Off-kilter With Rebecca Vallas

Last month, the newly launched Congressional Progressive Staff Association published a survey of more than five hundred Congressional staff. The results were damning. Half of Capitol Hill staffers who weren’t in management reported their pay was so low they were struggling to make ends meet. Roughly one in four of those who weren’t managers said they didn't have the equivalent of even one month's rent in the bank in the case of an emergency. And this despite routinely working twelve-hour days and weekends.  The survey’s troubling findings come as a viral Instagram account called “Dear White Staffers” has been drawing new levels of national attention to the low pay, poor working conditions, and toxic workplace environment that is often even more pervasive for staffers of color on the Hill. But a critical point that this growing national conversation demands is that the problem isn’t limited to Capitol Hill. Low starting salaries at many of the think tanks and policy organizations that shape public policy onl

With the Senate announcing they’re heading into recess without passing the Build Back Better Act, we figured why not get out of the news cycle for Off-Kilter’s last episode of the year and instead have a far more good-news conversation that Rebecca Vallas has been meaning to have for a while with her dear friend Rebecca Cokley about what she’s got underway at the Ford Foundation, in her history-making new role as the first program officer to head a U.S. disability rights portfolio at a major U.S. foundation.  For more: Learn more about Rebecca Cokley’s newly launched disability rights program at the Ford Foundation  Here’s more on what the Rebeccas mean when they say “disability is a cause and consequence of poverty” Follow Rebecca Cokley on Twitter: @rebeccacokley

With the clock ticking on Democrats’ “Build Back Better” legislation, which passed the House last month and now awaits Senate action, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin has cited yet another in a never ending string of “new” reasons for withholding his support for the bill. This time? Inflation.  On Tuesday, during a Wall Street Journal CEO Council Summit, Mr. Manchin said of inflation to a roomful of corporate CEOs: “The unknown we’re facing today is much greater than the need that people believe in this aspirational bill that we’re looking at and we’ve got to make sure we get this right.” Sen. Manchin, of course, isn’t alone in singing that tune, with Republicans already testing out their attack ads for the 2022 midterms and conservative media outlets blanketing their airwaves for months with baseless claims that rising inflation is due to pandemic recovery spending.  So, to help separate fact from fiction in the inflation debate, Rebecca sat down with two of the leading progressive economic voices working

​​With the biggest threat to abortion rights in fifty years reaching the Supreme Court this week, in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—which centers around Mississippi’s fifteen-week abortion ban—Rebecca sat down with two of The Century Foundation’s top experts on reproductive rights and health: Dr. Jamila Taylor, director of health care reform and senior fellow at TCF, and Anna Bernstein, a health care policy fellow at TCF. They unpack what overturning Roe v. Wade would mean for women and people who can become pregnant in the United States; why reproductive justice is critical to economic justice and gender equality; and why low-income folks and people of color are likely to face the most devastating consequences. But first, Rebecca sat down with Ian Millhiser, senior correspondent at Vox, author of The Agenda: How a Republican Supreme Court Is Reshaping America, and Off-Kilter’s resident longtime court-watcher, for a recap of this week’s oral argument in Dobbs.  For more:  Read SCOTUSbl

Earlier today, the House of Representatives passed President Biden’s Build Back Better economic recovery legislation—which includes historic and long-overdue investments in child care, pre-K, home care for people with disabilities and seniors, an extension of the monthly expanded child tax credit, and more.  But Democratic leaders caution that the bill still faces immense hurdles in the Senate: namely, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin. Senator Manchin—who has been wielding outsized influence throughout the entirety of the year’s Build Back Better debate by withholding the critical fiftieth vote Democrats need for the package to pass in the Senate—told CNN as recently as Thursday of this week that he still has not decided whether to even support a vote to proceed with the legislation, a critical first step for the Senate to take up the measure once the House passes the bill.  So for this week’s Off-Kilter, Rebecca sat down with two of the West Virginia moms and organizers behind a movement they call Rattle th

Some twenty months into the COVID-19 pandemic, estimates suggest that between 3 million and 10 million Americans may have “long COVID,” which can bring long-term and, in some cases, debilitating symptoms ranging from chronic pain and fatigue to brain fog, respiratory problems, organ damage, and more.  While experts may still be fuzzy on the exact number of so-called COVID “long-haulers,” two things are clear: this population represents the largest influx of new entrants to the U.S. disability community in modern history, and their ranks continue to grow by the day. But is America’s public policy infrastructure prepared to handle the coming tidal wave? And how was it faring for the 1 in 4 Americans already living with disabilities before the pandemic?  Following last week’s deep dive into America’s house-of-cards child care system, for this week’s Off-Kilter, Rebecca sat down with three dear friends and leaders from the disability community for a look at America’s frayed caring economy from the disability per

