Tag Archives: coronavirus

Exit Interview: How the COVID Tracking Project Stepped Up When The Trump Administration Didn’t

Originally published in GQ on February 19, 2021.
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It perhaps doesn’t say great things about the U.S. government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic that a plucky volunteer organization has grown into one of the most trusted data sources on COVID-19 in the U.S. But that’s the reality: The COVID Tracking Project, an improvised effort supported the Atlantic, was founded in the earliest days of the pandemic, after four journalists and data scientists realized there wan’t a good centralized source for essential stats like the number of tests administered and patients currently in the hospital with the virus. 

So every day for the last eleven months the project coordinated an effort of mostly volunteers to manually gather the latest public health data from all 50 states, Washington D.C., and five territories. They then worked to translate that information for the public—producing daily charts and analysis on the scale of the pandemic, which have been cited everywhere from local broadcasters to executive branch briefings. These daily updates on the number of tests, cases, hospitalizations and deaths have been invaluable journalists and public health officials, and for millions of people, become one of the few steady fixtures of this last year.

Earlier this month the group announced it would be ending its daily data compilation work on March 7, the one-year anniversary of it’s founding. Ahead of their last day, GQ spoke with two of the group’s co-founders, Alexis Madrigal and Erin Kissane, about the terrifying early days of the pandemic, why the government wasn’t doing this work, and their decision to shut down.

GQ: Can you both tell me about how this started?

Alexis Madrigal: I was talking with Robinson Meyer, another staff writer at The Atlantic, a lot in February about how we were worried about COVID. Rob realized that the number of people being tested in the U.S. was not actually known. He called me up one day and he was like, “Imagine we’re reporters on the Army Corps of Engineers beat, five days before Hurricane Katrina. Like what the fuck are we doing here? We should do something.”

We decided to try and count and compile the number of people who had been tested by calling all the states. We came up with a count of less than 2,000—when the Trump administration had been talking about having deployed millions of tests. Which meant the number of cases being reported was also an enormous undercount.

We published our first article [From March 6, Exclusive: The Strongest Evidence Yet That America Is Botching Coronavirus Testing] and after that I got an email from Jeff Hammerbacher, a college friend of mine who went on to build data systems at Facebook and then became a bioinformatics guy. He asked me if I had used his spreadsheet to write our article. I was like, “What spreadsheet?”  He linked us to it, and that Google spreadsheet became the basis of what we do at COVID Tracking Project.

Erin had a lot of experience in managing distributed news projects, she came on as a fourth founder, we made this cattle call for volunteers, and that was it. Now it’s 340 days later and we’re still doing it.

Erin Kissane: Rob and I had been doing late night anxiety texts in February about how we just didn’t have eyes on the virus in the United States. As soon as I saw that Rob and Alexis had done this work, I got in touch.

You both grasped that this would be a bigger deal earlier than most Americans, and earlier than most journalists.

EK: There were so many concerns about not alarming people and not overreacting. But it happens that I’m just a person interested in pandemics and I also have an autoimmune condition, so I’m particularly concerned about respiratory viruses. I also read a lot of news out of China. It just seemed so bad and U.S. coverage in January and into February was so much about how it’s probably not going to come here, but it felt like there was very little attention on how bad it actually was in Wuhan.

And so your project quickly became the best place for testing data. Correct me if I’m wrong, but as I understand it, at some point the CDC did start collecting a lot of similar data, but failed to package it in a way that the public could easily digest. At what point did that start happening?

AM: The short answer is I think it was roughly 100 days before the CDC released a testing dataset. It wasn’t until much, much later, in the fall, that the CDC put out a dataset on current hospitalizations.

But there’s two things, there’s data availability—is anything there? And then there’s data quality—are there reasons to suspect the data is not complete? And what we found with the CDC’s testing data is that there were major problems. Each federal data pipeline matches up differently with the stitched-together data from the 56 jurisdictions, and our job is to figure that out. That’s a lot of what our work became.

EK: May 9 is when the CDC began posting testing data, cases, and deaths all together in their COVID tracker. We did a pretty in-depth research report on that, and found the testing data was really quite dramatically off for a lot of states. In some cases, it was much higher than what states reported, in some cases much lower. So back in May we felt we couldn’t stop our project. When the federal hospitalization data came out, we did a lot of work to try to explain to our data users that their data was actually quite good.

We didn’t try to build a dashboard that was easy to use. We sort of backed ourselves into providing that. At first it was just journalists and data nerds, but eventually we brought on people with more science communication expertise. I think something we’re feeling very heartened and encouraged by is that some combination of the CDC and HHS [the Department of Health and Human Services] now seem quite committed to doing science communication about the details of this pandemic—with regular briefings and all those things.

How would you say your tracker differs from other COVID trackers, like the one hosted by Johns Hopkins or the New York Times?

EK: The metrics we track are different, and we also work at the state level, and some of the other trackers work at the county level. The other trackers that I’m aware of are primarily scrapers, and our work is entirely manual. We have humans who go in and collect the numbers, more humans who check the numbers and double check them. The benefit of continuing to work this way, instead of moving to automation, has been that we are very, very close to tiny definitional changes in the data. We can dig through PDFs, and we can spot tiny blips in ways that a scraper might miss. It’s a very labor-intensive way of doing work, but it’s really about keeping the institutional knowledge about what exactly each number means.

AM: Unlike most of the others, we weren’t trying to build a standalone-destination tracker. Our role was quite different. We were building a node that fed information to a lot of those other trackers, as well as people who were extremely interested in some of the in-depth texture of Covid statistics. We gave top-lines, but that was not the primary goal of the project.

How many people would you say were involved with the project? And how did it break down between paid staff and volunteers?

AM: I think about 900 people have flowed through in some way, and about 400 have done a shift and entered data. So 400 Americans have really contributed to this dataset for their fellow folks. On an average week, I think it’s about 250-300 active people, and on a given data shift, there’s only so many slots, so it’s probably like 30 people on a given shift.

EK: On a given day we have the new folks, the checkers, the more experienced folks, the double checkers, and then the shift leads.

AM: Then there’s reporter folks who go out to the states, data infrastructure people, data quality people, and then there’s been about 30 paid staffers for the last few months.

So your project is winding down. While I know you didn’t launch this with the intention to run it forever, you all have created a trusted institution at a time when some of our other institutions have come to be seen as less trustworthy. So why are you ending next month, as opposed to the summer or once we get through the pandemic?

EK: We wanted to wind down as soon as we thought the federal government was doing a good enough job that we could hand it off. That sounds arrogant to say, but let’s be clear, there were deficits. Our orientation has been from the beginning that we would only go as long as we had to. And the reason for that is that we really want people to be looking at, working with, banging on, and using the federal data.

We don’t want to be a barrier between full attention on the federal data. That was really an ethical concern for us: We think it’s properly the role of the federal government. Our data can only get so good, because we’re at the wrong end of the pipeline: We can only look at what’s on public dashboards, and there’s a lot of work on those metrics that happens before they get to the dashboards. The federal government can see things we can’t see, they can do things we can’t do.

AM: We’ve had tons of interactions with states and the federal government to know that people have been making really, really good faith efforts to collect data. It’s easy to say now that the government does not appear to be cooking the books—and has not appeared to be cooking the books—but that was not at all clear through most of 2020.

EK: This has all been very ad hoc, and the people doing this work, whether they’re getting paid or not, they’re doing it because they need to be doing the work for themselves, for their country. They see it as their responsibility but it’s not a sustainable situation. We haven’t ever paid our people what they’re worth. This work should not be done by volunteers.

A real turning point for us was when we decided not to collect vaccine data. That was a strategic and tactical decision, because we wanted to put attention and pressure on the feds to track it.

I understand you’ve given some recommendations to the Biden transition team. Can you say more about that, and why you feel better about passing the torch?

AM: The number one thing is that the people we have been pressuring at HHS to deliver have really been delivering. When we first made contact with people there, they said, “We’d really like to make things more open and transparent.” And we said, “Great, let’s see that.” And week after week we continue to get more and more releases, and information.

EK: One of the things that has happened over the course of this project is that we’ve developed relationships with most of the states, with people in their public health departments, who have really helped us understand what they could and couldn’t do. And something that we’re trying to do now, as we make these recommendations to the federal government, is to include those perspectives and things that we learned about what is actually possible for states, where there are resource problems, tech system problems. We hope these can be seeds for the federal government to do the deep, difficult long-term work of rebuilding the country’s public health infrastructure, which is what it’ll take to do a really good job on the data. That’s a very long project that needs to be done, and it hopefully can be nudged along by the pressure around COVID.

What needs to happen to be better able to track things in the future?

AM: The short answer is that it’s nuts to run a country, from a public health perspective, in the way that we do. Each governor and state control an enormous amount of information. The federal government can request things, even mandate it, but they’re not providing the systems that go along with those mandates. It’s not so much tech capacity, narrowly construed. It’s more like state capacity, and within that there are counties with their own capacity issues.

If we really want to go about fixing this in a deep, systemic way, you build up that capacity from the county level on up. But that does require federal coordination.

EK: Right, the federal government can compel uniform reporting. There are states that can refuse but the feds do have a lot more authority than an outside organization like us to get clean, standardized data. And we’ve seen, like with the federal hospitalization data, that they can do this. We just think they need to better provide resources to support state collection of that data, to help build capacity. I’m sure you’ve seen the reporting about how many people have quit their local public health departments this year all over the country because they’re so burnt out.

When you look back on the project, what were some interesting or particularly meaningful ways you saw the work impact the world?

AM: All of it, but the bottom up way the project hit people is what made us feel particularly good. Like when we’d hear from individual people that their family members had changed their decisions because they were able to see through our data that this was real and they should take it seriously. Also things we heard from the actual people doing heroic work on the frontlines in healthcare.

The things that were oftentimes dispiriting was seeing how much use the data was getting in governments at all levels. While that should maybe occasionally feel gratifying, it actually felt destabilizing because it made us realize the state of play in the world.

EK: We wanted to help media organizations do accountability reporting, and we did see huge pickups from media organizations, including tons and tons of broadcast stations. That was really meaningful for us, and it was also important to show media organizations that they could trust the data coming from states. We’ve seen very little malfeasance from states. We’ve seen mistakes. We’ve seen big backlogs that made things look weird. But really for the most part we’ve done the work of saying, “Look, you can trust this information.”

But I think also seeing our data cited by two different administrations has been unsettling. The hardest thing on this entire project for me has been when we learned the federal government didn’t have something that we thought they were just sitting on.

Interview has been edited and condensed.

