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He spent a Tuesday hearing attacking Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin for the military supposedly being overrun by woke-ness.
You might have thought that after that experience, Gaetz—a member of the party that talks a big game about its respect for “law and order”—would subsequently avoid churlishly attacking military leaders in general, let alone repeat that the armed forces have been infected by “woke” ideology. But you‘d have thought wrong!
On Tuesday, the conservative lawmaker used a House Armed Services Committee hearing about the Defense Department’s 2023 budget to berate Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin over the military’s supposed failures, which he pinned on the Pentagon’s alleged embrace of “wokeness.”
Referring to a February article in the conservative Washington Free Beacon that reported that Thomas Piketty, an economist whose work focuses on inequality, was slated to give a lecture at the National Defense University titled “Responding to China: The Case For Global Justice and Democratic Socialism,” Gaetz asked Austin why taxpayers should be funding talks that “embrace socialism.” When Austin said he was unaware of the lecture, Gaetz snarkily responded that it was “widely reported,” and asked the defense secretary if he agreed that “embracing socialism” would be an effective strategy. Naturally, as Austin began to reply, Gaetz cut him off, moving on to a line of questioning no doubt tailored specifically to appear in a clip on Fox News hours later.
“While everyone else in the world seems to be developing capabilities and being more strategic, we got time to embrace critical race theory at West Point, to embrace socialism at the National Defense University, to do mandatory pronoun training,” Gaetz said, to which Austin informed him that the U.S. military remains “the most capable” and “the most combat critical” force in the world and “will be so going forward.”
But Gaetz, who loves himself a camera, obviously wasn’t done. Sounding like a bratty teen yelling at his parents, the lawmaker lectured Austin: “You guys said that Russia would overrun Ukraine in 36 days. You said that the Taliban would be kept at bay for months. You totally blew those calls. And maybe we would be better at them if the National Defense University worked a little more on strategy and a little less on wokeism.”
To this Austin asked him, “Has it occurred to you has Russia has not overrun Ukraine because of what we’ve done? And what our allies have done?” Gaetz, who undoubtedly believes he could lead the military if necessary, shot back: “That was baked into your flawed assessment,” before claiming that the Obama administration “tried to destroy our military by starving it of resources, and it seems the Biden administration is trying to destroy our military by force-feeding it wokeism.”
Austin, who clearly has more class than Gaetz, obviously did not use the time between questions from lawmakers to mutter something under his breath about the congressman being a smug little shit, or something to that effect. But it would’ve been hard to blame him if he had!
Demonstrators march during a protest of the police killing of Amir Locke in Minneapolis, Minnesota on Feb. 5, 2022. (photo: Karen Yucel/Getty)
Locke, 22, who was Black, shot dead by police officer after Swat team entered apartment without knocking early in February
Locke, 22, who was Black, was staying on a couch in the apartment when authorities entered it on 2 February without knocking as part of an investigation into a homicide in neighboring St Paul.
His parents have said that from what they saw of the police body-camera footage, it appeared that their son was startled awake. His mother, Karen Wells, has called his death “an execution”. Their attorneys did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
Locke, who was not named in the warrant, was shot seconds after authorities say he pointed a gun in the direction of officers. Locke’s family has questioned that. The body-camera footage shows Locke holding a gun before he was shot.
Minnesota’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, and the Hennepin county attorney, Michael Freeman, whose offices reviewed the case, said they determined that the relevant officer, Mark Hanneman, was justified in firing his weapon.
“There is insufficient admissible evidence to file criminal charges in this case. Specifically, the state would be unable to disprove beyond a reasonable doubt any of the elements of Minnesota’s use-of-deadly-force statute that authorizes the use of force by Officer Hanneman,” Ellison and Freeman said in a joint statement.
Locke’s death came as three former Minneapolis police officers were on trial in federal court in St Paul in George Floyd’s 2020 killing.
It sparked protests and a re-examination of no-knock search warrants. Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey announced an immediate moratorium on such warrants, and on Tuesday, he formalized a new policy that will take effect on Friday requiring officers to knock and wait before entering a residence.
Some lawmakers also have been pushing for a statewide ban on no-knock warrants, except in rare circumstances.