A major contributor to poverty among U.S. families with children today is the incredibly high cost of child care. Statistics abound, underscoring how unaffordable child care in America has become, left to the whims of the private market: In more than half of states, care for an infant in a child care center costs more than in-state college tuition. For low-income families, child care expenses for children under five often amount to 35 percent of their income. A recent New York Times article by Jason DeParle on the subject was aptly titled, “When childcare costs twice as much as the mortgage.” Meanwhile, America’s broken child care system has a become a major driver of poverty and racial inequality on the worker side of the equation, as well, with many (disproportionately Black and Brown) child care teachers getting paid as if they were fast food workers despite the fact that their work is complex and specialized, not to mention incredibly valuable. Making a bad situation far, far worse—as with so many pre-e

In recent months, a wave of champions of the “tough on crime” approach to criminal justice have been trumpeting a spike in U.S. homicides in 2020 as fodder for rolling back critical reforms to America’s broken criminal legal system, and for scaremongering about the so-called defund the police movement. Meanwhile, criminal justice experts caution that efforts to blame the uptick in homicides on criminal justice reform aren’t just unfounded but are in fact directly contradicted by the very crime data the tough-on-crimers are trying to spin. As Fordham Law professor John Pfaff has put it: the rise in homicides last year actually “by and large took place on the status quo’s watch.”  So, for a look at what we know and what we don’t know about the 2020 crime data—and the shifting politics around criminal justice reform—Rebecca sat down with Ames Grawert, senior counsel at the Brennan Center and Josh Hoe, the policy analyst at Safe and Just Michigan and the host of the Decarceration Nation podcast.  For more: Here’

The Federal Reserve, better known as “the Fed,” has been in the spotlight quite a bit in recent weeks, following an apparent insider trading scandal embroiling several high-level officials at America’s central bank. And in the latest shoe to drop, disclosure documents made public in recent weeks reveal that the scandal of stock trading during the pandemic extends all the way up to the chair of the Fed himself—Jerome “Jay” Powell.  With Chairman Powell’s term ending in January 2022, a growing chorus of progressives, climate activists, advocates for racial justice, and economic heavyweights from Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz to Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren are calling on President Biden not to renominate Powell and instead to use what could be as many as four open seats on the Fed’s all-white, seven-member governing board to reshape the agency into an institutional force for racial, gender, climate, and economic progress—and bring some long-overdue racial and gender diversity to a cr

Last month, the U.S. Census Bureau put out its annual snapshot of income, poverty, and health insurance in the United States—which serves as something of an annual report card on the economic well-being of America’s families.  One of the most significant takeaways was the effectiveness of government relief at keeping people above the federal poverty line last year at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic: according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 53 million more Americans would have been officially poor in 2020 if not for a critical assembly of pandemic-related economic relief measures, from stimulus payments to boosts in jobless benefits, food assistance, medical coverage, and more. But while it’s always good news to see the enactment of public policies that measurably move the needle on poverty and hardship, a growing number of antipoverty researchers and advocates are raising a fundamental question: What good are these kinds of data if the way the United States defines poverty doesn’t bear any

As the debate over President Biden’s sweeping “build back better” agenda continues in Washington, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin hasn’t been shy about laying out his demands, as Democratic leadership in the House and Senate and the White House bend over backwards to garner his and Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s votes for reconciliation bill that’s been moving through Congress. High on Senator Manchin’s list: adding so-called work requirements to the newly expanded Child Tax Credit. In a September appearance on CNN’s State of the Union, he derided parents who don’t work outside the home, asking: “Don’t you think, if we’re going to help the children, that people should make some effort?”  Asked what he thought of the West Virginia Senator’s remarks, Child Tax Credit champion and Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown responded as aptly as he did succinctly, declaring: “I think raising children is work.” Of course, so-called “work requirements”—the policy of using survival benefits as a tool to compel paid work outsid

This week in Washington has featured no shortage of drama, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell saddling Democrats with the threat of both a government shutdown and default on the nation’s debts by withholding Republican votes for keeping the government funded or raising the debt ceiling. Meanwhile, despite months of forward momentum in Congress to craft sweeping “build back better” legislation encompassing much of President Biden’s American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan—austerity politics (or more precisely Sinemanchin intransigence—to borrow a timely term from The American Prospect’s David Dayen) has threatened to derail the president’s economic agenda. Thankfully, late on Thursday night, House progressives came to the rescue, making good on their promise to withhold their votes for the first part of “build back better”—the bipartisan infrastructure package—until there’s a commitment from the Senate (well, really Senators Manchin and Sinema) on a clear path forward for the second part of the p

For all the talk about what’s in “Build Back Better” recovery legislation that Democrats are trying to move through Congress, one thing that’s not currently in the bill, in what many workers’ advocates say is a glaring omission, is anything to do with Unemployment Insurance—which was badly in need of a refresh long before the COVID-19 pandemic, to ensure that when workers lose a job, they have the protection they need.  In fact, workers’ advocates and progressive think tanks have been ringing the alarm bells for years about how few jobless workers were protected by our UI system. The pre-pandemic share of jobless workers actually helped by UI in their time of need? Just 1 in 4, a record low. One of the most important lessons from the pandemic is without question the structural failings in America’s Unemployment Insurance system—gaps that were in many cases briefly filled by temporary expansions of jobless protections that have since been allowed to expire, leaving millions of still-jobless workers with less t