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Some Teachers Are Being Required To Come To School — To Teach Virtually

Originally published in The Intercept on August 28, 2020.
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KATHY ROKAKIS, a 62-year-old high school French teacher in Michigan, is dreading her return to school next week.

Students in her Wayne County school district — Plymouth-Canton Community Schools — were originally going to be given the option to return to in-person classes or do remote learning, but earlier this month her school board voted to start the school year 100 percent virtual. “A lot of teachers were really relieved for so many reasons,” said Rokakis.

But two days after the school board decided the district would go fully remote, Superintendent Monica Merritt announced that teachers would still be coming into school to teach children virtually. “There wasn’t anything that had been discussed, we were just told that’s how it would happen,” recalled Rokakis. “We were basically blindsided.”

In a letter sent last Friday to educators, Merritt defended her decision by saying, “We anticipate how hard it will be for many students to continue learning in a remote space when they miss their school community so much. It is with this lens, focused on what is best for our students, that has resulted in our expectation that our staff will teach remotely from their classrooms.” Merritt did not return requests for comment.

Teachers have continued to press administration for reasons the benefits of this arrangement outweigh the public health risks of coming into school during the coronavirus pandemic.

“The reasons have been ridiculous. One is so that students will be able to see their classrooms, so that when they come back face-to-face they’ll feel more comfortable,” said Rokakis. “Another is they say so we’ll have anything that we need accessible to us, and they keep using the scenario of if we have to do a science experiment. But I don’t teach science, and the things I need are very accessible to me here at home. And now I’m expected to teach French in a mask?”

In light of all this, some teachers in Plymouth-Canton have applied for family and medical leave to avoid going back, and others are retiring early, according to Rokakis. “If I could, I would, but I can’t because I carry the health insurance for my family,” she said. “I’m feeling very uncomfortable. To me, there needs to be more grace. This is not a normal time and people are trying their hardest.”

Across the country, as schools in some states have already reopened and others are planning to do so in the coming weeks, school districts and board members are grappling with and continually revising their back-to-school procedures. While many schools have opted to begin the year fully virtual given the risks presented by Covid-19, educators in some of those districts are still being required to teach from their classrooms. Even with requirements to wear masks, many teachers feel coming into school buildings is an unnecessary risk during the pandemic, for reasons including poor ventilation, slow coronavirus testing, and unreliable levels of personal protective equipment.

LATE LAST WEEK, Jeffrey Riley, the Massachusetts Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education, released guidance saying it’s the state’s “expectation” that all teachers and critical support staff will report to schools to teach each day if their district is doing remote learning. Reasons Riley listed included “provid[ing] more consistency” for students, more reliable internet access and faster IT support, making it easier to collaborate with colleagues, and making it easier for administrators “to monitor the level and amount of instruction students receive.”

The president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, Merrie Najimy, released a blistering statement in response to the state’s recommendation, accusing Riley of having a “fundamental lack of trust” in teachers to do their jobs without being supervised.

“It is paternalistic and punitive and has no bearing on the quality of education that the real experts — the educators — provide so masterfully,” Najimy wrote, urging for districts to reject the state’s guidance. “Educators across the Commonwealth are focused on fully redesigning remote instruction to make it more effective, while pushing school districts and the state to make the changes needed to gradually return to in-person instruction. Commissioner Riley should be advocating for the resources that educators and districts need to achieve these goals rather than putting the thumbscrews to teachers to get them to return to school buildings before it is safe to do so.”

Scott McLennan, a spokesperson for the union, told The Intercept that districts and unions are still negotiating reopening plans, so they’re still “waiting to see how it plays out.” At least a few large school districts in the state, like Springfield and Worcester, have said they will not require teachers to come to school for remote instruction.

Joanna Plotz, an elementary ESL teacher in Chelsea, a city with among the highest rates of Covid-19 infections in the state, is hoping her union succeeds in blocking the recommendation. “In an ideal world I’d obviously love to be in a classroom, but it just doesn’t feel worth it,” said Plotz.

If teachers at Plotz’s school are required to return to school, Plotz would be sharing a classroom with another educator, who has a 3-year-old daughter. Many teachers would like the option to go in. “I might want to go in sometimes. I live in a 500-square-foot-apartment, and Sundays it might be good to go in and prepare things, but I’d only want to do it if the other teacher and her daughter wouldn’t be there,” said Plotz. “And I do have some coworkers who are going crazy at home. But the way [the state] is doing it just says, ‘We don’t trust teachers.’”

Reached for comment, Colleen Quinn, a spokesperson for Commissioner Riley, defended the guidance. “In remote scenarios, instruction from the classroom is the most effective educational environment,” she said.

IN OTHER PARTS of the country, some teachers are already back at school providing remote instruction to students at home.

Erin Taylor, a middle school teacher in Colorado Springs, Colorado, said she still has not received a real explanation from her district as to why educators have to be teaching remotely from their school buildings.

“As teachers we always have to have an answer when our students ask us, ‘Why do we have to learn this?’ and I have not heard any answer from the district,” said Taylor. “It feels like a lack of trust, a surveillance thing, and I would totally be open and love to hear how they arrived at this decision, even if I disagreed with it. But we haven’t even gotten that.”

Devra Ashby, a spokesperson for the school district told The Intercept that it is their goal “to provide a standard professional instructional delivery setting and enhanced teacher classroom performance” and that teachers “have the most resources at their fingertips when they are in their classrooms.” Ashby added that one-third of their students will be coming into the building for hybrid learning and that their standards for education have not changed. “We must deliver industry-standard instructions in a professional academic setting, which promotes student academic potential and achievement,” she said.

Taylor said there has been mixed messaging around masks. Colorado has a statewide mandate that says individuals must wear masks when inside public places, and she says her school district has also advised educators to wear masks at all times, but that policy is not being enforced at every school.

“I’ve been back at school for over two weeks now and I just see a lot of people not wearing masks even though that’s supposed to be the official policy,” she said. “I’ve walked past people where there are meetings going on and a bunch of people sitting around the table not wearing masks.”

Taylor, who spoke to The Intercept on the second day of the school year, said she’s trying to be empathetic but is worried about how unsafe she already feels.

“We always talk as teachers about how the beginning of the year is the time to reinforce routine and rules and make sure you’re being clear, because with kids, if you don’t enforce a rule at the beginning, it becomes really hard to get that [compliance] later on,” she said. “It just feels like, well, if we’re not all wearing masks on Day 2, then I don’t have much hope for the year.”

Shawntel Shirkey, a paraeducator in Wichita, Kansas, also has to come into her high school for remote instruction. Earlier this month, the Wichita school board approved in-person learning for elementary schools and remote learning for middle and high school students.

Shirkey thinks given the conservative political climate in Kansas, her school board “made the best decision I could hope for.” At least one teacher at her school has tested positive for Covid-19 so far, but she praised her school for at least giving all staff members cloth masks, ample amounts of sanitizer and disinfectant, and the option to get face shields. “The district itself is not being very forthcoming but I’m lucky that my principal is being transparent about if someone has tested positive,” Shirkey said. Like in Taylor’s school, masks mandates don’t always mean staff actually wears them.

Shirkey thinks it’s been “pretty split” among teachers about who wants to be providing remote instruction from school. “Some educators definitely see the irony of requiring teachers to come into buildings that the district has deemed unsafe for students,” she said. “But others just think the pandemic is ridiculous and as soon as the election is over, coronavirus is going to go away.”

Senators Push for Free Prison Phone Calls in Next Coronavirus Relief Bill

Originally published in The Intercept on August 7, 2020.

THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC has put into sharp relief an issue criminal justice reformers have been raising for years: the astronomical rates that prison-phone corporations charge for phone and video calls to incarcerated individuals. Now, as Congress debates the next coronavirus stimulus deal, some lawmakers are pushing for provisions to make such calls free.

On Thursday, 17 Democratic senators, led by Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Tammy Duckworth, sent a letter to Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer urging them to make this a federal priority in the next package.

“Before the pandemic, more than 50 percent of families with an incarcerated loved one struggled to pay for housing and food, and one in 29 children had a parent incarcerated,” the letter stated. “In addition, one in three families with an incarcerated loved one went into debt in order to stay connected with them, and women shouldered 87 percent of these costs. Now, as many facilities have suspended in-person visits and families face layoffs, furloughs, and evictions due to the pandemic, these calls are more necessary—and cost prohibitive—than ever.”

In some jurisdictions, a local 15-minute phone call can run as high as $25, a cost that was untenable even before the current economic crisis. The Federal Communications Commission currently has jurisdiction to regulate interstate calls, but more than 80 percent of prison phone calls are in-state, meaning the vast majority of calls for the 2 million incarcerated individuals across the U.S. could not be regulated unless Congress changed the law — a challenge highlighted in the senators’ letter.

“Without action from Congress to address the rates for in-state calls, families will continue to suffer,” they wrote.

The pandemic and the nationwide protests for racial justice following George Floyd’s murder brought significant attention to conditions in U.S. jails and prisons, where there is a disproportionate rate of Covid-19 cases as compared to the broader U.S population; one recent estimate put it at 5.5 times higher. At the same time, the pandemic has made it even harder for incarcerated people to communicate with their loved ones, due to the combined stresses of expensive phone calls and the lack of in-person visitation. It’s an issue federal officials have been quietly chipping away at for months.

IN 2015, THE FCC announced it would act to address predatory in-state calling rates, but after telecom companies sued, FCC Chair Ajit Pai, a Trump appointee, in 2017 stopped defending his agency’s right to regulate those calls. Later that year, a federal court ruled that the FCC has the authority to regulate interstate prison phone calls but not in-state ones.

In June 2019, Duckworth, along with Sens. Rob Portman, R-Ohio; Cory Booker, D-N.J.; Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii; Ed Markey, D-Mass.; and Angus King, I-Maine, introduced a bill to expand the FCC’s authority to regulate prison phone calls. The Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act is named in honor of Martha Wright, a woman who filed a lawsuit in 2000 against the private prison where her grandson was living, saying the costs of calling him were unconscionably steep. The court ruled that Wright’s complaint was an issue for the FCC to handle, so she then moved to petition the agency to intervene. In 2013, the agency finally acted, voting to cap rates for interstate phone calls in jails and prisons.

Little changed following the introduction of Duckworth’s bill last year, but then the pandemic hit. In the first stimulus package authorized by Congress, to advocates’ surprise, language was included to make all phone calls free in federal facilities for the duration of the national emergency.

