15 June 22
Lacking for June: Larger Donors
So far for June larger donations, even those of one hundred dollars or more have been scarce. The volume of donations is actually up, but the dollar figures are down.
Not everyone can make a larger donation. But it would really help.
For your consideration, respectfully.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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14 June 22
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US attorney general says official guidelines do not prevent him from investigating ex-president
Merrick Garland also said at a press conference at the justice department’s headquarters in Washington that internal office of legal counsel guidelines did not prevent him from opening an investigation into the former president.
“I am watching and I will be watching all the hearings, although I may not be able to watch all of it live,” Garland said shortly after the select committee concluded its second hearing. “I can assure you the January 6 prosecutors are watching all of the hearings, as well.”
The attorney general declined to address potential investigations into Trump or other individuals mentioned by the select committee at the hearings, saying that could undermine prosecutors’ work and would be unfair to people under scrutiny who might never be charged.
But Garland reiterated earlier promises that the justice department is exploring potential criminal conduct regardless of those people’s level, their positions in the government and proximity to Trump, or whether they were at the Capitol on 6 January 2021.
The justice department appears in recent weeks to have expanded its criminal investigation to examine top figures connected to Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including government officials and Republican lawyers and operatives.
One grand jury in Washington is investigating the rallies that preceded the Capitol attack and whether any executive or legislative branch officials were involved in trying to obstruct Joe Biden’s election certification, according to a subpoena seen by the Guardian.
The justice department also appears to be investigating political operatives close to Trump, according to another grand jury subpoena seen by the Guardian, as well as some Trump lawyers involved in a scheme to send fake Trump electors to Congress.
Lisa Monaco, the deputy attorney general, confirmed in January that prosecutors were looking into any criminality in that plan, under which Trump’s lawyers hoped the former vice-president Mike Pence would refuse to certify those states and return Trump to office.
The attorney general added some additional insight into the justice department’s decision-making with respect to opening an investigation into Trump, saying that internal guidelines did not prevent him from taking such action if warranted.
“There’s nothing within the office of legal counsel that prevents us from doing an investigation,” Garland said. “There’s nothing that’s coming in the way of our investigation … We’re just going to follow the facts wherever they lead.”
Garland’s remarks about the office inside the justice department, which issues opinions for the agency that are broadly seen as binding, did not address whether the guidelines preclude charging, not just investigating, a former president.
But his careful response reflected the delicate and complicated legal considerations looming over the justice department should it consider whether to investigate and charge Trump over his efforts to reverse his 2020 election defeat to Biden.
In court filings and at its hearings, the select committee has been making the case that it believes Trump committed at least two felonies – obstructing a congressional proceeding and defrauding the United States – given evidence it has collected in its 11-month inquiry.
The question of whether to pursue a case against Trump has started to prompt serious discussions among senior justice department officials, according to a source familiar with the matter, though there has been no indication that Trump is currently a target of an investigation.
Meanwhile, Congressman Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the January 6 committee, said on Monday that he did not expect to make a criminal referral against Trump or anyone else over the Capitol attack to the justice department at the conclusion of its investigation.
The chairman appeared to indicate the panel would put the evidence of potential crimes by the former president into a final report – currently expected to come in September – and that Garland’s justice department would then have to decide whether to pursue a case.
“No,” Thompson said when asked explicitly on Capitol Hill whether the select committee would make a referral against Trump, “that’s not our job. Our job is to look at the facts and circumstances around January 6, what caused it, and make recommendations after the hearings.”
The disclosure from Thompson reflects a sense among some of the members on the panel that a criminal referral would make a resulting investigation by the justice department appear political and could undermine a potential case, according to sources close to the inquiry.
If the evidence is sufficient for the justice department to consider investigating or charging Trump, the sources said, then the justice department should be able to move ahead with a case regardless of whether the select committee makes a criminal referral.
The internal deliberations also come as the select committee has publicly said Trump repeatedly broke the law as he sought to overturn the 2020 election results, but criminal referrals are not binding and the final decision to prosecute rests with the justice department.
Ukrainian troops repair an army's Main Battle Tank (MBT) in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas, June 7, 2022. (photo: Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images)
“I am worried about it,” William Alberque, director of strategy, technology and arms control at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told CNBC. “There are huge risks that Ukraine will continue to lose land incrementally.”
A lot has changed since Russia first launched its invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24. Having initially appeared to attack the country from the south, east and north, Russia soon appeared to realize it had bitten off more than it could chew and instead changed its focus to eastern Ukraine.
