HIGHLIGHTS

JUMP: EDUCATION | PUBLIC SERVICES | INFRASTRUCTURE | THE REST

Image: a recent social media post, since deleted, from a Los Angeles real estate investor. The New York Times has a piece covering ways to help the victims of the fire.

First, the Good News

1) National: Route Fifty reports that “lacking nationwide protections, states are stepping up to protect child influencers.” California is leading the way. “Technology and the rise of social media has driven new people to visit public parks and lands, as the platforms make it easier to showcase the great outdoors. But outdoor enthusiasts and environmental conservationists say social media has also contributed to ‘selfie tourism or the influx of visitation to specific landmarks that go viral on social media. It also can describe the behavior of those that crowd a landmark or ignore safety protocol to get the perfect shot. Every year, there are incidents of people having such dangerous interactions with wildlife, or getting lost in the parks, or even losing their lives. It’s hard to quantify how exactly social media influences the decision-making or behavior of park visitors, but several nearly fatal and fatal incidents have been connected to attempting to capture content.”

2 National: How are state and local workforces changing? In a briefing, Route Fifty examines the latest trends in workforce changes and what they mean for agencies around the country. “State and local governments are constantly changing, especially in their workforce. Between workforce shortages, workers unions, new technologies, and more, agencies are navigating an ever-changing landscape.”

3) National: President Biden has signed legislation co-sponsored by Congressman Salud Carbajal (CA-24) “restoring full Social Security benefits for millions of retired school teachers, public employees, and first responders like firefighters and police officers. The legislation will increase retirement benefits for more than 350,000 California families that previously saw their income curtailed by a 40 year-old legal provision. ‘Dedicated public servants like our teachers, firefighters, and police officers spent decades paying into Social Security, only to have their benefits reduced because of their chosen careers. This unfair penalty has hurt millions of retirees across the United States, and its fix was long overdue,’ said Rep. Carbajal. ‘I’m proud to have been a part of the bipartisan coalition that rejected House Republican leadership’s opposition to this commonsense bill and used our legislative tools to circumvent them to see this bill to the President’s desk.’ The Social Security Fairness Act repeals both the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and Government Pension Offset (GPO), two provisions added to the Social Security Act in 1983 that unfairly reduce the earned Social Security benefits of many retired public servants like teachers, police officers, firefighters, emergency services personnel, other first responders, and federal, state, and local employees who worked in both covered and non-covered jobs during their careers.

4) National: As the nation faces a challenging time in the fields of public health and law, Lindsay F. Wiley and Lawrence O. Gostin have published a new edition of their important book, Public Health Law and Ethics: Power, Duty, Restraint.  “The science and practice of public health have reemerged from the shadows of high-technology, high-cost medicine. Growing ranks of public health law and ethics experts are pioneering innovative new strategies. A host of exciting new initiatives are under way to connect and support practitioners, advance research, and drive rigorous analysis of law as a tool for the public’s health. The ‘legal determinants of health’ have been an important problem for public health law and practice. The science of social epidemiology—in its infancy when the first edition was published—is informing wide-ranging discussion of the devastating effects of subordination and resulting health disparities on our society.”

5) North Carolina: In a new monthly series in General Surgery News, Melissa Red Hoffman, MD, discusses the impact of the catastrophic natural disaster, Hurricane Helene, “on rural healthcare, as well as the pros and cons to the ever-increasing privatization happening today in America’s healthcare system. If you’d like to aid in the recovery efforts of Asheville and other affected communities in Western North Carolina, please visit BeLovedAsheville.com and SamaritansPurse.org.”