“It wasn’t clear who led the effort with the CARES Act … but after years of advocacy, the prison phone justice movement certainly has its allies in Congress, and it paid off in a bizarre moment,” said Bianca Tylek, the executive director of Worth Rises, a group focused on dismantling the prison industry. “Unfortunately, the downside of that bill is that it’s only for the duration of Covid.”

In late March, Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., introduced a House bill, the Martha Wright Prison Phone Justice Act, which builds on Duckworth’s legislation. In addition to expanding the FCC’s authority to regulate in-state prison phone calls, Rush’s bill would also bar state and local government agencies from collecting commissions from prison phone calls and set interim rate caps during the pandemic. It was included in the HEROES Act, a supplement to the CARES Act that was passed by the House in May, a measure Tylek called “the most significant federal legislative vote on prison phone justice in history.”

Meanwhile in the Senate, Duckworth and Klobuchar continued to push on the issue. In mid-April, Duckworth organized a letter, signed by 18 other senators, urging Pai, the FCC chair, to pressure telecommunication providers to commit to reducing call rates in prisons and jails. “The FCC is uniquely positioned to seek commitments from these providers,” the senators wrote. “We applaud the FCC’s efforts to encourage traditional providers to bolster connectivity for Americans impacted by the coronavirus, most notably through the Keep Americans Connected Pledge; however, this effort does not adequately reflect the dynamics of prison and jail telecommunication systems.”

In May, Klobuchar and Dick Durbin, D-Ill., led 27 other senators in sending a bicameral letter to the Department of Homeland Security and ICE urging them to provide free phone calls to detained people during the pandemic. In the House, Reps. Jerrold Nadler and Zoe Logfren organized 50 colleagues to also sign on.

Then in July, Pai surprised advocates by coming out forcefully on the issue. On July 16, the FCC announced a new proposed rule to significantly lower the per-minute rate caps for interstate prison phone calls, from $.21 (prepaid) and $0.25 (collect) to $0.14 for calls from prisons and $0.16 for calls from jails. The proposed rule would also cap rates for international prison phone calls for the first time. In an accompanying blog post, Pai wrote, “Not surprisingly, without effective regulation, rates for inmate calling services can be unjustly and unreasonably high and make it difficult for inmates and their loved ones to stay connected.”

Four days later, Pai sent a letter to the president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, a trade association of state utility commissioners, urging the group to take action on the “unjust and unreasonable rates” of in-state prison phone calls, which he noted disproportionately hurt Black Americans. In 33 states, rates are at least double the federal cap, and in 27 states, the first-minute charge can be up to 26 times higher than that of an interstate call. In his letter Pai pointed to recent statements NARUC made following George Floyd’s killing about addressing discrimination and racial injustice. “These are noble sentiments … but it is time for these sentiments to manifest in action,” Pai wrote.

On July 23, NARUC issued a response to Pai’s letter, saying they “agree” and will ask their members to “take a comprehensive review in their jurisdictions around these rates and take action where warranted.” NARUC president Brandon Presley noted that in some states, corrections officials negotiate prison phone call contracts “outside the purview of state public service commissions,” so they would need to be involved, in addition to governors. But NARUC opposes expanding the FCC’s power over in-state prison calls, and in the last few weeks Pai has begun campaigning more vocally for Congress to give his agency that authority. While Pai has not endorsed Duckworth’s bill specifically, he has endorsed the most significant component of her bill. On Thursday the FCC voted to advance the proposed rule to lower interstate prison phone call rates, setting the stage for public comment.

 

Tylek said no activist anticipated this momentum from the FCC. “We can’t say we expected Commissioner Pai would come out and say, ‘State regulators, all of you are writing Black Lives Matter statements but aren’t doing anything about prison phone calls,’” she said, adding, “Having a pro-industry, Trump-appointee conservative acknowledging the issue is very positive for the movement and a welcome change.”

Pressure has continued to ramp up in the Senate to get this included in the next stimulus package. Advocates are planning to deliver a petition to Congress next week with over 75,000 signatures urging the passage of phone justice legislation, and this past Tuesday, Klobuchar formally signed onto Duckworth’s bill, and joined her in circulating the Dear Colleague letter on Thursday. Advocates say they are particularly excited about Klobuchar’s leadership since she has a good record of being able to corral Republicans onto legislation.

The real Republican gatekeeper on this issue is Sen. Roger Wicker, the chair of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee. Tylek says Wicker’s office has met with them, but he has not committed to support the legislation. Wicker’s office did not return requests for comment. 

Stuck-at-Home Parents Want More Support for Home Schooling

Originally published in Bloomberg Businessweek on July 22, 2020.
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Christine Morgan, a mother in Peachtree City, Ga., calls herself “a big proponent of public schools.” But after dealing with her district’s remote-learning offerings this past spring—which she says were scant on instruction and heavy on busywork—she decided to look at home schooling for her rising fourth grader. “I would consider sending my kid back to brick-and-mortar school if everyone were taking the virus seriously and taking precautions,” she says. “But it’s Georgia, and they are not.”

Before the Covid-19 pandemic began, about 4% of school-age children in the U.S. were home-schooled, according to the National Home Education Research Institute. Many more families are weighing the option for the fall, either frustrated with remote learning through their public school or nervous about the health risks of sending their children into buildings with others. School choice proponents, who’ve long advocated that per-pupil spending should “follow the child” wherever they seek their education, hope to capitalize on the shift. And with the backing of President Trump and Republicans in Congress, home schooling could get the biggest boost it’s ever gotten from the federal government in the next round of stimulus funding.

In April the American Federation for Children, a national school choice group that was formerly chaired by U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, commissioned a poll and found that 40% of families were more likely to consider home schooling even after lockdowns ended. Tommy Schultz, the group’s vice president, says the results were initially met with skepticism: “Some people were saying, ‘Well, those numbers are inflated and it’s too early to tell.’ ” But in late May, a separate Ipsos/USA Today poll found 60% of parents were considering home schooling in the fall and 30% were “very likely” to make the switch.

“We started putting on social media, ‘Hey, we’re spending on average $15,000 per kid for public schools. Shouldn’t families get some of that back to support home education?’ and that sort of messaging just skyrocketed in terms of interest and engagement,” Schultz says. “We’ve been running online petitions, and it’s the single largest spike in advocacy we’ve ever seen.”

Brittany Wade, a mother of five in Washington, D.C., is among the parents who think the government should do more to help families shoulder the cost of home schooling. Wade and her husband considered opting out of public school even before the pandemic, frustrated with what they felt was a stagnant curriculum offering too little Black history.

Wade helped her children with remote learning through the spring and says the difficulty of that experience hastened her decision to explore home schooling for the fall. She’s in the planning stages, browsing Facebook groups and talking with veteran home-schooling parents in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. “I do think there should be more support for parents that are choosing to keep their kids home,” she says. Because some of the learning apps that District of Columbia Public Schools used during the spring aren’t available during the summer, she says, “I had to pay out-of-pocket for them.”

Home-schooling families receive virtually nothing from the federal government, and some don’t want any public funding, seeing it as opening the door to government interference. But conservatives in Congress have been trying to change that. Now, with House Democrats and education groups clamoring for at least $250 billion in education stimulus funding, Republicans have their best shot in years to push through new school choice programs. Trump and DeVos support the passage of Education Freedom Scholarships, a $5 billion annual tax credit for individuals and businesses who donate to organizations that support private-school tuition or home-school expenses. Eighteen states have tax credit scholarship programs, although according to EdChoice, New Hampshire’s is the only one in which home-school students are eligible for funds.

Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who introduced the Education Freedom Scholarships legislation in 2019, also introduced the Helping Parents Educate Children During the Coronavirus Pandemic Act in June. The bill, which he hopes to include in the next round of stimulus, would allow parents to use 529 college savings plans to cover K-12 expenses such as tutoring, test fees, and private-school tuition.

It’s not clear whether Democrats will bite. Connecticut Representative Rosa DeLauro, chair of the House Education Appropriations Subcommittee, said that with only weeks until the start of the new academic year, “the administration and Secretary DeVos remain fixated on how it can siphon away resources for vouchers and other privatization schemes” instead of plugging public schools’ funding gaps.

Many school districts are scrambling to figure out how to keep students enrolled, at least in their virtual options, to avoid steep drops in per-pupil funding on top of additional budget cuts as states face a financial crisis. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, has urged Congress to reject “failed ‘choice’ schemes” in any future stimulus package. Her national teachers’ union has fought aggressively against past attempts to expand federal funding for favored school choice options such as charter and private schools, and likewise sees home schooling as a way to undercut public education. “DeVos’ craven attempts to divide and privatize would be laughable if the stakes weren’t so high,” Weingarten said in a statement.

Diane Ravitch, president of the Network for Public Education, an advocacy group championing public schools, is sympathetic to families that might decide on home schooling in the fall. “They won’t do it happily. They want real teachers, but they don’t want their children at risk,” she says. When Covid-19 is no longer a threat, Ravitch predicts parents who opted out will return their kids to public schools. “This isn’t going to be a permanent way of life.”

But other experts think the overlap we’re now seeing between remote schooling and home education will likely persist after the pandemic ends. Travis Pillow is the editorial director at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a research center based at the University of Washington Bothell. “The twin financial and public-health pressures of Covid appear to be accelerating the blurring of the lines between public education and home schooling that was already picking up steam before the pandemic,” he says. For Pillow, this would be a good thing—one that could lead to improvements and make home schooling more accessible. “We would welcome new entrants into this space,” he says, “because existing outcomes in full-time online learning have been pretty dismal.”

Over 100 Houston Doctors Slam Rep. Dan Crenshaw for “Spreading Dangerous Disinformation” On Coronavirus

Originally published in The Intercept on July 17, 2020.

MORE THAN 100 doctors, medical professionals, and emergency room physicians in the Houston area have signed their names to a letter condemning Republican Rep. Daniel Crenshaw for spreading misinformation during the Covid-19 pandemic, which has been ravaging the Texas city hard in recent weeks.

The doctors didn’t mince their words.

“The COVID-19 pandemic should not be a partisan issue — that’s why even Governor Abbott is finally stalling the reopening process and implementing the mask mandates that he unwisely blocked just two short months ago,” the medical workers, who are primarily women, wrote in the letter, which is first being reported on by The Intercept. “Dan Crenshaw, on the other hand, has spewed lies for the past four months — minimizing the threat we face and spreading dangerous disinformation for self-indulgent headlines.”

Doctors rarely ever make such pointed political statements, but the urgency of the coronavirus crisis — and the real harm caused by disinformation spread by elected officials — prompted the Houston-area physicians to speak up, especially as Republicans in the state continued to promote large, indoor gatherings against the advice of public health experts.