“Amir Locke is a victim,” Ellison and Freeman said. “This tragedy may not have occurred absent the no-knock warrant used in this case.”
Ukrainian army soldiers pose for a photo in Odessa on Feb. 16, 2022. (photo: Emilio Morenatti/AP)
When President Vladimir Putin launched his war on Feb. 24 after months of buildup on Ukraine’s borders, he sent hundreds of helicopter-borne commandos — the best of the best of Russia’s “spetsnaz” special forces soldiers — to assault and seize a lightly defended airfield on Kyiv’s doorstep.
Other Russian forces struck elsewhere across Ukraine, including toward the eastern city of Kharkiv as well as in the contested Donbas region and along the Black Sea coast. But as the seat of national power, Kyiv was the main prize. Thus the thrust by elite airborne forces in the war’s opening hours.
But Putin failed to achieve his goal of quickly crushing Ukraine’s outgunned and outnumbered army. The Russians were ill-prepared for Ukrainian resistance, proved incapable of adjusting to setbacks, failed to effectively combine air and land operations, misjudged Ukraine’s ability to defend its skies, and bungled basic military functions like planning and executing the movement of supplies.
“That’s a really bad combination if you want to conquer a country,” said Peter Mansoor, a retired Army colonel and professor of military history at Ohio State University.
For now at least, Putin’s forces have shifted away from Kyiv, to eastern Ukraine. Ultimately, the Russian leader may achieve some of his objectives. Yet his failure to seize Kyiv will be long remembered — for how it defied prewar expectations and exposed surprising weaknesses in a military thought to be one of the strongest in the world.
“It’s stunning,” said military historian Frederick Kagan of the Institute for the Study of War, who says he knows of no parallel to a major military power like Russia invading a country at the time of its choosing and failing so utterly.
On the first morning of the war, Russian Mi-8 assault helicopters soared south toward Kyiv on a mission to attack Hostomel airfield on the northwest outskirts of the capital. By capturing the airfield, also known as Antonov airport, the Russians planned to establish a base from which to fly in more troops and light armored vehicles within striking distance of the heart of the nation’s largest city.
It didn’t work that way. Several Russian helicopters were reported to be hit by missiles even before they got to Hostomel, and once settled in at the airfield they suffered heavy losses from artillery fire.
An effort to take control of a military airbase in Vasylkiv south of Kyiv also met stiff resistance and reportedly saw several Russian Il-76 heavy-lift transport planes carrying paratroopers downed by Ukrainian defenses.
Although the Russians eventually managed to control Hostomel airfield, the Ukrainians’ fierce resistance in the capital region forced a rethinking of an invasion plan that was based on an expectation the Ukrainians would quickly fold, the West would dither, and Russian forces would have an easy fight.
Air assault missions behind enemy lines, like the one executed at Hostomel, are risky and difficult, as the U.S. Army showed on March 24, 2003, when it sent more than 30 Apache attack helicopters into Iraq from Kuwait to strike an Iraqi Republican Guard division. On their way, the Apaches encountered small arms and anti-aircraft fire that downed one of the helos, damaged others and forced the mission to be aborted. Even so, the U.S. military recovered from that setback and soon captured Baghdad.
The fact that the Hostomel assault by the Russian 45th Guards Special Purpose Airborne Brigade faltered might not stand out in retrospect if the broader Russian effort had improved from that point. But it did not.
The Russians did make small and unsuccessful probes into the heart of Kyiv, and later they tried at great cost to encircle the capital by arcing farther west. Against enormous odds, the Ukrainians held their ground and fought back, stalling the Russians, and put to effective use a wide array of Western arms, including Javelin portable anti-tank weapons, shoulder-fired Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and much more.
A sidelight of the battle for Kyiv was the widely reported saga of a Russian resupply convoy that stretched dozens of miles along a main roadway toward the capital. It initially seemed to be a worrisome sign for the Ukrainians, but they managed to attack elements of the convoy, which had limited off-road capability and thus eventually dispersed or otherwise became a non-factor in the fight.
“They never really provided a resupply of any value to Russian forces that were assembling around Kyiv, never really came to their aid,” said Pentagon spokesman John Kirby. “The Ukrainians put a stop to that convoy pretty quickly by being very nimble, knocking out bridges, hitting lead vehicles and stopping their movement.”