That move away from Ukraine’s capital city of Kyiv, as well as other strategic failures by Russia’s forces during the initial phase of the conflict, gave Ukraine’s leadership and fighters a big morale boost and there was optimism among Western allies that perhaps Ukraine could even “win” this war against its more powerful neighbor.
Such unabated optimism has not lasted long, however, particularly as Russia appears to be throwing everything it can at seizing the entire Donbas region as it aims to cement a land corridor from Russia via the Donbas to the Black Sea, where it seeks to take control of Ukraine’s ports and trade.
The Donbas region refers to the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces in the easternmost part of Ukraine.
For several weeks now, Russian artillery has been battering eastern Ukrainian cities such as Lysychansk and Severodonetsk — the last city held by Ukrainian forces in the Luhansk province.
On Monday, Luhansk’s governor warned that Russia controlled a majority of Severodonetsk and that severe fighting continued, with all but one bridge into the city destroyed and the last one critically damaged. What’s worse is that Russian forces appear to have renewed their assaults on Kharkiv too, Ukraine’s second largest city, to the northeast, after a period of respite.
Losing Severodonetsk would be a major blow to Ukraine, analysts agree, and there are concerns that the country’s forces could be starting to lose momentum in the fight against Russia’s re-focused onslaught.
Russia is making advances
The situation now appears to have changed in Russia’s favor, analysts warn, and the capture of Severodonetsk by Russia, which is looking increasingly likely, could mark another turning point for Ukraine, and another major loss, like that of its major port Mariupol on the Sea of Azov.
“Russia is making incremental advances and is now reportedly controlling most of the strategic city of Severodonetsk, although heavy fighting is continuing in the area,” Andrius Tursa, central and eastern Europe advisor at Teneo Intelligence, said in a note last week.
“The capture of this city — as well as Lysychansk to the west — is crucial for Russia to gain full control of the Luhansk administrative region. If successful, the Russian offensive would likely shift focus onto the Donetsk region, around half of which has been already occupied,” he said.
Tursa said the situation in Donbas reflects Russia’s military advantages, including much greater firepower and troop numbers. Worryingly for Ukraine, Russia also appears to have sharpened its strategic nous.
“Compared to the first phase of the offensive, the Russian side appears to have improved its operational and logistical activities and is taking greater advantage of its air superiority and electronic warfare capabilities. Meanwhile, Ukraine is suffering from slow and insufficient weapons supplies from its allies.”
Alberque said there was still the possibility that the Russian line will collapse somewhere and they’ll have to pull troops out of the Severodonetsk front and push them toward the north, toward Kharkiv or Kherson, but what made this inflection point of the invasion dangerous was that Russia was now throwing everything it has at fully occupying the region.
“This is the part of the war that one really worries about because it’s a war of attrition because it’s just Russia throwing tons and tons of crap equipment into the battle. It’s them using the Donetsk and Luhansk fighters as cannon fodder. It’s them just drawing upon their huge human resources and there is the chance [Ukraine is] going to lose more land.”
Alberque added that he has “real fears that if Ukraine can’t collapse parts of the Russian line, and start pushing them back, and force Russia into an even further reduced [territorial] ambition, that we may see some sort of semi-permanent frozen conflict that lasts a decade or more.”
For its part, Ukraine continues to plead with its Western allies for hundreds more pieces of heavy weaponry to have what it called “weapons parity” with Russia and to “end the war,” according to Mykhailo Podolyak, an advisor to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Being straightforward – to end the war we need heavy weapons parity:
— Михайло Подоляк (@Podolyak_M) June 13, 2022
1000 howitzers caliber 155 mm;
300 MLRS;
500 tanks;
2000 armored vehicles;
1000 drones.
Contact Group of Defense Ministers meeting is held in #Brussels on June 15. We are waiting for a decision.
Ukraine’s wish list, including a request for tanks and more long-range weaponry such as howitzers and MLRS or multiple-launch rocket systems — which have a 50-80 kilometer range and can strike targets with precision-guided rockets — are seen to be exactly what Ukraine needs right now and while the U.S. and U.K. have pledged more of these weapons, there are concerns over how long it will take to deliver them.
Teneo’s Tursa said that the delivery of NATO-standard weapons – combined with heavy troop and equipment losses on the Russian side – could still shift the military balance in favor of Ukraine in the longer term.