6) North Carolina: The North Carolina Local Government Commission has approved several bond deals. “Durham‘s $200 million GOs will mature in no more than 20 years and will be sold by competitive bid. The city plans to use $115 million for streets and sidewalks. The remaining $85 million will be used for parks and recreation facilities. The bonds would add 3.46 cents per $100 of assessed property value, with the rate declining over 20 years. The commission approved the Piedmont Triad Regional Water Authority’s request to sell $130 million in bond anticipation notes, maturing April 1, 2027, for water treatment plant expansion to Truist Commercial Equity in a private placement. First Tryon is the municipal advisor and Robinson, Bradshaw & Hinson is the bond counsel. Supporting the BANs and planned bond will be a 6.5% increase in water rates from 2026 to 2028 and a 4% increase thereafter.” [Sub required]

Education

7) National: Author and education podcaster Jennifer Berkshire says “corporate vendors hoovering up student data for profit infuriates parents of all political stripes. It’s also fueling the rising opposition to school vouchers on the right. A growing # of conservative parents see the big money push for school privatization as a data grab.”

 Bloomberg Law reports that “PowerSchool Holdings Inc. is facing three federal lawsuits alleging the education software provider negligently failed to protect the personal information of students, parents, and teachers that was exposed in a December data breach. Sheilah Buack-Shelton, Tyler Baker, and Kimberly Kinney alleged in separate complaints that PowerSchool breached its duties under common law, contract law, industry standards, and the Federal Trade Commission Act to implement reasonable and adequate data security measures and provide timely notice of the breach. Information exposed in the incident includes names, addresses, Social Security numbers, contact information, medical and financial information, student grades and grade-point averages, bus-stop information, and employment information, according to complaints filed Jan. 8-9 in the US District Court for the Eastern District of California. (…) Each plaintiff seeks to represent a nationwide class of people whose information was exposed in the breach. Buach-Shelton also seeks to represent a California sub-class of affected people.”

8) National: Who is Linda McMahon, Trump’s likely new education secretary? Politico has a 3 minute video. Writing in The Nation, Christopher Lewis and Jacob Plaza have an excellent story on The MAGA Think Tank Behind Linda McMahon’s Education Agenda. “Following the lead of billionaire right-wing donors, AFPI enthusiastically champions the charter-schools movement, while seeking to undermine the government’s role in providing quality public education. McMahon’s think tank has erected a whole policy infrastructure to promote charter schools, including direct public subsidies to them, the creation of education saving accounts (ESAs) for parents to enroll kids in charters, and proposals to weaken teachers’ unions in conjunction with the rise of open-shop charters. This agenda does more than harness the long-standing animus to government-backed education on the right—it advances the creation of a parallel education system for right-wing partisans. In this regard, as well as in its aggressive model of privatized education funding, the AFPI plan recalls the original role that neoliberal economics played in supporting the new ad hoc network of “segregation academies” launched in the American South after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling to desegregate the nation’s schools. The same basic dictum holds for today’s American right as it did then: If you can’t segregate with law, segregate with economics.”

9) National: Washington Monthly editor Paul Glastris has weighed in with a proposal for federal and state support for tutoring, which was part of the American Rescue Plan. “Affluent parents have long known the value of paying private tutors to boost their kids’ academic success. But over the past three years, the federal government funded a vast, nationwide experiment to provide that benefit to millions of poor and working-class students. The American Rescue Plan, the mammoth $1.9 trillion COVID-relief measure that President Joe Biden signed in March 2021, contained an estimated $7.5 billion in funds that public schools used for online tutoring programs to help students during the pandemic (…) Even in the minority, Democrats have the ability to develop and publicize ideas like these that have real potential to improve the quality of the schools that average Americans send their kids to. And once the war over privatizing schools is fought and won, they might be in a position to turn those ideas into policy.”

