immigrants whose green cards came through the visa lottery program have faced heightened scrutiny of their applications , said Ana Pottratz Acosta , an immigration lawyer in the state .
The visa lottery is designed to attract citizens of countries with historically low levels of immigration , and it ’ s a program Trump has often maligned .
Immigrants have been threatened with deportation for failing to list a spouse or child on their initial visa application , which US officials allege constitutes fraud , even as their citizenship applications @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unusual , Acosta said , and has left many immigrants with little means of obtaining legal relief in federal court .
It ’ s also more expensive than ever to become a citizen .
Fees for online naturalization applications have already risen considerably in recent years , from $ 330 in 2006 to $ 640 in 2016 .
The fees will jump to $ 1,160 beginning October 2 , at which point USCIS will also eliminate most fee waivers for people who can not afford the cost .
( An ongoing lawsuit seeks @ @ @ @ @ @ @ effect on the basis they would disproportionately hurt applicants who are least able to pay . )
The cost of becoming a US citizen remains a big barrier to many of the roughly 9.2 million immigrants living in the US who are eligible to naturalize .
For example , Mexicans have naturalized at relatively low rates despite being the largest group of legal immigrants in the US by country of origin , and cost is the primary reason , according to the Pew Research Center .
Until it was struck down by a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ policy also increased scrutiny of noncitizens who joined the US military and are seeking naturalization .
Before the policy went into effect in 2017 , more than 8,500 service members applied to be fast-tracked for citizenship .
But under the policy , noncitizens were required to serve at least 180 days on active duty or one year in the reservists before they became eligible to apply for citizenship , resulting in a 72 percent decline in the number of soldiers applying for naturalization in the year after it was implemented .
The pandemic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ delayed naturalizations In March , just as many states were implementing Covid-19 stay-at-home orders , USCIS announced it was shutting down field offices , where interviews for citizenship applications normally take place .
Citizenship oath ceremonies — normally joyous affairs representing the final step in the naturalization process , attended by hundreds of almost-citizens and their families — came to a halt .
The agency refused to administer citizenship ceremonies online , citing “ logistical challenges ” and security concerns .
When USCIS began reopening offices June 4 , spokesperson Dan Hetlage said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” was to conduct naturalization ceremonies for people whose ceremonies had been postponed .
The ceremonies were pared down to just 15 minutes , with roughly 20 people standing 6 feet apart in a room , sometimes with the officiant appearing remotely on a screen .
Some ceremonies have been administered at drive-through sites .
Hetlage said the agency has since carried out almost all of those 110,000 naturalizations ( the rest have to be carried out by federal courts , some of which have put naturalizations on hold due to the pandemic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ only a fraction of the more than 700,000 naturalization applications that were pending at the end of March , suggesting the agency is still facing a hefty backlog .
“ With those oaths complete , naturalizations continue to be a priority for USCIS , and we strive to complete them as efficiently as possible .
We have also prioritized rescheduling interviews for naturalization and adjustment of status that were postponed , ” Hetlage said in a statement to Vox .
“ We are conducting naturalization interviews and are committed to conducting as many @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is safe for our staff and for the public.
” Immigrant advocates are worried that naturalization interviews , the second-to-last step before becoming a citizen , aren ’ t being scheduled quickly enough .
Rand said that by Boundless ’ s estimates , there could be some 315,000 people waiting for their interviews — many of them in Florida — who could be deprived of the chance to vote in November due to administrative delays .
Immigration attorneys have also reported delays in the scheduling of naturalization interviews across the US .
( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ number of people waiting for interviews from the number of pending cases , an agency spokesperson said . )
“ The USCIS , while clearly swearing people in that it interviewed before shutting down [ during ] the pandemic , is still light years behind where it should be in interviewing and naturalizing future citizens , many of whom applied well more than a year ago for their citizenship with the hopes to vote in the upcoming election , ” Charles Kuck , an immigration lawyer based in Atlanta , said .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ USCIS , it seems especially problematic this year , given what ’ s at stake in this year ’ s election for immigrants to America.
” USCIS has processed an average of about 12,000 citizenship applications per week since March 18 , according to USCIS data .
But that ’ s still well below the rate needed to reach the 70,000 naturalizations that are typically completed per month .
USCIS ’ s ability to speed up naturalizations is hampered by its ongoing budget crisis .
Unlike other federal agencies , USCIS receives almost @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on fees associated with filing applications for green cards , visas , work permits , US citizenship , and humanitarian benefits such as asylum .
In May , USCIS asked Congress for a $ 1.2 billion bailout , claiming it would “ have to take drastic actions to keep the agency afloat ” by the end of the summer without aid .
At the time , a spokesperson for the agency said the pandemic had already brought on a “ dramatic decrease ” in revenue .
Trump ’ s restrictions on immigration , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and the closing of necessary government offices that process applications all contributed to the decline in revenue .
To help mitigate the budget shortfall , USCIS in July announced a weighted average increase of 20 percent on all applications and limited spending to salary and mission-critical activities .
The agency now projects it will have enough funds to remain operable through October and announced it would delay a plan to furlough roughly 70 percent of staff .
But the agency also said it is still carrying out “ aggressive spending reduction measures ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ although “ naturalization ceremonies will continue.
” USCIS hasn ’ t released data on how many applications it has received since states first implemented stay-at-home orders in March , but it has acknowledged that applications are on the decline .
The latest available comprehensive data , from January through March , showed a reduction in overall applications of less than 2 percent from the preceding three months .
Applications dipped in April , May , and June compared to the same period last year across several temporary visa categories , including H-1B visas @ @ @ @ @ @ @ temporary nonagricultural workers , L-1 visas for people transferring within a multinational company , and O visas for those who show extraordinary ability or achievement in particular industries .
But some experts are skeptical that the budget shortfall due to Covid-19 is as dire as USCIS made it out to be in May , saying the agency was already on a path to insolvency before the pandemic hit .
Sharvari Dalal-Dheini , director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association , told Congress in July that USCIS had mismanaged a surplus @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump administration , introduced inefficient vetting procedures , and hired too many new staff to identify and investigate fraud , among other ill-advised financial decisions .
“ The primary cause of its financial woes is fiscal mismanagement , as well as the agency ’ s adoption and implementation of various policies and processes that are negatively impacting its own revenue and efficiency , ” she said .
Help keep Vox free for all Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what ’ s happening in the news , from the coronavirus crisis @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , quite possibly , the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes .
Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment : to empower you through understanding .
But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn .
Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers , your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work , and helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world .
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Immigrants have applied to become US citizens in increasing numbers since Donald Trump took office, which some policy analysts say is the effect of the president’s anti-immigrant rhetoric.
But the path hasn’t been easy. They’re facing ballooning processing times, higher fees, more intensive vetting, and even the possibility of later losing their citizenship at the hands of the Department of Justice’s newly created “denaturalization section,” which it announced in February 2020. US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the agency that processes applications for immigration benefits, has reopened its offices, but it’s also grappling with a budget crisis amid the coronavirus pandemic and struggling to keep up with the naturalization backlog.
As he seeks reelection, Trump is trying to portray himself as favoring legal immigration. On August 25, he held a naturalization ceremony at the White House for citizens of five different countries. The ceremony, broadcast during the Republican National Convention, likely violated federal law prohibiting taxpayer funds from being used for political campaigns. It also exploited the new American citizens, who didn’t know the ceremony would be part of the president’s reelection pitch.
But his actual immigration policies have primarily aimed to keep even legal immigrants out. The Covid-19 pandemic has added another layer of complications: More than 300,000 people stuck in a naturalization backlog could lose out on their chance to vote in the November election, in which new US citizens were previously projected to be among the fastest-growing voting blocs.
Doug Rand, a former White House official who worked on immigration policy in the Obama administration and the co-founder of Boundless Immigration, a tech company that helps immigrants apply for green cards and citizenship, said it’s hard not to see the obstacles to naturalization as being tinged with politics at the leadership level, even though rank-and-file employees are rushing to process naturalizations.
“This administration will do anything it can do to prevent people from achieving all of the milestones up to and including citizenship,” Rand said. “There’s certainly no evidence that this administration has been in a hurry to give people the franchise, even though they’re legally entitled to it.”
The Trump administration has made it harder to naturalize
Under Trump, naturalization — the process of becoming an American citizen — is taking longer than it has in the recent past.
Generally, only people who are over the age of 18 and have been a permanent resident for at least five years (or three years if they are married to a US citizen) are eligible to naturalize. Once they file a naturalization application, they can expect to wait another 8.8 months on average before they become a citizen, according to the latest USCIS data available — an increase of more than 50 percent since before Trump took office. In some areas, such as Seattle and Miami, wait times can exceed two years.
The increasing delays are due in part to Trump’s policy of “extreme vetting.” As a result, USCIS has increased its scrutiny of all immigration applications on the premise of rooting out fraud.
