Manchin killing Build Back Better is ‘devastating’ to climate change action, experts say
Ben Adler, Senior Climate Editor December 20, 2021
When Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., announced on Fox News on Sunday that he won’t vote for the current version of Build Back Better, experts predicted he may have single-handedly killed the world’s best hope of avoiding catastrophic climate change.
In order to avoid breaching the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold that will trigger a cascade of devastating effects, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that global emissions of the greenhouse gasses that cause climate change must be cut in half by 2030, with emissions reaching net zero by 2050.
President Biden committed the United States — the world’s second-largest emitting country currently, and the largest historically — to reaching those goals and laid out a plan to achieve it. It was centered around Build Back Better’s unprecedented $555 billion in spending to subsidize transitioning the country to clean sources of energy and electric vehicles.
Without those actions, according to modeling by experts, the U.S. likely won’t hit its targets. And if the U.S. isn’t on pace to hit its targets, that will undermine the whole global push to switch to clean energy and cut emissions.
“We won’t be acting on the climate crisis if we don’t pass this bill, and there’s not a decade left to waste,” Leah Stokes, a climate policy professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told Vox.
Princeton engineering professor Jesse Jenkins, who studies electricity policy, tweeted a one-word response to Manchin’s comments: “devastating.”
Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., speaking to the media in September. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
“It’s in everyone’s interest for the U.S. to slash emissions. As the second-largest polluter of greenhouse gasses in the world, that’s fundamental to solving the problem,” Pete Ogden, vice president for energy, climate, and the environment at the U.N. Foundation, told Yahoo News. “And because we have an amazing ability to shape the markets in such a way as to drive innovation, and with our market locked in, as the Biden administration has been trying to do to this clean energy future, that’s going to have a global impact on clean energy markets.”
Environmental activists and experts such as Ogden have not given up on the prospect that the U.S. could still meet its emissions targets, however. Some hold out hope that Manchin, the conservative Democrat from a coal- and gas-heavy state, can still be persuaded to vote for a revised version of the bill.
“This is not the end of the road,” said League of Conservation Voters senior vice president Tiernan Sittenfeld in a statement. “We are more determined than ever, and we will keep fighting like hell to ensure the Build Back Better Act becomes law — for the people of West Virginia and for all people in this country who care deeply about climate, jobs, and justice.”
Green groups are also trying to figure out alternative ways of getting sufficiently ambitious climate policies in place through separate legislation or regulations adopted by federal agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency.
Manchin is followed by reporters as he leaves a caucus meeting with Senate Democrats at the Capitol on Friday. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
“This is a clear signal that the administration must pursue big and bold efforts across the federal government to achieve as much as possible on climate & clean energy action, clean air and clean water by utilizing its robust executive branch authority,” Sierra Club legislative director Melinda Pierce told Yahoo News in an emailed statement. “In tandem, we are confident that the Biden Administration will work on a legislative path forward on climate and clean energy, because we must deliver on our international commitments.”
Given the evenly divided Senate, whether the U.S. could live up to its international commitments is an unanswered question. Throughout the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, last month, Biden administration officials and Democratic leaders in Congress repeated three words as if it were an almost magical mantra: Build Back Better. Nearly every U.S.-sponsored event amounted to a primer on what the bill would deliver. Based in part on its climate change provisions, special envoy for climate John Kerry negotiated joint climate actions with a number of other large nations, including China, the No. 1 emitter.
While the national commitments made at the Glasgow conference, also known as COP26, fell short of what is needed to stay below 1.5C, climate scientists and activists hope that next year’s conference, COP27, will see nations return with more ambitious pledges. That’s a lot less likely to happen if the country most responsible for climate change fails to pass the bill it touted at COP26 and isn’t clearly on a path to fulfilling its pledges.
President Biden addresses a press conference at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in November. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
“This is a huge lost opportunity, not to get this thing passed right now, before the holidays and before the end of the year, so that the administration would have a full year of running room [before COP27],” Ogden said.
Ogden argued, however, that Biden can find a way to show the U.S. is on the way to slashing its emissions.
“There are still multiple paths ahead and time to get things moving in the right direction before the next COP,” Ogden said.
For example, Ogden noted that the U.S.’s pledge to reduce emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, by 30 percent by 2030 is not solely contingent on the methane-focused components of Build Back Better, which are subsidies for oil and gas well operators to adopt advanced methane-control technologies and fees for those who continue to leak excessive methane. The EPA is also writing regulations that would clamp down on methane emissions.
“One of the major initiatives that the administration has been driving globally is a methane reduction pledge,” Ogden said. “That’s something that the administration has already set in motion, with a domestic regulatory framework to achieve that. So I think that’s going forward.”
On Monday, the EPA announced that it had finalized new rules raising the average fuel efficiency of cars and light trucks. As long as the U.S. finds a way of getting the cuts it promised, the administration can keep leading the charge on global climate diplomacy, Ogden argued.
“I think that the rest of the world isn’t ultimately concerned about whether the climate action the United States takes is via Build Back Better or some other suite of actions, legislative and regulatory,” he said.
‘America’s dirty secret’ is a public health nightmare for Alabama residents
Kylie Mar, Host & Producer, Yahoo Entertainment
December 20, 2021
Catherine Coleman Flowers US environmental activist
On CBS’s 60 Minuteson Sunday, correspondent Bill Whitaker took a deep dive into the lack of sewage treatment affecting residents of Lowndes County, Ala.
According to Whitaker, Lowndes County is one of the most neglected corners of the country and the poverty rate is double the national average, which makes sanitary sewage disposal financially unattainable for the county’s residents.
“I have seen things like this in Haiti, and parts of Southeast Asia. I have never seen anything like this in the United States,” said a shocked Whitaker as he scanned one resident’s backyard.
Environmental health researcher and White House advisor Catherine Coleman Flowers has been battling this longstanding, and overlooked, public health failure in Lowndes County for 20 years. It is what she calls “America’s dirty secret.”
“If this was a community of more affluent people, this would’ve made headlines 20 years ago when I first started doing the work,” said Flowers. She added, “The reason that the situation has continued for so long is because of the type of benign neglect that has happened to Black communities, poor communities, and rural communities across the United States.”