10) Florida: Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has continued to pack the governing bodies of Florida colleges with right wing extremists. “The appointments, which include a political science professor who has criticized feminism and a Heritage Foundation fellow who has written about privatizing public universities, come two years after a similar slate of appointments at New College of Florida ignited a radical overhaul of the once left-leaning college. DeSantis’ recent picks for state university trustees have typically included controversial choices — including anti-DEI provocateur Christopher Rufo and former Georgetown Law professor Ilya Shapiro, who publicly criticized President Joe Biden’s 2022 commitment to nominate a Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court. (…) The remaining three appointees are attorney and Pensacola Christian College professor Paul Bailey, private equity CEO Gates Garcia and lawyer and logistics entrepreneur Chris Young. The appointments are subject to confirmation by the Florida Senate and the Board of Governors, which oversee the state’s public university system.”

11) Idaho: Rod Gramer, veteran Idaho and Oregon journalist, says Idaho Governor Brad Little is selling the usual okey-doke on using public dollars for private education.  “Little is following the script of other Republican governors who have bowed to the out-of-state billionaires and their front organizations that are foisting these misbegotten policies on the residents of their states. He is promising that he won’t let any voucher-style law hurt funding for public schools. He also told lawmakers that he wants accountability built into the program. Unfortunately, in every voucher state there is little or no accountability and, in some cases, even the weakest sideboards are eliminated over time. The same playbook has been used in other states, including neighboring Utah. When Gov. Spencer Cox signed the first-ever taxpayer-supported voucher bill two years ago he asked for an increase in school funding and the privatization program capped at $43 million. But in the second year the voucher lobbyists wanted it increased to $150 million.”

12) Ohio: State Republican leaders are out to slash school funding. “Had the levy not passed, they would have been looking at at least an additional $8 million in reductions going into the next school year, so doubling what reductions they made into this school year, the superintendent added. ‘It would be a complete restructuring and dismantling of the district,’ he said. Both superintendents think this is Huffman’s goal. ‘Do you believe this is an effort to privatize education?’ we asked Sable. ‘I think there’s been an ongoing effort by some legislators to privatize public education,’” Sable responded. We asked the same question to Smialek. ‘“You try not to be cynical, but ultimately, it has been,’” Smialek responded. ‘If you look at the money that went into the voucher system, we’re almost at $1 billion. So when we talk about what isn’t sustainable, we’re not hearing that the $1 billion in EdChoice vouchers wasn’t sustainable.’”

Infrastructure

13) National: So, what is the connection between privatization and wildfires? The U.S. (California PG&E and elsewhere) and Brazil offer instructive examples. And, under the Trump administration, we are facing a massive corporate grabbing of public lands, which will further contribute to the risk of wildfires. “During his first term, Trump made his hostility toward public lands clear as he reduced national monuments and rolled back regulations on fossil fuel extraction. This time, he promises a repeat performance, backed by a GOP-dominated Congress, a conservative-leaning Supreme Court and an army of professional ideologues who have been eagerly preparing for this moment for the last four years.”

14) National: Inside Climate News has a useful rundown of what to expect from state governments on renewable energy policy in 2025. “But 2025 is not like 2017, when Trump first took office and vowed to boost fossil fuels. In the eight intervening years, most of the states with the political will to pass major clean energy legislation have already done so. Now they are focusing on the granular and challenging process of implementation. Also, the markets for renewable energy and EVs are more mature than before, which leaves states to focus as much on managing growth as they would on nurturing emerging technologies. And energy demand and costs are rising to an extent that they weren’t in 2017, which affects just about every discussion of energy policy. Much of the demand growth is coming from data centers.” Will states be able to fulfill their commitments to 100% carbon-free energy?

15) New York: Newsday has a lengthy roundup of what some Long Island towns are planning to accomplish in 2025 in the way of municipal services and facilities. “The year starts after nine of Long Island’s 13 towns pierced the state tax levy cap – meaning this year’s tax hikes will be more than the customary 2% for most homeowners. Many town officials blamed higher costs for state-mandated employee pension and health insurance plans. Four towns, however—Babylon, Brookhaven, Riverhead and Southampton, the only towns where those shops are legal—will be seeing new revenues in the form of tax income from the growing number of cannabis dispensaries. Here are major developments expected in the new year.” [Sub required]