People applying for citizenship have already been vetted at least once to obtain a green card, and often more than once if they first came to the US on a temporary visa. Officials typically screen green card applicants, for example, for tax compliance, criminal history, US residence, and family ties.
Immigration attorneys have argued that additional in-depth screening isn’t necessary and only makes the process more cumbersome. But Ken Cuccinelli, then the acting director of USCIS, made his priorities clear in a July 2019 interview with the Wall Street Journal. “We are not a benefit agency, we are a vetting agency,” he said.
In Minnesota, immigrants whose green cards came through the visa lottery program have faced heightened scrutiny of their applications, said Ana Pottratz Acosta, an immigration lawyer in the state. The visa lottery is designed to attract citizens of countries with historically low levels of immigration, and it’s a program Trump has often maligned.
Immigrants have been threatened with deportation for failing to list a spouse or child on their initial visa application, which US officials allege constitutes fraud, even as their citizenship applications are still pending. This is highly unusual, Acosta said, and has left many immigrants with little means of obtaining legal relief in federal court.
It’s also more expensive than ever to become a citizen. Fees for online naturalization applications have already risen considerably in recent years, from $330 in 2006 to $640 in 2016. The fees will jump to $1,160 beginning October 2, at which point USCIS will also eliminate most fee waivers for people who cannot afford the cost. (An ongoing lawsuit seeks to prevent those changes from going into effect on the basis they would disproportionately hurt applicants who are least able to pay.)
The cost of becoming a US citizen remains a big barrier to many of the roughly 9.2 million immigrants living in the US who are eligible to naturalize. For example, Mexicans have naturalized at relatively low rates despite being the largest group of legal immigrants in the US by country of origin, and cost is the primary reason, according to the Pew Research Center.
Until it was struck down by a federal court in August, one Trump policy also increased scrutiny of noncitizens who joined the US military and are seeking naturalization. Before the policy went into effect in 2017, more than 8,500 service members applied to be fast-tracked for citizenship. But under the policy, noncitizens were required to serve at least 180 days on active duty or one year in the reservists before they became eligible to apply for citizenship, resulting in a 72 percent decline in the number of soldiers applying for naturalization in the year after it was implemented.
The pandemic and USCIS’s budget crisis have delayed naturalizations
In March, just as many states were implementing Covid-19 stay-at-home orders, USCIS announced it was shutting down field offices, where interviews for citizenship applications normally take place. Citizenship oath ceremonies — normally joyous affairs representing the final step in the naturalization process, attended by hundreds of almost-citizens and their families — came to a halt. The agency refused to administer citizenship ceremonies online, citing “logistical challenges” and security concerns.
When USCIS began reopening offices June 4, spokesperson Dan Hetlage said the agency’s “first priority” was to conduct naturalization ceremonies for people whose ceremonies had been postponed. The ceremonies were pared down to just 15 minutes, with roughly 20 people standing 6 feet apart in a room, sometimes with the officiant appearing remotely on a screen. Some ceremonies have been administered at drive-through sites.
Hetlage said the agency has since carried out almost all of those 110,000 naturalizations (the rest have to be carried out by federal courts, some of which have put naturalizations on hold due to the pandemic).
But that’s still only a fraction of the more than 700,000 naturalization applications that were pending at the end of March, suggesting the agency is still facing a hefty backlog.
“With those oaths complete, naturalizations continue to be a priority for USCIS, and we strive to complete them as efficiently as possible. We have also prioritized rescheduling interviews for naturalization and adjustment of status that were postponed,” Hetlage said in a statement to Vox. “We are conducting naturalization interviews and are committed to conducting as many interviews as we can in manner that is safe for our staff and for the public.”
Immigrant advocates are worried that naturalization interviews, the second-to-last step before becoming a citizen, aren’t being scheduled quickly enough. Rand said that by Boundless’s estimates, there could be some 315,000 people waiting for their interviews — many of them in Florida — who could be deprived of the chance to vote in November due to administrative delays.
Immigration attorneys have also reported delays in the scheduling of naturalization interviews across the US. (USCIS doesn’t break out the number of people waiting for interviews from the number of pending cases, an agency spokesperson said.)
“The USCIS, while clearly swearing people in that it interviewed before shutting down [during] the pandemic, is still light years behind where it should be in interviewing and naturalizing future citizens, many of whom applied well more than a year ago for their citizenship with the hopes to vote in the upcoming election,” Charles Kuck, an immigration lawyer based in Atlanta, said. “While this is a perennial problem at USCIS, it seems especially problematic this year, given what’s at stake in this year’s election for immigrants to America.”
USCIS has processed an average of about 12,000 citizenship applications per week since March 18, according to USCIS data. But that’s still well below the rate needed to reach the 70,000 naturalizations that are typically completed per month.
USCIS’s ability to speed up naturalizations is hampered by its ongoing budget crisis. Unlike other federal agencies, USCIS receives almost no taxpayer dollars, and instead depends on fees associated with filing applications for green cards, visas, work permits, US citizenship, and humanitarian benefits such as asylum.
In May, USCIS asked Congress for a $1.2 billion bailout, claiming it would “have to take drastic actions to keep the agency afloat” by the end of the summer without aid. At the time, a spokesperson for the agency said the pandemic had already brought on a “dramatic decrease” in revenue. Trump’s restrictions on immigration, other countries’ limitations on travel, and the closing of necessary government offices that process applications all contributed to the decline in revenue.
To help mitigate the budget shortfall, USCIS in July announced a weighted average increase of 20 percent on all applications and limited spending to salary and mission-critical activities. The agency now projects it will have enough funds to remain operable through October and announced it would delay a plan to furlough roughly 70 percent of staff.
But the agency also said it is still carrying out “aggressive spending reduction measures” that will likely increase processing times, although “naturalization ceremonies will continue.”
USCIS hasn’t released data on how many applications it has received since states first implemented stay-at-home orders in March, but it has acknowledged that applications are on the decline. The latest available comprehensive data, from January through March, showed a reduction in overall applications of less than 2 percent from the preceding three months.
Applications dipped in April, May, and June compared to the same period last year across several temporary visa categories, including H-1B visas for skilled workers, H-2B visas for temporary nonagricultural workers, L-1 visas for people transferring within a multinational company, and O visas for those who show extraordinary ability or achievement in particular industries.
But some experts are skeptical that the budget shortfall due to Covid-19 is as dire as USCIS made it out to be in May, saying the agency was already on a path to insolvency before the pandemic hit.
Sharvari Dalal-Dheini, director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told Congress in July that USCIS had mismanaged a surplus it inherited at the beginning of the Trump administration, introduced inefficient vetting procedures, and hired too many new staff to identify and investigate fraud, among other ill-advised financial decisions.
“The primary cause of its financial woes is fiscal mismanagement, as well as the agency’s adoption and implementation of various policies and processes that are negatively impacting its own revenue and efficiency,” she said.
ntribute today from as little as $3.


vox--2020-09-03--The federal government has banned some evictions. Here’s who is eligible for relief.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ( CDC ) announced a four-month ban on evictions for most renters Tuesday , allowing some people who are unable to pay rent to stay in their current housing through the end of the year .
It ’ s a huge step that could help ward off a major homelessness crisis in America .
But it ’ s also one that Democrats and housing advocates say is avoiding the root problem , which Congress could solve by passing a second round of pandemic-related financial stimulus , and one that could face significant legal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ health agency invoked federal health law to impose the policy , saying “ housing stability helps protect public health because homelessness increases the likelihood of individuals moving into congregate settings , such as homeless shelters , which then puts individuals at higher risk to COVID-19 , ” according to the order .
Under the ban , landlords would face criminal penalties for evicting qualifying tenants for nonpayment of rent .
According to the policy , property owners are still allowed to evict for other reasons , such as illegal activity or destruction of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ eviction ban that expired at the end of July .
The CDC did not respond to a request for comment from Vox .
The $ 2 trillion CARES Act passed in March imposed a 120-day moratorium on evictions for tenants in federally assisted housing or in homes with federally backed mortgages — extending protections to approximately 12.3 million rental housing units , according to the Urban Institute .
The bill also gave the vast majority of Americans a one-time stimulus check and enabled an extra $ 600 per week in enhanced unemployment benefits @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pandemic , money that many families used to help pay their rent or mortgage .
But those eviction protections and enhanced unemployment benefits lapsed at the end of July , and Congress hasn ’ t yet come to an agreement to take further action on more coronavirus stimulus .
In lieu of a congressional package , some states have taken action to prevent evictions , but as of Tuesday , only 17 states and the District of Columbia have prohibitions still in place .
In June , Sen. Elizabeth Warren proposed expanding the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Act to cover most renters , while extending it until next March .
That hasn ’ t come to fruition .
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told a House Oversight select committee Tuesday that the new CDC policy would protect about 40 million renters .
Both housing advocates and landlords said the CDC ban , without financial or rental assistance , doesn ’ t go far enough to protect both renters and rental property owners .