Whitaker shared that the state of Alabama could not identify how many homes had this problem, so Flowers went door-to-door to find out. After surveying 3,000 homes, Flowers found that two-thirds had failing systems or no systems at all. Even worse, the unsanitary conditions have even had an effect on the residents’ health, according to a tropical disease specialist at Baylor College of Medicine, Dr. Rojelio Mejia, who tested the stool and soil from residents’ properties.
“Using a PCR test, like those used to detect COVID-19, they found small amounts of DNA from hookworms, a parasite that can cause stomach problems, anemia and developmental delays in children,” Whitaker reported of Mejia’s team’s findings.
“Our study in Alabama was a small study, about 55 patients, and the results were, we found over 30 percent of people in at-risk situations with poor sanitation had hookworm,” said Mejia, who was surprised by their results. “We were very shocked, and we actually had to run the sample several times to prove to ourselves that we found these numbers.”
So why has nothing been done? Lowndes County officials have claimed they don’t have the money, and the governor and the head of the State Department of Public Health declined to speak with 60 Minutes. However, according to Sherry Bradley at the State Department of Public Health, the agency is not responsible. Nevertheless, she has taken it upon herself to start a pilot project on her own.
“I have begged money from a whole lot of people,” admitted Bradley, who also said she does not know why the state hasn’t stepped in to solve the problem.
In the end, Whitaker concluded, “Last month, just days after we spoke with Bradley, the DOJ launched an unprecedented civil rights investigation into whether the Alabama Department of Public Health is discriminating against Black residents in Lowndes, denying them access to proper sanitation.”
However, Whitaker also shared, “the department says it’s cooperating. We couldn’t find a single state program devoted to remedying the sewage problem in rural areas.”
Don’t care about the Build Back Better Act? Hearing people’s personal stories might change that
Angela Bradbery, Frank Karel Endowed Chair in Public Interest Communications, University of Florida December 20, 2021
Reporters waiting outside a private meeting between advisers to President Biden and Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema about the Build Back Better Act on Capitol Hill, Sept. 30, 2021. AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
When U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said that he wouldn’t support President Joe Biden’s signature Build Back Better Act, he set off a wave of breaking news alerts.
It was fitting. For months, media coverage has breathlessly focused on the behind-the-scenes wrangling and hour-by-hour negotiations around the legislation. How much has been slashed from the bill today? What does it mean for the future of the Democratic and Republican parties?
The roughly US $2 trillion proposal is designed to bolster what is widely seen as a frayed social safety net. But most Americans don’t think it will benefit people like them, a recent NPR/Marist poll shows. And a quarter of Americans can’t even say whether they like or dislike the legislation.
It’s no wonder the nation is so indifferent about the sweeping bill, which would change the country’s tax system, increase social services and ramp up efforts to combat climate change.
Largely omitted from news coverage – and consequently, from the national conversation – are the voices and stories of individuals who would be affected by the legislation.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, masked, leaving an office in the Senate, surrounded by people.
Focusing outside D.C.
What if daily media coverage instead featured those voices? What if reporters and talk show hosts ditched the pundits and issue experts and instead explored the problems that led to the proposed policies – through the eyes and voices of those living with those problems?
That means we would hear from parents who need help paying for child care and elderly people who can’t afford medicines or hearing aids.
We would hear from people who can’t afford health care, people living in their cars or on the streets, and yes, those who earn more than $400,000 a year. Multimillionaires, billionaires and corporations would pay more under the new tax plan.
What if news stories shined a spotlight on these voices, rather than just throwing in an occasional anecdote? Would people tune in? Would they engage in conversations or take action around the legislation?
Research shows that they likely would. And that would be good for democracy.
Real stories can spark real engagement
It’s well documented that horse-race journalism – which treats politics as a sport, focusing on who’s ahead or behind, rather than the substance of issues – is associated with an uninformed electorate and elevates public cynicism about politics. Such coverage doesn’t help people understand what proposals could mean to them.
Policy overviews filled with large numbers don’t engage people, either. When discussing the Build Back Better Act, proponents understandably focus on the scope of the problem: 2.2 million low-income Americans couldn’t get health insurance subsidies in 2019 but also weren’t eligible for Medicaid.
But science tells us that discussing large-scale suffering makes people turn away. The phenomenon is called psychic numbing. It means the problem is so big that people disengage, because they feel powerless to help. And individuals find it hard to understand the scale of large numbers.
The way to combat this? Journalists can tell stories about real people. Personal stories quickly bring big issues into focus and make them relatable. They make people care.
In 2015, for example, the Syrian refugee crisis had been raging for four years. But it took a picture of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi, whose corpse washed up on a Turkish beach after his family fled Syria by boat, to generate international horror.
After the photo of the young Syrian boy went viral, donations to refugee organizations skyrocketed. The story and photo engaged people who had not yet paid attention to the crisis.
Research backs up the notion that including real people in news stories can spark reader engagement.
A 2012 study compared people’s reactions after they read two versions of a news story detailing how the lack of health care affected one of three groups: immigrants, prisoners or the elderly.
One version presented the issue using quotes from experts. The other version included a story about a specific person’s experiences dealing with that health care issue.
The news pieces that featured people’s stories elicited emotions in readers that the policy pieces did not. That led the participants to be more willing to help the people they read about.
Including real people in news stories doesn’t mean that engaged readers will only feel sympathy for the characters profiled. Engagement could produce support or opposition to proposed policies.
Joe Biden speaks at a lectern in front of large Building Back Better posters. American flags flank him on the podium.
Looking beyond the political play-by-play
The Build Back Better Act – which the U.S. House of Representatives passed in November – comes as civic engagement in the U.S. is low.
Considering the scope and potential impact of this bill, it’s a disservice to the country for news coverage to focus on the play-by-play in Washington, D.C.
If the press eases up on the machinations occurring in the marble halls of Washington, D.C., and instead focuses on real people, the U.S. could perhaps build back something else: civic engagement, a necessary part of our democratic system.
At the same time, three retired generals wrote in the Post that they were “increasingly concerned about the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election and the potential for lethal chaos inside our military”.
Such concerns are growing around jagged political divisions deepened by former president Donald Trump’s refusal to accept defeat in the 2020 election.
Trump’s lie that his defeat by Joe Biden was caused by electoral fraud stoked the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January, over which Trump was impeached and acquitted a second time, leaving him free to run for office.
The “big lie” is also fueling moves among Republicans to restrict voting by groups that lean Democratic and to make it easier to overturn elections.