Mansoor says the Russians underestimated the number of troops they would need and showed “an astonishing inability” to perform basic military functions. They vastly misjudged what it would take to win the battle for Kyiv, he says.
“This was going to be hard even if the Russian army had proven itself to be competent,” he said. “It’s proven itself to be wholly incapable of conducting modern armored warfare.”
Putin was not the only one surprised by his army’s initial failures. U.S. and other Western officials had figured that if the invasion happened, Russia’s seemingly superior forces would slice through Ukraine’s army like a hot knife through butter. They might seize Kyiv in a few days and the whole country in a few weeks, although some analysts did question whether Putin appreciated how much Ukraine’s forces had gained from Western training that intensified after Putin’s 2014 seizure of Crimea and incursion into the Donbas.
On March 25, barely a month after the invasion began, the Russians declared they had achieved their goals in the Kyiv region and would shift focus to the separatist Donbas area in eastern Ukraine. Some suspected a Putin ploy to buy time without giving up his maximalist aims, but within days the Kyiv retreat was in full view.
Putin may yet manage to refocus his war effort on a narrower goal of expanding Russian control in the Donbas and perhaps securing a land corridor from the Donbas to the Crimean Peninsula. But his failure in Kyiv revealed weaknesses that suggest Russia is unlikely to try again soon to take down the national capital.
“I think they learned their lesson,” said Mansoor.
Attorney John Eastman (left) speaks next to Then-President Donald Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani in Washington, D.C., January 6, 2021. (photo: Jim Bourg/Reuters)
House panel receives 101 emails belonging John Eastman, concerning plans to obstruct certification of 2020 election result
The 101 emails were released to the committee after Judge David Carter ruled in federal court in California last week that Eastman, a hard-right supporter of the former US president, had not made a sufficient claim to attorney-client privilege.
The cache of documents, sent between 4 and 7 January 2021, contains extensive communications between Eastman and others about plans to obstruct the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.
These included proposed efforts to pressure Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence, to reject or delay counting electoral college votes and weaponizing false allegations of voter fraud in numerous state lawsuits.
In one email, which includes a draft memo for Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, recommending Pence reject some states’ electors during the 6 January congressional meeting, Carter ruled for disclosure as the communications were being used to plan criminal activity.
“The draft memo pushed a strategy that knowingly violated the Electoral Count Act, and Dr Eastman’s later memos closely track its analysis and proposal,” the ruling says. “The memo is both intimately related to and clearly advanced the plan to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021.”
Neither Trump nor Eastman have been charged with crimes relating to 6 January and the order on Eastman’s emails was made in civil court.
Others references to emails in the judge’s ruling allude to other plans Eastman was involved in.
“In a different email thread,” Carter writes, “Dr Eastman and a colleague consider how to use a state court ruling to justify Vice-President Pence enacting the plan. In another email, a colleague focuses on the ‘plan of action’ after the January 6 attacks, not mentioning future litigation.”
The sprawling select committee investigation, chaired by the Democratic congressman Bennie Thompson from Mississippi, has interviewed more than 800 people as part of its investigation into the events on January 6.
On Tuesday, Thompson confirmed that Ivanka Trump, the former president’s daughter, had appeared before the committee, marking the first time a member of the immediate Trump family had appeared.
Reports indicated her testimony lasted about eight hours. The testimony followed an appearance before the committee by her husband, Jared Kushner, the previous week.
Amazon union organizers Derrick Palmer (left) and Amazon Labor Union president Chris Smalls (right). (photo: Getty/AP)
ALSO SEE: 'The Revolution Is Here':
Chris Smalls' Union Win Sparks a Movement at Other Amazon Warehouses
It is the behemoth company's first U.S. union, and was born on Friday after a dramatic and unexpected victory over Amazon by a ragtag grassroots movement.
At the heart of the campaign is Smalls who was fired from his job at the Amazon warehouse on Staten Island at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 — the same day he had organized a walkout over safety conditions.
His co-star in the organizing drive is his friend Derrick Palmer, who currently works at the warehouse. Together, they will lead a union representing some 8,300 workers who work at the same warehouse.