“ The very least the federal government ought to do is assure each of us that we won @ @ @ @ @ @ @ middle of a global pandemic , ” National Low Income Housing Coalition CEO and President Diane Yentel told Politico .
But Yentel went on to say that a moratorium without accompanying financial relief is a “ half-measure that extends a financial cliff for renters to fall off of when the moratorium expires and back rent is owed.
” Landlord advocates expressed similar concerns , explaining that it can be difficult for property owners to pay their mortgages and taxes without any rent coming in .
“ Not only does an eviction moratorium not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a protracted eviction moratorium does nothing to address the financial pressures and obligations of rental property owners , ” said Doug Bibby , the president of the National Multifamily Housing Council , in a statement about the moratorium .
House Democrats have proposed up to $ 100 billion in rental assistance in the next round of pandemic stimulus .
The Trump administration ’ s rule can help protect renters until Congress agrees to fund that — or fund some smaller amount .
But the rule ’ s language also opens the door for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for nonpayment of rent , and there is a limit on who can apply for protection from eviction .
And that ’ s assuming the rule doesn ’ t immediately get overturned in court .
Who is — and isn ’ t — eligible , briefly explained Covid-19 and the resulting economic fallout have put millions of people at risk of becoming homeless .
According to the financial journal Stout , nearly two in five renters are at risk of being served eviction papers in the coming months thanks to the coronavirus pandemic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ report estimated there could be as many as 40 million evictions caused by the pandemic .
But the moratorium the CDC put in place isn ’ t a universal ban on evictions .
In order to qualify , single renters making less than $ 99,000 a year or couples making less than $ 198,000 are eligible .
That encompasses a fairly large number of Americans .
However , they must prove that they made an effort to pay their rent and have exhausted other federal rental assistance programs .
Forms will be available @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is published in the Federal Register .
According to Politico , renters must prove that eviction will make them homeless or that they ’ d have to double up with someone else in close quarters , which would present a pandemic health risk .
While most renters won ’ t be at risk for eviction until the end of the year thanks to the ban , the policy does not waive rental payments due during that time period .
So any nonpayment would accrue until the renter either pays or the ban expires @ @ @ @ @ @ @ down the road for just a few months .
The eviction moratorium is likely to run into legal trouble No federal law explicitly provides for an eviction moratorium .
Instead , the CDC relied on a broadly worded public health law that permits the CDC ’ s director to “ make and enforce such regulations as in his judgment are necessary to prevent the introduction , transmission , or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the States or possessions , or from one State or possession into any other State or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ draft rules intended to prevent diseases from spreading across state borders .
In theory , an eviction moratorium would make it somewhat less likely that Covid-19 would spread across state lines .
If a person who is infected with the virus is evicted in New York , for example , they might travel to New Jersey to stay on a friend ’ s couch and wind up infecting that friend in the process .
But , as American University law professor Lindsay Wiley noted on Twitter , the CDC ’ s eviction moratorium @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reading of the agency 's statutory authority .
And there is good reason to believe that the moratorium will not survive a court challenge .
Briefly , some federal laws permit federal agencies to issue binding rules known as “ regulations.
” But the Supreme Court ’ s conservative majority recently signaled that it wants to roll back much of Congress ’ s ability to delegate regulatory power to agencies in this way .
Most significantly , in Gundy v. United States ( 2019 ) , Justice Neil Gorsuch called for fairly strict @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to authorize federal agencies to regulate .
A law authorizing such regulation , Gorsuch wrote , should be struck down unless it is “ ‘ sufficiently definite and precise to enable Congress , the courts , and the public to ascertain ’ whether Congress ’ s guidance has been followed.
” Gorsuch ’ s opinion in Gundy was technically a dissent , but all five members of the Court ’ s Republican majority have since indicated that they agree with Gorsuch .
And admittedly , Gorsuch ’ s opinion is vague — just @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a federal law have to be in order to survive contact with the courts ?
But the public health law the CDC relied upon in creating the eviction moratorium is also quite vague .
Again , that law permits the CDC director to make regulations that “ in his judgment are necessary ” to prevent the spread of communicable diseases across state or international borders .
It is fairly likely , in other words , that a lower court could apply the approach Gorsuch laid out in Gundy — and if they did @ @ @ @ @ @ @ eviction moratorium .
The point of Gorsuch ’ s Gundy opinion is that Congress should not be able to delegate too much discretionary power to an agency — Congress must , instead , provide agencies with clear instructions on how to regulate .
But Congress did not provide especially clear instructions when it allowed the CDC to make public health regulations .
To be clear , it is far from certain that the Supreme Court would strike down the moratorium .
There are good reasons why public health agencies should have broad regulatory @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and Congress would have a tough time drafting a statute that anticipates every step a public health agency might need to take in order to control a pandemic .
Moreover , while Chief Justice John Roberts has largely been sympathetic to Gorsuch ’ s approach to agency regulation , he ’ s also urged judges to defer to public health officials who are struggling to control the pandemic .
Roberts joined Gorsuch ’ s opinion in Gundy , but the chief justice may have second thoughts if Gorsuch ’ s approach could @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the fate of the eviction moratorium is uncertain once a landlord decides to challenge it in court .
And even if Roberts eventually joined the Supreme Court ’ s liberal minority in upholding the moratorium , that moratorium could potentially be put on hold by a conservative lower-court judge while this case is making its way to the justices .
The threat of eviction , in other words , is likely to hang over many renters until Congress gets its act together and provides them with clear statutory relief .
Help keep @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Vox each month to understand what ’ s happening in the news , from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is , quite possibly , the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes .
Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment : to empower you through understanding .
But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn .
Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers , your support will be a critical @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world .
Contribute today from as little as $ 3 .

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced a four-month ban on evictions for most renters Tuesday, allowing some people who are unable to pay rent to stay in their current housing through the end of the year.
It’s a huge step that could help ward off a major homelessness crisis in America. But it’s also one that Democrats and housing advocates say is avoiding the root problem, which Congress could solve by passing a second round of pandemic-related financial stimulus, and one that could face significant legal challenges, to boot.
The public health agency invoked federal health law to impose the policy, saying “housing stability helps protect public health because homelessness increases the likelihood of individuals moving into congregate settings, such as homeless shelters, which then puts individuals at higher risk to COVID-19,” according to the order.
Under the ban, landlords would face criminal penalties for evicting qualifying tenants for nonpayment of rent. According to the policy, property owners are still allowed to evict for other reasons, such as illegal activity or destruction of property. The moratorium replaces a previous eviction ban that expired at the end of July. The CDC did not respond to a request for comment from Vox.
The $2 trillion CARES Act passed in March imposed a 120-day moratorium on evictions for tenants in federally assisted housing or in homes with federally backed mortgages — extending protections to approximately 12.3 million rental housing units, according to the Urban Institute. The bill also gave the vast majority of Americans a one-time stimulus check and enabled an extra $600 per week in enhanced unemployment benefits for those laid off due to the pandemic, money that many families used to help pay their rent or mortgage.
But those eviction protections and enhanced unemployment benefits lapsed at the end of July, and Congress hasn’t yet come to an agreement to take further action on more coronavirus stimulus.
In lieu of a congressional package, some states have taken action to prevent evictions, but as of Tuesday, only 17 states and the District of Columbia have prohibitions still in place. In June, Sen. Elizabeth Warren proposed expanding the previous federal eviction ban from the CARES Act to cover most renters, while extending it until next March. That hasn’t come to fruition.
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told a House Oversight select committee Tuesday that the new CDC policy would protect about 40 million renters.
Both housing advocates and landlords said the CDC ban, without financial or rental assistance, doesn’t go far enough to protect both renters and rental property owners.
“The very least the federal government ought to do is assure each of us that we won’t lose our homes in the middle of a global pandemic,” National Low Income Housing Coalition CEO and President Diane Yentel told Politico. But Yentel went on to say that a moratorium without accompanying financial relief is a “half-measure that extends a financial cliff for renters to fall off of when the moratorium expires and back rent is owed.”
Landlord advocates expressed similar concerns, explaining that it can be difficult for property owners to pay their mortgages and taxes without any rent coming in. “Not only does an eviction moratorium not address renters’ real financial needs, a protracted eviction moratorium does nothing to address the financial pressures and obligations of rental property owners,” said Doug Bibby, the president of the National Multifamily Housing Council, in a statement about the moratorium.
House Democrats have proposed up to $100 billion in rental assistance in the next round of pandemic stimulus.
The Trump administration’s rule can help protect renters until Congress agrees to fund that — or fund some smaller amount. But the rule’s language also opens the door for landlords to add fees and extra charges for nonpayment of rent, and there is a limit on who can apply for protection from eviction. And that’s assuming the rule doesn’t immediately get overturned in court.
Who is — and isn’t — eligible, briefly explained
Covid-19 and the resulting economic fallout have put millions of people at risk of becoming homeless.