Such moves remain without counter from Democrats stymied by the filibuster, the Senate rule that demands supermajorities for most legislation.
In addition, though Republican presidential nominees have won the popular vote only once since 1988, the GOP has by playing political hardball stocked the supreme court with conservatives, who outnumber liberals 6-3.
All such factors and more, including a pandemic which has stoked resistance to government, have contributed to Walter’s analysis.
Last month, she tweeted: “The CIA actually has a taskforce designed to try to predict where and when political instability and conflict is likely to break out around the world. It’s just not legally allowed to look at the US. That means we are blind to the risk factors that are rapidly emerging here.”
The book in which Walter looks at those risk factors in the US, How Civil Wars Start, will be published in January. According to the Post, she writes: “No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline, or headed toward war.
But “if you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America – the same way you’d look at events in Ukraine or Ivory Coast or Venezuela – you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely”.
“And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory.”
Walter, the Post said, concludes that the US has passed through stages of “pre-insurgency” and “incipient conflict” and may now be in “open conflict”, beginning with the Capitol riot.
Citing analytics used by the Center for Systemic Peace, Walter also says the US has become an “anocracy” – “somewhere between a democracy and an autocratic state”.
The US has fought a civil war, from 1861 to 1865 and against states which seceded in an attempt to maintain slavery.
Estimates of the death toll vary. The American Battlefield Trust puts it at 620,000 and says: “Taken as a percentage of today’s population, the toll would have risen as high as 6 million souls.”
Sidney Blumenthal, a former Clinton adviser turned biographer of Abraham Lincoln and Guardian contributor, said: “The secessionists in 1861 accepted Lincoln’s election as fair and legitimate.”
The current situation, he said, “is the opposite. Trump’s questioning of the election … has led to a genuine crisis of legitimacy.”
With Republicans’ hold on the levers of power while in the electoral minority a contributing factor, Blumenthal said, “This crisis metastasises, throughout the system over time, so that it’s possible any close election will be claimed to be false and fraudulent.”
Blumenthal said he did not expect the US to pitch into outright civil war, “section against section” and involving the fielding of armies.
If rightwing militia groups were to seek to mimic the secessionists of the 1860s and attempt to “seize federal forts and offices by force”, he said, “I think you’d have quite a confidence it would be over very, very quickly [given] a very strong and firm sense at the top of the US military of its constitutional, non-political role.
“… But given the proliferation of guns, there could be any number of seemingly random acts of violence that come from these organised militias, which are really vigilantes and with partisan agendas, and we haven’t entered that phase.
“The real nightmare would be that kind of low-intensity conflict.”
Members of the Oath Keepers, a far-right group, on the East Front of the US Capitol on 6 January. Photograph: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP
The retired generals who warned of conflict around the next election – Paul Eaton, Antonio Taguba and Steven Anderson – were less sanguine about the army.
“As we approach the first anniversary of the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol,” they wrote, “we … are increasingly concerned about the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election and the potential for lethal chaos inside our military, which would put all Americans at severe risk.
“In short: We are chilled to our bones at the thought of a coup succeeding next time.”
Citing the presence at the Capitol riot of “a disturbing number of veterans and active-duty members of the military”, they pointed out that “more than one in 10 of those charged in the attacks had a service record”.
Polling has revealed similar worries – and warnings. In November, the Public Religion Research Institute asked voters if they agreed with a statement: “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”
The poll found that 18% of respondents agreed. Among Republicans, however, the figure was 30%.
On Twitter, Walter thanked the Post for covering her book. She also said: “I wish I had better news for the world but I couldn’t stay silent knowing what I know.”
Washington is a state like Arizona – only with 13,000 fewer COVID-19 deaths
EJ Montini, Arizona Republic December 20, 2021
A COVID-19 patient in an ICU.
At some point in the future there will be an accounting, and only one number will matter:
The number of lives lost to COVID-19.
For much of the pandemic that number has not seemed to matter much, if at all, to Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey. Spouting platitudes about the economy has mattered. Acquiescing to the conspiracy theorists and the anti-vaccine kooks in the Republican party has mattered.
But talking about COVID-19 and the terrible toll it has taken on Arizona, and actually doing something to stop it … those things have not mattered.
And so there will be an accounting.
Is making comparisons fair?
There will be arguments that making comparisons between Arizona and other jurisdictions, other communities, other states, is unfair. Apples to oranges. Night and day. As different as chalk and cheese.
That kind of thing.
But then there are the numbers. And the numbers are what matters.
In terms of population, for example, Arizona and the state of Washington are fairly similar.
One difference between us is that Washington’s Gov. Jay Inslee hasn’t been as timid as Ducey when it comes to trying to protect his citizens.
He’s taken a lot of heat for some of his policies. Making people do things they’d prefer not to do – even if it might save their lives – doesn’t always go well for a politician. At least in the short term.
Unlike Arizona, which long ago abandoned its citizens to their own devices, Washington still has a number of restrictions aimed at mitigating the spread of COVID-19. Mask requirements. Proof of vaccination or negative COVID-19 test requirements. It’s a fairly long list and not everyone is happy about it.
Ask yourself a few questions and answer them honestly.
Would you have accepted a few more restrictions, a few more government imposed attempts at mitigating the spread of the virus, if it might have saved 13,000 Arizonans?
That’s roughly the difference between us and Washington. No comparison between states is perfect, of course. There are differences in city sizes and environment and demographics an all that.
What will matter in the long run
But the bottom line is that their population is slightly more numerous than ours, yet they have lost 13,000 fewer of their brothers and sisters than we have in Arizona.
Thirteen thousand.
Not one or two or even five thousand.
Thirteen.
And the reason, simply, is that their leadership worked harder at saving lives than ours did. They understood, better than our leaders did, that saving lives should have started, and remained, and continue to be, priority number one.
AOC on Manchin’s Build Back Better opposition: ‘We knew he would do this months ago’
John L. Dorman December 19, 2021
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York remains in her seat as Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia stands and applauds as President Donald Trump delivers his second State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress at the US Capitol on February 5, 2019.Jonathan Ernst / Reuters
AOC on Sunday said that Manchin turning on the Build Back Better bill was not a shock.
“People can be mad at Manchin all they want, but we knew he would do this months ago,” she tweeted.