However, he noted, “it remains unclear whether such deliveries are timely and sufficient for Ukraine to halt the Russian offensive in Donbas or regain at least some of the occupied territories.”
Activists walk outside the Supreme Court in Washington on Monday. (photo: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/WP)
In one decision, the court said federal law does not require a bond hearing after six months of detention for those who can show they fear persecution if returned to their home countries. And in the second, it said undocumented immigrants with similar cases cannot band together as a class to seek relief, but must pursue their cases individually.
The rulings came as the court begins a sprint to try to clear its docket by the end of the month or early July. A controversial ending is in store, as the justices still must rule on cases involving religious rights, gun control, the power of the federal government to combat climate change and the future of the constitutional right to abortion. More decisions are expected Wednesday.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor figured prominently in both immigration cases decided Monday.
She wrote the majority opinion about how federal law does not require bond hearings for those detained. But she dissented in the second, saying it will “leave many vulnerable noncitizens unable to protect their rights.”
The first case was brought by Antonio Arteaga-Martinez, a Mexican citizen who repeatedly entered the United States unlawfully. He most recently did so in 2012, saying he had been beaten violently by members of a criminal street gang. He had lived in the country for six years and was expecting the birth of his first child when U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issued a warrant for his arrest.
An asylum official found credible Arteaga-Martinez’s story that he would be persecuted or tortured if returned to Mexico, but the man was detained while waiting for an immigration judge to consider his request to put off his deportation. After four months, Arteaga-Martinez said he should be released while his case was considered because he was not a flight risk or danger to the community.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit eventually agreed, saying immigrants such as Arteaga-Martinez deserved a bond hearing after six months of detention.
Sotomayor said that was a mistake. “There is no plausible construction” of the federal law at issue, Sotomayor wrote, “that requires the Government to provide bond hearings before immigration judges after six months of detention, with the Government bearing the burden of proving by clear and convincing evidence that a detained noncitizen poses a flight risk or a danger to the community.”
She added that there is nothing in the law that prevents the government from offering such hearings.
Sotomayor and Justice Stephen G. Breyer said there might be hope for Arteaga-Martinez on an issue that had not been raised in lower court. The court decided in Zadvydas v. Davis in 2001 that the government may not detain immigrants indefinitely. If deportation was not likely in the “reasonably foreseeable future,” immigrants should be released unless there is good reason to detain them, the court concluded.
Justice Clarence Thomas, on the other hand, said the case “illustrates why we should overrule Zadvydas at the earliest opportunity.” He was joined in the sentiment by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch.
The conservative justices were in the majority in the second case, which was decided 6 to 3.
In that case, the court overturned a ruling of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which said it was proper for federal courts to impose broad “class-wide injunctive relief” for similarly situated immigrants who had been detained for more than six months.
But the Biden administration appealed and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said federal law limits judges to deciding the claims of the individuals in front of them.
Alito said the text of the law passed by Congress limited relief by judges to “an individual alien.” Therefore, “injunctive relief on behalf of an entire class of aliens is not allowed.”
He was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., as well as Thomas, Gorsuch and Justices Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
Sotomayor wrote for herself and fellow liberals Breyer and Elena Kagan.
She said the majority reaches its conclusion “in a purportedly textualist opinion that, in truth, elevates piecemeal dictionary definitions and policy concerns over plain meaning and context.”
She said “contextual and historical evidence demonstrates that the enacting Congress would not have prohibited classwide relief simply by using the word ‘individual.’ ”
The dueling interpretations of dense text in federal immigration law pointed out another problem, Sotomayor said.
Those covered by the law are often unaware of federal law or fluent in English, she said. “Even so, these individuals must navigate the Nation’s labyrinthine immigration laws without entitlement to appointed counsel or legal support,” she wrote.
“Class litigation not only enables individual class members to enforce their rights against powerful actors, but also advances judicial economy by eliminating the need for duplicative proceedings pertaining to each class member,” Sotomayor wrote.
Law enforcement detains 31 members of the white nationalist group Patriot Front after they were removed from a U-Haul truck near the LGBTQ+ community's "Pride in the Park" event in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, June 11, 2022. (photo: Jim Urquhart/NPR)
ALSO SEE: Neo-Nazi Group Plasters VA Hospital
With White Supremacist Propaganda
That's according to police chief Lee White who spoke to media during a press conference Monday.