In a conversation with NPR on Twitter Spaces, Palmer and Smalls spoke about their underdog journey and the response from workers all over the country. Here are highlights and edited excerpts from the event.
"You guys lit a fire under me. I want to unionize my building"
Smalls: I'll read you one email I got last night from a woman. I'm not going to say the building name yet, but in Sacramento, California, basically a 24-year-old woman emailed me last night and told me. She said...'You guys lit a fire under me. I want to unionize my building.'
We've been getting emails like that, you know, of course they're congratulating us, but most of them are saying: You guys motivated me. I want to unionize. How do I get involved? How do I start a new chapter?
So we have been contacted from over 50 buildings ... I'm talking about 50 different buildings all over this country and not just this country, even overseas in South Africa, India. Canada has reached out to us, the UK. So the world is definitely paying attention now and these workers are paying attention now, which is the best thing possible because that's exactly what we plan on doing. Just like the Starbucks movement, we want to spread like wildfire across the nation.
"If I can lead us to victory over Amazon, what's stopping anybody in this country from organizing their workplace? Nothing"
A worker and organizer, who identified himself as Ryan with the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades was in attendance at the Twitter Spaces event and called the union's victory over Amazon "a watershed moment." He asked: "What message do you have for the millions of workers across the country who want to organize right now or, you know, who want to be in a union, but either can't or haven't had the opportunity, what would you say to them, what can they do?"
Smalls: If I can lead us to victory over Amazon, what's stopping anybody in this country from organizing their workplace? Nothing. You know, people got to get out of that mentality of, Oh, let me just quit my job. Because when you quit your job, guess what? They hire somebody else. So you're jumping from one fire into the next, and the system doesn't get fixed by doing that.
So we, as workers, the working class, we got to realize our value. If we don't go to work, these CEOs don't make their money. So if workers can realize that no matter where you work in this country, what you're doing, then you will realize that you can form something that can collectively bargain. That's what I think we witnessed on April 1st — we were able to share this experience with the world and let everybody know that any ordinary person can take down the most powerful company or retailer, or whatever, no matter how big or small.
"2 tables, 2 chairs in the tent"
Smalls: We didn't have no plan. We had no playbook. We just knew that we were doing something. We knew what we wanted to do ... But you're talking about a handful of people. We're talking about four people that started this all. Two tables, two chairs in the tent. And that was it. We started signing people up. We just say, You know what? We're going to sign people up for this union and see where it goes.
On the established labor union that is struggling to organize a warehouse in Alabama
Palmer: We actually went down to Alabama and we noticed a few things about how they ran a campaign. First of all, you know, they're an established union with a limited amount of Amazon workers that are actually organizing. So we feel like they didn't really have that one-on-one connection with the workers. And I feel like that's vital to a union campaign, that you need to talk to these workers, you need to really understand their pain and what they're going through.
So we felt like there was a lot of missed opportunities — just them, like not really communicating with the workers as much as we thought they should. Just because you have an election coming up doesn't mean they're going to actually win. You have to still engage with them on a consistent basis. So that made us feel like, you know, they were kind of like out of touch.
So, you know, when we took our organization efforts on, we just decided that, you know, Amazon workers need to organize other Amazon workers...we knew we had to have an unorthodox approach.
Smalls: Amazon's been around for 28 years. You know, that's it. These established unions had 28 years to try. We did it in 11 months.
"We were just regular guys with regular lives, partying, going to work ... doing what normal 30-year-olds do"
Smalls: We were just living our normal lives, going to work every day, just going home, watching sports. We had no intentions of doing any of this. And that is the god-honest truth.
Palmer: You know, we were just regular guys with regular lives, partying, going to work and coming home...doing what normal 30-year-olds do. Amazon pretty much motivated us to get to where we are now. And you know, who knows if Amazon would have treated us right? Instead of listening to our concerns, you know, during the pandemic, they decided to take their own stance. And ultimately, I feel like they paid the price...So it backfired on them. Everything they tried to do to silence me, silence Chris and all the organizers, it worked against them.
