Originally published in Vox on February 20, 2025.
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Last week, a Texas judge ordered Dr. Margaret Carpenter — a New York abortion doctor — to pay at least $100,000 in penalties for failing to appear in court. Carpenter has found herself at the center of two major abortion lawsuits: In December, she became the target of the first-ever civil suit against an out-of-state abortion provider, and officials in Louisiana are now also seeking her extradition, with newly appointed US Attorney General Pam Bondi signaling that she’d “love” to get involved.

The mounting legal battles center on whether states with abortion bans can block their constituents from receiving FDA-approved abortion pills from doctors in states with no such restrictions. The cases represent the latest salvo in the fast-evolving fight over reproductive rights in America.

The attacks on Carpenter coincide with new federal threats to abortion medication: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now at the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), recently said he was open to reviewing and potentially reinstating stricter safety requirements on the abortion drug mifepristone — despite it being incredibly safe, as affirmed by decades of patient data from around the world.

Abortion pills have become the most common method for ending pregnancies in the United States, partly due to their safety record, their lower cost, and diminished access to in-person care. While states have ramped up abortion restrictions since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, access to abortion pills has actually significantly expanded since then, helping to explain why there were more US abortions in 2023 than in any year since 2011.

Reimposing federal restrictions on the drugs could effectively end telemedicine abortion access, in which patients consult with abortion providers remotely, and which thousands of people in states with bans rely on each month for care.

A potent strategy is emerging: revert back to older Food and Drug Administration (FDA) restrictions on mifepristone under the guise of women’s health and safety, while simultaneously supporting states’ attempts to block out-of-state abortion providers. If it works, the anti-abortion movement could achieve many of the same ends as a federal ban without the political backlash.

Maggie Carpenter’s charges underscore an emboldened anti-abortion movement

Carpenter, a family medicine physician from New Paltz, New York, has become a focal point in the ongoing war over abortion access.

In 2022 she co-founded the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine Access (ACT) to help enact shield laws in blue states to support providers dispensing abortion pills to patients in red ones. Shield law protections can include barring state agencies from helping another state’s criminal investigation, and ensuring that an abortion provider does not lose their professional license or face malpractice insurance penalties as a result of an out-of-state complaint. To date, 18 states, including New York, have passed such laws, though Carpenter’s case represents the first real legal test of this shield strategy.

The Texas civil suit filed by Attorney General Ken Paxton alleges that Carpenter violated a state law that bans the mailing or online prescribing of abortion pills to people in Texas. The case was initiated by a report filed with Paxton’s office by a man who claims to be the father of the pregnancy allegedly affected by the abortion pills. The Washington Post reported that the anti-abortion movement plans to launch a campaign encouraging male partners of women who’ve had abortions in Texas to come forward and sue.

The Louisiana criminal case centers on Carpenter prescribing medication to the mother of a pregnant minor. Abortion pills are banned in the state and Carpenter, her medical practice, and the girl’s mother, who turned herself into the police, were all charged with felonies. The Louisiana law carries penalties of one to five years in jail and fines ranging between $5,000 and $50,000.

In an interview with Talk Louisiana, the district attorney who filed the criminal charges, Tony Clayton, said doctors “can’t hide behind the borders of New York and ship pills down here,” but acknowledged New York’s shield law “prevents me” from going there to issue his arrest warrant. Clayton will be prosecuting with state Attorney General Liz Murrill, who warned that Carpenter could face arrest if she leaves New York, as most states honor each other’s warrants through reciprocal agreements.

Julie Kay, Carpenter’s colleague and ACT co-founder, described this as a “watershed moment.”

“This has crossed a line that’s never been crossed in this country and is not what people want,” she told Vox. “Nor is it smart because we have an incredibly high rate of maternal mortality and this pushes people away from licensed practitioners.”

New York has responded aggressively so far to protect Carpenter. Gov. Kathy Hochul explicitly stated she would “never, under any circumstances” extradite the physician, while the state’s attorney general, Letitia James, denounced the prosecution as a “cowardly attempt” to weaponize the law. Days after Louisiana’s indictment, Hochul also signed new legislation that allows physicians prescribing abortion pills to keep their names off the drug packaging. This new shield protection, which took immediate effect, lets doctors put their medical practice’s name on the packaging instead.

These shield laws set the stage for new kinds of legal battles between red and blue states. “If Illinois refuses to extradite an abortion provider to Georgia, will Georgia retaliate and refuse to extradite a gun dealer to Illinois?” Greer Donley of University of Pittsburgh, David Cohen of Drexel University, and Rachel Rebouché of Temple University wrote in a 2022 paper that was cited directly in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization dissent.

A broader backdoor strategy

The lawsuits against Carpenter are part of a broader legal offensive that seeks to exploit the post-Roe landscape.

Louisiana has emerged as a key battleground, in 2024 becoming the first state to classify mifepristone as “a controlled dangerous substance” — putting it in a class of highly regulated drugs that include fentanyl and methamphetamine. According to legislative tracking from the Guttmacher Institute, four more states — Indiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Texas — have all introduced or pre-filed bills this year that would do the same thing.

Meanwhile Republican attorneys general from Idaho, Kansas, and Missouri are mounting a new federal challenge to mifepristone that represents a more legally sophisticated approach than previous attempts. Unlike the 2024 Supreme Court case brought by anti-abortion advocates that was ultimately dismissed for lack of standing, these attorneys general argue they have standing because their states incur costs for emergency medical care, and say they have an interest in enforcing their state abortion bans.

The states’ rights strategy will likely appeal to Trump, who campaigned for reelection by insisting the Supreme Court had made abortion a states’ issue going forward. Trump also claimed he would avoid signing any federal abortion ban if elected. His flip-flopping on abortion worked: Most voters believed that Trump would not be a threat to abortion rights and that he would not prioritize the issue. As Vox reported last month, anti-abortion activists have signaled they’re willing to accommodate compromises with the White House that allow Trump to say he’s kept his campaign pledge, even as they push other restrictions and promote “fetal personhood” language in policy wherever possible. (Trump’s recent executive orders have already begun incorporating language about “sex at conception” — a win for the fetal personhood movement.)

State Rep. Mandie Landry, a Democrat from Louisiana, told Vox that her state was already deeply hostile to abortion, even before the charges against Carpenter. The way forward, according to Landry, will be to build more political power state by state, not file more lawsuits or push more federal bills. “The way to dig out of the hole we’re in with reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights is to do the grunt work that takes a long time through the state legislatures,” she said.

The anti-abortion movement’s embrace of states’ rights arguments might seem to conflict with their ultimate goal of ending abortion nationwide. But experts say this strategy could actually advance their broader aim of establishing the national standard of fetal personhood. If the Supreme Court accepts red states’ argument that they can block their residents from getting abortion care from blue states, it would help establish precedent for state authority to “protect unborn life” — precedent that could later support arguments for fetal rights more broadly.