White said the department received more than 100 calls to their office; half were applauding officers for their work, and the other half called to bash police for arresting the Patriot Front members. One call came all the way from Norway.
The arrest of the 31 group members happened on Saturday near a Pride event in the city. The men were found packed into a U-Haul, and came from at least 10 other states.
White previously said the information and gear collected from the U-Haul indicated these men were preparing to riot downtown. He said Monday that there was a clear level of preparation that "you don't normally see everyday." Officers were able to understand immediately this group had "ill intent" planned, he said.
White applauded the actions of the unnamed, concerned citizen that called police as soon as they witnessed these men entering the U-Haul truck Saturday. This person "prevented a riot from happening," he said.
New details of the case are still scarce as police are still investigating, White said. Body-worn camera footage from police and other details will be released at a later date, he said.
The city's Mayor Jim Hammond reassured the public that Coeur d'Alene is a welcoming, safe, and accepting place.
"We are the same city we were last week," Hammond said. "We are not going back to the days of the Aryan Nations."
This is in reference to the white supremacist hate group had its headquarters in Idaho until at least 2001. Other extremists groups have made themselves known in some parts of the state.
During Saturday's Pride event, other groups gathered nearby to protest the event. An anti-LGBTQ group was gathered that same day to pray and were attended by by affiliates of the white nationalist America First movement.
Signage lays on the ground during a protest outside the Santa Clara County Courthouse in San Jose, California, to halt eviction proceedings in January 2021. (photo: Gabrielle Lurie/SF Chronicle/Getty Images)
Pandemic rental assistance upended conventional wisdom on housing. What happens when it runs out?
In December 2021, Chicago opened up a new round of applications for renters needing emergency aid. But Brewer’s landlord — who was then threatening them with eviction —wasn’t interested. Normally, that would have been the end of it: If a landlord refuses to participate in a government program, their tenants won’t get help. But in this case, Brewer was able to apply for and receive the money directly. She picked up her check from City Hall, paid off all her outstanding rental debt, and her wife eventually got her job back.
“Becoming homeless was one of my greatest fears,” she recalled. “I’m 64 years old. I can’t be out in the streets. I’m still struggling to get the weight back I lost from all that stress.”
Brewer was able to stay in her home because, about a year before she got her aid, the federal government had taken an unprecedented step: It decided to help people at risk of eviction stay in their homes. The Emergency Rental Assistance Program — or ERAP — marked a fundamental departure from virtually all previous housing aid programs. Tenants could get money directly, the eligibility process was streamlined, and the categories of people who qualified were intentionally broad.
Nearly 1 million people are evicted in the US each year, mostly for nonpayment of rent. Between 2000 and 2016, according to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, one in 40 American renter households was evicted, and more than twice that share were threatened with it. The experience of losing one’s home to eviction has been linked to all sorts of adverse consequences, including higher job loss, debt, suicide, and reduced credit access.
Many evicted families are forced to relocate to lower-quality homes in neighborhoods with more crime. Evicted children experience higher food insecurity and lower academic achievement than other low-income kids living in rental housing, partly as a result of having to shuffle between schools and their parents’ declining mental health.
But even as research mounted on the prevalence and harms of eviction, the federal government did little to help families avoid it. “Before the pandemic, evictions were happening and there was a crisis, but we weren’t thinking about federal intervention in that space in a real way,” acknowledged Peggy Bailey, the senior adviser on rental assistance at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. The federal government would sometimes take action if the eviction violated the Fair Housing Act, but not otherwise.
The situation changed only when the pandemic hit, and orders to “stay at home” grew louder and more urgent. You can’t stay at home if you lose your home.
Initially plagued by bureaucratic hurdles, the rental assistance program eventually succeeded in reducing evictions. Although twice as many renters reported being behind on rent in mid-2021 compared to pre-pandemic times, eviction levels remained well below historic averages by the end of the year. They did not rebound to expected levels even after the Supreme Court struck down the CDC’s federal eviction moratorium. The money also largely reached the vulnerable tenants it was intended to help. Among those renters, researchers have found, the experiment was associated with a host of benefits, including less debt and physical stress.
But now, as federal ERAP dollars dry up, evictions are beginning to climb again.
The country faces a pivotal choice to build on what communities have learned. Before the pandemic, almost 8 million renters spent more than half of their incomes on housing. With more funding, the government could create a permanent program to help those who, living paycheck to paycheck, might need emergency assistance to cover temporary shortfalls on rent. A bipartisan bill in the Senate would do just that.