16) National: Steep lodging rates are pricing some visitors out of national parks. “National Park visitors can keep their expenses down by buying annual and senior passes, camping, and picnicking. But the privatization of park lodges—occurring since the National Park Service’s (NPS’s) inception—has made stays inside the parks unaffordable for many visitors. Lodging costs “price lower income families out of the national parks and make it very challenging for people to visit our parks,” said Jackie Ostfeld, the Sierra Club’s campaign director for their program, Outdoors for All. Costs are not preventing people from frequenting the national park; more than 325 million visits were tallied in 2023. Of the 13 million individuals who overnighted in parks last year, almost 3 million stayed in lodging run by concessioners, according to NPS data. But lodging stays are not in everyone’s budget. ‘You know, the parks are for everybody, but yet they’re not because they are pricing people out. You can get through the gate, and you can do stuff and enjoy the park for relatively little money. But the lodging part, unless you’re camping, the lodging’s prohibitive,’ said Bruce Andersen, a retired U.S. Forest Service environmental planner now living in southwestern Colorado.”

17) Nevada: ProPublica reports that Elon Musk’s Boring Company is tunneling beneath Las Vegas with little oversight. “Despite its size, the project, because it’s privately funded, has not gone through the vetting typical of public transit systems, including lengthy governmental studies. (…) Elon Musk’s Boring Company spent years pitching cities on a novel solution to traffic, an underground transportation system to whisk passengers through tunnels in electric vehicles. Proposals in Illinois and California fizzled after officials and the public began scrutinizing details of the plans and seeking environmental reviews. But in Las Vegas, the tunneling company is building Musk’s vision beneath the city’s urban core thanks to an unlikely partner: the tourism marketing organization best known for selling the image that ‘What Happens Here, Stays Here.’ The powerful Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority greenlit the idea and funded an 0.8-mile route at its convention center. As that small ‘people mover’ opened in 2021, the authority was already urging the county and city to approve plans for 104 stations across 68 miles of tunnels. The project is also realizing Musk’s notion of how government officials should deal with entrepreneurs: avoid lengthy reviews before building and instead impose fines later if anything goes awry. Musk’s views on regulatory power have taken on new significance in light of his close ties to President-elect Donald Trump and his role in a new effort to slash rules in the name of improving efficiency. The Las Vegas project, now well under way, is a case study of the regulatory climate Musk favors.”

18) Wyoming: The Cowboy State is the latest to float a bill blocking responsible investment, The Bond Buyer reports. The House measure “restricts state funds from being invested with firms that consider environmental, social or governance factors in their actions or investment strategies. Two of the state’s largest funds warned the bill would shrink the universe of asset managers willing to partner with the state and thus decrease their revenues. (…) A fiscal note accompanying the bill notes that the State Treasurer’s Office and the Wyoming Retirement System said the bill, if enacted, would decrease their revenues ‘primarily as a result of a smaller universe of investment managers willing to partner with Wyoming to provide investment opportunities.’” The Wyoming Retirement System estimated its pension fund would lose $193 million in fiscal year 2026, $387 million in 2027 and $580 million in 2028 compared to the status quo, which includes outperformance relative to the WRS reference portfolio. The Treasurer’s office did not estimate the impact. The note added that the bill’s administrative impact ‘appears to increase duties or responsibilities of one or more state agencies and may impact agency spending or staffing requirements.’” [Sub required]