According to the financial journal Stout, nearly two in five renters are at risk of being served eviction papers in the coming months thanks to the coronavirus pandemic and resulting economic collapse. A CNBC report estimated there could be as many as 40 million evictions caused by the pandemic.
But the moratorium the CDC put in place isn’t a universal ban on evictions. In order to qualify, single renters making less than $99,000 a year or couples making less than $198,000 are eligible. That encompasses a fairly large number of Americans. However, they must prove that they made an effort to pay their rent and have exhausted other federal rental assistance programs. Forms will be available on the CDC website once the order is published in the Federal Register.
According to Politico, renters must prove that eviction will make them homeless or that they’d have to double up with someone else in close quarters, which would present a pandemic health risk.
While most renters won’t be at risk for eviction until the end of the year thanks to the ban, the policy does not waive rental payments due during that time period. So any nonpayment would accrue until the renter either pays or the ban expires, essentially kicking a potential emergency crisis down the road for just a few months.
The eviction moratorium is likely to run into legal trouble
No federal law explicitly provides for an eviction moratorium. Instead, the CDC relied on a broadly worded public health law that permits the CDC’s director to “make and enforce such regulations as in his judgment are necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the States or possessions, or from one State or possession into any other State or possession.” Thus, the CDC may draft rules intended to prevent diseases from spreading across state borders.
In theory, an eviction moratorium would make it somewhat less likely that Covid-19 would spread across state lines. If a person who is infected with the virus is evicted in New York, for example, they might travel to New Jersey to stay on a friend’s couch and wind up infecting that friend in the process.
But, as American University law professor Lindsay Wiley noted on Twitter, the CDC’s eviction moratorium is only lawful under a particular aggressive reading of the agency's statutory authority. And there is good reason to believe that the moratorium will not survive a court challenge.
I've been speculating since Feb. abt whether CDC might push the envelope on what Section 361 of the Public Health Service Act authorizes. I didn't expect it to come in the form of a federal eviction moratorium. Wow. I definitely expect this to be challenged in court. — Lindsay Wiley (@ProfLWiley) September 1, 2020
Briefly, some federal laws permit federal agencies to issue binding rules known as “regulations.” But the Supreme Court’s conservative majority recently signaled that it wants to roll back much of Congress’s ability to delegate regulatory power to agencies in this way.
Most significantly, in Gundy v. United States (2019), Justice Neil Gorsuch called for fairly strict new limits on Congress’s ability to authorize federal agencies to regulate. A law authorizing such regulation, Gorsuch wrote, should be struck down unless it is “‘sufficiently definite and precise to enable Congress, the courts, and the public to ascertain’ whether Congress’s guidance has been followed.”
Gorsuch’s opinion in Gundy was technically a dissent, but all five members of the Court’s Republican majority have since indicated that they agree with Gorsuch.
And admittedly, Gorsuch’s opinion is vague — just how “definite and precise” does a federal law have to be in order to survive contact with the courts? But the public health law the CDC relied upon in creating the eviction moratorium is also quite vague. Again, that law permits the CDC director to make regulations that “in his judgment are necessary” to prevent the spread of communicable diseases across state or international borders.
It is fairly likely, in other words, that a lower court could apply the approach Gorsuch laid out in Gundy — and if they did, they would likely strike down the eviction moratorium. The point of Gorsuch’s Gundy opinion is that Congress should not be able to delegate too much discretionary power to an agency — Congress must, instead, provide agencies with clear instructions on how to regulate. But Congress did not provide especially clear instructions when it allowed the CDC to make public health regulations.
To be clear, it is far from certain that the Supreme Court would strike down the moratorium. There are good reasons why public health agencies should have broad regulatory power. Public health emergencies are unpredictable, and Congress would have a tough time drafting a statute that anticipates every step a public health agency might need to take in order to control a pandemic.
Moreover, while Chief Justice John Roberts has largely been sympathetic to Gorsuch’s approach to agency regulation, he’s also urged judges to defer to public health officials who are struggling to control the pandemic. Roberts joined Gorsuch’s opinion in Gundy, but the chief justice may have second thoughts if Gorsuch’s approach could exacerbate a pandemic.
In any event, the fate of the eviction moratorium is uncertain once a landlord decides to challenge it in court. And even if Roberts eventually joined the Supreme Court’s liberal minority in upholding the moratorium, that moratorium could potentially be put on hold by a conservative lower-court judge while this case is making its way to the justices.
The threat of eviction, in other words, is likely to hang over many renters until Congress gets its act together and provides them with clear statutory relief.


vox--2020-09-03--The secret history of dirt, explained to kids

Dirt .
We think we know it .
But do we really ?
What if dirt isn ’ t just the stuff we knock off our soccer cleats and brush off our knees ?
What if it ’ s the key to life on planet Earth ?
Dirt is alive .
It ’ s full of billions of creatures so small you can ’ t even see them under a microscope .
For 10,000 years , dirt has helped humans convert the limitless energy of the sun into the plants and animals we eat to keep us alive .
Dirt @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it turns out , we haven ’ t been very good to the dirt .
This is the story of how dirt helped build civilization , only to get stabbed in the back by us .
We ’ ll explore how humans zapped the life out of dirt in just a few short centuries in the hopes of getting rich , and how those mistakes are coming back to haunt us .
And we ’ ll get our hands dirty with a farmer who has figured out how to nurse sick dirt back @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It ’ s time to get dirty .
Try the dirt experiment featured in this episode for yourself .
You can print it out from this link .
This video is part of Vox ’ s first-ever week of video programming for kids .
We designed these episodes for kids ages 9 to 13 , but we hope everyone in our audience enjoys them .
If you ’ re a parent , educator , or a kid at heart , please sign up for our newsletter for updates on all of our @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from podcasts to videos to new shows : http : //www.vox.com/kids Special thanks to Rachel Gianni , a consultant we worked with on this week of programming .
Civilizations rise and fall on the quality of their soil ( Science Daily ) One amazing substance allowed life to thrive on land ( BBC ) Farmers and Their Languages : The First Expansions ( Science ) The Science Behind the Three sisters ( Cornell University ) Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues ( Scientific American )

Dirt. We think we know it. But do we really?
What if dirt isn’t just the stuff we knock off our soccer cleats and brush off our knees? What if it’s the key to life on planet Earth?
Dirt is alive. It’s full of billions of creatures so small you can’t even see them under a microscope. For 10,000 years, dirt has helped humans convert the limitless energy of the sun into the plants and animals we eat to keep us alive.
Dirt has been good to us. But it turns out, we haven’t been very good to the dirt.
This is the story of how dirt helped build civilization, only to get stabbed in the back by us. We’ll explore how humans zapped the life out of dirt in just a few short centuries in the hopes of getting rich, and how those mistakes are coming back to haunt us. And we’ll get our hands dirty with a farmer who has figured out how to nurse sick dirt back to health.
Roll up your sleeves. It’s time to get dirty.
Try the dirt experiment featured in this episode for yourself. You can print it out from this link.
This video is part of Vox’s first-ever week of video programming for kids. We designed these episodes for kids ages 9 to 13, but we hope everyone in our audience enjoys them.
If you’re a parent, educator, or a kid at heart, please sign up for our newsletter for updates on all of our upcoming kids’ programming at Vox, from podcasts to videos to new shows: http://www.vox.com/kids
Special thanks to Rachel Gianni, a consultant we worked with on this week of programming.
Additional reading and sources
Soil Foodweb Institute (Australia)
Civilizations rise and fall on the quality of their soil (Science Daily)
One amazing substance allowed life to thrive on land (BBC)
The Big Bloom—How Flowering Plants Changed the World (National Geographic)
Soil Science Society of America (SSSA)
Farmers and Their Languages: The First Expansions (Science)
The Science Behind the Three sisters (Cornell University)
Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues (Scientific American)


vox--2020-09-03--The pandemic is forcing Democrats to ask: How important is door-knocking, anyway?

Among the many impossible-to-predict consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic for the 2020 presidential campaign , this may be one of the most surprising : The Trump campaign is taking door-knocking much more seriously than the Biden campaign .
Door-to-door canvassing — where campaign workers knock on doors to either persuade residents to vote for their candidate or remind the already persuaded to turn out — is traditionally a strong suit of Democratic campaigns .
“ Field , ” as it ’ s called , is where many leading party strategists , from 2008 Obama campaign manager David Plouffe to 2020 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Dillon , came up .
Political scientists have written whole books about Obama ’ s effort to mobilize millions of volunteers for field operations in 2008 and 2012 .
In 2016 , the conventional wisdom that Hillary Clinton was a heavy favorite to defeat Trump derived partly from a sense she had a better “ ground game.
” But in 2020 , the politics of Covid-19 mean that pattern is reversed .
Trump is door-knocking , and Biden just isn ’ t .