“As everyone is seeing right now with Dr. Fauci, the medical community is just getting raked over the coals, and undermined and blamed,” Dr. Christina Propst, a pediatrician in Houston who helped to organize the letter, told The Intercept. “If you’re a physician working in places like Texas and Florida, you’re just battling disinformation constantly, and it gets so exhausting and frustrating.”

The list of Crenshaw’s comments undermining the seriousness of the pandemic runs long. He has also taken it upon himself to strongly defend the Trump administration’s response to the public health crisis. In mid-April, the first-term representative recorded a video entitled “Debunking the Left’s COVID-19 Narrative” where he defended President Donald Trump’s pandemic response. (Trump tweeted the video, describing it as “BRILLIANT, A MUST-WATCH.”) Crenshaw’s campaign did not return a request for comment.

On Wednesday, Houston reported 16 new deaths from Covid-19, the first time the city had reported double-digit fatalities since the virus hit the region in March. The deaths were linked to cases that were reported in June, as the past month has seen the number of cases skyrocket in Texas and the greater Houston area.

Between Memorial Day and mid-June, Texas’s hospitalization rate shot up by 36 percent, a fact that Crenshaw has downplayed. “If you just hear 36 percent increase, that does sound like a lot. … In reality, it’s under 500 additional hospitalizations out of a state of 30 million people,” he said on his podcast. “So it’s really not a lot. … We’re so far away from being in over-capacity or even close to it that it’s laughable.”

When a Harris County judge said around the same time that Texas “may be approaching the precipice of a disaster” Crenshaw blasted her for “pure and simple fear mongering.” He also added that “people have figured out what they need to do to remain safe.” A few weeks later, he argued that “prolonged and universal closures” had been “devastating for learning and health.”

In their letter, the doctors criticized Crenshaw for “undermin[ing] the advice of our public health experts at every turn — enabling millions of his followers to the same.” This mixed messaging, they say, left medical workers “handicapped in our mission” to protect Texans from the start of the pandemic.

“We need elected officials who don’t throw out meaningless platitudes while trying to shift blame to the institutions working to keep us informed and protected,” the doctors wrote. “Please Congressman Crenshaw. We are tired. We are your neighbors. … We implore you to stop playing politics with our lives, stop spreading dangerous disinformation, and start leading by example.”

Propst said that she felt the tide start to change among physicians a few weeks ago, back when the Republican Party of Texas made clear it had no intention of canceling its in-person biennial convention, where 6,000 people were expected to convene inside Houston’s George Brown Convention Center. Propst and some fellow female colleagues began organizing a petition and phone calls to pressure the Texas Medical Association to condemn the event, which at the time the association was still sponsoring. The internal lobbying was successful and in late June, the president of the 50,000-member state medical association withdrew its sponsorship of the event and urged the GOP to cancel it. (Earlier this week the state Republican Party finally agreed to hold its convention online.)

“I think when people saw that organizing work, it emboldened us to speak out against more dangerous and unethical things we’ve been dealing with,” said Propst.

Crenshaw, who represents Texas’s 2nd District — which includes much of northern and western Houston — is facing off in November against Democratic challenger Sima Ladjevardian, an attorney and former adviser to Beto O’Rourke. The race is one of the seven Texas House seats that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has deemed most competitive and possible to flip.

“Now more than ever we need a leader who will listen to our medical heroes, guide Houston toward a recovery, and protect Texans with pre-existing conditions,” said Ladjevardian. “Our medical frontline heroes are begging Congressman Crenshaw to stop spreading disinformation and start acting responsibly, but he won’t.”

Could Your Fitness Tracker Really Detect COVID-19?

Originally published in GQ on July 14, 2020

When professional golfer Nick Watney woke up on Friday, June 19, after playing the first round of a PGA tournament in South Carolina, he felt physically fine. But when he checked the WHOOP fitness tracker he’s worn on his wrist for the past year, he was startled to see a spike in his breathing rate while he was sleeping.

He had heard that could be a sign of COVID-19, so just to be safe, despite showing no other symptoms, he got a test. To Watney’s surprise, it came back positive. Over the next ten days, while he self-isolated in South Carolina, he never developed a fever, cough, or shortness of breath—though he did end up losing his sense of smell for a while.

A week after Watney tested positive, the PGA Tour announced it would be distributing WHOOP bands to all players and caddies, in the hopes that they too might be able to identify potential coronavirus infections early. The straps have since been credited with early detection for other PGA Tour golfers who have gone on to contract the virus. This comes on the heels of the NBA’s announcement earlier in June that it would be purchasing more than 2,000 Oura Rings, a similar fitness tracker, to help detect cases of the virus when the league re-starts in Orlando.

Whether it’s WHOOP and Oura Ring, or other fitness trackers like Fitbit and the Apple Watch, there’s increasing enthusiasm around fitness trackers among researchers as a first line of defense in the fight against coronavirus. While the science is still in its earliest days, the hope is these devices could alert individuals to changes in their health they might not otherwise notice. Early detection is particularly crucial for combating the coronavirus, which has the unusual characteristic of spreading “silently” from people who are not feeling symptoms. These devices use sensors to track a range of physiological markers—sleep patterns, heart rate, breathing rate, and temperature. For example, if your resting heart rate is normally 62 bpm, but jumps inexplicably to 75 bpm, you likely wouldn’t feel any different, but that jump could prompt your tracker to issue an alert to get tested. Of course, no researcher expects the tech to replace real diagnostic testing. At least right now, the best anyone can say about this right now is that, when combined with other coronavirus safety protocols, it doesn’t hurt.

Researchers also see potential to use wearable tech to study how the virus moves through large populations. If a cluster of people living in the same area all start to notice similar changes in their heart rate or temperature, that could help officials better respond to outbreaks and mitigate their spread. “If you and many of your neighbors are showing similar reactions—that’s when it becomes a signal rather than noise,” said Eric Topol, the director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, which is leading one of the major ongoing fitness tracking studies. Topol’s interest in using fitness trackers to predict disease predates the current pandemic. In January he and his colleagues published a study that found by using de-identified heart rate data from Fitbit users, researchers were able to significantly improve their predictions of influenza-like illness when compared to using CDC data.

A built in advantage for fitness trackers is that millions of people already have them. In 2019 Gallup reported nearly 20 percent of Americans currently use one, and consumer analysts say the devices represent one of the fastest-growing sectors in global technology, especially smartwatches. Another benefit is that they work passively; they don’t require manually entering symptoms into an app, or sticking a thermometer under your armpit on a daily basis.

While researchers are optimistic about the potential, they caution that the existing knowledge base is very, very scant. There’s been almost no research, for example, on how wearables could be turned into reliable clinical tools. “Your average doctor doesn’t want to see your wearable data because they don’t know what to do with it or how to make sense of it any more than anyone else,” said Benjamin Smarr, a data science and bioengineering professor who is leading a University of California at San Francisco study on Oura ring data and COVID-19.

Smarr is among a handful of researchers who have been studying wearable tech data for the past decade. He said the overall assumption is that having lots of information health professionals wouldn’t otherwise have access to will prove to be useful in some way, even if they don’t know exactly how yet.

And while Harvard health policy professor Thomas Tsai supports the ongoing research—“it’s fascinating and important,” he says—from a public perspective, Tsai worries about the mixed messages these fitness trackers could be sending during the pandemic. “We’re working really, really hard to break the message that only symptomatic individuals should get tested,” he said. “That was true back in March and April, when we had a huge shortage of tests, but that’s not true anymore.”

Tsai also raised concerns that someone’s smartwatch could give them a false sense of security about their health. “The danger is that someone who needs to get tested may not want to because their wearable device says they are showing no symptoms,” he says.

Right now there’s at least four large-scale fitness tracker studies underway; the one at UCSF, the one at Scripps, a third at West Virginia University, and a fourth at Stanford. In late May the West Virginia researchers announced preliminary results from a study of 600 healthcare professionals and first-responders, which found that, using Oura Ring data and artificial intelligence models, researchers could predict COVID-19 symptoms three days in advance of their onset, with over 90 percent accuracy. That’s not a huge sample size, but they’re now scaling up their next phase of research to roughly 10,000 people. (Oura is not funding the West Virginia study, but is funding the trial at UCSF.)

Topol says he hopes that when (and if) we have high-quality coronavirus tests that people can administer from home, the fitness trackers could pair well with them, allowing infected people to self-isolate earlier than otherwise would have. “There are sixteen companies working on at-home COVID tests and we’re in discussions with five of them,” he said.

“These fitness tracker studies are going to lead to a really, really large amount of comparative physiological data,” Smarr added. “We don’t know yet what we’ll find— nobody has ever done something like this before.”

Elderly People Subject to Flawed Guardianship System Are More Vulnerable Amid Pandemic

Originally published in The Intercept on July 6, 2020.
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IN THE SUMMER of 2018, then-84-year-old Genyte Dirse was removed from her home — a motel she had owned and lived in for decades — and placed in an assisted living facility in St. Petersburg, Florida. This followed a relatively fast and bewildering legal fight between Dirse and a local real estate agent who argued that she wasn’t in her right mind to live independently. Ever since then, her closest living relative in the U.S., her great-nephew Gedi Pakalnis, had fought a losing legal battle to bring her back home.

Pakalnis’s fight to bring Dirse home ramped up this spring, as the coronavirus pandemic ravaged the globe. In the United States, residents of nursing homes and assisted living facilities have been particularly vulnerable, with more than 51,000 deaths reported nationally from those institutions so far. In Florida, like elsewhere in the country, the number of Covid-19 deaths at senior living facilities has grown at a much faster rate than the broader population and, by early May, accounted for more than a third of the state’s pandemic fatalities.

In late April, the virus struck Patrick Manor, where Dirse lived. For weeks prior, Pakalnis had been trying to reach his great-aunt’s legal guardian to get information about her health, raising concerns about the fast-spreading disease. After weeks of no news, Pakalnis finally learned that Dirse had been hospitalized with Covid-19 symptoms. Dirse’s guardian told Pakalnis that he could potentially visit her once the pandemic calmed down.

He never got the opportunity. On May 5, Dirse died of Covid-19, alone at St. Anthony’s Hospital. She was not the first Patrick Manor resident to be hospitalized with the coronavirus, and by mid-May, 11 Patrick Manor residents and two staff had tested positive with the disease.

The frequent deaths of elderly people in nursing homes and assisted living facilities has become a horrifying reality throughout the pandemic. But something was also different about Dirse’s death; according to her great-nephew and others who were involved in the guardianship process, she was confined against her will to Patrick Manor, where she faced a greater likelihood of getting sick — despite having family willing and able to take care of her.