Public Services

19) National/California: The Los Angeles Times calls attention to the issue of privatized firefighting—for those corporations and wealthy individuals who can afford it. “Torgerson’s operation, which has been contracting with insurance companies since 2008 and employs hundreds of firefighters, engineers, and other staff, highlights a lesser-known component of fighting wildfires in the U.S. Along with the more than 7,500 publicly funded firefighters and emergency personnel dispatched to the current conflagrations, which have burned more than 30,000 acres and destroyed more than 9,000 structures, a smaller force of for-hire professionals is on the fire lines for insurance companies, wealthy individual property owners, or government agencies in need of additional hands. Their presence isn’t without controversy. Private firefighters hired by homeowners directly have drawn criticism for heightening class divides during disasters. This week, a Pacific Palisades homeowner received backlash for putting a call out on X, the social media site formerly named Twitter, for help finding private firefighters who could save his home. ‘Does anyone have access to private firefighters to protect our home in Pacific Palisades? Need to act fast here. All neighbors houses burning,’ he wrote in the since-deleted post.’ ‘Will pay any amount.’ ‘The epitome of nerve and tone deaf!’ someone replied.”

In the 19th century, before most cities and towns had unified, public firefighting departments, it was not unusual for several teams of private fire companies to show up simultaneously at a burning home and haggle with the owner over who would get the deal to put the fire out—if the owner could afford it. The controversies generated by that situation built public pressure for unified public agencies.

20) National: Economics columnist Tyler Cowen says you may not want crony capitalists delivering your mail.  “In other words: If embedded in an imperfect system, corporate efficiency is not always a pure virtue. In the U.S., privately owned and publicly owned water utilities show, on average, roughly equal performance. Perhaps that is a disappointing result, but it is consistent with the ‘public choice’ theories favored by many free-market economists. A third kind of privatization is when business adds a layer of activity to a preexisting government function. For instance, some states have ‘privatized’ their Medicaid services by outsourcing Medicaid provision to private health insurers. The Medicaid program has not gone away or been turned over to the private sector; rather, companies have a role in administering the system. This kind of ‘layered’ privatization, like the second kind of privatization, can work out either for the better or for the worse. One recent study shows this privatization increased the costs of Medicaid significantly without providing offsetting benefits. The private companies have done a good job—for themselves—of extracting more revenue from the system.”

Cowen isn’t focusing on the usual questions surrounding service and/or salary cutbacks being weaponized as “efficiency.” “I have questions of a different sort: Namely, how good would a newly involved private company be at manipulating the federal government to get extra delivery subsidies, entry barriers and price privileges? Maybe postal privatization can work, but it is unlikely to succeed in an environment of crony capitalism. And at least so far, that seems to be what is on tap from the Trump administration.”

It’s fair to wonder whether the team of millionaires and billionaires (many with huge government contracting portfolios) that Trump, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel is putting together to massively slash federal government services in a six month, drive-by operation, will respect the distinctions “state capacity libertarians” like Cowen are raising.

21) National: Barron’s columnist Andrew Bary says “Taking Fannie Mae Private Could Be Ugly. Here’s Why It May Not Happen.” The privatization process, he points out, “could be lengthy and difficult with the possibility of higher mortgage rates if the two companies are freed from federal control, according to analysts at DoubleLine, a large investor in the mortgage securities market. Higher mortgage rates could make the whole process politically unpalatable. ‘Even if Trump 2.0 is able to end conservatorship, it’s hard to see how GSE privatization would lead to lower mortgage rates that benefit the consumer,’ wrote Kunal Patel and Alex Shvartser of DoubleLine in a new report. DoubleLine is headed by longtime mortgage-backed securities investor Jeff Gundlach. ‘Further, privatization could carry significant execution risks and could adversely affect the secondary mortgage market, which could drive primary mortgage rates much higher.’ The DoubleLine analysts wrote that the risk/reward balance is a ‘tenuous one.’ (…)

“Members of Congress may be wary of approving privatization legislation that would be a boon to equity investors in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac but potentially hurt American home buyers. (…) Release could mean big profits for shareholders, depending on how it is structured. Investor Bill Ackman, a holder of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, last week wrote on X that a 2026 public offering could value shares of both companies at $31. That assumes the government retires much of its own equity stake in them. But there have been several false dawns for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac privatization over the past decade. The DoubleLine analysis suggests that the current enthusiasm could be too strong given the challenges in achieving that goal.”