Politico ’ s Alex Thompson reported in early August that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ doors each week , while the Trump campaign claims to have knocked on over a million .
More recently , in Michigan , the Trump campaign boasts that it has “ an army of over 43,000 volunteers and staff covering all 83 counties , ” whereas the state Democratic Party told reporter Jonathan Oosting it was “ not yet comfortable ” knocking on doors .
On August 28 , the Trump campaign bragged about knocking on its 1 millionth door in Florida .
Door-knocking numbers like this aren ’ t really useful ( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ many people were actually contacted ) , but the pattern is illustrative .
The Biden campaign is responding to the risk that door-to-door canvassing will spread Covid-19 infection by shutting down its door-knocking efforts .
If you go to the campaign ’ s volunteer page , you get options to call voters , to text voters , to download an app for pushing your friends and families to vote for Biden , to attend virtual events — but not to go knocking on doors .
The Trump campaign , reflecting the president ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ speed up “ reopening , ” is doing the opposite , and still doing volunteer recruitment for canvassing .
Given the central role canvassing has played in recent Democratic presidential campaigns , you would think this discrepancy would prompt some concern among Democrats who believe in the ground game .
But some people in the world of Democratic campaigns are coming around to a different view : Maybe door-knocking really isn ’ t as important as we all thought .
Most political scientists I talked to affirmed this view .
Melissa Michelson , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on field experiments for voter turnout , told me , “ That the Biden campaign can ’ t engage in door-to-door canvassing is maybe not that big of a loss because we actually have tons of data about how to effectively and in a cost-efficient way mobilize voters from all different parts of the Democratic coalition — younger voters , low-income voters , Black voters , Latino voters — without going door to door.
” Indeed , there ’ s a growing body of research suggesting that methods like calling voters and “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as effective — if not more effective — than traditional door-knocking .
To be clear , there ’ s a consensus that field work can juice turnout and even persuade voters in primary elections or local elections where the candidates are less well-known and voters ’ opinions are less formed .
But skeptics argue that you can ’ t just look at whether the effect of a field operation is positive or negative .
You have to ask how many votes it pulls in per dollar spent , and compare that to whatever @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of campaign money : TV ads , digital ads , direct mail , and non-knocking fieldwork like phone banking .
Given the expense of running a good field team , skeptics argue that the cost-per-vote is too high relative to alternatives and that Covid-19 might serendipitously be pushing campaigns away from inefficient uses of resources and toward more efficient ones .
“ There ’ s not any other kind of information we try to communicate by going door to door , ” says David Shor , an independent Democratic data analyst who helped @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in 2012 .
When big companies want to get the word out about their products , they use ads — and Shor and other field skeptics think campaigns should double down on those , too .
It ’ s important to distinguish between two different purposes of political campaigns .
One purpose is persuasion : convincing an undecided voter , or even one who ’ s decided for the other candidate , to support your candidate .
The other purpose is turnout : getting people who are already persuaded to support your candidate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by some mechanism in elections — swing voters are rare , but real , and a large number of voters switched from supporting Trump in 2016 to supporting Democrats in the 2018 midterms .
That ’ s persuasion of at least some kind taking place .
But when political scientists try to evaluate the effect of specific campaign interventions at persuasion , the results tend to be quite dire .
Even though persuasion happens , it ’ s hard for campaigns to reliably pull it off .
UC Berkeley ’ s David Broockman @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an evidence review in 2017 of studies evaluating how effective interventions aimed at persuading voters are , be they canvassing , phone calls , direct mail , TV , online ads , or anything else under the sun .
They found that there ’ s lots of room for persuasion in primaries ; a canvass during the 2015 Philadelphia mayoral primary , an open race where voters didn ’ t know the candidates that well , was quite effective .
But in general elections ?
Nope .
“ The best estimate for the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ — such as mail , phone calls , and canvassing — on Americans ’ candidate choices in general elections is zero , ” they write .
“ Our best guess for online and television advertising is also zero , but there is less evidence on these modes.
” There are unique circumstances where persuasion tactics become more effective for campaigns ( see the last section here ) .
But the 2020 presidential election doesn ’ t feel like one of them .
Voters know who Donald Trump is .
They know who Joe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ learned about both of them over the past four years , or past several decades even , it ’ s unlikely that door-knocking or phone banking is going to be the decisive factor in changing people ’ s votes .
Turning out existing voters , however , is possible Even though campaign contact doesn ’ t seem to persuade people in general elections , it ’ s not necessarily a bad idea .
That ’ s because campaign contact can increase turnout , too .
The empirical literature here was kicked off by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ two decades ago , and their book Get Out the Vote !
is still one of the best sources on the evidence base around the effectiveness of canvassing , phone banking , and direct mail at turning out voters .
In the book ’ s fourth edition , released in 2019 , Gerber and Green estimate that the average per-conversation effect size of canvassing turnout operations is 4.0 ; the average effect of commercial phone banks is 0.947 ; the average effect of volunteer phone banks is 2.8 .
This is across a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ just presidential ones , where effect sizes might be lower .
That ’ s a lot of numbers , so let me spell it out : If canvassing has an effect size of 4.0 , that means that a door-knocking operation that knocks on 5,000 doors , and gets a response at 1,000 of those doors ( a pretty standard or even high response rate ) will generate 40 new voters .
Similarly , a volunteer phone bank that reaches 1,000 people will produce about 28 new voters , since the effect size @ @ @ @ @ @ @ just as good as door-knocking anyway When you put it like that , it makes door-knocking look considerably better than calling voters , which is likely to replace it in a Covid-19 environment .
But you can also talk to more people in an hour through phone banking than through canvassing .
You don ’ t have to walk or drive between addresses .
Put it all together and Gerber and Green ’ s rough estimate is that canvassing can garner campaigns a vote for about $ 33 , while volunteer phone-banking can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not too different , especially when you consider how imprecise these estimates necessarily are .
Michelson , the professor of political science at Menlo College , has evaluated dozens of experiments testing turnout and persuasion , reporting many in her 2012 book with UC Berkeley ’ s Lisa García Bedolla , Mobilizing Inclusion .
They found that calling voters produced more consistently positive results than door-to-door canvassing , in part because it was easier for callers to stick to a script than it was for canvassers .
“ What we found is that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ effects , it was not actually our recommended method , ” Michelson told me .
“ We thought that other things like two-round phone banks were more effective.
” In “ two-round ” phone banks , voters are first contacted several weeks before the election , and then get a follow-up call to encourage them to vote a day or two before the election .
Door-knocking and phone banking are not the only possible ways to contact voters , of course .
Gerber and Green estimate that the average effect of conventional mailers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the vote is 0.296 per mailer ( so a mailer that reaches 1,000 people might produce 3 new voters ) .
Robocalls and explicitly partisan direct mail ( fliers advertising a particular candidate , say ) don ’ t seem to have any effect .
But “ social pressure ” mailers have a bigger effect on average .
In that tactic , campaigns or other turnout organizations use mail to remind voters that whether or not they voted in the past is public information , and share information on which of their neighbors @ @ @ @ @ @ @ June 2012 Wisconsin recall election for Gov .
Scott Walker , Green , Harvard ’ s Todd Rogers , Yale ’ s John Ternovski , and Carolina Ferrerosa Young ( now working for Democratic Sen. Mark Warner ) found that social pressure mailers like this sent out by an anti-Walker group boosted turnout of Democratic-leaning voters substantially , working out to a cost per vote of roughly $ 55 .
And in a 2006 primary election in Michigan ( a much less visible race ) , Gerber , Green , and Christopher Larimer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for $ 1.93 each , an astoundingly low price .
Social pressure techniques can generate backlash — as when Ted Cruz used them in the 2016 Iowa caucus but used made-up voter histories and told voters they ’ d committed a “ VOTER VIOLATION ” in a font that kind of implied they ’ d done something illegal — but they seem consistently effective .
The limits of our existing data There are a few factors , however , that complicate this public data .
For one thing , only a small share @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of canvassing and phone banking on turnout are public .
The majority are conducted through firms like the Analyst Institute ( for Democrats ) or Evolving Strategies ( for Republicans ) , and the results are typically proprietary .
Democrats don ’ t want Republicans to benefit from studies they spent millions of dollars conducting and vice versa ( though everyone acknowledges that Democrats invest vastly more in these kinds of experiments than Republicans do ) .
Don Green , the Columbia political scientist and doyen of campaign field experiments , told me @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ] do the meta-analysis , we are super careful to get our hands around everything we can find , ” including unpublished working papers and even individual regressions .
He believes that their public summary of the evidence is representative of what groups like the Analyst Institute know privately .
But there ’ s a limit on how much journalists like me or the general public can know about the evidence base , given how much of it is secret .
The other complication is that phone banking has diminished in effectiveness as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are harder to match to voter records , and which they ’ re less likely to use as phones and less likely to pick up calls from unfamiliar numbers .