Makeshift tents at the camp for displaced people near Kismaayo, Somalia. (photo: Joost Bastmeijer/Der Spiegel)
Ukraine isn't the only place where children are dying because of the Russian invasion. With all attention on the war there, aid money is drying up in other regions – including in Somalia, which is experiencing a devastating drought.
She's surrounded by plastic tarps rippling in the wind, stretched as they are across branches bound together to create dome-shaped shelters. It is a camp for displaced people, set up by the Somalian government in the southern part of the country. A water truck comes by every now and then, but residents of the camp have to take care of everything else themselves. They all used to be cowherds, but the persistent drought has killed off their livestock, and their livelihoods. More than 4 million of the country’s population of 16 million have been affected.
Among the makeshift tents, small mounds of earth can periodically be seen. They are graves, and they used to be at the edge of the camp. But every day, dozens more people show up and build shelters for themselves. A tent city that has expanded beyond the dead.
On this Tuesday in March, yet another burial takes place. A man walks away from the tents toward the bush with what looks like a roll of material in his arms. There is a group of around a dozen men waiting a few hundred meters into the bush where they have dug a hole. The roll of material is so thin that it is hard to imagine that a body can be wrapped inside. But it is that of a four-year-old child, little Ubah, who died a few hours before, just after morning prayers.
On the previous day, DER SPIEGEL had spent time with Ubah and her mother, an extremely difficult encounter. The girl was lying in her mother’s arms, with each bone clearly visible through her skin. The child was hardly able to raise her arm. A mobile medical team had just been to the camp and had measured the circumference of Ubah’s upper arm, with the MUAC band so deep in the red zone that it almost didn't even surpass the lowest end of the scale.
"She is doing worse and worse each day. She can hardly keep anything down anymore," her mother Juhara Ali said. Even before malnutrition set in, Ubah had been sick, and had been partially paralyzed since birth. "She used to drink milk from our animals, that gave her strength," said Ali. But when the animals died, starvation set in. The five-person family had no choice but to leave their home. They walked five days and five nights to reach the camp, running out of food after the second day. And when they finally arrived, there was no end to their hunger: There is no aid organization that brings food to the camp on a regular basis. On good days, they get a single meal. On bad days, there is nothing at all.
The doctors referred Ubah to the nearest hospital, located in the port city of Kismaayo around 15 kilometers away. But it was too late. Ubah fell victim to the drought. "I will remember her as a happy girl. She was always laughing with her siblings," says her mother. According to officials, 15 people, most of them children, have died of hunger in the region in recent weeks.
Around 500 kilometers to the north, in the Somalian capital of Mogadishu, sacks of food are being loaded up. They are printed with the American flag along with the stamp USAID. They sacks are full of peas, wheat and sorghum. They are intended to help save lives, but the warehouse of the World Food Program (WFP) in the city isn’t even half full.
"We can’t do anything for the people in the camps. We are leaving them in the lurch," said El-Khidir Daloum, the local WFP director in Somalia. And the reason is a rather banal one: There simply isn’t enough money. According to the calculations of various aid agencies, only 3 percent of the humanitarian aid Somalia needs has thus far been met. Which means that 97 percent is missing – which translates into people dying of hunger. Like Ubah.
And more recently, aid supplies that have already been paid for are also missing. Almost half of the food that the WFP distributes to drought victims in Somalia used to come from Ukraine. Such a delivery was supposed to have arrived on March 10 – 1,188 tons of peas for famine-struck regions in Ethiopia and Somalia. The delivery had been scheduled to depart from the Ukrainian port city of Odessa, which is, like the rest of the country, under attack from the Russians. A message was sent to the WFP planners in Mogadishu that the arrival of the shipment had been delayed to March 15. But this deadline came and went as well, and the delivery never arrived. And the people of Somalia continue to suffer.
In other instances, the AFP logisticians at least know what happened to the freight. "There were some deliveries promised to us by donors that were suddenly rerouted toward Ukraine," Daloum said. WFP headquarters in Rome confirms that some deliveries were rerouted to Ukraine instead of continuing to the crisis regions for which they had originally been intended. But, WFP headquarters say, those diversions had no effect on the provision of aid in those countries since sufficient reserve supplies were on hand. Still, because of the war in Ukraine, it has become increasingly difficult to procure fresh supplies. Hunger in Europe is now competing with hunger in Africa. It is now possible to find victims of Vladimir Putin’s violence in every corner of the world.