Kirsten Moore, the director of the Expanding Medication Abortion Access Project, says the red state charges against Carpenter reveal the anti-abortion movement’s hypocritical logic. “They’re saying you blue states don’t get to do what you want, and we red states get to do what we want,” she said.

Can red states preempt the federal government?

Over the objections of groups like the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the FDA long has long had mifepristone on its Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies (REMS) list, a designation used when the government determines that increased restrictions are necessary for a drug’s benefit to outweigh its risks. As a result, until relatively recently, patients had to visit doctors in person to receive the medication, meaning telehealth was off limits, and patients couldn’t just fill a prescription at their local pharmacy

In 2017, the ACLU sued the FDA, arguing its mifepristone restrictions were not medically justified, and during the pandemic the FDA temporarily lifted its requirement that mifepristone be dispensed in person at a clinic or a hospital. In December 2021, the FDA announced it would permanently lift the in-person requirement, leading to the robust abortion telemedicine abortion industry that exists today.

But many leaders in the anti-abortion movement cast these actions as proof that lawmakers had “lowered medical standards.” They pushed a number of baseless and misleading arguments about protecting women’s safety which Vox examined in 2023. It’s widely expected that anti-abortion lobbyists will try to push the FDA to reinstate the national restrictions that the Biden administration eased.

Related

• The new front in the right’s war on abortion

Moore, of the Expanding Medication Abortion Access project, emphasizes that this would take time, and almost certainly face legal challenges from drug companies that have invested millions into the FDA drug approval process already. Another option though, could be for an official at HHS to write a memo on behalf of Kennedy claiming mifepristone represents an “imminent harm.” Under federal law, that could empower the HHS Secretary to pull the drug from the market. Moore suspects, however, that a less politically conspicuous states’ rights strategy would be more attractive to Trump.

The fight over whether states can restrict FDA-approved medication isn’t new. In 2022, the manufacturer of generic mifepristone sued Mississippi over its restrictions on the abortion pill, arguing that federal approval should preempt state regulations under the supremacy clause of the Constitution. While that case was ultimately deemed moot after Roe was overturned, the same fundamental tension now animates the Republican attorneys general lawsuit and the prosecution of Carpenter.

Legal scholars see a “strong, though legally uncertain” argument that federal authority should prevail when state and federal law directly conflict. But anti-abortion forces are betting that the current Supreme Court, which emphasized state authority in overturning Roe, will be receptive to arguments for state power to restrict abortion pills — even if that means overriding federal drug approvals.

For providers like Carpenter, these federal developments add another layer of uncertainty to an already precarious and shifting landscape. Even if she and her colleagues successfully fight off state-level prosecution, FDA rule changes could effectively limit their ability to provide telehealth abortion care to patients in restricted states.

What comes next

The legal challenges to Carpenter will likely take months, if not years, to play out. A spokesperson for ACT declined to comment on the new Texas penalties.

For now, advocates emphasize that abortion remains accessible and affordable to people in all fifty states. Should that change — be it through new FDA restrictions, new aggressive enforcement of the Comstock Act, or other developing tactics — even the backup option of international providers like Aid Access might not be enough to prevent a significant increase in people forced to carry unwanted pregnancies.

Still, a broader aim of the anti-abortion movement is to deter providers like Carpenter from choosing to offer care at all. While the immediate battles center on medication abortion and the provision of care to red states, the long-term goal for the anti-abortion movement is to end access in all states, with fetal personhood established nationwide.

When asked how other providers have been reacting to the charges, Kay, the ACT co-founder, said the new attacks follow a long history of violence, harassment and intimidation against people who offer this care. “Nobody becomes an abortion provider lightly,” she said. “They do it because they’re mission-driven and because they recognize that one in four women in America will have an abortion, with more than half of those already mothers.”

Originally published in Vox on February 18, 2025.

Americans don’t move much anymore and Yoni Appelbaum thinks that’s a serious problem. Appelbaum, a historian and deputy executive editor at The Atlantic, is the author of a new book exploring how and why Americans have become less likely to settle in new places.

In Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity, he examines in illuminating detail the consequences of this decline in geographic mobility — both for individuals and for the broader political and economic landscape of the US, where the freedom to move to different parts of the country has long shaped the nation’s identity.

I spoke with Appelbaum about mobility acting as a form of social glue, the trade-offs of tenements, and his ideas for getting Americans moving around again. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Your research found that Donald Trump’s strongest support in 2016 came from people who stayed in and around their hometowns, while those who moved away were more likely to back Hillary Clinton. Do you see a connection between staying put and a rightward political drift?

There’s a lot of good social science research to suggest that moving doesn’t just change people’s economic destinies and the prospects of their children, it shifts their whole mindset. Researchers have found that people who relocate to new places are more open to new experiences, they tend to necessarily be more open to diversity, and conceive of the world as a place where there can be win-wins.

People who want to move, and can’t, grow more cynical, more pessimistic, more inclined to see the world as zero-sum. They may also grow more isolated, more set in their ways and habits. I think that a society that ties people down is likely to produce a politics that views change as threatening and diversity as dangerous.

Your book powerfully argues that geographic mobility shaped America’s innovative spirit. But moving often means leaving behind the family, friends, and neighbors who give our lives real meaning. Is there a way to recapture the benefits of mobility without asking people to repeatedly uproot their deepest local ties?

I was surprised as I researched the book to see what a large role mobility had played in shaping the distinctive character of America, not just in terms of economics. Maybe the most surprising thing is what an enormous role it’s played in shaping the vitality of American community. When people relocate, they tend to feel lonely when they first arrive, and respond to that feeling by reaching out, by making connections, by making themselves do uncomfortable things like joining organizations.
We often think of mobility as something that dissolves the ties that mean the most to us. In practice, though, in the US, mobility has usually served as a kind of social glue, as the thing which binds us to each other. And if you look at the last 50 years with a really sharp decline in mobility, we have simultaneously seen a really sharp decline in other kinds of social ties. That’s not coincidental.

You also argue that mobility is crucial for the ability of an economy to grow and create new opportunities. Do you think America can remain competitive if more people stay put, or is a higher level of geographic mobility necessary?

In a dynamic economy where firms rise and fall, and sectors boom and decline, it’s essential to get workers to the right places. Unlike a command-and-control economy, where you decide where to put factories and how many people to employ, market economies require high labor mobility to match workers with new opportunities. Without this, you’ll have factories closing and workers losing jobs while new opportunities arise elsewhere, but not for those displaced workers. That’s been the issue in recent decades.