“What we know now from ERAP is that we can play a role in preventing evictions due to nonpayment of rent,” Bailey said. “Just a little bit of housing assistance can go a long way to saving money and a lot of aggravation for families.”
“We put a lot of effort into building the [rental assistance] plane while we were flying,” added Dave Thomas, the president of the Philadelphia Housing Development Corporation. “And now that it’s built, we have to figure out: Does it last, or was it a lot of energy for nothing?”
The federal CARES Act from March 2020 included money that states and cities could use to assist renters. But it was in December 2020 that Congress authorized $25 billion for its first initiative dedicated exclusively to helping renters stay in their homes. A second round of funding in March 2021 brought Congress’s total ERAP spending to $46.5 billion.
The money was directed to states and localities to distribute to newly created rental assistance programs. These built-from-scratch, decentralized programs, which number over 500 today, had varying rules and requirements for tenants and landlords to apply. Natasha Leonard, a housing specialist with the National League of Cities, said much of her work during the pandemic was spent trying to spread awareness about what other cities were doing for rental assistance. For months, the program was blasted for administrative hangups, shifting and confusing guidelines, and sending money to renters too slowly.
ERAP was administered by the Treasury Department, not the Department of Housing and Urban Development. HUD has more experience developing targeted funding formulas, but Treasury has experience sending money out quickly. It also exists outside of the traditional federal housing bureaucracy, so some leaders felt it was better positioned to innovate and take risks.
Over time, Treasury did innovate. It loosened ERAP rules and clarified its expectations. Jurisdictions scrambled for new technology and staff and for nonprofit partners to help spread awareness among eligible renters.
In 2021, 3.8 million payments were distributed to eligible households. By April of this year, per a Treasury spokesperson, that number had reached 5.7 million. In all, more than $30 billion in assistance has been distributed or obligated, and the remaining money is expected to be spent in the next few months. Activists and reporters are now warning of the funds running out too quickly.
Researchers have found that, by and large, the funds went primarily to communities hit hardest by the economic impacts of the pandemic — places with steeper job losses, higher shares of renter households, and more residents of color. Treasury data published in late February reported that over 80 percent of program funds went to very low-income households, defined as those earning 50 percent or less of area median income, and primarily reached Black, Latino, and female-headed households.
“It was unlike anything — and at a scale unlike anything — we’ve seen in our lifetime,” said Greg Heller, a former Philadelphia Housing Development Corporation official who helped lead the aid distribution for his city.
Claudia Aiken, a policy researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, has already found clear results from Philadelphia. Receiving emergency rental assistance was associated with a lower likelihood of incurring debt, a lower share of tenants reporting that they worried frequently, and a significant decrease in the amount of rent owed among those behind on payments. Other studies on preliminary impacts in Atlanta and Baltimore have found receiving rental aid is associated with reduced risk of homelessness and lower debt.
As states and cities cobbled together their rental assistance programs, policymakers quickly ran into several issues. Landlords weren’t always eager to participate because accepting the money sometimes came with requirements to forgive past penalties, interest, and court costs; or because participating barred landlords from chasing payments for anything outstanding in the months they received aid. Some states capped available rental assistance so low that many landlords saw accepting it as consenting to de facto rent cancellation while they were dealing with their own cash flow problems.
Some programs tried to grease the wheels to induce more participation. A Pennsylvania rental assistance program in place before ERAP launched had a monthly cap of $750, regardless of what rent was owed. But only 44 percent of landlords participated, so Philadelphia policymakers decided to pair state aid with CARES money to offer landlords up to $1,500 per month. This boosted Philadelphia participation to 63 percent.
Still, many landlords just wouldn’t bite. In a national survey of rental assistance programs conducted in spring 2021, 44 percent of program administrators said landlord responsiveness was a challenge. That number rose to 67 percent in summer 2021, and 74 percent in late 2021. As one ERAP administrator explained, “many landlords are not looking to keep unreliable tenants; some refuse to work with us; [and] others are not willing to renew leases.”
Landlord resistance is nothing new in federal housing policy. But to address the issue, Treasury took an unprecedented step. It said that programs must send money directly to tenants when their landlords don’t cooperate, and clarified that programs can even provide direct assistance to tenants before trying to engage the landlord. Not all programs embraced the idea, but many did.