Deliveries aren’t the only problem. The World Food Program and other aid agencies are also facing the challenge of rapidly rising prices. Their budgets no longer go as far as they used to, meaning they can help far fewer people. In some African countries like Somalia, prices had exploded in recent months anyway, even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Many people are no longer able to afford even the dietary basics. Drought at home, war abroad: It's a toxic mixture.
Many planned visits to Somalia by senior donors have been cancelled in recent weeks, said local WFP coordinator Daloum. "That means we are no longer on the radar. That's unfair. We have deep sympathy for the people in Ukraine, they don’t deserve what they are going through. But the people of Somalia don’t deserve it either."
"It is currently extremely difficult to raise money. Many potential donors say that the war in Ukraine is consuming a lot of resources," said another high-ranking United Nations official. "We should continue prioritizing, but we are slowly running out of criteria." Aid workers have started to take a closer look at where rain is most likely to fall soon, since people there at least have a chance of survival – and some organizations have begun focusing what remains of their efforts on those locations.
"The war in Ukraine has distracted attention from the catastrophic drought in Somalia," wrote the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) earlier this month. That became abundantly clear on a recent Wednesday evening on the other side of the Gulf of Aden in Yemen. The country is still suffering from a brutal civil war, with the UN describing the situation in the country as "still one of the largest humanitarian crises in the world."
A major donor conference was scheduled to bring in money to make a dent in the suffering. Conference organizers warned ahead of the gathering that suffering in other parts of the world cannot be ignored despite the war in Ukraine. But in the end, only a third of the 3.9-billion-euro target was collected. The UN expressed "disappointment" over the result.
Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, international organizations had been facing increased difficulties with raising money. According to the European Commission, need for humanitarian aid is at an all-time high, and new crises are continually popping up. Money for Ukraine has not, thus far, been diverted from budgets for other regions. But the gap between the money available and the global need continues to grow.
Indeed, global warming is essentially transforming large regions of Africa into unlivable wasteland. After years of economic improvement in many countries on the continent, famine has suddenly returned. And those crises have now been joined by a humanitarian catastrophe right in the heart of Europe, triggered by Putin’s merciless invasion of Ukraine. The world is bleeding from a growing number of wounds and the rich countries of the world are running out of bandages.
March is one of the more decisive months of the year, with many countries in the process of approving their budgets, as is the case in Germany. And extremely disturbing signals are coming from Washington, D.C. On the one hand, the U.S. is making $4.1 billion available to victims of the war in Ukraine, but at the same time, the humanitarian budget for the rest of the world is to be reduced by $1 billion relative to last year. Numerous aid organizations have voiced their vehement opposition to the move.
Germany’s budget, presented earlier this month, is similar. There is to be a slight increase in the money available for emergency aid, likely a byproduct of the war. But significant cuts are to be made elsewhere, with the Development Ministry set to lose 800 million euros in funding, pending ongoing negotiations.
Transition aid has been particularly affected, a term referring to measures that go beyond emergency aid. Such funds are used to dig wells, for example, or support efforts at expanding drought resistant agricultural practices and creating jobs for the displaced.
In 2020, funding for such measures in the German budget amounted to 1 billion euros, but that sum has been cut in half in this year’s budget. "Given the rising number of crises, this development is concerning," says the non-governmental organization ONE. The new budget has also raised hackles within the Development Ministry in Berlin, DER SPIEGEL has learned.
The next major donor conference, for Afghanistan, is on Thursday. Syria is scheduled for May. Even before Putin’s invasion, it had become more difficult to raise the required funds. But the war has worsened the situation. The Russian tanks and bombs aren’t just destroying residential buildings in the cities of Ukraine. The war is also killing children in Somalia.
Marchers in New York on June 26, 2020, press for a response to climate change and racial injustice. (photo: Felton Davis/Creative Commons)
Inside the White House’s unpublicized experiment in open governance.
Once finalized, this map and formula will be used by government agencies to ensure that at least 40 percent of the benefits of certain federal climate programs are directed to disadvantaged communities — an initiative known as Justice40.