The congresswoman voted against the bipartisan bill over concerns about the legislative process.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday expressed little shock at Senator Joe Manchin’s blockbuster announcement that he would decline to back President Joe Biden’s signature Build Back Better Act, pointing to legislative concerns that progressives have raised for months regarding the roughly $2 trillion social-spending bill.
After Manchin’s announcement, the two-term New York Democrat took to Twitter to reiterate her longstanding dissatisfaction with the way in which the bills have been handled on the House floor, continuing in her criticism of the decoupling of the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill from larger package.
“When a handful of us in the House warned this would happen if Dem leaders gave Manchin everything he wanted 1st by moving BIF before BBB instead of passing together, many ridiculed our position,” she tweeted. “Maybe they’ll believe us next time. Or maybe people will just keep calling us naïve.”
She continued: “Either way, we cannot accept no for an answer. Dem leadership – incl but not limited to the President himself and House Dem leadership – wrote a massive check on their credibility the night of the BIF vote in order to secure the votes they needed, *promising* passage of BBB to every member who brought up Manchin, they personally promised they had a solution & BBB would pass. It is simply not an option for Dem leaders to walk from BBB, voting rights, etc. They must find a way, just as they promised they would when we raised this inevitability.”
Months before the bipartisan bill passed the House and was signed into law, progressives called on Democratic leadership to place both bills on the floor for a vote at the same time, while moderates pushed for a vote on the bipartisan bill – without tying it to the larger bill.
Moderates eventually won out, with the bipartisan infrastructure bill passing the lower chamber. However, Ocasio-Cortez was among only six Democratic House lawmakers to oppose the bill, largely based on mistrust over the legislative process.
“Throughout this process, people would say that within our caucus, one of the issues that we have had is trust. And trust is not built in the big moments. Trust is built in the little moments. Trust is built-in process,” she said last month.
“We were ready to vote on Build Back Better this week. At the very last minute, there was a group of people saying, ‘All of sudden, we need a CBO score.’ You’re claiming that you don’t want to let Build Back Better proceed unless you can get certainty on the deficit … [and] demand that you have a deficit-increase bill at the same time? It doesn’t add up. It’s weird. Something weird was going on,” she added at the time, frustrated by the demands from moderates.
While the House eventually passed their version of the Build Back Better Act last month, Manchin’s position — if he stands firm — effectively tosses aside the legislation in the Senate. The bill would establish universal pre-K, renew monthly child tax credit payments to families for another year, and tackle climate change, among other provisions.
Ocasio-Cortez pointed to Democratic leaders to resolve the problem, arguing that the party cannot give up on their shared values.
“People can be mad at Manchin all they want, but we knew he would do this months ago,” she tweeted. “Where we need answers from are the leaders who promised a path on BBB if BIF passed: Biden & Dem leaders. *They* chose to move BIF alone instead of w/ BBB, not Manchin. So they need to fix it.”
Bill Schackner, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette December 17, 2021
Spring semester rule for students, staff comes as colleges brace for omicron-driven spike in cases
Carnegie Mellon University announced late Thursday that it will require COVID-19 booster shots for its thousands of students and employees for the spring semester and will provide additional information in the coming days.
The school joins a small but growing number of campuses nationally that have announced a booster requirement.
”Earlier today Carnegie Mellon issued a COVID-19 update regarding ongoing mitigation efforts as a new semester begins in 2022,” read a statement from the university just after 5 p.m. (Read it here).
“Carnegie Mellon will be requiring booster shots for all CMU community members and in January will provide further information on the timing of that requirement, how to enter that data into the university’s HealthConnect system and the exemption request processes,” it read. “This information is being shared now to enable everyone eligible to take advantage of scheduling their booster shots during the upcoming break.”
The move comes amid increasing concern nationally about the emerging omicron variant on top of the delta variant. On many campuses, finals are wrapping up this week, but some schools seeing a spike in cases have moved tests online, among them Cornell University. New York University and Fordham University have made similar announcements.
Another major campus in the city, the University of Pittsburgh, earlier this month began requiring that students and employees be vaccinated for the spring semester. The university has not altered its fall semester finals or event schedules and has not announced a booster shot requirement for the spring.
Said Pitt spokesman David Seldin:“The University’s Healthcare Advisory Group and COVID-19 Medical Response Office are carefully monitoring the rise in cases nationally and locally, as well as emerging data on the Omicron variant.”
He added:
“As reported in last week’s (Covid-19 Medical Response Office report), there was slight increase in case numbers on the Pittsburgh campus, but to date we’ve not seen anything that would cause us to change our plans for next term. We will continue to monitor the situation during Winter Recess and make adjustments if necessary consistent with public health and expert guidance.”
According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, in other states booster shots are being added as requirements at schools, a sampling of which include, American University, Amherst College, Bentley University, Boston College, Boston University, Bowdoin College, Brown University, Carleton College, Emerson College, Emory University, Georgetown University, George Washington University, Harvard University, Princeton University and Syracuse.
Earlier this month, indoor mask requirements were extended into the spring at several area campuses, including Penn State University and West Virginia University.
“West Virginia University’s spring 2022 semester will begin Monday, Jan. 10, with many of the current COVID-19 campus health and safety protocols remaining in place as health officials monitor the emerging omicron variant,” read a statement from WVU in part.
“With the identification of the omicron coronavirus variant and experts predicting the number of COVID-19 cases to rise over the winter months, Penn State’s indoor masking policy will remain in effect into the spring 2022 semester. University officials will continue to monitor the evolution of the pandemic and the spread of various coronavirus variants and will adjust Penn State’s masking policy when it is safe to do so,” Penn State said in its statement.
At Carnegie Mellon, a message Thursday to campus from Provost Jim Garrett, Dean of Students Gina Casalegno and Daryl Weinert, Vice President for Operations, noted that facial covering requirements will remain as spring semester begins on that campus, too.
They cited the importance that those on campus receive the vaccine.
’Vaccinations have proven to be safe and highly effective in reducing the severity of symptoms and risk of hospitalization, and preliminary indications are that boosters will prove to be an effective defense against severe symptoms with the Omicron variant as well,” they wrote.
Do you know what’s in your blood? New EPA docs show widespread risk from common chemicals
Kyle Bagenstose, USA TODAY December 16, 2021
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Do you know what’s in your blood? New EPA docs show widespread risk from common chemicals
John Hickey, center, with his sons, Michael Hickey, right, and Jeff Hickey during a family vacation to the Badlands of South Dakota in 2012. It was a bucket list trip for John; his family booked it two weeks after learning he had stage 4 cancer. He died six months later.