The second aspect is personal. It’s hard to leave a bad job because it’s still a job, and switching industries or taking risks is tough. We know sharp interventions help people break habits, and physical relocation resets habits. If you leave a declining industry and move to a new town, you’ll likely take a job in a growing sector, speeding up the [economic] transition.

Your book makes a compelling case that local zoning restrictions have created barriers to geographic mobility by making housing so scarce and unaffordable. Yet journalist Phil Longman points to the late 1970s federal retreat from regulating transportation, enforcing antitrust, and investing in infrastructure as the turning points that made mobility more difficult. How do you see broader policy shifts interacting with local zoning to keep people “stuck” today?

If you look to the American South, for half a century after the Civil War, people didn’t leave in large numbers, because they were not welcome in the North. When immigration halted in World War I, you then got the Great Migration, as people fled north to take available jobs — something like 20 million white Southerners and 8 million Black Southerners moved north over the 20th century. Today we’re seeing a flow back toward the South, where cities are now growing faster.

What’s different about the current flow is that people are often migrating to places where housing is cheap, rather than where jobs pay well. This marks a sharp departure from the past. For 200 years, the poorest and richest places in America were converging. It plateaued in the ’70s and ’80s, then started widening again this century. The reason: For 200 years, moving from a poor place to a rich place meant ending up ahead because earning gains outstripped living costs. For most Americans now, that’s not true anymore. Local housing regulations mean moving to richer places costs more in housing than they gain in income, leaving them behind.

Let’s talk more about this link between affordable housing and mobility. You note that while 19th- and early 20th-century tenements had real problems, many residents weren’t actually unhappy or feeling degraded by their living situations. When I wrote about converting vacant offices into adult dorm-style SROs last year, some progressives criticized it as undignifying, especially the idea of sharing bathrooms. Do you see parallels between these older housing reform movements and today’s resistance to certain affordable housing models? How do we balance housing quality concerns with the risk that imposing middle-class preferences might harm those we’re trying to help?

Tenements were really surprising to me. I thought I knew the story of tenements: that it was greedy landlords exploiting vulnerable immigrants and making them live in really horrifying conditions. But for most immigrants, tenements were a temporary housing solution that enabled them to come to a country with better prospects to find jobs, to care for their families and to move up.

Housing reformers tended to highlight the very worst examples of tenements they could find, but the more comprehensive government reports which looked at the overall quality of the housing stock found that most tenements were well-maintained, clean, and worked well for their inhabitants. The great fear is usually that these housing conditions will become permanent. You can hear that in today’s housing debates, too. You don’t want anyone to be stuck. You don’t want somebody to be housed in a way that’s not them making a conscious trade-off but rather a blighted condition that’s being imposed on them from which they can’t escape.

But in our zeal to eliminate these problems, I think reformers have often looked at difficult housing conditions and concluded that the problem is the building code, when the problem is almost invariably poverty. The alternative to less-than-ideal housing that society seems to have hit upon is homelessness, which from the perspective of somebody who’s offered to move off the streets and into an SRO is usually a much worse option. If you give people back the agency to choose what housing conditions they’d like to accept as they try to climb a ladder towards security, I think you get a really different set of decisions than if those decisions are being made in the abstract by reformers.

Your book highlights this remarkable moment from 1913: Housing reformer Lawrence Veiller admitted that Americans liked apartments and would never vote to ban them. So he recommended that regulators find ways to “penalize” apartments through indirect means, like stricter building codes — including fire safety rules as he had done in New York City. Do you think these regulations not only restricted housing options but also reshaped Americans’ preferences over time?

Yeah, and as we see today, as restrictions tend to target certain kinds of housing, including multifamily housing, often that housing tends to become associated with undesirable populations. It’s easier to say, “I don’t want an apartment building,” than to say, “I don’t want immigrants in my neighborhood.” So I think that the stigmatization of certain kinds of housing has shaped American preferences. There are a lot of people who just prefer to live in a single-family home, and that’s fine. They should have that choice. What strikes me as peculiar is somebody who prefers a single-family home and doesn’t think anyone else should have the choice to prefer something else.

Your book joins an important body of work, including Marc Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works and Paul Sabin’s Public Citizens, both of which explore how a new wave of progressive activism emerged in the latter half of the 20th century, fostering a more adversarial relationship with government and expertise. As a journalist covering housing and other social issues today, I’m struck by how this history complicates our role — we need to expose problems and hold power accountable, but our industry’s more adversarial pivot may have also contributed to the erosion of trust and tolerance needed for sustaining support for collective pluralistic solutions. How do you navigate these tensions as a journalist and a scholar?

As a writer, I aimed to tell the story as accurately as possible, and followed where that led. But looking back, I see that deep suspicion of institutions led in an unexpected direction. The belief that government doesn’t act in the public interest and must be challenged by citizen activists and journalists took hold in progressive circles for good reason — the government often wasn’t acting in the public interest. But many of the self-appointed guardians weren’t either. We replaced a flawed system with one that made it nearly impossible to get anything done.

At first, activists saw this new environment as a victory; they stopped and could stop many of the bad things they had observed. However, over time, we’ve accumulated a growing deficit of things that need to be done, built, and changed, and it’s become harder and harder to implement any of it.

Our institutions, including journalism, are good at exposing abuses of power but not very good at addressing inaction or missed opportunities. As Marc Dunkelman suggests in his book, we need a rebalancing. If in the end, what you do is reduce every bureaucrat to a defensive crouch, if people decide that the safe option is not acting rather than trying to make something a little bit better, that’s got big institutional consequences. I don’t have a good answer for that.

You suggest that if we can’t restore geographic mobility, we might need to redesign our welfare system around a more static population. How do you see the relationship between these two challenges — restoring mobility and providing welfare?

If you have a society that has an operating assumption that people are going to stay where they’re born, then you need to have a really strong form of redistribution, because the gains are not going to be matched terribly well to the population. You’ll need to plan to take the gains from the regions of your country which are doing really well, from folks who are doing really well, and redistribute them to the people who are not doing as well. And you see that in many European social welfare states — that’s the underlying logic. It comes with some real costs, including, typically very high unemployment in some places, intergenerational poverty and a lack of agency, but it is a solution to the problem of that mismatch.

America has typically had a very different solution, which is that, instead of providing a really robust social safety net that redistributes income to allow people to remain where they are, we favored engineering a society that maximizes individual agency, and allows people to take their futures into their own hands and go where they want. When that works it yields a set of outcomes that people seem to prefer, which is one reason why, for most of American history, we’ve had a very large net inflow of immigrants.

What we have right now in America is a society that is increasingly marrying European levels of stasis to American levels of social welfare policy, and that is the worst of both worlds. We’re not helping people go where the opportunities are and we don’t help them where they’re living either. And that strikes me as dangerous and unsustainable and also inhumane. And so it’s a real choice that America faces at this moment to decide which of those two models it wants to pursue.