But this new screening tool is not only essential to environmental justice goals. It’s also a pioneering experiment in open governance. Since last May, the software development for the tool has been open source, meaning it was in the public domain — even while it was a work in progress. Anyone could find it on GitHub, an online code management platform for developers, and then download it and explore exactly how it worked.
In addition, the government created a public Google Group where anyone who was interested in the project could share ideas, help troubleshoot issues, and discuss what kinds of data should be included in the tool. There were monthly “community chats” on Zoom to allow participants to have deeper discussions, regular “office hours” on Zoom for less formal conversations, and even a Slack channel that anyone could join.
All of this was led by the U.S. Digital Service, or USDS, the government’s in-house staff of data scientists and web engineers. The office was tasked with gathering the data for the tool, building the map and user interface, and advising the Council on Environmental Quality, or CEQ, another White House agency, in developing the formula that determines which communities are deemed disadvantaged.
These were unprecedented efforts by a federal agency to work both transparently and collaboratively. They present a model for a more democratic, more participatory form of government, and reflect an attempt to incorporate environmental justice principles into a federal process.
“Environmental justice has a long history of participatory practices,” said Shelby Switzer, the USDS open community engineer and technical advisor to Justice40, citing the Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing, a sort of Bible for inclusivity in environmental justice work. “Running this project from the start in as open and participatory of a way as possible was important to the team as part of living environmental justice values.”
The experiment gave birth to a lively community, and some participants lauded the agency’s effort. But others were skeptical of how open and participatory it actually was. Despite being entirely public, it was not widely advertised and ultimately failed to reach key experts.
“Open source” doesn’t just mean allowing the public to look into the mechanics of a given software or technology. It’s an invitation to tinker around with it, add to it, and bend it to your own needs. If you use a web browser with extensions like an ad blocker or a password manager, you’re benefiting from the fact that the browser is open source and allows savvy developers to build all sorts of add-ons to improve your experience.
The Justice40 map is intended to be used similarly. Environmental organizations or community groups can build off the existing code, adding more data points to the map that might help them visualize patterns of injustice and inform local solutions. The code isn’t just accessible. The public can also report bugs, request features, and leave comments and questions that the USDS will respond to.
The USDS hoped to gather input from people with expertise in coding, mapping technology, and user experience, as well as environmental justice issues. Many similar screening tools have already been developed at the state level in places like California, New York, Washington, and Maryland.
“We know that we can learn from a wide variety of communities, including those who will use or will be impacted by the tool, who are experts in data science or technology, or who have experience in climate, economic, or environmental justice work,” the agency wrote in a mission statement pinned to the Justice40 data repository.
Garry Harris, the founder of a nonprofit called the Center for Sustainable Communities, was one such participant. Harris’ organization uses science and technology to implement community-based sustainability solutions, and he found out about the Google Group from a colleague while working on a project to map pollution in Virginia. “As a grassroots organization, I feel really special to be in the room,” he said. “I know in the absence of folks like us who look at it both from a technology and an environmental justice lens, the outcomes are not going to be as beneficial.”
Through the Google Group and monthly community chats, the agency solicited input on finding reliable data sources to measure things like a community’s exposure to extreme heat and to pollution from animal feedlots.
“That level of transparency is not common,” said Rohit Musti, the director of software and data engineering at the nonprofit American Forests. Musti found out about the open-source project through some federal forest policy work his organization was doing and became a regular participant. He said he felt the USDS did a lot of good outreach to people who work in this space, and made people like him feel like they could contribute.
Musti submitted American Forests’ Tree Equity Score, a measure of how equitably trees are distributed across urban neighborhoods, to the Justice40 data repository. Although the Tree Equity Score data did not make it into the beta version of the Justice40 screening tool, it is included in a separate “comparison tool” that the USDS created.
Right now there’s no user-friendly way to access this comparison tool, but if you’re skilled in the programming language Python, you can generate reports that compare the government’s environmental justice map to other established environmental justice screening methods, including the Tree Equity Score. You can also view all of the experiments the USDS ran to explore different approaches to identifying disadvantaged communities.