This week, millions of families across the United States are receiving their third monthly child allowance payment as implementation of the expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC) authorized by the American Rescue Plan Act earlier this year continues. Meanwhile, as “Build Back Better” legislation continues to come together in Congress, with key House committees marking up their portions of the legislation this week, the future of America’s first guaranteed minimum income for families with children—a policy estimated to cut child poverty in half in the United States—is at the heart of the ongoing debate. While not the permanent extension community advocates are calling for, the version of the bill currently moving through the House would extend the life of America’s first-ever child allowance by four years to give the expanded CTC time to take root—while making at least one key feature permanent: the credit’s so-called “full refundability” (read: full availability for the lowest-income families). So, for this week’s O

Thirty-one years ago, the fabric of America's legal and policy landscape changed dramatically for people with disabilities in the United States when the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, was signed into law by President George H. W. Bush, on July 26, 1990. But, as far we've come these past thirty-plus years, we still have incredibly far to go. Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, disabled people in the United States—who make up one in four Americans—were roughly twice as likely to live in poverty and two to three times more likely to be unemployed. Now, as federal policymakers work to "build back better," the United States has the opportunity to take another set of historic steps towards achieving the ADA's promise of equal opportunity, community integration, and participation in American life for people with disabilities—a promise that remains as-yet unfulfilled.  For this special relaunch episode of Off-Kilter, Rebecca talks with four of the disabled women leaders who've been making history on the fr

This week, Off-Kilter’s bringing you a conversation Rebecca moderated at The Century Foundation earlier this week, on the historic opportunity to make long overdue improvements to Supplemental Security Income as part of #BuildBackBetter—featuring Sen Sherrod Brown, Rep. Raul Grijalva, and Rep. Jamaal Bowman, as well as a panel of disability and seniors’ advocates.   Guests: Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH); Congressman Jamaal Bowman (D-NY); Congressman Raul Grijalva (D-CA); Nancy Altman, president, Social Security Works; Matthew Cortland, chronically ill, disabled lawyer and senior fellow, Data for Progress; Kristen Dama, managing attorney for SSI, Community Legal Services of Philadelphia; Tracey Gronniger, directing attorney, economic security, Justice in Aging; Mia Ives-Rublee, director, Center for American Progress Disability Justice Initiative; and Kathleen Romig, senior policy analyst, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.     Show notes: Event video: https://tcf.org/content/event/strengthening-ssi-

Nearly 40 million people in the U.S. live below the official poverty line—which in 2021 is just $26,000 for a family of four. But while poverty is all too often portrayed as a personal failure, it’s actually the result of bad public policy choices. Public policy has purposefully erected barriers that deny access to basic needs, creating a society where people can easily become trapped in poverty—not because we as a nation lack the resources to lift them out, but because we are actively choosing not to. This is the premise of a new book called Broke in America: Seeing, Understanding, and Ending U.S. Poverty, which looks at many of the policy choices conspiring to keep people poor and offers a roadmap of solutions that would eradicate poverty in the U.S. Rebecca sat down with the authors, Joanne Goldblum and Colleen Shaddox, for this week's pod. Get the book: https://benbellabooks.com/shop/brokeinamerica/ National Diaper Bank Network: nationaldiaperbanknetwork.org Alliance for Period Supplies: https://www.alli

The April jobs data released by the Department of Labor last week spurred an avalanche of hysteria and conservative hand-wringing about supposedly widespread labor shortages, with many on the right pointing to pandemic jobless benefits as the bogeyman. In a particularly troubling move, on Wednesday of this week, 12 Republican governors announced they’d be ending access to pandemic unemployment benefits in their states. To help unpack the state of the labor market as the COVID-19 economic recovery continues—and the role of pandemic unemployment insurance in the recovery—Rebecca sat down with Heidi Shierholz, policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, former chief economist at the Department of Labor under President Obama, for a reality check on the jobs data and what they really tell us about the kind of policies we need at this point in the ongoing recovery. More from Heidi on all this: https://twitter.com/hshierholz/status/1392272908618145796 https://www.epi.org/blog/restaurant-labor-shortages-show

As leaders at all levels of government work to “build back better”—and to address the nation’s legacy of racial injustice and persistent racial inequality—removing barriers to employment for workers with records is more urgently needed than ever amid the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and downturn, to ensure not only a full but an equitable recovery that does not leave tens of millions of system-impacted individuals and families behind. As Off-Kilter closes out our #SecondChanceMonth series for the month of April, we’re bringing you a conversation Rebecca had earlier this week with a group of state leaders who’ve been advancing transformative “clean slate” and fair chance licensing reforms in recent years: Michigan Lt. Governor Garlin Gilchrist II Sharon Dietrich, litigation director at Community Legal Services in Philadelphia Representative Jordan Harris, Minority Whip of the Pennsylvania Assembly Josh Hoe, policy analyst at Safe and Just Michigan Whitley Carpenter, criminal justice staff attorney at F