Originally published in Vox on February 14, 2025.
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Amid the fourth week of Donald Trump’s presidency and Elon Musk’s unprecedented blitz against the federal government, dread abounds for the country’s federal civil service — the 2.3 million career government employees who handle everything from managing national parks and taxes to overseeing public health and homelessness aid.

Some 75,000 federal employees, or 3 percent of the workforce, accepted the murky offer for “deferred resignation.” Since roughly 7 percent of federal workers voluntarily resign every year, there’s no indication yet that these voluntary departures will exceed typical levels. On Thursday night, the Trump administration directed agency heads to fire thousands of federal workers, including most probationary staff, a move that could affect up to 200,000 employees.

Musk and his allies have made clear they have no plans to stop their broader crusade to shrink the federal government, automate more of its tasks, and potentially cut spending by dismantling agencies one by one.

The aggressive campaign against the civil service parallels a long history of attacks against another type of public sector worker far more familiar to most Americans: teachers.

The current portrayal of civil servants as “deep state” bureaucrats pushing far-left ideology draws from the same playbook conservatives have long deployed against the 3.2 million Americans who teach in K-12 public schools. Examining these movements together reveals striking similarities in both rhetoric and strategy — and offers clues to the longer-term dangers ahead.

While the most immediate risks from the civil service attacks include a collapse of critical services, economic fallout, and a security vacuum, the consequences could reverberate far beyond this particular purge. Though civil servants have weathered previous onslaughts, the assault from the Department of Government Efficiency stands alone in both its scale and ambition. The warning signs are already visible in education — just as teaching has become an increasingly embattled profession, the prospect of joining the federal workforce may become so diminished and insecure after the DOGE ambush that we face a more lasting degradation of policy implementation, accountability, and enforcement. A nation that devalues its public servants ultimately devalues its own future.

Attacks on “efficiency” and a “bloated public sector” didn’t start with DOGE

When conservatives talk about shrinking government, they draw on decades of ideas that took root well before Donald Trump. The push to deregulate began in earnest during the Ford and Carter years, when both Republicans and Democrats worked to slash rules governing everything from airlines to banking. Education was part of this campaign, too: The right-wing Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973, made public funding for private schools one of its early priorities, and Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago economist who wielded enormous influence in conservative circles, championed school vouchers as a way to bring free market ideas into education.

Ronald Reagan would later cement these policies as Republican gospel, elevating privatized, bare-bones government as essential for economic growth and reducing federal overreach. Government wasn’t just inefficient, Reagan argued — it actively stood in the way of American prosperity. This anti-government philosophy found its perfect target in public education with the release of the 1983 federal report, “A Nation at Risk.”

This influential (though empirically flawed) analysis concluded that American public schools were failing — “eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity” — with ill-prepared teachers and low-quality standards. Conservatives seized on the findings, tied them to the nation’s Cold War fear of falling behind Russia, and painted a picture of failing public schools run by bureaucrats who cared little for student learning.

The attacks on public education gained new momentum in the 1990s when Bill Clinton and his “New Democrat” coalition joined the push for school reform. Worried that traditional liberalism had become too politically toxic, synonymous with bloated bureaucracy, these centrist Democrats saw education reform as a way to prove they could be tough on government waste and special interests while still supporting public services. This bipartisan embrace of market-based education reform laid the groundwork for even more aggressive attacks after the 2008 financial crisis, when conservatives argued that teacher salaries and benefits were bleeding taxpayers dry.

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More than 120,000 teaching positions were ultimately eliminated across the United States in the two years following the market crash, with state funding for K-12 education falling roughly 8 percent below 2008 levels. This decline in employment had lasting impacts — by 2020, despite enrollment growth, public schools still employed fewer teachers than they had in 2008.

Teachers were cast as “deep state” infiltrators first

Today’s attacks paint federal workers as “deep state” subversives, echoing the long history of targeting educators as dangerous ideologues. During the Cold War, public school teachers faced intense scrutiny as potential communist sympathizers, with hundreds pushed out of their jobs through what amounted to political purges.

Suspicions of teachers as secret radicals never fully went away. Instead, they morphed as American politics changed. Attacks ramped up during the Obama years, when conservatives began labeling ethnic studies courses as “un-American” and pushing back against a revised history curriculum they alleged cast US history in too dark a light.

The playbook took on new life during the pandemic. Conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who is now advising Trump on federal diversity and inclusion policy, helped transform vague anxieties about what kids were learning into specific accusations about “critical race theory” — a term that came to mean nearly any curriculum that refers to systemic or structural racism.

And when the “CRT” controversy started to fade from the public’s attention — largely because most voters just didn’t know or care about it — the political attacks shifted to claims about gender identity and “woke ideology” — a term increasingly used to attack diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in schools and government. Republicans doubled down on these attacks in the presidential election, and within his first few days as president, Trump issued an executive order calling to “end radical indoctrination” in public education. In February, Musk tweeted that California teachers are “indoctrinating kids in DEI racism & sexism & communism” — capturing how these different accusations still blur together.

Undermining public servants puts all Americans at risk

As anti-teacher tactics spread to target federal workers, the battered teaching profession stands as a warning.

Decades of attacks on teachers have wrought serious consequences for schooling in the US. Research published last year by Melissa Arnold Lyon of the University at Albany and Matthew Kraft of Brown University found that interest in teaching among high school seniors and college freshmen has fallen 48 percent since the 1990s, and 40 percent since 2010. Over the last two decades, the number of people earning a teaching license annually dropped by over 100,000, and the proportion of college graduates who go into teaching is at a 50-year low.

The crisis isn’t limited to recruitment. For those who have chosen the classroom, deteriorating conditions and mounting frustrations are driving more teachers to quit. Lyon and Kraft find that teachers’ job satisfaction recently reached its lowest level in five decades, declining by 26 percent in the past 10 years. While many commentators point to the pandemic as the culprit, the researchers find that most of the declines occurred steadily throughout the last decade, preceding the Covid-19 crisis. This kind of sustained dissatisfaction has led to increased turnover, which is linked to poor student outcomes and a worsened school climate overall.

The consequences of pushing talented teachers out of the field and deterring ambitious young people from entering at all are becoming impossible to ignore. School leaders are struggling more than ever to fill empty teaching spots, and average teacher pay has barely moved in three decades, unlike other jobs that need a college degree. The teacher shortage has gotten so bad that some states are lowering their standards just to get more adults into classrooms — a desperate move that risks putting unqualified people in charge of children’s education.

Perhaps most importantly, these developments have hurt student learning. Teacher quality is consistently identified as the most influential school-related factor affecting student achievement, graduation rates, college attendance, employment, and lifetime earnings. The impact is particularly pronounced for low-income students, who stand to gain the most from quality teaching.