For decades, adult guardianship has been a legally thorny issue, with independent watchdogs and journalists repeatedly finding that senior citizens are stripped of their rights and often financially exploited — with little government oversight. The cases often involve complex family drama and disagreements among siblings, but sometimes, as in Dirse’s case, it’s an outsider who gets involved, over the objections of the elderly person’s relatives. A court’s decision to appoint a guardian is usually final, as appeals are costly and complex, and appellate courts are highly deferential to the lower court’s initial findings.

The issue has taken on new relevance amid the pandemic. In a Covid-19 resource compiled by the National Guardianship Association, the American Bar Association, and the National Center for State Courts, advocates acknowledge the pandemic “will make it more difficult” for seniors to exercise the remaining rights they do have.

“In this pandemic we’re going to see abusive guardianships started over Zoom, with the virus facilitating the racket that’s already in place,” warned Dr. Sam Sugar, founder of Americans Against Abusive Probate Guardianship, a national advocacy group. “The difference with Covid-19 is we’re going to see wards dying in nursing homes faster, in weeks, rather than months, and a further decrease of any monitoring.”

LIKE MANY LEGAL guardianship cases, the story of how Dirse ended up at Patrick Manor is fraught with allegations of ulterior motives and complex family dynamics. It all started after a local real estate agent accused Pakalnis of exploiting his great-aunt.

Pakalnis, who is 37, is the great-great grandson of Dirse’s maternal grandmother. In the early 1990s, Dirse visited her relatives in Lithuania, where Pakalnis was being raised by his dad. Dirse invited him to come live with her in the U.S. He took her up on the offer in 2003, living with Dirse throughout high school, college, and graduate school. “My aunt has always been like my mother,” he said. “We were a happy family for 15 years, lived together, and loved each other.”

For several decades, Dirse managed her small motel business, Dirse Apartments and Motel. In 2017, in front of witnesses and a notary, she sold one of her three properties to Pakalnis for $50,000. Diana Sames, a local real estate agent who visited Dirse annually to pass out calendars and broach selling her property, was aghast at the transaction, which was for well below market-value.

Sames petitioned a court to appoint a guardian for Dirse, citing the property sale as evidence that she was not in her right mind. Though Sames denied doing so out of self-interest, she did tell local reporters that she “would have no problem” taking a commission from the sale of Dirse’s property if it were listed on the market. As the guardianship case proceeded, tenants said in sworn affidavits they repeatedly heard Dirse tell Sames that she had no intention of listing and had long planned to sell one building to her family. One recalled Dirse mentioning that she was “well prepared for retirement” and would “have more than enough for herself,” even with one less property. Pakalnis meanwhile scrambled to hire attorneys to provide evidence to the court and file complaints with local institutions.

But a few months later, a judge and a panel of professionals declared Dirse “incapacitated” and appointed an adult legal guardian to take over her affairs. The guardian, Traci Samuel, had no prior relationship with Dirse and was proposed to the court by Sames, the petitioner.

Samuel quickly filed a lawsuit to reverse the sale of Dirse’s property and moved Dirse against her will to an assisted living facility, Inspired Living in St. Petersburg. At first, Pakalnis was able to visit her there. After a visit on November 10, 2018, he filed an affidavit with the court saying that his great-aunt looked weaker, less healthy, had complained of untreated leg pain, and told him she wanted to go home. The guardian then barred Pakalnis from seeing Dirse again, claiming that Dirse didn’t want to hear from her great-nephew anymore.

Samuel, who later changed her name to Traci Hudson, was soon engulfed in scandal. In November 2019, she was charged with felony exploitation by the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office and accused of stealing more than $500,000 from a 92-year-old man who she was also caring for. Investigators found that she had transferred nearly all his money to her bank accounts and used the funds to buy NFL tickets, new clothes and jewelry, and even a new house. She did not return requests for comment.

The court appointed a new legal guardian for Dirse in late November: Jean Farnan. In March, at the outset of the pandemic, Pakalnis contacted Farnan through a court filing, requesting information about his aunt’s well-being and said he was concerned “since nursing homes and assisted living facilities are vulnerable to fast-spreading Coronavirus.”

But he got no response. A month later, he learned via Farnan’s attorney, Hamden Baskin, that Dirse had been taken to the hospital. Farnan and Baskin declined to comment for this article.

Pakalnis filed another court petition on April 29 asking for more information about Dirse’s whereabouts and lamented to Farnan that he could have been caring for his great-aunt at home. “My aunt has educated family who never committed any crime and we have healthy environment and people who love her and can take care of her at any time at no cost,” he wrote in a court filing. He begged for his great-aunt to at least receive video and phone calls, stressing that she needed the emotional support.

The next day, Farnan wrote back claiming that she hadn’t received his earlier court correspondence. Attaching a photo of Dirse from January, Farnan wrote that Dirse is a “very pleasant lady” and said, “I am sure she is not feeling that well, and being in the hospital is always stressful.” Farnan ended her email by saying when the Covid-19 situation is under control, she’d like to allow Dirse to see whoever she wants.

Pakalnis wrote back on May 1, urging again for the opportunity to talk with his great-aunt on the phone and reiterating that Dirse could stay with him. “[P]lease remember that she has her home near the beach in ecological environment with her family that misses her,” he wrote. “[Not] being able to hear and see her for many months is unhealthy for both of us.”

Four days later, Baskin filed a brief asking the court to deny Pakalnis’s emergency petitions and prohibit any further communication from him. Dirse died later that day. Diana Sames, the realtor who started this whole process, defended her decision to petition for guardianship for Dirse. “She’s in heaven now. Why is there so much drama around this poor lady?” she asked The Intercept. “I don’t need to make money; I own my car, own my home, I have my own conscience.”

ADULT LEGAL GUARDIANSHIP is a process that has existed in the United States since colonial times, imported from a 14th century English legal principle known as parens patriae. The idea entails giving full rights and obligations to the state if an adult is deemed too vulnerable or “incapacitated” to care for themselves. A judge can appoint a guardian — often it’s a family member, sometimes it’s a third-party professional like Traci Hudson or Jean Farnan — and they have full legal authority to manage the individual’s health care decisions, their financial assets, or both. Many people can petition a court for guardianship if they believe an elderly person needs it: relatives, hospitals, government agencies, and even acquaintances like the realtor Diana Sames.

Adult legal guardianship varies by state, even sometimes county by county. However, in most places anyone 18 or older can nominate themselves to be a guardian, and few states require any sort of registration or licensing for the role. No good data even exists on how many seniors are currently living under guardianship. The National Center for State Courts estimated that based on the average of active pending cases in four states in 2008, there were 1.3 million cases nationwide, in control of roughly $50 billion in assets. This could be a low estimate, and as baby boomers get older, experts anticipate the numbers to rise considerably.

Though guardianship can at times be beneficial for the elderly, particularly if they really are at risk of being swindled or do need assistance, a growing movement over the last few decades has raised staggering examples of how mentally sound seniors lose their rights through this process, becoming totally isolated and forced to live in ways wholly contrary to how they want. In the worst cases, it’s the guardians themselves who exploit the senior, draining their assets, cutting off contact with friends and family, and confining them to expensive facilities when they just want to remain in their homes. Seniors have described the experience as living a “civil death” or being a “legal ghost.”

How widespread guardian abuse is remains unclear, but following a yearlong investigation, the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging said in a 2018 report that they “identified persistent and widespread challenges that require a nationwide focus” to ensure  that guardianship “works on behalf of the individuals it is intended to protect.” The committee acknowledged that in some cases, “more rights than necessary” may be taken from an individual and that with such minimal oversight “once a guardianship is imposed, there are few safeguards in place to protect against individuals who choose to abuse the system.”

Issues around guardianship have existed for decades, and efforts at reform really took off in 1987, following a six-part Associated Press exposé. The investigative series prompted a flurry of new state legislation and the formation of the National Guardianship Association to establish new standards.

Yet despite modest improvements, lasting and widespread change remains elusive, and media reports detailing guardian abuse have continued to emerge. The U.S. Government Accountability Office looked at guardianship in 2004, 2010, 2011, and 2016, each time identifying major issues and a lack of clear information to guide policy. In its 2010 report, the GAO “identified hundreds of allegations of physical abuse, neglect and financial exploitation by guardians in 45 states and the District of Columbia” since 1990.

Rick Black — who co-founded the Center for Estate Administration Reform with his wife in 2018 after dealing with a guardian who stole $200,000 from his father-in-law — blames “predatory attorneys” and a startlingly low burden of proof required to strip seniors of their rights.

Pakalnis described his experience dealing with the legal system as massively stressful and time consuming. When it first began, he thought that once he provided the court his great-aunt’s medical records, the matter would quickly resolve. He said he wishes people understood how difficult it is “when a strange person is in charge of your loved one and is ignorant to the family.” He thinks the pandemic has “opened up the sores” of guardianship and revealed that some assisted living facilities just can’t guarantee safe environments for people living there.

TIM REID AND his sister Donna O’Neil have also been grappling with the guardianship system amid Covid-19. On March 18, after years of unsuccessful attempts to bring her home from an assisted living facility in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, their mom, Margaret Estelle Reid, died.

“My attorneys and I tried everything legally and medically possible to show the court why my mother should have been allowed to live in her home,” O’Neil told The Intercept. “I presented the guardianship and court multiple plans to prove Mom would be better cared for at home, but no matter what we presented, it was always disregarded. She was moved almost an hour away into a lockdown facility with the very predictable result of her receiving much less visitation. She never again saw her neighbors or old friends, and visitation with family was destroyed.”

Margaret Reid ended up in guardianship after a 2014 dispute among Reid’s children about their mother’s future and estate plan.

Dr. Gregory Marsella, a psychiatrist in Boca Raton in South Florida, recalled speaking with Reid about the dispute shortly after it happened. (He had seen Reid several times between 2009 and 2014. He has also treated Tim Reid, the son, for years.)

“She raised concern in our last meeting about how the siblings would work together in the event that she was incapacitated, and she talked about how she planned to make edits to her advance health directives,” Marsella said in an interview. “She told me she wanted to stay in her home no matter what, that she wanted to die in her home. She gave me a handwritten note saying this for my records, which I still have, and she said she was going to review her advance health directives with her attorney too to make sure they underscored this.”