After his father died in 2013 from a cancer that started in his kidney, Michael Hickey was troubled by more than his grief. John Hickey was 70, never smoked and rarely drank.
He did work a night shift at a Saint-Gobain textile plant in their hometown of Hoosick Falls, New York. The plant historically produced fabrics coated with a Teflon-like substance, similar to nonstick pans and other products. When a local schoolteacher also died from cancer shortly afterward, Hickey’s suspicions skyrocketed.
“We seemed to have a ton of this cancer, and I didn’t know what was going on,” he said.
An internet search for “Teflon and cancer” opened a Pandora’s box of studies linking PFOA, a chemical in Teflon, to kidney cancer. He took samples of tap water from his home, his father’s home and a few local businesses, then shipped them to a Canadian laboratory for testing.
Each came back showing extremely high levels of PFOA. The discovery led to intervention by all levels of government and a class action lawsuit by village residents against Saint-Gobain, prior owner Honeywell International, and 3M. The suit was settled this summer for $65 million, which will pay for loss in property values and medical monitoring for residents.
Now, scientists are warning that the dangers of PFOA and a sister chemical stretch far beyond contaminated communities like Hoosick Falls.
In fact, they threaten virtually every American.
John Hickey, center, with his sons, Michael Hickey, right, and Jeff Hickey during a family vacation to the Badlands of South Dakota in 2012. It was a bucket list trip for John; his family booked it two weeks after learning he had stage 4 cancer. He died six months later.
New documents released by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency draw the startling conclusion that PFOA is a “likely carcinogen,” with essentially no safe level of exposure.
Startling because scientists have known for two decades that small amounts of PFOA and similar chemicals are in the blood of more than 98% of Americans. Startling because they affirm independent research that indicates the chemicals are measurably driving up rates of kidney cancer, weakening immune systems and possibly even causing tens of thousands of low-birthweight babies each year.
And startling because scientists say it means the EPA’s 5-year-old advisory for safe levels of the chemical in drinking water no longer appears adequate.
It could take years for the EPA to develop a new advisory. Even then, the agency will have to weigh the benefits of filtering out chemicals against the costs – which could stretch into the billions for water utilities across the country.
Yet in the meantime, Americans will continue to consume chemicals that could be harming them, said Scott Faber, senior vice president of the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Environmental Working Group. Through tracking public records, the organization found that at least 1,700 water supplies across the country contain PFOA.
“Tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of Americans are drinking a chemical that’s now even more strongly linked to cancer,” Faber said.
And experts warn there’s a much bigger picture. Drinking water is only one source of PFOA. Before PFOA and PFOS – a similar chemical also reviewed in the new EPA documents – were phased out of U.S. manufacturing in 2015, Americans were primarily exposed through common household products such as pots and pans, rain gear, carpets and food packaging. The virtually indestructible substances still remain in the environment and in animals consumed by humans, such as fish.
The widespread exposures add enough PFOA to the blood of an average American to be of concern, regardless of their drinking water, said Philippe Grandjean, a researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Often, the chemicals’ harm may not be obvious, he said. For example, it may manifest itself as a child who can’t seem to stay out of the doctor’s office with another cold.
“We see that mothers are recording that more often their kids are sick if they have higher prenatal or postnatal exposure to PFOA,” Grandjean said. “This is already harming populations.”
And PFOA is only one of hundreds of chemicals within a wider class called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). While PFOA and PFOS have been phased out, replacement PFAS chemicals are now in circulation. Some researchers warn early analysis shows they may also cause some of the same toxic effects.
“It’s as bad as it sounds. I don’t think we can sugarcoat this,” Faber said. “PFAS are a public health emergency that touches many more Americans than have been touched by lead pipes or other really urgent health risks.”
Some companies that produced or used PFAS argue that the science isn’t settled.
Sean Lynch, a spokesperson for 3M, which along with DuPont has faced lawsuits over production of the chemicals across the U.S., told USA TODAY the company believes the “weight of evidence” from its own studies and other independent research “does not show these substances cause adverse health outcomes” in the general population.
The EPA told USA TODAY, however, that its new documents concluded the risks from the chemicals are real.
“The new data and analyses in EPA’s draft documents indicate that the toxicity values (for PFOA and PFOS) are much lower than previously understood – including near zero for certain health effects,” the agency said.
Researchers and regulators have known for decades about the potential for harm from chemicals like PFOS and PFOA, but concern was often focused on sites of heavy contamination like this tannery in Rockford, Michigan. New EPA documents conclude PFOA has essentially no level of exposure.
‘This is a bit overdue’
The discovery of PFAS in the blood of everyday Americans happened by chance more than half a century ago. It has taken a new generation of scientists to understand what it may be doing to our health.
While working as a researcher at the University of Rochester in the late 1960s, Donald Taves was interested in studying a relatively new development: the addition of fluoride to drinking water.
He took a sample of his own blood and ran it through a machine that can detect incredibly small amounts of chemicals. What he saw surprised him.
“I found this extra fluorine,” Taves said, and it was more than could be attributed to fluoridation of drinking water.
A colleague checked samples from more than 100 donors at five blood banks in New York and Texas and found the excess fluorine there, too.
“It seemed likely it was some sort of contaminant in the environment,” Taves said. “And that’s when I called 3M.”
Taves’ instincts were right, and his discovery kicked off a decadeslong reckoning. The PFAS chemicals companies such as 3M and DuPont were using in their consumer products were slipping into the blood of hundreds of millions of Americans.
Unlike fluoride found in drinking water, PFAS are synthetic and bind fluorine to carbon molecules, forming one of the strongest bonds in chemistry. That means the chemicals don’t degrade, accumulating in the environment and in human bodies.
Kyle Steenland, an epidemiologist at Emory University in Georgia, is one of the present-day researchers trying to find out what threat that poses.
In the 2000s, Steenland served on a panel of independent scientists that studied 70,000 people along the West Virginia-Ohio border who were exposed to high levels of PFOA from a local DuPont plant. After years of study, Steenland said in three separate studies that researchers found “consistent evidence of kidney cancer” – the same illness that befell John Hickey in Hoosick Falls.
In addition, Steenland and his colleagues found “probable links” between PFOA and diagnosed high cholesterol, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, testicular cancer and pregnancy-induced hypertension.