Parties are getting better at reaching cellphones — the Democratic National Committee announced a massive purchase of tens of millions of cellphone numbers in January — but it does complicate matters .
Digital advertising is another arrow in a campaign ’ s quiver .
In recent months , it has become a highly public topic of controversy in light of Facebook and Twitter @ @ @ @ @ @ @ misleading ads .
Most evidence to date , though , is dismissive or murky as to digital advertising ’ s effectiveness .
An early randomized experiment by Broockman and Green using Facebook found that ads weren ’ t effective at boosting favorability or name recognition for a Republican state legislative candidate or a Democratic congressional candidate .
The nonpartisan group Rock the Vote conducted experiments in 2012 and 2013 using Facebook ads , garnering millions of impressions , meant to boost turnout , and found no difference between the treatment group and the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ experiment conducted by NextGen Climate , an advocacy group founded and funded by billionaire Tom Steyer .
The experiment assigned over 1 million voters in New Hampshire , Nevada , and Pennsylvania to receive online ads urging them to turn out and vote in the 2016 general election .
Two-thirds of the ads were on Facebook .
Kalla found a very small effect on turnout , with an overall cost of $ 474 per vote , which is very high compared to phone banking or door-knocking .
Political scientists tend to be similarly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ turnout effects of TV and digital ads are basically zero , ” Green told me , with some exceptions like Rock the Vote that he himself has tested .
Green and UCLA ’ s Lynn Vavreck found that an advertisement specifically designed to boost youth turnout did just that — but most campaign ads aren ’ t as laser-focused on turnout .
“ I don ’ t know that there ’ s a study that shows that the turnout effects of a regular TV campaign , not the old ones that Lynn Vavreck @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were specifically about get-out-the-vote .
It ’ s basically a null set .
There are some non-experimental papers that purport to find effects , though there are plenty of non-experimental findings that show no effect , ” he said .
But those TV ads are generally trying to do persuasion , not turnout — and some non-experimental papers suggest they help with persuasion .
There ’ s a long history of observational studies ( looking at ads after the fact rather than deploying them in a randomized way as part of a formal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ads , and analysts like Shor find them compelling .
Moreover , they think the weight of the non-experimental evidence is more in favor of TV than against it .
In 1999 , University of Texas at Austin ’ s Daron Shaw found substantial statewide effects of TV advertising in statewide races from 1988 to 1996 ; a book by a trio of political scientists found that TV advertising was effective in the 2000 race .
Studies analyzing the 2004 and 2006 elections came to similar conclusions .
Most recently , a study @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Advertising and Election Results , ” from economists Jörg Spenkuch and David Toniatti ( un-paywalled copy here ) pooled results across three elections and used a particularly compelling design .
Spenkuch and Toniatti exploit the fact that TV ad-buying is done on the “ media market ” level , and that neighboring and similar counties are often in different “ media markets ” due to FCC regulations , to measure the effect of TV ads on US presidential elections from 2004 to 2012 .
They find substantial effects : “ Showing someone 100 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in a presidential race increases their odds of voting for you by 1 percent , ” Shor summarizes .
If a TV ad costs only , say , $ 30 per 1,000 impressions , then that ’ s a much more favorable cost-per-vote than phone banking or canvassing .
Shor also points to the 2020 primary for a particularly illustrative example : Shor ’ s conclusion : The Warren organizer-based model is a waste of money .
The Buttigieg strategy , based on TV and earned media , got much closer to succeeding @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people who work in data for politics are coordinating field programs , which is wild , ” Shor says .
“ What we actually need are people with a different skillset , who are good at making ads , are good at ad tech , or work in video production .
I have a friend who ’ s a professional video producer who was asking me where she should go knock on doors .
That ’ s a massive misallocation of resources.
” Others , like Green and Kalla , consider the Spenkuch/Toniatti @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a pro-TV , anti-field case upon .
Kalla acknowledged that the study “ changed my prior a bit ” in favor of TV being effective .
But he noted that it identified “ a very weird mechanism ” for its effects .
TV ads tend to be geared more toward persuasion than turnout .
But TV , Spenkuch and Toniatti find , changes the turnout of the electorate .
When one party has an advantage on TV , its supporters turn out more in general elections than supporters for the candidate who fell @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the study “ basically an anomaly .
What is the mechanism that would cause turnout to be the driving force behind a vote shift ?
That really struck me as strange.
” This debate might seem esoteric , but the stakes are high .
If Shor ( and Spenkuch/Toniatti and their precursors in the literature ) are right , then campaigns should be investing far less in the ground game and much more in TV ads with messages refined and perfected through iterative field experiments .
If Green is right , then phone @ @ @ @ @ @ @ crucial activities for campaigns to be engaged in .
The future is canvassing your friends Beyond the disagreement over TV , there ’ s widespread agreement and optimism across the political scientist/data consultant spectrum about the possibilities of “ relational voter turnout ” that exploits people ’ s friendships and social attachments .
Case in point : In 2010 , Facebook conducted a 61 million-person experiment testing whether a banner urging US members to vote in the midterm elections could juice turnout .
Simply putting up an informational banner didn ’ t work @ @ @ @ @ @ @ friends who ’ d clicked an “ I Voted ” button was effective at increasing turnout .
More recently , campaigns have turned to “ relational voter turnout , ” where instead of phone banking or canvassing strangers , volunteers try to turn out people close to them , like friends and family .
Persuading friends and family can be hard , as anyone who ’ s gotten into a Facebook argument with an uncle can attest , but encouraging turnout is somewhat easier .
“ Everybody , even a relatively high-probability voter @ @ @ @ @ @ @ same family , in the same congregation , on the same street , in the same workplace , you name it , who are low-propensity voters , ” Green says .
“ That ’ s what you ’ re looking for in 2020 : Find 10 people who haven ’ t voted in a while , are 19 , etc.
” Recently , Green and Columbia University ’ s Oliver McClellan conducted an experiment for the nonpartisan group Turnout Nation in which 43 organizing “ captains ” in four states each put together @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who would be eligible to vote ” in upcoming municipal elections .
Half of the names were assigned to be treated , meaning captains were encouraged to contact them and ask them to vote .
The other half the captains were told not to contact .
The effect was 13.2 percentage points , which the authors call “ extraordinary , exceeding estimates from any other randomized trial on voter turnout.
” In Ohio , where the program was more regimented , the effects were even greater .
Shor disagrees with Green on TV @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on board regarding relational organizing .
One informal way for people to engage in it is to , well , post about who they ’ re voting for and remind people to vote on social media networks like Instagram and Facebook .
“ The most effective thing that anyone can do is go out and shit-post and talk to their friends and tell people what they believe and what they care about , ” Shor says .
“ That ’ s what politics is about.
” 2020 in general has been a year @ @ @ @ @ @ @ digital , or at least socially distant , replacements for in-person experiences : eating at restaurants , connecting with friends , celebrating big events .
While the particulars are controversial , one unanimous message from political scientists and election analysts is that electioneering translates quite well to a post-pandemic world .
Campaign volunteers don ’ t necessarily need to knock on strangers ’ doors as much as they need to be texting their friends to get them to vote .
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Among the many impossible-to-predict consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic for the 2020 presidential campaign, this may be one of the most surprising: The Trump campaign has taken door-knocking much more seriously than the Biden campaign.
Door-to-door canvassing — where campaign workers knock on doors to either persuade residents to vote for their candidate or remind the already persuaded to turn out — is traditionally a strong suit of Democratic campaigns. “Field,” as it’s called, is where many leading party strategists, from 2008 Obama campaign manager David Plouffe to 2020 Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon, came up. Political scientists have written whole books about Obama’s effort to mobilize millions of volunteers for field operations in 2008 and 2012. In 2016, the conventional wisdom that Hillary Clinton was a heavy favorite to defeat Trump derived partly from a sense she had a better “ground game.”
But in 2020, the politics of Covid-19 mean that pattern is reversed. Trump is knocking on doors, and Biden, until very recently, was not.
In late August, the Trump campaign in Michigan boasted that it has “an army of over 43,000 volunteers and staff covering all 83 counties,” whereas the state Democratic Party told reporter Jonathan Oosting it was “not yet comfortable” knocking on doors. On August 28, the Trump campaign bragged about knocking on its 1 millionth door in Florida. Door-knocking numbers like this aren’t really useful (they don’t tell you how many people were actually contacted), but the pattern is illustrative.
The Biden campaign responded to the risk that door-to-door canvassing will spread Covid-19 infection by shutting down its door-knocking efforts. On October 1, O’Malley Dillon finally announced the campaign would start limited door-knocking efforts, but only after months of not doing any door-knocking at all. The Trump campaign, reflecting the president’s efforts to downplay the pandemic and speed up “reopening,” is doing the opposite, and still doing volunteer recruitment for canvassing.