22) National: Veteran economic journalists Felix Salmon and Emily Peck weigh in with similar warnings. “Last week, the Treasury Department and the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees the two companies, released a roadmap for how privatization could work. 

State of play: In a sign that investors believe there’s a real chance privatization could happen during Trump 2.0, stocks of government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) jumped on the news.

  • Mortgage Bankers Association chief lobbyist Bill Killmer told Axios it’s highly likely that the issue will at least be examined during the new administration, following several other reports.
  • Trump did not address the GSEs during the campaign or since his election. “No policy should be deemed official unless it comes directly from President Trump,” Karoline Leavitt, spokeswoman for the transition, said in an email.

Reality check: This roadmap is a memo from a lame-duck administration, and the incoming Trump team could simply reverse it.

  • But the idea was to put up some guardrails up so the incoming administration doesn’t act too recklessly in getting rid of federal oversight, said Jim Parrott, who was a housing adviser in the Obama administration.
  • He describes it as ‘a good governance move just to make sure that the new guys don’t f–k things up too badly’”

23) National: John M. Crisp, a Texas-based op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service, says USPS privatization would be a bad idea. “It’s easy to see why a politician such as Trump is attracted to his party’s default position—privatization—on nearly everything. Hate is too strong a word, so let’s just say that Republicans reflexively detest government, operating on the assumption that it is always inept, inefficient, bloated and inferior to private enterprise. It’s not just that government is ineffective; it usually does more harm than good. This attitude is reflected in Ronald Reagan’s oft-repeated simplistic dismissal: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

“Somehow this attitude manages to persist among Republicans despite the fact that there are some things that only the government can do: Win World War II, for example, or land on the moon, build and maintain the world’s finest military, build an interstate highway system, desegregate public schools, and develop a Social Security system that keeps millions of elderly citizens out of the poverty they experienced in pre-Social Security days. Closer to home: If your house catches on fire, your tax-supported government will come and put it out for you. Why? Because we recognize that your burning house is bad, not just for you, but for everyone. Back to the post office: Yes, $9.5 billion is a significant shortfall. On the other hand, for perspective, according to multiple sources Americans spent $12 billion on Halloween in 2023, $147 billion on pets and around $1 trillion on Christmas.”

All the Rest

24) National/California: You can look far and wide for mainstream media coverage of the link between massive wildfires and climate change, though the alternative media is on the case (see here, here, and here) and even further afield if you want to hear your TV weather reader say the words “extractive industries” and “climate polluters.”  Food & Water Watch says “the past few years have shown us that climate change-fueled wildfires and their smoke can threaten anyone. But these risks—and their consequences—aren’t distributed equally. As with most crises, those with more resources can respond and cope better. They can move quickly to safer places; buy air filters and high-quality masks; work from home or take the day off to shelter inside. These resource inequities often track with other inequities. For instance, outdoor workers like farmworkers, many of which are migrants and immigrants lacking basic labor protections, must often work through the smoke.”

Democracy Now! took a look at the issue of staff cutbacks in Los Angeles fire department, which made it more difficult to fight the wildfires, and at the use of prison labor to fight these fires. “Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and City Council are facing new scrutiny for cutting the fire department’s funding by around 2%, while increasing the police department budget. Nearly 400 incarcerated firefighters are among those deployed to battle the fires. Democracy Now! reached former incarcerated firefighter Amika Mota with the Sister Warriors Freedom Coalition.” Mota says, “You know, and many of these people are going home tonight to cells, to fire camps. Also, in Malibu, you know, we have a fire camp there that is under threat. We’re really concerned about the folks there. We also know that there’s a youth fire camp in Malibu, so we have a lot of young people facing some pretty terrible conditions.” See Also Democracy Now!’s special report interviewing incarcerated firefighters, “A New Form of Slavery? Meet Incarcerated Firefighters Battling California’s Wildfires for $1 an Hour.”

Related Posts