Scott Bartell, a researcher at the University of California, Irvine, began studying the levels at which PFOA might cause kidney cancer. What he found added to the concern. PFOA didn’t appear to be dangerous only at the levels found in highly exposed populations like in Hoosick Falls and West Virginia but also at levels permissible in drinking water everywhere.
In 2016, the EPA created an advisory level for the chemical in drinking water of no more than 70 parts per trillion (ppt). But Bartell’s calculations showed that somebody drinking the chemical at that amount for a decade faced a 16% higher risk of developing kidney cancer than someone drinking none.
Of even greater concern, Bartell said, the new EPA documents determine PFOA may be even more carcinogenic than his study found. “This is a bit overdue,” Bartell said of the findings in the documents EPA released in November. “It confirms things that many of us already thought were the case.”
The EPA’s findings are also significant to Tracey Woodruff, director of the Reproductive Health and the Environment program at the University of California, San Francisco.
Her research suggests that the average American woman has enough PFOA in her blood to account for about an ounce of lost birthweight in a baby.
On an individual basis, that may not sound like much. But for mothers whose babies are on the margin for clinically low birthweight – 5.5 pounds – it could be critical, Woodruff said. The risks also increase for those with additional PFOA in their blood. If the millions of women whose PFOA blood levels rank in the top half nationwide instead had only the average amount, as many as 40,000 fewer babies would be born at low birthweight each year, Woodruff’s research estimated.
Though that research was completed years ago, Woodruff echoed other researchers in saying the new EPA documents took a similar approach and have now reached similar conclusions.
“This review essentially confirms those findings,” Woodruff said.
Asked further about 3M’s reaction to the EPA’s new documents, Lynch pointed to earlier reviews by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the International Agency for Research on Cancer and other government health agencies that did not definitively find a cause-and-effect relationship between PFAS and human health effects.
The company also pointed out that studies show the amount of PFOA and PFOS in the blood of the average American is declining.
Daniel Turner, a spokesperson for DuPont de Nemours, a corporate entity spun off from the original DuPont in 2019, said only that the company does not “make or use” PFOA or PFOS in its products and otherwise supports the EPA’s development of “science-based” regulations.
Saint-Gobain, the textile company in Hoosick Falls, said it never manufactured the chemicals, instead obtaining them from third-party vendors. In addition to the legal settlement made this summer, the company has paid for new filtration systems for public drinking water in Hoosick Falls, spokesperson Peter Clark said.
What’s next?
After a board of scientists peer-reviews the EPA’s new documents, the agency will need to determine a safe limit for the chemicals. The agency has set a goal for the fall of 2022, with regulation going into effect a year later.
The EPA also told USA TODAY it is moving “as quickly as possible” to update its health advisories in the interim.
The EPA could ultimately decide to set the safe limit at effectively zero, requiring drinking water utilities to filter out any detectable amount of the chemicals. Or it could decide that the costs of doing so outweigh the benefits. The agency will hold its first public hearing on that process at 12 p.m. Thursday.
While the Environmental Working Group and others advocate for strict regulation of the chemicals, the American Water Works Association, a nonprofit representing water utilities across the country, is urging a cautious approach to those calculations.
The lower EPA makes the limit, the more utilities will have to spend on new sources of water or installing and maintaining treatment systems, said Steve Via, director of federal relations for the group. With costs for a single system often reaching millions of dollars, the total could reach into the billions.
“It’s a huge number,” Via said, adding that money is needed to address other risks like lead pipes. “At the end of the day, you’ve got to ask yourself, ‘Is this the best way to manage risk?’”
Other action could emerge from the court system. Rob Bilott is an Ohio-based attorney who sued DuPont and created the science panel that studied PFOA’s health effects in West Virginia. (Bilott was played by Mark Ruffalo in the 2019 film about the case, “Dark Waters.”)
Now he has filed a nationwide class action lawsuit in federal court to require that 3M, DuPont and other companies that used the chemicals pay for studies to determine their health effects. If approved, it would represent any American with PFOA and at least one other PFAS in their blood.
“We shouldn’t have to spend decades fighting in court to have this threat recognized – and to hold those companies that caused this mess responsible,” Bilott said. “The science is there. The public health threat is real.”
Paul Gosar’s chief of staff tried to intercept a plane rumored to be full of fake votes for Biden: court docs
Tom Porter December 16, 2021
Chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party Kelli Ward, Rep. Debbie Lesko, Rep. Andy Biggs, Rep. Paul Gosar, and Sen. Martha McSally greet US President Donald Trump on the tarmac after he arrived at the international airport in Yuma, Arizona, on August 18, 2020.BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
Paul Gosar’s chief of staff went to great lengths to find evidence of voter fraud, court documents say.
In one notable incident, he tried to intercept a plane rumored to be stuffed with fake votes.
He failed. No evidence has emerged for this kind of elaborate voter fraud.
The chief of staff for Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona tried to catch a plane rumored to be full of fake votes, according to a recent court document.
The episode is one of the most outlandish in the fruitless search by allies of former president Donald Trump for proof that the 2020 election was stolen.
Gosar’s aide, Tom Van Flein, hunted for a plane from South Korea that conspiracy theorists identified as a source of what they thought would be election-changing levels of fraud, per documents cited by The New York Times on Thursday.
They found a Korean Air plane, but no proof of fraudulent ballots.
Gosar himself, a Republican and close ally of Trump, has long pushed conspiracy theories about a stolen election.
The incident with Van Flein was described in a Supreme Court lawsuit filed in March by voter Staci Burk challenging Arizona’s election result, which found Joe Biden had won the state.
The lawsuit’s documents said that Van Flein was among a group of people who traveled on November 7, 2020, to an airplane parking lot near Phoenix after rumors circulated that a plane filled with fake ballots had landed.
According to the documents, the expedition was prompted by a tip sent to independent journalist Ryan Hartwig that a plane from South Korea loaded with fake votes had landed in Sky Harbor Airport on Election Night, and was about to depart.
Van Flein is also mentioned as a participant in an account of the trip on Hartwig’s website.
Hartwig and Van Flein were accompanied by GOP congressional candidate Josh Barrett, activist Marko Triskovitts, and others on the expedition, according to the documents.
They recorded grainy video footage of the exterior of plane belonging to Korean Air, the national carrier of South Korea, which was then uploaded onto Hartwig’s website. The lawsuit said that a member of the group called the local sheriff urging him to investigate. No proof of fake ballots ever emerged.