But shortly thereafter, her other daughter, Margaret Fallon, successfully petitioned a court for legal guardianship. The idea that Margaret Reid was incapacitated was “risible, ludicrous, absurd,” said Marsella, who had seen her earlier that month. He described the whole experience as “eye-opening” in seeing the way that “hired gun” doctors work with courts and attorneys to strip the elderly of their rights.

As an expert witness in Reid’s guardianship hearing in a Florida state court, Marsella testified about the risks of moving her to an assisted living facility or nursing home. Among other things, he testified that mortality rates go up 200 to 300 percent for patients in such institutions, compared to those kept and cared for in their homes. Ten to 15 percent of patients with dementia die within six months of their placement into assisted living facilities, he also told the court.

The court was not convinced. Margaret Reid was taken from her home in 2017 and moved to the Meridian at Waterways.

Reid’s guardianship process quickly ate up her assets. After an internal audit raised red flags, a Palm Beach County Inspector General investigation found that in just one year, guardianship costs amounted to nearly 22 percent of Reid’s net worth, with legal fees averaging $539 per day. The report also found “billing practices, invoices, and time entries for numerous of the attorney fee petitions were unconventional, unreasonable or unsubstantiated.”

In part distressed about visitation restrictions, when Covid-19 began to spread, O’Neil filed an emergency court petition about the risk her mom faced amid the pandemic. “I saw her alive the day before she died; she didn’t look good at all, she seemed to exhibit a lot of the symptoms of coronavirus and was fading so fast from when I had seen her a week earlier,” recalled Tim Reid.

Tim said he asked both a Meridian medical attendant and Fallon, his sister, to get Margaret Reid tested for Covid-19, which never happened. (Fallon denies ever hearing about a request for a Covid-19 test.) “It’s not uncommon for these institutions to avoid documenting things that could lead to charges of malpractice or negligence,” said Tim.

Randy Ramroth, executive director of the Meridian at Waterways, declined to comment on why Margaret Reid was not tested, to share how many positive coronavirus cases among residents there have been, and how, if at all, testing is handled. In an email, Ramroth cited the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act as to why he could not answer. Instead, he asked for some positive press for his facility. “I realize you are reporting a news story but if possible, please share some encouraging words regarding our staff members for their dedication and tireless work in keeping their residents and families safe,” he said.

“The tragedies of assisted living and nursing homes are not new at all. Well before Covid-19, you could talk to 80 percent of doctors in any specialty, and they would tell you these places are death sentences for Mom or Dad,” said Marsella. “They absolutely accelerate your demise.”

Fallon declined a phone interview but in an email told The Intercept that it had been “deemed medically necessary” to move her mother to an assisted living facility. She said all of her siblings’ legal claims related to her guardianship were “fully litigated” and that her siblings had “full opportunity” to call witnesses and present evidence to the court. (Tim Reid denies all of this.) Fallon’s attorney, Laura Burkhalter, told that The Intercept she believes Tim and Donna’s attempts to bring their mother home were rejected because they couldn’t show it was in their mom’s best interest. “I think she got high-quality care” where she was, said Burkhalter.

BLACK, THE ADVOCATE and founder of the Center for Estate Administration Reform, said he hopes that Covid-19 will help shine a light on the abuses of adult legal guardianship. “The pandemic has illuminated our long-term care crisis in general,” he said. “Many of these facilities do not have adequate staffing, and they don’t want the public to realize how so many of them are just built around making money.” A recent New York Times investigation revealed that some nursing homes have been evicting Medicaid-funded residents in favor of Covid-19 patients who can bring in more funds.

Marsella said he can’t imagine there won’t be some kind of public reckoning, given all the coronavirus-related deaths that have been reported recently in nursing homes. “We’re not so blind yet as a culture that something of this magnitude will be swept under the rug,” he said. “The first and best change to happen would be to sweep away this aspect of guardianship as it exists and is promulgated by attorneys and judges.”

Some advocates say the answer lies in less restrictive options. One such alternative, which grew out of the disability rights movement, is known as supported decision-making. Under this framework, an elderly person would keep their rights and work with trusted advisers to help them make decisions. Texas passed the country’s first law recognizing supported decision-making agreements in 2015, and since then eight more states have followed suit. Experts say it’s too early to know if this model is less prone to exploitation.

Nevada has also been leading the way on guardianship reform, following exposés that revealed massive guardianship corruption. (One notorious Nevada guardian, April Parks, was recently sentenced with up to 40 years for senior exploitation.) In 2017, following recommendations issued by a state commission, Nevada’s legislature passed a series of reforms, including granting all seniors facing guardianship the right to counsel, the creation of a new bill of rights, and the establishment of a State Guardianship Compliance Office that investigates fraud and abuse. Iowa also responded to a spate of guardianship scandals by passing new legislation in 2019 aimed at reducing elder abuse.

Not all recent reforms have led to real improvement, though. In 2016, after local media exposed widespread guardianship problems in Florida, lawmakers established a new Office of Public and Professional Guardians in the state’s Department of Elder Affairs. Black described this as “a strategic paper tiger by state leadership,” noting that the division lacks jurisdiction over local courts and has yet to involuntarily remove or successfully prosecute a single guardian. When the office’s top executive abruptly resigned last summer, the Orlando Sentinel reported that she had grown frustrated by her agency’s limited power to execute its mission.

Advocates say one reason that meaningful reform has inched along so slowly is because the federal government provides no real money or guidance to states that might otherwise improve their practices. In 2019 U.S. Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Bob Casey, D-Penn., introduced the Guardianship Accountability Act, which would expand federal demonstration grants to help states collect better data and improve their practices, yet its only other co-sponsor is Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama.

“I hope we can learn from this pandemic that we need to prioritize support and services for the elderly and people with disabilities,” said Dari Pogach, a senior staff attorney at American Bar Association Commission on Law and Aging. “And that must include funding for state adult guardianship reform.”

This Hurricane Season, The Coronavirus Pandemic is Complicating Disaster Response Plans

Originally published in The Intercept on June 15, 2020.
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IN THE LEAD-UP to a hurricane, residents of high-risk areas may find themselves subject to evacuation orders. Some travel to other states that fall outside the storm’s projected path, while others stay with friends and family who live in higher-elevation homes. Many people flock to shelters prepared by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and its state and local counterparts. Volunteers pitch in to assist with first aid and essential supplies like food and toilet paper.

The coronavirus pandemic — and the attendant social distancing guidelines and stay-at-home orders — has upended hurricane planning protocol for the 2020 season, a five-month period that started on June 1. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted in May this season will be “above-normal,” with as many as six major hurricanes expected. To put this in perspective: The agency predicted two to four major storms in 2019, and three in 2018. Major storms are those classified as Category 3 or higher, with winds of at least 111 miles per hour, and are guaranteed to yield significant destruction and death.

It’s the first time in U.S. history that hurricane season planning will have to take into account social distancing, and the first time every state and territory has simultaneously declared a “major disaster” — a designation that allows them to access millions in federal funds and assistance from FEMA.

“This is very uncharted territory,” said Lauren Sauer, an assistant professor of Emergency Medicine at Johns Hopkins, where she studies disaster response and how disasters impact health care infrastructure. “Almost everything we’re doing is new, and we’re already seeing shortages on essential supplies.”

For now the federal government is projecting an air of confidence. In a recent briefing FEMA Administrator Pete Gaynor told the president his agency is ready to handle the challenges of hurricane season and Covid-19, noting they’re “more than fully funded” thanks to an extra $40 billion allocated from recent pandemic appropriations, on top of the $40 billion FEMA typically begins hurricane season with. The agency also put out guidance last month on how leaders should plan to navigate the next few months. “FEMA is prepared to address unique disasters with a customized response that meets the mission need while minimizing the potential for COVID-19 exposure,” a spokesperson told The Intercept.

Like many workplaces around the country, FEMA has had to adapt to teleworking in light of the pandemic, and those adjustments will extend to hurricane response as well. In its recent hurricane guidance, the agency said it’s expecting “many aspects” of disaster response could be operated remotely. In an email, a FEMA spokesperson said that includes inspection processes, preliminary damage assessments, coordinating meetings with government officials, and increased public communications through internet and social media platforms. “Depending on the needs of a particular disaster, it may still be necessary to send Disaster Survivor Assistance teams, search and rescue, damage assessment teams or communications technicians into a disaster area,” the spokesperson said.

When asked how FEMA will provide remote services if internet and cell service is no longer available, the spokesperson said they coordinate with industry partners and federal agencies to provide “temporary communications solutions” if the traditional infrastructure is degraded. Still, independent experts and some members of Congress are less sanguine about the federal government’s readiness.

Last week Democrats on the House Subcommittee on the Environment sent a letter to FEMA criticizing its hurricane guidance as lacking important details and noted staffing shortages the agency is facing. The “available personnel qualified to lead field operations has fallen from 44 to 19, staff members have been pulled from responding to other disasters, training centers have been shuttered, and new employee recruitment efforts are on hold,” they wrote. The letter cited a Homeland Security Department inspector general report from March that reported FEMA lacked “a coherent strategy” for using advanced contracting during Hurricane Maria, and a Government Accountability Office report that documented FEMA’s challenges in responding to hurricanes and wildfires in 2017. The lawmakers requested a virtual hearing with Gaynor by June 22 to discuss FEMA’s plans for navigating Covid-19 and natural disasters, including tornadoes, wildfires, and hurricanes.

WHILE THE FEDERAL government deliberates, states and cities have been taking steps to consider how they might plan for evacuation shelters while maintaining social distancing. Officials are hoping to screen evacuees with temperatures checks, to require masks, and to isolate anyone with symptoms. “States will most likely need to identify more sheltering capacity [than normal],” said Brant Mitchell, the director of the Louisiana State University’s Stephenson Disaster Management Institute. “One potential solution may be contracting with hotels due to decline in hotel capacity resulting from stay-at-home orders. Typically during disasters that is not an option for the state but may be a consideration due to the circumstances of the lockdowns.”

Another challenge is that often during hurricane season, many who lack the means to physically evacuate the state in an emergency make plans to shelter with a neighbor or friend whose house may be on higher ground. With coronavirus, though, there may be less willingness among individuals to let people crash in their home.

“The base elevation of our house is 9 feet so we’re completely safe from flooding and storm surge, and I’m pretty sure we’d be able to survive OK even during the worst possible hurricane,” said Hugh Gladwin, a retired Florida International University sociologist and anthropologist who studies hurricane evacuations. “We have a guest bedroom and we could take two people in, but I’m elderly, I have a heart condition, and I have to be certain they don’t have Covid-19 because I would croak.” Gladwin said he’s making plans with two friends who live in a condo on the Miami coastline but acknowledged it requires a higher level of trust and coordination than is typical.