But to Jessie Mahr, director of technology at the nonprofit Environmental Policy Innovation Center, who was also active in the Justice 40 open-source community, the Python fluency prerequisite signifies an underlying problem.
“You can call it open source,” she said, “but to which community? If the community that’s going to be using it cannot access that tool, does it matter that it’s open source?”
Mahr said she respected what the USDS team was trying to do but was not convinced by the result. She said that relatively little of the discussion and information sharing that went on in the Google Group and monthly community chats seemed to make it into the tool. While the USDS staffers running the effort seemed genuinely interested in gathering outside expertise, they weren’t the ones making the final decisions — CEQ was. And the open-source platforms did not offer any window into what was being conveyed to the decision-makers. Mahr was disappointed that the beta tool that was released to the public in February did not reflect the research that outside participants shared related to data on extreme heat and proximity to animal feedlots, for example.
Switzer, the USDS technical adviser, told Grist that CEQ was part of the effort from the start. They said that a senior advisor to CEQ regularly participated in the Google Group and that learnings from the group were brought to CEQ “in various formats as relevant.”
CEQ has not explained the logic behind the choices embedded in the tool, like which data sets were included, though it is planning to release more details on the methodology soon. The agency is also holding listening and training sessions where the public can learn more.
But it was also strange to Mahr that despite the high profile of the White House’s Justice40 initiative in the environmental justice world, the open-source efforts were not advertised. “I never heard about it through any other channels working on Justice40 that I would have expected to,” said Mahr. “I enjoyed participating in the USDS’s team’s efforts and don’t think they were trying to hide them,” she added in an email. “I just think that they didn’t have the license or capacity to really promote it.” Like the other participants Grist spoke to, Mahr heard about the project through word of mouth, from a colleague who knew the USDS team.
Switzer confirmed that the USDS team largely relied on word of mouth to get the word out and noted that they did reach out to people who had expertise working on environmental justice screening tools.
But it’s clear that the word-of-mouth system failed to reach key voices in the field. Esther Min, a researcher at the University of Washington who helped build Washington’s state-level environmental justice screening tool, told Grist that she had met with folks from CEQ about a year ago to talk them through that project. But she hadn’t heard anything about the Google Group until February, after the beta version of the federal tool was released. Alvaro Sanchez, the vice president of policy at the nonprofit Greenlining Institute and a participant in the development of California’s environmental justice screening tool, said he had no idea about the group until Grist reached out to him in March.
Sanchez was frustrated, especially because for months the government offered very little information about the status of the tool. On one hand, he understands that the USDS team may not have had the capacity to reach out far and wide and invite every grassroots organization in the country. “But the bar that I’m setting is actually fairly low,” he said. “The people who have been working on this stuff for such a long time, we didn’t know what was happening with the tool? To me, that indicates that the level of engagement was actually really minimal.”
Sacoby Wilson, a pioneer of environmental justice screening tools based at the University of Maryland, received an invite to the group from another White House agency called the Office of Management and Budget last May. He said he didn’t get the sense that the group was hidden but agreed that the USDS hadn’t done a great job of getting the word out to either the data experts who build these environmental mapping tools at the state level, or the community organizations that actually work on the issues that the tool is trying to visualize.
But Wilson pointed out that the federal government used another channel to gather input from communities: The White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, which is made up of leaders from grassroots organizations all over the country, submitted extensive recommendations to CEQ on which considerations should be reflected in the screening tool. To Wilson, an overlooked issue was that the Advisory Council didn’t have enough environmental mapping experts.
In response to a question about whether USDS did enough outreach, Switzer said the agency was still working on it. “We hope to continue to broaden this kind of community engagement and making the open source group as inclusive and equitable as possible.
“Of course, it has been a learning experience as we’re kind of pioneers in this as a government practice!” they also said.
The tool is still in beta form, and CEQ plans to update it “based on public feedback and research.” The public can attend CEQ listening sessions and submit comments through the Federal Register or through the screening tool website. The discussion in the open-source Google Group is also ongoing, and the USDS team will continue to host monthly community chats as well as weekly office hours.
In a recent email announcing upcoming office hours, Switzer encouraged people to attend “if you don’t know how to use this Github thing and would like an intro :)”
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