Insider contacted Gosar’s office, and all of those named in the documents, for comment.
Gosar closely embraced Trump’s election-fraud conspiracy theories, and spent months hyping an audit of votes in Maricopa County.
The belief that votes were being shipped in from abroad was one of the many conspiracy theories pushed by Trump allies as they sought to undermine Biden’s win.
The audit in Maricopa was conducted by a firm run by a Trump supporter, Cyber Ninjas.
Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, reportedly pressed FBI officials to investigate the conspiracy theory that China had managed to hack voting machines using thermostats.
The election fraud “Big Lie” remains at the center of Trump’s speeches and public statements as he stirs rumors of another bid for the presidency in 2024, and continues to be eagerly promoted by his close allies in the GOP.
Congress makes it nearly impossible to investigate whether its aides are violating financial conflict-of-interest laws. We went and did it anyway.
Camila DeChalus,Warren Rojas,Kimberly Leonard December 15, 2021
Congress makes it hard to get records about staffers’ finances and conflicts of interest.Drew Angerer/Getty Images
To promptly access staffers’ financial records, you have to trek to the US Capitol.
We found many staffers violating the STOCK Act. Several refused to explain why.
The lack of transparency isn’t a bug, it’s a feature, legal experts say.
In August, three Insider political reporters endeavored to obtain public records about the personal finances of top congressional staffers.
These records aren’t supposed to be some state secret. They’re mandated by a law called the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act. In theory, any American should have reasonable access to them.
But they don’t.
This is a story about how Congress makes it nearly impossible to obtain and understand information designed to defend against conflicts of interest — and how over the last five months we went and did it anyway.
KIMBERLY LEONARD: Theoretically, you can call to obtain copies of congressional staffers’ personal financial disclosures. For Senate records, they’re $0.20 per page. But when we tried, our calls either went to voicemail or we were asked to fill out forms to retrieve these records — a process that could take weeks. To obtain these records without an indeterminate wait or great expense, or without playing phone tag with the Office of Public Records, you have to physically go to Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. This information is only readily accessible via computers located in windowless rooms in the House Cannon Building basement and the Senate Hart Building.
CAMILA DECHALUS: Some may wonder, why does that matter? Why did we spend countless hours looking at these records? Well, senior congressional staffers regularly have access to sensitive information that lawmakers are getting in closed-door meetings that is not available to the public.
WARREN ROJAS: They could also be taking advantage of these privileges and making certain well-timed stock investments, which could go against current regulations.
KIMBERLY: By law, congressional staffers whose salaries exceed a certain annual threshold — more than $132,552 in 2021 and $131,239 in 2020 — are required to disclose what stocks they bought and sold.
CAMILA: Back in August, we at Insider realized that the only way to find out whether senior congressional staffers were violating the law through late filings or potential conflicts of interests would be to manually check every single financial disclosure and reported stock trade. That meant spending endless hours on Capitol Hill scrolling through ever-changing financial records.
KIMBERLY: We spent countless hours on Capitol Hill, and we went back multiple times ahead of publishing our project, but in the end we did look at every filing from the start of 2020 to the end of August 2021.
CAMILA: That meant sifting through approximately 8,300 filings — more than 4,400 from high-ranking House staffers, and nearly 3,900 from high-ranking Senate staffers — click by mind-numbing click.
WARREN: What we learned wasn’t just that roughly 200 people had filed their disclosures late. The process taught us the extent to which elected officials and their staff were willing to go to obscure information they’re required to make publicly available. After talking to experts, we learned it was that way by design.
KIMBERLY: It took me half a day to figure out where in the sprawling US Capitol campus — there are numerous office buildings beyond the Capitol — the financial disclosures were located. I finally found the House records in the Cannon Office Building basement. (The Senate records are located elsewhere — more on that in a moment.)
Before I could begin searching the records, I had to type my name, address, and organization into the only computer that was working at the time.
I realized there wasn’t an easy way to search these records. You can’t just type in “Nancy Pelosi” or “Kevin McCarthy” and see the financial disclosures their senior staff submitted. The House documents don’t even say which member of Congress each person works for. If you look at a document, it will show only the state abbreviation and the district, or list the abbreviation for the committee. Try memorizing that for 435 people.
The other option for looking through the database is to select a year, such as 2021, to see all the filings reported so far. But there’s no way to limit the search to a more narrow time frame. So good luck checking the records every week hoping to spot new filings. You can’t. You must go through them all and pick up where you left off alphabetically.
It became immediately clear that getting a full picture of congressional staffers’ financial interests would be a task as tall as the Capitol dome. So I teamed up with Insider DC Bureau colleagues Camila DeChalus and Warren Rojas to get it done.
CAMILA: At first I thought it wasn’t going to be that difficult accessing information on what kind of stocks congressional staffers in the Senate were trading. Wow, I was wrong.
The first time I set out to access records on Senate staffers, I went to the Senate public-records office located in the Hart Senate Office Building on the second floor. In front of the office’s glass doors stands a tall American flag on the left side. Immediately when you enter the room you see on the right side three computers set up side by side. When I arrived I was greeted by a “be back in 15” sign on the door. The person running the office eventually came back, but these short breaks became routine. When the office-minder went on a break, I had to go on a break, too — they wouldn’t allow me to stay there alone. One hour’s worth of work to find information often turned into two or three hours’ worth of work because of the constant delays.
Only one Senate staffer was allowed to work in the office to limit in-person contact due to the pandemic. That made accessing these records more difficult.
WARREN: For a while there, the “out for a quick errand” sign on the Hart Building’s second floor became the bane of our existence.
I quickly learned that swinging by the Senate resource center within an hour on either side of noon was a fool’s errand because of the unpredictability of the staff’s lengthy lunch breaks. But popping by earlier proved equally frustrating.
Away sign outside the Office of Public Records in the Hart Senate Office Building.Waren Rojas/Insider
On more than one occasion I found myself waiting for the lone office staffer theoretically on duty that day to return from tending to their personal to-do list. Often they’d meander back double-fisting steaming java from Senate-staffer haven Cups & Company. One aide strolled in with freshly reclaimed dry cleaning over their shoulder.