Relatedly, hurricane experts are expecting less volunteer assistance both from within state and out-of-state due to coronavirus. “Typically we’ve relied on volunteers from the American Red Cross and partners from Division of Social Services and a lot of those volunteers are what you would classify as high risk population,” explained Mike Sprayberry, North Carolina’s director of Emergency Management, in a recent interview with ABC11. “We had 35-40 states that provided us with assistance during [2018’s Hurricane] Florence. … We’re pretty much going to have to be aware that we’re not going to be able to count on assets from other states like we would have in the past.”

Experts say evacuations could be a mess, particularly for vulnerable populations. And while such events are always challenging, public health officials recognize that a call to evacuate during a pandemic could confuse people who have heard for months that the safest thing they could do was to stay home and social distance.

“There will be a good chance some might assess that their risk is higher from getting Covid than the hurricane and they need to understand that if an evacuation order is issued, it’s incredibly important that they leave,” said Sauer.

Gladwin said he’s worried about highway gridlock while a Category 3, 4, or 5 hurricane goes over vehicles. “We’ve had almost no experience with that, just because we’ve gotten lucky,” he said. “We would have that with Irma” — a Category 4 hurricane that hit in 2017 — “if Irma had stayed on its original trajectory.”

In New Orleans, where many residents lack the means to evacuate themselves, Mitchell said Louisiana typically contracts with roughly 600 commercial buses to transport people to state-operated shelters and shelters in other states. “Due to social distancing requirements a commercial bus that may be able to transport 60 passengers may only be able to transport half that capacity or less,” he explained. “This will require either additional buses or moving the evacuation timeline up significantly to allow the buses to make multiple trips.” And whether states will welcome evacuees if they’re coming from a city that had a large outbreak is another area of uncertainty. I’m “not sure what the answer is but it is certainly something the state has to be prepared for,” Mitchell said.

In many ways, the states that frequently get hurricanes and are bracing for more severe ones this year may be somewhat better positioned than states that have less experience planning for and dealing with them. In Florida’s Miami-Dade County, for example, the local government mailed a hurricane readiness handbook to all homes in early June that included instructions on making plans amid the pandemic.

“I think we’ll make it through here in Florida, but I am extremely worried about other parts of the country,” said Gladwin. “Here we are in good shape in terms of hospital capacity, but take a state like Georgia or the Carolinas. If they’re still on their wave of coronavirus infections going up and their hospitals need more capacity, that could be a big problem.”

Mitchell agreed that Louisiana might also be better positioned and noted state officials started planning for shelter capacity and evacuation routes back in April. “The state will be as prepared as they can for a major hurricane making landfall in [Louisiana] during this pandemic,” he said.

Sauer says the most important thing the federal government could be doing right now is scaling up its emergency response workforce, planning ahead for transportation, and working to contain Covid-19. “I think more attention should be paid right now to where all these states are reopening and we’re still seeing a ton of hotspots,” she said. “We need to use public health interventions to keep those cases low.”

In the Midst of the Unemployment Crisis, Why Not Guarantee Jobs?

Originally published in In These Times on June 10, 2020.
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Later this month, Pavlina Tcherneva, an economics professor at Bard College and a research scholar at the Levy Economics Institute, is publishing a book entitled The Case for a Job Guarantee. The book details a policy idea that she’s been thinking about and developing throughout her career. It’s gained momentum in recent years, with senators like Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) embracing it, and many activists have described it as an integral part of any Green New Deal. But what is a Job Guarantee, and how would it work? Contributing writer Rachel Cohen talked with Dr. Tcherneva about her forthcoming book, and how we should be thinking about a policy for guaranteed employment amid our current economic crisis. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

Rachel Cohen: Reading your book, as I understand it, a job guarantee is a promise that a job, paying at least $15 an hour, will be given to anyone who wants one. If someone doesn’t want to be unemployed, they will be able to access a living-wage job through this program. Can you be fired from this job—for poor performance, co-worker complaints, or something else?

Pavlina Tcherneva: Yes, they can be fired. If someone is harassing people in the workplace, surely. A job guarantee is a promise that a job will be there, but it’s not a promise that belligerent workers will be tolerated. But the way we think about ‘belligerent’ just changes completely when you start thinking with a real person in mind.

So I sometimes equate a job guarantee to public libraries. You can assume that you can walk into a public library and get a book, and our libraries have services beyond books that librarians help you with. People may have all sorts of challenges and difficulties that prevent them from holding onto whatever private-sector job they have, but with a job guarantee, we would help those individuals with wraparound services, and our aim and interest is to help people be successful—like in a public library.

And just like with libraries—maybe you are escorted out at some point for bad behavior, but you’re not denied access if you return.

Rachel: You trace the Job Guarantee’s historical roots. It was affirmed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and it was in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s proposed Economic Bill of Rights. It was a signature issue for civil rights activists in the ’60s and it’s been etched into many nations’ constitutions. Has it ever existed anywhere in practice?

Pavlina: We have never had a law anywhere that guarantees everyone the legally-enforceable right to employment permanently. We’ve had one that comes close, in India, but it’s only for rural employment and just for up to 100 days per year. We’ve had situations where countries have achieved very low unemployment rates—in Japan, for example, their industrial labor and market policies produced unemployment at 1% to 2% for much of the post-war era. But I’m not talking about whether we can have policies that produce low unemployment. I’m talking about a codified right to employment to provide not just the legal, but also the institutional support for guaranteeing that right over the long-term. Because even in those countries that have been successful at getting us to 1 to 2% unemployment, they are not able to sustain it. So the Job Guarantee idea is to create a new legally-assured safety net.

Rachel: Your book went to print in December 2019, when U.S unemployment was at 3.5%, but it talks a lot about how unemployment can spread like a virus. It felt really poignant reading your book as unemployment is now 16.3%, and a real infectious virus is spreading. If 10 years ago we had passed a Job Guarantee program, what role do you think it could play to buffer the kind of mass unemployment we’re seeing today with coronavirus?

Pavlina: Had we put a Job Guarantee in place 10 years ago we would have had institutional infrastructure that would be ready to employ folks now. However, if you were working at a Job Guarantee job, just like if you were working any other job, you might need to stay home and you might need to be paid to socially distance. But because the Job Guarantee I’m envisioning would be aimed at filling certain public service gaps, it would also be able to, for example, mobilize people to check in on the elderly, to deliver meals, to provide teacher assistance.

Now I’d prefer that we respond to Covid-19 like they did in Denmark, where the government protects the private-sector jobs by paying the payrolls of the workers. That way you wouldn’t have this flood of unemployed people. But surely a Job Guarantee could help. I’m not an idealist, and I know this wouldn’t function totally smoothly. But just like any other institution that we consider important, we would make it work.

Rachel: Can you talk about what you’ve learned with respect to the unique harms of unemployment?

Pavlina: Economists will talk about the ‘scarring effects’ of unemployment, but that’s normally limited to what are the wages you lost, and you didn’t replace. But there are many other costs economists tend to ignore. An unemployed person experiences higher physical and mental health costs, they are sicker and weaker. Unemployment also negatively impacts a person’s net-worth, their connections, social capital. Unemployment creates so many conditions that make it harder to be re-employed later. And this then impacts families and children. If we were to add all those costs, we would not tolerate unemployment even when it’s very low. And I reject the idea that there is a “natural” rate of unemployment, just like we don’t accept a natural rate of homelessness.

Rachel: What kinds of lessons about unemployment did we learn from the Great Recession?

Pavlina: One irony of our economic system is that we have normalized the idea of ‘jobless recoveries.’ What we’ve learned from the Great Recession is that firms do not want to hire the unemployed. That’s the problem we have to solve. The folks who earn low wages are the first to be fired during economic downturns—we see this very clearly. And this has a racial dimension; unemployment always shoots up for African Americans more, it’s always higher for them and they recover more slowly. People with disabilities also saw their unemployment rate recover last after the recession. What we learn is that the official numbers do not tell the full story.

Rachel: In your book you talk a lot about green jobs. How do see the Job Guarantee as connected to the Green New Deal?

Pavlina: That is the promise, that for the person who loses their fossil fuel job, that they will find a job through the Green New Deal. This has been a challenge for the environmental movement—we have not been able to articulate clearly how will we protect people if they lose their jobs from oil rigs and mines or all of that. It’s the missing piece of the puzzle and it ensures a just transition, that the most vulnerable folks will have access to a living wage.

Rachel: Will it be just though if those workers are used to making $40 an hour and now can only get a $15-an-hour job?

Pavlina: Well other people have structured their Job Guarantee proposals with tiered wages. In my vision, the primary, overriding objective is to secure a firm, living-wage floor. And folks who are more highly-skilled typically don’t have the absolutely most horrific unemployment conditions. Maybe the floor has to be $17 an hour, or $20, but the point is we want to shore up that floor. In my ideal world, a Job Guarantee would be as small as possible. I’d much prefer to see permanent public services provided that are well-paid for, but there will always people who fall through the cracks and they deserve a living wage with guaranteed benefits, too.

The way I think about it is we literally are constrained with two choices. We either continue to accept unemployment as normal, or we have a Job Guarantee. The world with unemployment is simply worse than the one where we guarantee employment.

Rachel: What kinds of green jobs are you envisioning?

Pavlina: When I talk about green jobs, I’m not just talking about traditionally environmental jobs. To me ‘green’ is conservation of community and conservation of people, so it also includes care work. To me there’s no limit to the kinds of creative projects we could imagine. I think in addition to caring for people, we also could have jobs that involve caring for the environment like cleaning up parks, urban farming, planting trees, and doing preventative work for natural disasters.

Rachel: My last question: Are there any policy downsides you see to the Job Guarantee?

Pavlina: While I don’t see this as a downside to my proposal, traditionally many job programs have been done in punitive terms, like work-fare in the post-Reagan era. And with the rise of authoritarian governments, there’s always the risk of them awakening to the idea of providing employment and doing so in a punitive way. There’s always a risk of a policy being bastardized, but that just means we have to say vigilant.

 

Does the Earned Income Tax Credit Deliver?

Originally published in The American Prospect on May 26, 2020.
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As tens of millions of American workers file for unemployment amid the global economic and public-health crisis, we are reminded of how much of the nation’s welfare system is tied to jobs. This is not only true with employer-sponsored health insurance and other benefits, but with a lesser-discussed feature: the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).