“ERAP operated under the idea that we should help everyone who has a need, and that’s just a radical departure and mindset from our other existing housing programs,” said Aiken.
ERAP’s goal to assist needy tenants was so explicit, and so unlike any past federal program, that Treasury officials even clarified that aid should be delivered to anyone experiencing hardship during the pandemic, not just due to Covid-19.
Federal policymakers have contemplated the idea of distributing rent money directly to tenants, but they’ve only really tried it once before, via a small program that ran in a dozen cities in the 1970s.
“Tenants are the program’s primary beneficiaries,” explained Noel Poyo, the deputy assistant secretary for community economic development at Treasury, who led the department’s implementation of ERAP. “It is a low-income household that meets these tests. The program doesn’t exclude tenants with landlords who don’t want to participate.”
Another defining characteristic of the program was its gradual embrace of unusual strategies to get money out the door. In distributing public funds, governments have an obligation to ensure that the dollars really get to those who need them. But fraud mitigation can go too far, requiring so many bureaucratic hurdles that the aid never reaches those it was meant to help.
Some ERAP programs took dramatic steps to cut down on paperwork. Instead of submitting official records, people could simply affirm, under penalty of perjury, details of their personal circumstances, like their income or address. Administrators were also allowed to verify income by cross-referencing applicants’ statements with other population-level data in the same geographic region.
Others embraced “categorical eligibility”: the idea that if you qualify for one existing welfare program, and that program verified your personal details, then you should be considered automatically eligible for another. Researchers found that programs with fewer and more flexible requirements were able to distribute their rental assistance funds faster.
Watchdogs have thus far produced little evidence of fraud. Eight months into California’s pandemic rental assistance program, housing officials identified 1,800 fraudulent applications out of nearly 500,000 — or 0.0036 percent — and none of those applications were paid. California officials explained they had learned a lot about detecting fraud after the state’s costly unemployment fraud debacle. Other states that disclosed data — such as Utah, Arizona, and New York — reported virtually no rental assistance abuse, either. In Montgomery County, Maryland, auditors wrote in October, “We ultimately found no specific instances of fraud,” though they acknowledged that self-attestation made it difficult for them to discern who might be lying.
In February, federal auditors with the Government Accountability Office warned Congress that they did not think Treasury had implemented enough monitoring controls for its ERAP program, and stressed fraud was a risk. A spokesperson for Treasury said all ERAP grantees must have in place procedures to prevent, investigate, and address fraud. Rich Delmar, deputy inspector general of the Department of the Treasury, the division responsible for oversight, could not provide specifics on ERAP fraud allegations, but said when they receive tips of abuse through their hotline, they investigate them.
Even with Treasury’s encouragement, some local administrators resisted easing up on their program requirements, fearful of the potential for scandal or backlash.
But Poyo, from Treasury, said that ERAP demonstrated governments could reduce unnecessary barriers to aid while still using identity verification tools to evaluate applications. “It is not a zero-sum game between supporting access for vulnerable populations and ensuring strong program integrity,” he said.
ERAP was clunky at times. Local program leaders said the continually shifting Treasury guidance made distributing money more challenging, as did the IT demands and lack of qualified staff and volunteers. It took time to build up coordination with local court systems that handled evictions, too.
“There was a perception at first that if you just dump loads and loads of money that local governments should have some way of getting it out,” said Heller. “But to get hundreds of millions of dollars — in Philadelphia, we had over $250 million — requires a huge amount of infrastructure, a lot of IT backbone, a lot of training.”
While the program overall did a good job reaching needy areas, some struggled more than others. Elizabeth Kneebone, the research director for the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley, has been studying communities that were more readily able to deploy this federal assistance, which tended to be denser urban areas. Suburbs and rural communities — with fewer nonprofits, diminished or nonexistent local media, and less institutional capacity in their local governments — tended to have a harder time, even as the need for help persisted.
“With the suburbanization of poverty, we need to ask, how do we make these areas more flexible and responsive to the ways needs can change?” Kneebone said.
Experts and policymakers say they are not exactly sure what happens now. Federal funds are drying up and most programs are no longer accepting new applicants. Researchers are continuing to publish new reports on ERAP lessons learned.
There is a consensus among housing leaders that the next year will be critical in determining whether all this pandemic-era knowledge is sustained and expanded upon, or buried and forgotten.