This should all serve as a wake-up call: If DOGE teaches a generation that working for the federal government, once attractive for its prestige, decent pay, and job security, is actually precarious and prone to attack, all of us will be worse off for a long time.

The public sector is democracy’s backbone — it handles the big stuff we all share like parks and highways, plays the long game when businesses won’t, and actually has to answer to voters, not shareholders. Getting these things right depends on attracting and keeping talented people who want to serve.

Federal workers are taking unprecedented hits right now, and many are asking themselves if staying in government is worth it, even if current legal challenges get resolved in their favor. It’s a fair question that every person will have to figure out for themselves, and that teachers have long been asking. But here’s what we know for sure: The work of the public sector will matter long after any administration changes, and we should be doing everything we can to make people want to be part of that mission.

Originally published in Vox on February 13, 2025.
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When Mary Fox went to apply for a passport, she brought copies of her birth certificate, certificate of legal name, driver’s license, and a check, because the State Department website said passport fees had to be paid by check or cash. “They took Apple Pay,” Fox, a transgender woman, told Vox. “I was worried about the wrong things.”

Fox handed over the documents, paid, and received a slip for pickup of her passport after January 28 — in time for travel she had planned in early February. But when Fox returned on the 29th, the agency official said there was a problem in the system. “We don’t have authorization right now to issue a passport,” he told her in a recording of the conversation, which Vox has reviewed. Fox asked if he knew how long it would be until she’d be able to get one. “Unfortunately not, there’s no time frame,” he told her.

Fox had expected that there might be issues with getting a passport with a female gender marker in light of President Donald Trump’s Day 1 executive order, which requires that government-issued documents reflect a person’s sex “at conception.” (The “conception” terminology reflects new influence from the anti-abortion movement, which seeks to ascribe full legal personhood to embryos from their earliest stages.) Fox was ultimately fine with being issued a passport with a male gender marker, telling Vox that, “being able to travel is more important than the letter on a piece of paper.”

“I don’t care what marker you put on it,” she said to the agency official, according to the recording. “See, from my perspective, all I want is any passport that has my legal name.” But Fox was ultimately told that the agency couldn’t issue her any passport, male or female. “So I can’t leave the country?” Fox asks incredulously. “I can’t answer that question,” the official replied.

Fox shared her story on TikTok, where it went viral, and she was ultimately able to collect her new ID documents — albeit with the male identity marker — on February 3.

But many others have encountered similar, bewildering bureaucratic limbo with no such resolution. These restrictions on transgender people’s passports — just one part of a broader campaign by the new administration to intimidate transgender Americans — affect more than just international travel. Passports are also frequently used for domestic purposes, such as applying for jobs, housing, loans, or other government benefits.

“The goal is to make life untenable for transgender and nonbinary folks,” ACLU attorney Aditi Fruitwala said. “They want to sow fear and chaos and to make everyone extremely afraid to be out and who they are.”
As of Tuesday afternoon, over 1,700 people had reported concerns to the American Civil Liberties Union regarding new passport issues, Fruitwala told Vox.

Trans passports are getting caught in the crosshairs

On Trump’s first day back in office, he passed an executive order stating that the government would only recognize a person’s sex and not their gender, and that sex was unalterable. After the EO, which also required that government documents “accurately reflect the holder’s sex,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a directive to pause all processing of passports that requested that the gender be changed, leaving many applicants in limbo.

The policy change marks a sharp departure from decades of evolving passport rules. The inclusion of gender markers on US passports dates back to 1977, when government officials felt they needed to distinguish between men and women due to increasingly similar fashion trends. Beginning in the early 1990s, transgender Americans could update their passports by providing proof of having undergone gender-affirming surgery. By 2022, the State Department moved to allow for self-attestation.

Across the US, the majority of states allow people to update gender markers on their drivers’ licenses and birth certificates. And the Trump policy shift also comes at a time when other nations have been moving in the opposite direction — 14 countries now allow gender self-attestation on passports, and 16 permit “X” gender markers. In truth, the 1,700 transgender and nonbinary people reported by the ACLU likely far undercounts the number of people who have been struggling with their passports. One such person is Aiden McDermott, a 28-year-old trans man in New York, who applied to renew his expired passport on January 20, requesting a name and gender marker change as well.

“I honestly wanted the passport in case I needed to make a quick exit,” explained McDermott, who has not contacted the ACLU. Since he’s adopted from China, he’s found his US passport tends to be the easiest way to prove his US citizenship. “I just hadn’t had the money [to renew earlier] — it’s like $130 — so when I finally got the money I was hoping there would be time between Trump entering office and him signing things into law,” McDermott told Vox.

McDermott received State Department confirmation that his application was received on January 28, and his file was marked online as “in progress.” But by February 5 his online application status had changed to “not available” and he’s received no further information or update since.

A screenshot of McDermott’s online application.Courtesy of Aiden McDermott

Lawyers are taking the new passport rules to court

Last Friday, the ACLU announced it would be suing the Trump administration over the new passport restrictions on behalf of seven transgender and nonbinary Americans. The ACLU alleges that the restrictions violate the Americans’ right to privacy, the First Amendment, the freedom to travel, and the equal protection clause of the Constitution. Lawyers are also claiming the Trump administration failed to comply with a requirement for a 60-day notice and comment period.

ACLU plaintiffs include people like Drew Hall, a 25-year-old PhD student at the University of British Columbia whose passport has been held by the State Department for weeks, preventing them from traveling home to be with family in Wisconsin. They have a US wedding to attend in May and an academic conference in July, and worry about being stuck in Canada.

Another plaintiff is Reid Solomon-Lane, a 36-year-old Massachusetts resident who regularly travels to Ireland to visit his mother-in-law. Despite having been openly out and transgender since 2007, he now worries about what could happen to him or his three children if he’s stopped while traveling for a discrepancy on his documents.

This fear is not theoretical. “Any time you need to show multiple forms of identification, and this is especially true when you are traveling abroad, you might be accused of fraud if there is a mismatch,” said Fruitwala, who added she’s already spoken with a trans person who recently faced hostile questioning like this from a US passport officer.

Given all the uncertainty, LGBTQ rights organizations like Lambda Legal are now actively discouraging transgender people who have valid US passports from applying to renew or change their documents. “If you have urgent upcoming travel or an emergency need, you should seek out an attorney licensed in your state of residence,” the group advises.

When asked what the stalled applications mean for people like McDermott, a State Department spokesperson referred Vox to this webpage titled “Get My Application Status.”

Citing new agency guidance issued Monday, the spokesperson also said that if any applicant’s biological sex at birth is “not sufficiently established,” the government will hold the application and request more information. “Once we have the needed information, we will issue a new passport to you in your biological sex at birth,” they told Vox.