The EITC is the largest federal subsidy for low-income workers. It’s a refundable credit that workers generally get in an annual lump sum when they file taxes. For childless low-income workers, the benefit is pretty small; in 2019, it maxed out at $529. But for low-income parents with children, it can rise as high as $6,557, depending on how many kids they have and how many hours they worked. About 22 million workers received EITC benefits in 2018, and it’s credited with lifting 5.6 million Americans out of poverty.

The EITC is also distinctive for being unusually popular among both parties. Democrats are fans because it gets more money to the poor, while Republicans like it because it rewards work. During the recent Democratic presidential primary, all the major candidates except Andrew Yang supported expanding the EITC, and in Congress, almost every Senate Democrat has signed on to a bill that would bolster it. In 2017, Gordon Berlin, then-president of the think tank MDRC, told The New York Times that he sees expanding the EITC as the best policy to pursue if one wanted to cut poverty.

But while the political class continues to rally around the EITC, their enthusiasm overlooks an ongoing debate among left-of-center policy wonks that has picked up steam over the last year. Some new research finds significant shortcomings with the EITC as a poverty-reduction tool; others have rebutted that critique. With a potential Democratic majority poised to return to this framework for aiding the working poor, the debate could clarify whether there are better options to reach that goal.

Last summer in the Prospect, New School economist Teresa Ghilarducci and her graduate student Aida Farmand laid out one critique: They argued that while the EITC does increase labor participation among the poor, it also effectively acts as a subsidy to low-wage employers and bears responsibility for driving down American wages overall.

A few months later, Princeton economist Henrik Kleven made a very different argument, in a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Kleven argued that, contrary to popular consensus, the EITC is not responsible for increasing labor force participation at all. Specifically, he argues that the large increase in employment among low-income women in the mid-1990s, which is generally attributed to the 1993 EITC expansion, was actually driven by contemporaneous welfare reforms and the decade’s booming economy.

Most EITC experts have dismissed the concern that the tax credit may exert downward pressure on wages. If true, it doesn’t outweigh its benefits, and just underscores the need for a robust minimum wage, the theory goes. “If you put a strong minimum wage and a good EITC you get the best of both worlds,” said Bob Greenstein, the founder and president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

But while the political class continues to rally around the EITC, their enthusiasm overlooks an ongoing debate among left-of-center policy wonks that has picked up steam over the last year. Some new research finds significant shortcomings with the EITC as a poverty-reduction tool; others have rebutted that critique. With a potential Democratic majority poised to return to this framework for aiding the working poor, the debate could clarify whether there are better options to reach that goal.

Last summer in the Prospect, New School economist Teresa Ghilarducci and her graduate student Aida Farmand laid out one critique: They argued that while the EITC does increase labor participation among the poor, it also effectively acts as a subsidy to low-wage employers and bears responsibility for driving down American wages overall.

A few months later, Princeton economist Henrik Kleven made a very different argument, in a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Kleven argued that, contrary to popular consensus, the EITC is not responsible for increasing labor force participation at all. Specifically, he argues that the large increase in employment among low-income women in the mid-1990s, which is generally attributed to the 1993 EITC expansion, was actually driven by contemporaneous welfare reforms and the decade’s booming economy.

Most EITC experts have dismissed the concern that the tax credit may exert downward pressure on wages. If true, it doesn’t outweigh its benefits, and just underscores the need for a robust minimum wage, the theory goes. “If you put a strong minimum wage and a good EITC you get the best of both worlds,” said Bob Greenstein, the founder and president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The debate got a new jolt last week when Matt Bruenig, the founder of the People’s Policy Project think tank, put out a new, highly critical paper on the EITC. Bruenig cites Kleven’s work to show that the EITC does not increase labor supply, and he also argues that the tax credit’s administrative costs have been understated (mainly because they don’t take into account the private administrative costs of tax preparers that the majority of EITC beneficiaries use), while its poverty-reduction impacts have been overstated (by 47 percent, according to his calculations). Bruenig cites a 2019 Census study that also found the EITC overstated its impact on reducing poverty. He argued in Jacobin that Democrats “should abandon their EITC fetish.”

Steinbaum praised Bruenig’s paper for “putting the received wisdom of the EITC in a more questionable light.” Claudia Sahm, the director of macroeconomic policy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, called Bruenig’s arguments “thought-provoking and dangerous.”

Not everyone was taken with Bruenig’s arguments. Some criticized him for treating Kleven’s paper as dispositive, and others argued that his estimate of the EITC’s administrative costs—11 percent—was dubious. A different Rothstein estimate, which also accounted for private tax prep, clocked EITC administrative costs at about 5 percent. John Wancheck, an EITC expert at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said the data underlying the Rothstein estimate is likely more reliable and reflective of national trends.

Rothstein, Greenstein, and Edin all told the Prospect they believed Bruenig had overstated the importance of his mismeasurement critiques.

Bruenig argues in his paper that it’s problematic that the Current Population Survey—which is sponsored by the Census and the Bureau of Labor Statistics—counts EITC benefits received in the subsequent year as having been received in the current year. In doing so, he argues, the survey makes the EITC appear more perfectly targeted to those in poverty than it really is.

Greenstein told me he doesn’t find that objection “very important” and thinks it’s given too much weight in Bruenig’s paper. Edin agrees that “it’s a technicality that I don’t think means very much.” She said in order to believe it was important, one would have to believe there was a serious difference between those who are living just above and just below the poverty line. Rothstein echoed them in saying, “I have a hard time believing it matters.” The researchers also pointed to evidence not included in Bruenig’s paper, like that the EITC has had significant benefits for children, and that many beneficiaries like that they can use their tax credit as an annual forced-savings vehicle, rather than a monthly wage supplement.

In an interview, Bruenig defended the mismeasurement critiques, saying they directly challenge the idea that the EITC is a “well-targeted program.” He also said that how policymakers measure the EITC’s effectiveness contrasts with how they measure the effectiveness of other welfare programs like food stamps, which evaluate uptake in the current year. “The [evaluations] have to be comparable,” he said. “And if you want to defend the EITC on the basis that a lump-sum payment can be beneficial to the poor, well that’s different than saying it’s a well-targeted program.”

KLEVEN AND BRUENIG both cite one piece of evidence as a reason they believe the EITC has been overhyped when it comes to incentivizing work. They argue that there’s no real proof that low-wage workers who were already employed then increased their hours to access more of the benefit, or phased out their hours once they had reached the maximum benefit. In economics jargon, this is known as an “intensive margin effect.” Even Rothstein agrees there’s been little good evidence for this, though he notes it’s a bit harder to study.

“How can it be that the EITC influences whether people work or not but does not influence how much they work?” asked Bruenig. “Defenders just wave away this question and say it’s ‘informational frictions.’”

Edin, for her part, says that when she did her qualitative research for her 2015 book, It’s Not Like I’m Poor, she found that while very few low-income people could name the EITC, virtually everyone she met knew they got a tax refund that was associated with their kids and that they had to work to get it. “People generally understood the more you work the more you get,” she said, later adding that no survey she knows of has asked that question.

With millions now losing jobs or seeing working hours reduced, problems with the EITC are cropping up. First, households generally receive the EITC as a refund in February and March, meaning it’s not something people can turn to if they face an unexpected crisis later in the year. And if they’re unable to find work in a depressed labor market, they won’t receive any assistance at all.

“It’s targeted and very effective at raising people’s incomes for low-income taxpayers … but it is not designed to be an effective recession stabilizer for families,” said Hilary Hoynes, a professor of public policy and economics at UC Berkeley.

In the aggregate, researchers find that EITC usage doesn’t vary all that much across economic cycles. But Hoynes says this obscures what actually goes on. During recessions, low-income workers may lose all their earnings, and therefore all their EITC benefits. Meanwhile, higher-income households that were not previously eligible for the EITC may suddenly “drop in” to eligibility, as they face a reduction in their own earnings.

AWARE THAT MANY workers in poverty or on the brink of it could soon lose their EITC, House Democrats included a provision in their latest proposed stimulus package, the HEROES Act, that would allow workers to substitute their 2019 earnings in the 2020 tax year. In other words, a middle-class household that was newly eligible for the EITC could still claim it with their 2020 earnings, but a low-income worker who lost their job could claim the EITC using their 2019 income status.

Other temporary modifications in the HEROES Act include expanding the EITC for workers without children (by nearly tripling the maximum benefit to $1,437) and expanding age eligibility.

It’s not clear how hard Democrats plan to fight for these measures—they’ve already stated that the HEROES Act is just a starting point for negotiations with the Senate. But these are not the only poverty-reduction programs on the Democratic side that use the EITC model. The Working Families Tax Relief Act—a bill led by Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Michael Bennet (D-CO)—would substantially increase the size of the EITC, and has nearly every Senate Dem signed on as a co-sponsor. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Brown introduced an even bigger EITC expansion bill in 2017, the GAIN Act, and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) has her own version, too, the LIFT Act.

“The EITC is one of the largest anti-poverty programs that exists in America and it also needs to be strengthened, which is why I introduced the Cost of Living Refund, which would lift millions more American families and individuals into the middle class,” said Rep. Khanna, adding that the EITC can’t stand alone and we need a higher minimum wage, stronger union protections, and other safety net programs. “This crisis underscores the dire need for more anti-poverty programs, and I’m reviewing the latest research on how we can make the EITC more effective and what other approaches we can pursue to combat the scourge of poverty.” The offices of Sens. Bennet, Brown, and Harris did not respond.

The debate over the EITC won’t be ending anytime soon, though all involved agree that improving the EITC alone, or scrapping it, would not be enough.

Kleven told Vox’s Dylan Matthews last year that even if the EITC doesn’t incentivize labor participation, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad policy, as it would also suggest the EITC is not driving down wages as Ghilarducci and Farmand argued. It would make the EITC “a pure money dump on the working poor that doesn’t come with any labor supply distortions,” he said.

But Bruenig says that if the EITC doesn’t actually drive labor force participation, then it’s even more immoral to phase in the tax benefit to the working poor, instead of giving it to all low-income households. He argues in his paper for replacing the EITC and the Child Tax Credit with a universal monthly child allowance, though he told me he’d also support an EITC that had no connection to the number of children one has. “It’s not ideal, but I would be OK with that,” he said.

Greenstein said his decades working in tax policy have given him no reason to think that scrapping the EITC will then drive more money to poor people with no earnings. Getting rid of it is not the answer, he argues, but he agrees there needs to be more money channeled to low-income families. Rather than a child allowance that extends to the top of the income scale, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities backs bolstering the Child Tax Credit for families earning up to $200,000 or so. “We don’t have to choose,” Greenstein said. “We should do both.”