Given the central role canvassing has played in recent Democratic presidential campaigns, you would think this discrepancy would prompt some concern among Democrats who believe in the ground game. But some people in the world of Democratic campaigns are coming around to a different view: Maybe door-knocking really isn’t as important as we all thought.
Most political scientists I talked to affirmed this view. Melissa Michelson, professor of political science and an expert on field experiments for voter turnout, told me, “That the Biden campaign can’t engage in door-to-door canvassing is maybe not that big of a loss because we actually have tons of data about how to effectively and in a cost-efficient way mobilize voters from all different parts of the Democratic coalition — younger voters, low-income voters, Black voters, Latino voters — without going door to door.”
Indeed, there’s a growing body of research suggesting that methods like calling voters and “relational” voter turnout seem to be as effective — if not more effective — than traditional door-knocking.
To be clear, there’s a consensus that field work can juice turnout and even persuade voters in primary elections or local elections where the candidates are less well-known and voters’ opinions are less formed.
But skeptics argue that you can’t just look at whether the effect of a field operation is positive or negative. You have to ask how many votes it pulls in per dollar spent, and compare that to whatever the equivalent figure is on alternative uses of campaign money: TV ads, digital ads, direct mail, and non-knocking fieldwork like phone banking. Given the expense of running a good field team, skeptics argue that the cost-per-vote is too high relative to alternatives and that Covid-19 might serendipitously be pushing campaigns away from inefficient uses of resources and toward more efficient ones.
“There’s not any other kind of information we try to communicate by going door to door,” says David Shor, an independent Democratic data analyst who helped develop Obama’s data analytics operation in 2012. When big companies want to get the word out about their products, they use ads — and Shor and other field skeptics think campaigns should double down on those, too.
Persuading voters in presidential general elections is difficult
It’s important to distinguish between two different purposes of political campaigns. One purpose is persuasion: convincing an undecided voter, or even one who’s decided for the other candidate, to support your candidate. The other purpose is turnout: getting people who are already persuaded to support your candidate to actually vote.
Persuasion obviously happens by some mechanism in elections — swing voters are rare, but real, and a large number of voters switched from supporting Trump in 2016 to supporting Democrats in the 2018 midterms. That’s persuasion of at least some kind taking place.
But when political scientists try to evaluate the effect of specific campaign interventions at persuasion, the results tend to be quite dire. Even though persuasion happens, it’s hard for campaigns to reliably pull it off. UC Berkeley’s David Broockman and Yale’s Joshua Kalla conducted an evidence review in 2017 of studies evaluating how effective interventions aimed at persuading voters are, be they canvassing, phone calls, direct mail, TV, online ads, or anything else under the sun.
They found that there’s lots of room for persuasion in primaries; a canvass during the 2015 Philadelphia mayoral primary, an open race where voters didn’t know the candidates that well, was quite effective. But in general elections? Nope.
“The best estimate for the persuasive effects of campaign contact and advertising — such as mail, phone calls, and canvassing — on Americans’ candidate choices in general elections is zero,” they write. “Our best guess for online and television advertising is also zero, but there is less evidence on these modes.”
There are unique circumstances where persuasion tactics become more effective for campaigns (see the last section here). But the 2020 presidential election doesn’t feel like one of them. Voters know who Donald Trump is. They know who Joe Biden is. Given everything voters have learned about both of them over the past four years, or past several decades even, it’s unlikely that door-knocking or phone banking is going to be the decisive factor in changing people’s votes.
Turning out existing voters, however, is possible
Even though campaign contact doesn’t seem to persuade people in general elections, it’s not necessarily a bad idea. That’s because campaign contact can increase turnout, too.
The empirical literature here was kicked off by political scientists Alan Gerber and Donald Green two decades ago, and their book Get Out the Vote! is still one of the best sources on the evidence base around the effectiveness of canvassing, phone banking, and direct mail at turning out voters.
In the book’s fourth edition, released in 2019, Gerber and Green estimate that the average per-conversation effect size of canvassing turnout operations is 4.0; the average effect of commercial phone banks is 0.947; the average effect of volunteer phone banks is 2.8. This is across a variety of elections, though, not just presidential ones, where effect sizes might be lower.
That’s a lot of numbers, so let me spell it out: If canvassing has an effect size of 4.0, that means that a door-knocking operation that knocks on 5,000 doors, and gets a response at 1,000 of those doors (a pretty standard or even high response rate) will generate 40 new voters. Similarly, a volunteer phone bank that reaches 1,000 people will produce about 28 new voters, since the effect size is 2.8.
Contacting voters by phone might be just as good as door-knocking anyway
When you put it like that, it makes door-knocking look considerably better than calling voters, which is likely to replace it in a Covid-19 environment.
But you can also talk to more people in an hour through phone banking than through canvassing. You don’t have to walk or drive between addresses. Put it all together and Gerber and Green’s rough estimate is that canvassing can garner campaigns a vote for about $33, while volunteer phone-banking can garner a vote for $36 — not too different, especially when you consider how imprecise these estimates necessarily are.
Michelson, the professor of political science at Menlo College, has evaluated dozens of experiments testing turnout and persuasion, reporting many in her 2012 book with UC Berkeley’s Lisa García Bedolla, Mobilizing Inclusion. They found that calling voters produced more consistently positive results than door-to-door canvassing, in part because it was easier for callers to stick to a script than it was for canvassers. “What we found is that although door-to-door canvassing could generate the largest effects, it was not actually our recommended method,” Michelson told me. “We thought that other things like two-round phone banks were more effective.”
In “two-round” phone banks, voters are first contacted several weeks before the election, and then get a follow-up call to encourage them to vote a day or two before the election.
Door-knocking and phone banking are not the only possible ways to contact voters, of course. Gerber and Green estimate that the average effect of conventional mailers from nonpartisan groups meant to get out the vote is 0.296 per mailer (so a mailer that reaches 1,000 people might produce 3 new voters). Robocalls and explicitly partisan direct mail (fliers advertising a particular candidate, say) don’t seem to have any effect.
But “social pressure” mailers have a bigger effect on average. In that tactic, campaigns or other turnout organizations use mail to remind voters that whether or not they voted in the past is public information, and share information on which of their neighbors voted.
In a study of the June 2012 Wisconsin recall election for Gov. Scott Walker, Green, Harvard’s Todd Rogers, Yale’s John Ternovski, and Carolina Ferrerosa Young (now working for Democratic Sen. Mark Warner) found that social pressure mailers like this sent out by an anti-Walker group boosted turnout of Democratic-leaning voters substantially, working out to a cost per vote of roughly $55. And in a 2006 primary election in Michigan (a much less visible race), Gerber, Green, and Christopher Larimer found that social pressure mailers produced votes for $1.93 each, an astoundingly low price.
Social pressure techniques can generate backlash — as when Ted Cruz used them in the 2016 Iowa caucus but used made-up voter histories and told voters they’d committed a “VOTER VIOLATION” in a font that kind of implied they’d done something illegal — but they seem consistently effective.
The limits of our existing data
There are a few factors, however, that complicate this public data. For one thing, only a small share of all studies conducted on the effects of canvassing and phone banking on turnout are public. The majority are conducted through firms like the Analyst Institute (for Democrats) or Evolving Strategies (for Republicans), and the results are typically proprietary. Democrats don’t want Republicans to benefit from studies they spent millions of dollars conducting and vice versa (though everyone acknowledges that Democrats invest vastly more in these kinds of experiments than Republicans do).
Don Green, the Columbia political scientist and doyen of campaign field experiments, told me, “When [Gerber and I] do the meta-analysis, we are super careful to get our hands around everything we can find,” including unpublished working papers and even individual regressions. He believes that their public summary of the evidence is representative of what groups like the Analyst Institute know privately. But there’s a limit on how much journalists like me or the general public can know about the evidence base, given how much of it is secret.
The other complication is that phone banking has diminished in effectiveness as people have moved to cellphones, which are harder to match to voter records, and which they’re less likely to use as phones and less likely to pick up calls from unfamiliar numbers. Parties are getting better at reaching cellphones — the Democratic National Committee announced a massive purchase of tens of millions of cellphone numbers in January — but it does complicate matters.
Advertising matters — potentially a lot
Digital advertising is another arrow in a campaign’s quiver. In recent months, it has become a highly public topic of controversy in light of Facebook and Twitter’s role in spreading false or misleading ads.
Most evidence to date, though, is dismissive or murky as to digital advertising’s effectiveness. An early randomized experiment by Broockman and Green using Facebook found that ads weren’t effective at boosting favorability or name recognition for a Republican state legislative candidate or a Democratic congressional candidate. The nonpartisan group Rock the Vote conducted experiments in 2012 and 2013 using Facebook ads, garnering millions of impressions, meant to boost turnout, and found no difference between the treatment group and the control group.