Per the new guidance, passports previously issued with an X marker will remain valid for travel until their expiration date, and those holding an X passport issued less than a year ago may apply for free to replace it with one “that reflects their biological sex at birth.”

Fruitwala said the new guidance does little to provide clarity. She’s hopeful that the federal courts will soon block the passport policy entirely, even though that won’t end the confusion and fear for trans Americans navigating the situation.

“I think the [government is] scrambling, it’s all a very confused and confusing policy,” she said. “They really don’t know how to implement this executive order.”

Originally published in Vox on January 22, 2025.
—

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump relished the chance to assure voters that the 2022 overturn of Roe v. Wade meant people did not need to worry about more federal abortion restrictions, since it was all effectively moot and now up to the states. As Election Day grew closer, Trump insisted he’d be “great for women and their reproductive rights” and even that he would “not support a federal abortion ban, under any circumstances.” His flip-flopping worked: Most voters believed that Trump would not be a threat to abortion rights and that he would not prioritize the issue if elected.
Since winning, Trump and his transition team have aimed to keep abortion out of the news and maintain the appearance of moderation to avoid losing broader support. While Trump did tap two anti-abortion doctors to oversee the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Food and Drug Administration (Dr. Mehmet Oz and Marty Makary, respectively), his Health and Human Services secretary pick is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is on record supporting abortion rights. Trump’s team also rejected naming Roger Severino to a top HHS post, primarily because his team thought his anti-abortion views would be too controversial. (Anti-abortion leaders lobbied heavily for Severino.)

On his first day back in office Trump sought to downplay reproductive rights: None of his first dozens of executive orders directly pertained to abortion, though his anti-transgender decree did invoke the idea that human personhood begins at conception, a key tenet of the “fetal personhood” wing of the anti-abortion movement. Trump will also be in California on Friday, skipping the chance to speak at the March for Life rally in Washington, DC, which he addressed as president in 2020.

But this more evasive period will soon run headlong into the reality of Congress, litigation, and executive governing.

His administration will have to weigh in on pending abortion rights lawsuits, legislation dealing with new abortion restrictions, and he’ll have to appoint more judges. (In his first term, Trump appointed one of the most anti-abortion judges in the country — Matthew Kacsmaryk.) In the months ahead, as Congress sends bills to his desk and courts issue more fetal personhood rulings, Trump’s carefully crafted moderate image on abortion will face mounting pressure. While he likely does not want to wade back into the messy world of abortion politics — an issue he has never held strong convictions about — he’ll soon have to.

The anti-abortion strategy

Emerging statements from anti-abortion advocates suggest that most are prepared to be lenient with the new president, accepting compromises so Trump can continue to claim that he signed no new federal abortion ban. Activists see it in their interest to accommodate the president so as to stay within his good graces, and influence policy and judicial nominees where possible.

Letting Trump keep his promise of no federal abortion ban isn’t such a big sacrifice, because there was never much likelihood that Congress would be able to pass such a ban without lawmakers overturning the filibuster. The anti-abortion movement, for its part, had not been counting on the GOP to push bills with a simple majority.

Related

• Trump won. So what does that mean for abortion?

“Quite frankly, unless something really unusual happens in this election, neither side is going to have the votes in Congress to pass a national law,” Carol Tobias, president of the National Right to Life Committee, told the Associated Press in early October.

Expect more euphemistic language games. Steven Aden, the general counsel at Americans United for Life, told States Newsroom in November that his national anti-abortion group would support a federal “dismemberment” bill, meaning a proposed ban on the most common second-trimester abortion procedure, known as dilation and evacuation. This would still technically leave physicians able to use methods like C-sections to terminate later pregnancies — allowing Trump to claim he didn’t ban abortion writ large — but those alternatives are less safe. Several states have banned D&E since 2017.

Anti-abortion advocates will also press for enforcement of the Comstock Act, an 1873 federal law that could prohibit anything associated with abortion from being sent in the mail. The Comstock Act was rendered moot by Roe in the 1970s but never formally repealed, and now, with Roe gone, many conservatives see it as an ideal vehicle for restricting abortion nationwide, precisely because it wouldn’t require passing a new law. The Trump administration could enforce it, and Trump could continue to insist he kept his campaign pledge to sign no new federal ban.

In August, after months of dodging the question, Trump told CBS he “generally speaking would not” use the Comstock Act to restrict access to abortion medication. However, many people in his orbit, including his vice president, are on record urging the opposite, and it’s not clear if Trump’s Department of Justice will keep the Biden-era interpretation that mailing abortion pills is not in violation of the act. Trump’s DOJ pick, Pam Bondi, has not clarified what she’d do, but said in her confirmation hearing that she would not let her personal opposition to abortion influence her actions as US attorney general.

Other items high on the anti-abortion wish list that could allow Trump to maintain the relative pretense of moderation include renewed efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, the largest reproductive health network in the country. While Planned Parenthood is popular, Trump could say federal funding is at odds with the vision of states deciding abortion policy. On the campaign trail, JD Vance said Trump would support defunding Planned Parenthood, and in his first term, Trump implemented a “domestic gag rule” on US-based family planning programs, eliminating funding for any program that provided abortion services or even abortion information. It led to 400 Planned Parenthood clinics nationwide losing federal money. Legislation to defund the organization was recently reintroduced in Congress.

Related

• Planned Parenthood is giving up federal Title X funding thanks to a Trump administration rule

Activists also want to bring back older restrictions on medication abortion like bans on telehealth — which will make the drugs much harder for people to access but enable the president to claim he isn’t actually banning them. Anti-abortion groups plan to press the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to study potential environmental harm from flushing abortion pills down the toilet, a move they hope could lead to new restrictions on how the drugs can be legally administered and disposed of. Activists also hope RFK Jr.’s general skepticism of FDA drug approvals helps them win support for a federal study, since they argue the agency erred in its approval of mifepristone 25 years ago.

Thorny decisions await

One less polarizing course for the Trump administration would be to merely undo Biden administration policies, reverting back to more typical GOP restrictions like the “global gag rule,” which blocks foreign organizations receiving US aid from providing abortion information or referrals. Every Republican president since Ronald Reagan has implemented this policy, including Trump in 2017. Other things Trump could revoke include Biden’s expanded abortion access for military veterans, and a Biden-era Medicaid waiver that supports patients’ traveling out of state for care. “They don’t have to advance a pro-life federal law,” Eric Kniffin, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, told The Hill recently. “They just have to stop the overreaches that [the Biden] administration has been taking.”

But even if Trump wanted to duck more high-octane political fights over abortion, he likely won’t be able to avoid the brewing battles over IVF, which now accounts for about 2 percent of births in the US.