The worst time suck was the day I showed up at 9:30 a.m. stupidly believing I’d knock out the pending research in a few minutes. The errand sign was already up, falsely promising me access within 10 minutes. When the bagel-toting staffer finally showed up 35 minutes later, I rushed to the first available terminal in the hopes of extracting what I needed before the first round of votes that morning.
Silly me.
The first computer failed to boot up properly. The staffer tinkered with it for a little bit before sliding over to the next terminal. That one wouldn’t even turn on. He made a call. He nodded knowingly before hanging up. And then the staffer asked if I could come back later. I said something about returning within the hour.
“Could you make it after 2 p.m.?” the staffer countered.
KIMBERLY: It was clear from our visits that most people did not even know that they could access these records and that they rarely did so. The logbook on the Senate side hadn’t been signed in months, so our day-after-day presence at these computers was definitely out of the ordinary.
Over on the House side, Congress’ lower chamber had its own problems. For weeks there was only one functioning computer terminal — literally the only one in the entire United States of America — available for viewing congressional staffers’ financial information. Camila, Warren, and I had to take turns using it.
Someone from congressional IT finally got a second computer working. But the system remained super complicated.
If someone trades stocks frequently, they generate reams of documents to comb through, and each must be separately downloaded. Some individual disclosures went on for 10 pages or more, so I had to scroll back and forth to see whether staffers had disclosed their trades late and which of their filings were the most tardy. I also had to compare the different amendments they filed to see whether some of the disclosures were actually late or whether an amendment was filed to fix a typo.
Some of the filings were handwritten and incredibly difficult to read. (This turned out to be true for some members of Congress as well.) Printing the filings for closer inspection might have helped somewhat, but the House charges $0.10 per printed page, while the Senate charges $0.20 a page.
House staffers’ disclosures are kept in this basement room on Capitol Hill.Camila DeChalus
‘They want to make it hard’ to find these records
KIMBERLY: The public’s right to access data about top congressional staffers’ personal finances was supposed to be significantly stronger. Under the original STOCK Act that Congress passed in 2012, senior congressional staffers’ financial disclosures were slated to be posted online, just like they are for members of Congress.
Craig Holman, a government-affairs lobbyist for the nonprofit watchdog Public Citizen, told me the law had also mandated that the disclosures be “searchable, sortable, and downloadable.”
Obviously, that’s not the system we have today. Not even close.
So how did it all get so off track? One year after the STOCK Act became law, Congress quietly and quickly passed another bill that amended it. President Barack Obama signed it into law. This amendment gutted language that would have made it easy to search congressional staffers’ financial records. That’s how they all ended up in specific databases that could be accessed only on the Hill.
Even the data on members of Congress — while posted publicly online and accessible to anyone with an internet connection — is clunky. For example, there’s no way to see how many members of Congress invest their money in a particular company, except to look at every member’s individual filings. (But you can soon do that using a database Insider has created!)
CAMILA: When we finally analyzed the congressional-staffer financial data we needed, we determined that dozens of staffers were weeks, months, or even years late in filing their mandatory disclosures. I followed up with the Legislative Resource Center about whether it keeps records for people who violate the STOCK Act’s deadlines and whether they paid statute-required late fees. But a clerk of the office said he could not comment on it because the information was “confidential.”
WARREN: Neither House nor Senate Ethics Committee staffers would speak on the record about their internal processes. They provided no official guidance on whom congressional staff with filing-related questions should ask to speak to at the committee — though the names of the lawyers and financial professionals who vet everything for eachchamber are posted online. And they offered no explanation about whether documentation exists that would verify claims of having hashed things out with ethics officials one way or the other.
The Senate Ethics team redirected every question to a dedicated phone line that evidently handles all incoming calls, while House Ethics stuck with the check-our-website mantra.
CAMILA: I spoke with James Thurber, an American University professor and congressional-studies expert, and he said the lack of transparency about congressional staffers’ financial records is “intentional.”
He told me that “they want to make it hard” to find these records.
KIMBERLY: I called up Walter Shaub, the former director of the executive-branch-focused US Office of Government Ethics who now leads the government-ethics initiative at the Project on Government Oversight. I told him what it was like for us to dig up the congressional data.
“This is absolutely shocking, which is not to say that it’s surprising,” he said. “But it’s shocking in that it’s truly appalling behavior by Congress trying to flout the spirit of its own laws.”
When people want financial documents from the executive branch, all they have to do is send an email asking for it, he told me.
He also noted that my colleagues and I were all in DC when we researched congressional staffers’ financial information. But that’s not true for everyone who wants to access such a wide array of information. A political researcher from Fairbanks, Alaska, for instance, would need to take at least two flights, pay for a hotel, and trek to Capitol Hill. It would be especially difficult on days when the congressional document repositories have limited hours, such as during recess — or when someone like Camila, Warren, or me is monopolizing the limited computer terminals.
Jason Briefel, the director of policy and outreach at the Senior Executives Association, a nonprofit, nonpartisan professional association representing career federal civil servants, told me that his organization supported amending the law in 2013 for personal safety and security reasons, particularly for those who work on national security issues or have to travel abroad for work.
“We don’t want privacy to be a cloak, but being able to track someone down at their house where you know what their assets are and how much they are worth — that is a lot to put out there,” he said.
Yet he also said he thought the law clearly could be improved. While he doesn’t think the information from senior staff should be posted online like it is for members of Congress, he said lawmakers should consider how to make it easier for journalists to access and sort through the records. He called the enforcement of the law “inadequate.”
The system, as designed, doesn’t allow reporters or the general public to independently verify whether congressional staffers and members of Congress are paying fines associated with violating the STOCK Act’s filing requirements. We are mostly left to rely only on the word and honor of congressional staffers and lawmakers who may have violated the STOCK Act.
CAMILA: Because we couldn’t confirm with other congressional committees and offices on which lawmakers and staffers violated the law and therefore had to pay the fines, we contacted congressional staffers and lawmakers themselves independently to confirm if they paid a $200 late fee.
KIMBERLY: While several people were transparent about what had happened and even provided us documentation, many others refused to explain why they had violated the STOCK Act, saying only that “the matter was resolved.” Some forwarded our inquiries to press representatives who gave similar canned answers.
Shaub lamented that “Congress has a terrible history of not even trying to live up to ethical requirements it sets for both itself and the executive branch.”
“The problem is that the executive branch has Congress watching over it, and Congress has nobody watching over it,” Shaub said. “So the old saying ‘It’s good to be king’ rings true in this case.”