Kalla evaluated a similar experiment conducted by NextGen Climate, an advocacy group founded and funded by billionaire Tom Steyer. The experiment assigned over 1 million voters in New Hampshire, Nevada, and Pennsylvania to receive online ads urging them to turn out and vote in the 2016 general election. Two-thirds of the ads were on Facebook. Kalla found a very small effect on turnout, with an overall cost of $474 per vote, which is very high compared to phone banking or door-knocking.
Political scientists tend to be similarly dismissive of television ads. “The turnout effects of TV and digital ads are basically zero,” Green told me, with some exceptions like Rock the Vote that he himself has tested. Green and UCLA’s Lynn Vavreck found that an advertisement specifically designed to boost youth turnout did just that — but most campaign ads aren’t as laser-focused on turnout.
“I don’t know that there’s a study that shows that the turnout effects of a regular TV campaign, not the old ones that Lynn Vavreck and I crafted 16 years ago that were specifically about get-out-the-vote. It’s basically a null set. There are some non-experimental papers that purport to find effects, though there are plenty of non-experimental findings that show no effect,” he said.
But those TV ads are generally trying to do persuasion, not turnout — and some non-experimental papers suggest they help with persuasion. There’s a long history of observational studies (looking at ads after the fact rather than deploying them in a randomized way as part of a formal experiment) evaluating the effectiveness of TV ads, and analysts like Shor find them compelling. Moreover, they think the weight of the non-experimental evidence is more in favor of TV than against it.
In 1999, University of Texas at Austin’s Daron Shaw found substantial statewide effects of TV advertising in statewide races from 1988 to 1996; a book by a trio of political scientists found that TV advertising was effective in the 2000 race. Studies analyzing the 2004 and 2006 elections came to similar conclusions.
Most recently, a study under the unassuming title of “Political Advertising and Election Results,” from economists Jörg Spenkuch and David Toniatti (un-paywalled copy here) pooled results across three elections and used a particularly compelling design. Spenkuch and Toniatti exploit the fact that TV ad-buying is done on the “media market” level, and that neighboring and similar counties are often in different “media markets” due to FCC regulations, to measure the effect of TV ads on US presidential elections from 2004 to 2012.
They find substantial effects: “Showing someone 100 ads in the month before the election in a presidential race increases their odds of voting for you by 1 percent,” Shor summarizes. If a TV ad costs only, say, $30 per 1,000 impressions, then that’s a much more favorable cost-per-vote than phone banking or canvassing.
Shor also points to the 2020 primary for a particularly illustrative example:
[Elizabeth] Warren spent the entire cycle building up this massive army of organizers in Iowa who knocked on a bunch of doors. This is a low-salience race: only 7.6 percent of Iowans voted in the [Democratic] caucuses. But what [Pete] Buttigieg did is take roughly the same amount of money she spent on field, and spent it on TV in the summer [of 2019]. That made him go up in the polls to the point that the media started covering him. That helped him raise more money so he could buy more TV, and he almost won.
Shor’s conclusion: The Warren organizer-based model is a waste of money. The Buttigieg strategy, based on TV and earned media, got much closer to succeeding.
“A solid 95 percent of people who work in data for politics are coordinating field programs, which is wild,” Shor says. “What we actually need are people with a different skillset, who are good at making ads, are good at ad tech, or work in video production. I have a friend who’s a professional video producer who was asking me where she should go knock on doors. That’s a massive misallocation of resources.”
Others, like Green and Kalla, consider the Spenkuch/Toniatti study a rather thin reed to build a pro-TV, anti-field case upon. Kalla acknowledged that the study “changed my prior a bit” in favor of TV being effective.
But he noted that it identified “a very weird mechanism” for its effects. TV ads tend to be geared more toward persuasion than turnout. But TV, Spenkuch and Toniatti find, changes the turnout of the electorate. When one party has an advantage on TV, its supporters turn out more in general elections than supporters for the candidate who fell behind on TV ads. Green calls the study “basically an anomaly. What is the mechanism that would cause turnout to be the driving force behind a vote shift? That really struck me as strange.”
This debate might seem esoteric, but the stakes are high. If Shor (and Spenkuch/Toniatti and their precursors in the literature) are right, then campaigns should be investing far less in the ground game and much more in TV ads with messages refined and perfected through iterative field experiments. If Green is right, then phone banking and canvassing for turnout are still crucial activities for campaigns to be engaged in.
The future is canvassing your friends
Beyond the disagreement over TV, there’s widespread agreement and optimism across the political scientist/data consultant spectrum about the possibilities of “relational voter turnout” that exploits people’s friendships and social attachments.
Case in point: In 2010, Facebook conducted a 61 million-person experiment testing whether a banner urging US members to vote in the midterm elections could juice turnout. Simply putting up an informational banner didn’t work at all. But including faces of friends who’d clicked an “I Voted” button was effective at increasing turnout.
More recently, campaigns have turned to “relational voter turnout,” where instead of phone banking or canvassing strangers, volunteers try to turn out people close to them, like friends and family. Persuading friends and family can be hard, as anyone who’s gotten into a Facebook argument with an uncle can attest, but encouraging turnout is somewhat easier.
“Everybody, even a relatively high-probability voter … would nonetheless know people in the same family, in the same congregation, on the same street, in the same workplace, you name it, who are low-propensity voters,” Green says. “That’s what you’re looking for in 2020: Find 10 people who haven’t voted in a while, are 19, etc.”
Recently, Green and Columbia University’s Oliver McClellan conducted an experiment for the nonpartisan group Turnout Nation in which 43 organizing “captains” in four states each put together lists of 20 “friends or relatives who would be eligible to vote” in upcoming municipal elections. Half of the names were assigned to be treated, meaning captains were encouraged to contact them and ask them to vote. The other half the captains were told not to contact. The effect was 13.2 percentage points, which the authors call “extraordinary, exceeding estimates from any other randomized trial on voter turnout.” In Ohio, where the program was more regimented, the effects were even greater.
Shor disagrees with Green on TV ads, but he’s absolutely on board regarding relational organizing. One informal way for people to engage in it is to, well, post about who they’re voting for and remind people to vote on social media networks like Instagram and Facebook. “The most effective thing that anyone can do is go out and shit-post and talk to their friends and tell people what they believe and what they care about,” Shor says. “That’s what politics is about.”
2020 in general has been a year in which people have struggled to find digital, or at least socially distant, replacements for in-person experiences: eating at restaurants, connecting with friends, celebrating big events. While the particulars are controversial, one unanimous message from political scientists and election analysts is that electioneering translates quite well to a post-pandemic world. Campaign volunteers don’t necessarily need to knock on strangers’ doors as much as they need to be texting their friends to get them to vote.


The great rebuild

The Covid-19 pandemic is a tragedy , a massive policy failure , and an existential threat to the livelihood and health of millions of Americans — with the pain disproportionality falling on Black Americans .
With more than 5 million cases worldwide , more than 175,000 Americans dead , more than 16 million US jobs eliminated , and schools and businesses shuttered , half measures won ’ t cut it .
It didn ’ t have to be this way .
However , there is still much we can do to recover — and not just recover , but rebuild @ @ @ @ @ @ @ thinkers , economists , and policymakers , The Great Rebuild imagines how we could marshal the power of the federal government and the potential of its citizens to fight back against the catastrophic effects of Covid-19 , and in the process create a system steeped in fairness , inclusion , and sustainability .
The Great Rebuild is made possible thanks to support from Omidyar Network , a social impact venture that works to reimagine critical systems and the ideas that govern them , and to build more inclusive and equitable societies .
All @ @ @ @ @ @ @ produced by our journalists .
How to decarbonize America — and create 25 million jobs The US has the technology to decarbonize by 2035 .
Here ’ s a plan to do it .
What it would take to end child poverty in America Rep. Barbara Lee on why rebuilding the economy should mean investing in our kids .
What would Keynes do ?
What the 20th century ’ s most influential economist can teach us about rebuilding the US economy .
The failed dream of the American small business Small businesses were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and systemic forces left many fighting for survival .
Then came the pandemic .

The Covid-19 pandemic is a tragedy, a massive policy failure, and an existential threat to the livelihood and health of millions of Americans — with the pain disproportionality falling on Black Americans.
A problem this big demands a bold solution.
With more than 30 million cases worldwide, more than 200,000 Americans dead, millions of US jobs eliminated, and schools and businesses shuttered, half measures won’t cut it. It didn’t have to be this way. However, there is still much we can do to recover — and not just recover, but rebuild.
Tapping the voices of prominent American thinkers, economists, and policymakers, The Great Rebuild imagines how we could marshal the power of the federal government and the potential of its citizens to fight back against the catastrophic effects of Covid-19, and in the process create a system steeped in fairness, inclusion, and sustainability.
The Great Rebuild is made possible thanks to support from Omidyar Network, a social impact venture that works to reimagine critical systems and the ideas that govern them, and to build more inclusive and equitable societies. All Great Rebuild coverage is editorially independent and produced by our journalists.
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