Personhood advocates argue that discarding unused embryos during IVF is tantamount to abortion, and pushing for new restrictions could significantly affect millions of Americans struggling with infertility. While Louisiana remains the only state to outright prohibit the destruction of embryos, activists are pressing more states to follow its lead. Federal courts may also need to address whether embryos possess constitutional rights — a legal battle that could reshape reproductive law.

In a post-election memo, SBA Pro-Life America, a major anti-abortion advocacy group, insisted that the Republican Party must focus on “the unalienable right to life for the unborn child that exists under the 14th Amendment.” This indicates the GOP may be pressured to adopt the far-right goal of fetal personhood more aggressively — potentially influencing its stance on issues like IVF too.

Several pending lawsuits will force Trump to take clearer positions on abortion access than he might otherwise like. One concerns the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) requiring hospitals to provide emergency abortion care. Though Trump campaigned on supporting abortion in emergency situations, he has not yet clarified his position on the law. Project 2025, the controversial GOP blueprint that Trump has distanced himself from, called for rescinding Biden’s EMTALA guidance and ending federal investigations into cases of alleged refusals to perform abortion. Trump’s administration might also dismiss ongoing EMTALA cases in Texas and Idaho where the federal government has been arguing to preserve abortion rights.

Another lawsuit is a newer case taking aim at mifepristone filed by three Republican state attorneys general. This suit notably argues that the FDA violated the Comstock Act by permitting abortion pills to be sent by mail. Last week, Kacsmaryk said this lawsuit could move forward. In the previous federal attempts to challenge the legality of mifepristone, the Biden administration defended access to the medication. It’s not clear what Trump’s DOJ will decide to do.
Beyond these legal challenges, Congress may force Trump’s hand as well. While House Speaker Mike Johnson limited certain anti-abortion measures in previous must-pass spending bills, it will be easier this year for Republicans to push restrictions forward. He and GOP Senate Majority Leader John Thune are planning to speak at the March for Life rally later this week, and Thune has already pledged to hold a vote on legislation that would introduce new criminal penalties for doctors based on myths about later abortions — a move abortion rights advocates see as part of a larger plan to criminalize the procedure.

For now, abortion rights groups are not planning to seek compromise

While some Republican lawmakers in addition to Trump have signaled openness to compromise on issues like abortion exceptions, contraception, and IVF, thus far there’s little indication that abortion rights groups would seek such opportunities. “We have no interest in shrinking our vision,” Kimberly Inez McGuire, executive director of Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity, told me late last year. Working with Republicans on even limited protections could also undercut the narrative of GOP extremism — a message advocacy groups see as crucial for Democrats winning in 2026 and 2028.

In general, polls show voters have grown even more supportive of abortion rights than they were before the Supreme Court overturned Roe. About 80 percent of voters say protecting contraception access is “deeply important” to them, and 72 percent of Republican voters had a favorable view of birth control. IVF is even more popular: 86 percent of Americans think it should be legal, including 78 percent of self-identified “pro-life advocates” and 83 percent of evangelical Christians.

These overwhelming public approval numbers show why Trump’s strategy of distancing himself from abortion restrictions resonated during the campaign. But governing requires actual decisions — and unlike campaign rhetoric, those can’t be as easily walked back.

Originally published in Vox on January 16, 2025.
—-

As fires continue to rage in and around Los Angeles, burning more than 40,000 acres since last week, destroying more than 12,000 homes and other buildings, and killing at least 25 people, two things are becoming clear: California must rebuild quickly, and it must rebuild differently.

Housing affordability and availability in Los Angeles, and California more broadly, were already at a crisis point even before the fires broke out.

Since January 7, tens of thousands of families have been forced to evacuate and are now rushing to find places to live. Many were stunned to realize there are virtually no rental options available to them, even when they’d be willing to pay large sums of money to stay in the area.

The region’s rental market was already strained before the fires. An analysis by CoStar Group Inc. found that vacancy rates — meaning the percentage of rental homes sitting empty and available — bottomed out at 2.1 percent in western Los Angeles County — now affected by the Palisades Fire — and 3.8 percent in Pasadena, where the Eaton Fire burns. Los Angeles as a whole had vacancy rates of about 5 percent.

For larger apartments with three or four bedrooms, the rental options are even worse. Almost all new housing developed over the last decade has been studios or one- and two-bedroom apartments, built with singles, childless couples, and adult roommates in mind.

“I think the real wakeup call this is giving is it doesn’t matter how much money you have if you live in a city that has never allowed housing to be built for families,” said Matt Lewis, the communications director for California YIMBY. “The presumption all along has been that fires happen to someone else.”

But the housing impact extends well beyond the immediate needs of evacuees. Facing mounting losses from increasingly severe climate disasters, insurance companies have hiked rates statewide over the last few years and declined to renew coverage for nearly 3 million homeowners in vulnerable regions. (The state updates its regulations to force more insurance companies to cover homes in fire-prone areas, but those changes took effect just before the recent fires broke out.)

As a result of losing their coverage many of the newly uninsured homeowners turned to California’s FAIR plan, a last-resort option that offers limited home coverage for higher costs. FAIR plans are not publicly funded, and if their reserves and reinsurance deplete, then insured homeowners across the state help foot the bill.

“All policyholders, not just FAIR plan policyholders,” could be on the hook for the fires, Dave Jones, the director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment, told Vox.

In other words, all Californians could face higher premiums next year, making it even more expensive to live in the already the most unaffordable state.

These wildfires could be the tipping point for California’s already teetering housing ecosystem. As insurance premiums soar, both current residents and prospective homebuyers face impossible choices: absorb the skyrocketing costs, abandon their properties, or leave the state entirely.

Years of warnings about this scenario have proven prescient. The next few months of policy decisions will determine whether the state can stabilize its housing market, or whether the fires will trigger a wave of foreclosures, homelessness, and exodus unprecedented in California history.

Build Back Better?

While California politicians so far have taken small steps to signal they want to make it easier to rebuild homes quickly, housing advocates say the moment calls for much bolder leadership: not just for restoring homes that burned, but significantly increasing the amount of fire-resistant houses and apartments in less risky areas for people at all income levels.

On Sunday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order calling to waive permitting requirements under the landmark California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which is notorious for holding up housing development. To rebuild properties quickly, Newsom also suspended permitting requirements under the state’s Coastal Act, which ensures the protection of California’s coastal resources including its beaches and environmental wildlife.

But these flashy measures were not meaningful reform. Single-family homes are already exempt from CEQA, and the Coastal Act already exempts reconstruction of homes destroyed by disasters from typical coastal permitting. Legal experts were skeptical it would lead to real change, especially as rebuilt homes would still need to become compliant with zoning and building ordinances that have changed significantly over the years.
On Monday, LA Mayor Karen Bass followed suit with her own executive order calling to expedite rebuilding in Pacific Palisades, though critics note that the city’s already slow permitting is attributed partly to city understaffing, and this order doesn’t say anything about funding more staffers.

To merely restore what was lost — which will take years even with potentially rushed permitting approvals — won’t be enough to stem the mounting crisis.

As insurance companies begin to deploy artificial intelligence to assess a region’s climate risk, and as state insurance rules evolve to allow insurers to charge policyholders more for more vulnerable homes, there will be more pressure to rebuild suburban homes that can better withstand fire and other natural disasters; this will undoubtedly be more expensive to both construct and insure than they were before the fires.

These changes could force a long-overdue transformation in how and where leaders build: away from fire-prone suburban sprawl and toward denser urban neighborhoods that are naturally more fire-resistant. But without major zoning changes to allow this kind of urban development, the crisis could instead accelerate displacement as middle and working-class families — especially those who inherited their homes in communities like Altadena and Pasadena — are forced out of uninsurable areas with nowhere affordable to go.

University of Southern California policy and planning professor Dowell Myers told Vox there’s no good data yet on how longtime residents who inherited their homes have been handling rising insurance premiums. The average annual cost of homeowners insurance in the state has surged to $3,100 — a 62 percent increase compared to the national average — with some California coastal and inland locations facing double-digit percentage increases.

To create housing for people who can’t afford soaring insurance premiums or multimillion-dollar homes, advocates are urging policymakers to make it easier to build housing in denser, relatively fire-safe cities, places that already combine modern building codes, rapid emergency response times, mandatory sprinkler systems, and updated infrastructure to minimize risk.

Communities must build back differently — faster and with more density than they’ve traditionally allowed.

A bill introduced back in 2020 by a California state representative would have exempted infill housing from CEQA, but it died in the legislature. Lawmakers could reintroduce and pass that quickly, and advocates have been urging Newsom to support such a step.

“The real challenge is that we’re very late to try to do this, and so it won’t actually solve the problem for people who need housing today,” said Lewis of California YIMBY. “This crisis will absolutely spill over into other states, as people who aren’t willing to rebuild or can’t afford to rebuild will find they have nowhere left to stay.”

The mounting barriers to homeownership

While the fires are devastating to homeowners, the crisis has made the situation even more stressful for renters.

The ripple effects of California’s insurance crisis extend far beyond current homeowners, threatening to worsen an already severe housing affordability crisis. For renters, who make up more than half of Los Angeles County residents, the impact could be devastating.

The insurance crisis creates what National Low Income Housing Coalition disaster recovery manager Noah Patton describes as a “three-pronged impact” on housing affordability. Rising insurance costs push more potential buyers into the rental market, increasing demand. Meanwhile, landlords pass these costs onto renters via rent increases, and developers struggle to finance new affordable housing projects in disaster-prone areas that “desperately need it.”

The stakes are particularly high in California, where nearly 186,000 people already live on the streets or in shelters — an 8 percent increase since 2022. Homeless people already have greater exposure to the climate crisis and wildfire smoke in particular when they cannot take shelter inside. For the many households spending over half their income on housing, even small rent increases can trigger a cascade toward eviction and homelessness.

While residents displaced by the fires may be allowed to live temporarily on their properties in recreational vehicles, tiny homes, and other modular structures, this stopgap solution does nothing to help the many Californians still struggling to become homeowners or pay their rent in the first place.

“While many millennials were able to take advantage of record-low mortgage rates during the pandemic, young people are still facing a housing affordability crisis that doesn’t show many signs of improvement on the for-sale side,” said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin. “What’s more, these devastating wildfires are in Los Angeles, which already has the least affordable housing market in the country, with the median home price exceeding $900,000.”

I’m coming pretty down to the wire with this one this year. I’ve got a 6:30 dinner reservation and it’s 4:30 pm New Years Eve. But I’m admittedly a sap for traditions and I’ve been doing this every year for nine years! It’s good for me to look back on work that I’ve done and think about the new year ahead. I think every journalist in the industry is trying to figure out how we do our work in this increasingly fractured media environment and in a new Trump presidency. A lot has changed and seems likely to keep changing.

While I Figure That Out, I took a look at the 52 stories I published this year. I’m really proud of this years’ journalism, and know many of the issues I’ve been long focused on — reproductive rights, housing, homelessness, and child care — were particularly prominent in politics and culture. The rights of homeless people were considered by the US Supreme Court. Housing and abortion rights were among the most salient issues in the presidential election. I looked for new ideas and creative solutions, and tried to clarify debates and highlight new threats coming down the pike.

Here are a dozen pieces I’m particularly proud of from 2024. These weren’t necessarily the most read or popular!

(Past roundups can be found here: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, and 2015)

1. What a big new Supreme Court decision could mean for homeless Americans (6/28)
I wrote several articles about the Grants Pass v. Johnson case this year, and was fortunate to get to sit in oral arguments in April. This one looks at where things go next.

2. A prescription for housing? (2/13)
On states preparing to use Medicaid for rental assistance for the first time, and the debates associated with that step.

3. Why I changed my mind about volunteering (8/24)
A personal essay on individual action with a really terrific companion Today Explained podcast episode.

4. Why IVF looks different in the US than the rest of the world (3/26)
My intervention into the oft-repeated claim that the US is a “wild wild west” for the fertility industry.

5. What if public housing were for everyone? (2/10)
After we published this story, some folks in the Biden White House took notice and reached out to one of our main sources for a meeting. About a month later, a proposal supporting this idea was included in Biden’s 2024 budget, and Kamala Harris also backed it on the campaign trail. Just this month San Francisco published a report affirming the model’s feasibility for their city.

6. What happens when you promise child care for every kid? (10/30)
Traveled to Germany to report this complicated story, with some stunning original photography.

7. The movement desperately trying to get people to have more babies (7/30)
This story on “pronatalism” ended up being more topical than I had anticipated?

8. Why abortion politics might not carry Democrats again in 2024 (3/15)
Some people were not happy when I published this at the time, even called for my employer to fire me!

9. The federal government’s new plan to (maybe) give renters straight cash (6/13)
Builds on reporting I’ve been doing around this story since 2021.

10. If Democrats could compromise with Republicans on abortion, should they? (11/26)
Gets at some big underlying strategic questions I will stay focused on next year.

11. Biden’s push for child care failed. What lessons are there for Kamala Harris?
The “care economy” agenda collapsed despite a Democratic trifecta. I wanted to see how advocates were thinking about next steps, and GOP control.

12. Yes in God’s Backyard? This housing solution may be the answer to your prayers (6/18) Looking at how churches, mosques, and temples could change the game on affordable housing. If you like this kind of thing, I also rounded up 6 standout housing ideas I covered this year earlier this week at Vox.

I hope you all have really fun or restful nights and I’ll see you next year! Tomorrow!