The National Low Income Housing Coalition, an advocacy group, is focusing on rising eviction rates and the need to establish a permanent emergency rental assistance program, said Sarah Gallagher, the group’s senior project director. “We need it both for individuals in emergency situations because of personal crisis, as well as to prepare for another pandemic,” she said.
If Congress was planning to reallocate new dollars, then local officials would work to invest in infrastructure and staff, just like they do for other permanent housing programs. But at this point, communities don’t know if they’ll be using their ERAP systems again, or be forced to dismantle them.
Meanwhile, HUD is now considering an eviction prevention strategy and is beginning to think through how to start tracking eviction data nationally. In recent federal appropriations acts, Congress tasked the housing agency with considering the feasibility of developing some sort of national eviction database, and three bills have been introduced to increase federal analysis of evictions.
“I think you can make an extremely strong defense that investing in eviction prevention provides a positive economic and social return to the country,” said Gene Sperling, the American Rescue Plan coordinator for the Biden administration. “So even on that hard-headed basis, eviction strategy is the type of wise investment that people think of like quality preschool — especially when you consider the economic scarring, emotional trauma, and heartbreak these policies can prevent.”
The uncertainty surrounding future funding makes this all particularly confusing for local housing leaders. Right now, some communities are still distributing their ERAP funding, which doesn’t expire until September 2025. Localities are also tapping into remaining state and local recovery funds to help sustain their programs.
But these funding streams will, eventually, be gone. On the congressional level, there’s a bill to establish a permanent Emergency Assistance Program. While its proposed $3 billion in annual funding is fairly low, housing advocates say passing the legislation would be an important seed that could help motivate HUD to continue building on ERAP lessons. For now, though, passage looks unlikely.
In the meantime, activists are fighting to press for broader reforms to the housing market.
Gallagher suggested making ERAP recipients automatically eligible for other programs through categorical eligibility. “Some of the households that received ERAP are in need of longer-term subsidies, and now that households have been engaged, we don’t just want to walk away,” she said. “We’ve already deemed them eligible, there should be a way to transition those folks to additional resources, using self-attestation.”
Bailey, from HUD, noted it was her agency that first encouraged Treasury to consider self-attestation as a strategy because HUD knew from experience how hard it can be for homeless populations to receive government assistance when they lack certain documents. She acknowledged, though, that currently no HUD programs, including even its own homeless assistance programs, allow for that flexibility.
Some communities, like Philadelphia and Chicago, have used their ERAP dollars to bolster adjacent housing assistance efforts, like expanding access to lawyers for low-income tenants and encouraging alternatives to eviction through so-called court diversion programs. The White House is encouraging these kinds of efforts and held a summit on court diversion in the summer of 2021, something Sperling said was done partly to accelerate a conversation around long-term eviction reform.
While federal funds certainly enabled Philadelphia and Chicago to run more successful diversion programs (landlords are much more likely to agree to an eviction alternative if there is money available to pay them rent) local leaders say they don’t plan to abandon their diversion efforts even if ERAP dollars dry up. “As our resources have diminished, we’ve tried to be a little more intentional ... and do a little more targeting,” said Thomas, of the Philadelphia Housing Development Corporation.
“We used $8 million of our ERAP funds to launch a right-to-counsel pilot because we want this to be not a one-time emergency measure, but to help create infrastructure that can be lasting,” said Daniel Kay Hertz, the director of policy with the Chicago Department of Housing.
“The primary crisis we have now is how many people continue to need assistance, and not having enough money for them,” he added. “But the secondary crisis is that Chicago and dozens or hundreds of jurisdictions gained an enormous amount of administrative capacity to do a direct relief program, and we aren’t sure yet what that will mean.”
The students have coordinated meals and sit-in shifts, making sure at least three students are onsite at any given time. (photo: Hallie Golden/Guardian)
At Seattle Pacific University, students have spent weeks fighting anti-gay policies common among Christian schools
The professor had explained that sex and gender were not the same, said Scanlan, 32, an alum.
There had been no talk of being transgender or intersex, Scanlan recalled to the group of current LGBTQ+ students. But the lecture had helped Scanlan, who described themself at the time as a closeted trans non-binary person, finally start to realize an important fact:
“There are people in my community that recognize I exist.”
It was the 14th day of a sit-in over the university’s policy prohibiting employee same-sex sexual activity. Scanlan was one of several alumni who had returned to the administration building to show solidarity with the dozens of students who had been camped out in the hallway.
The policy, students argue, is blatantly discriminatory and leaves the campus’s LGBTQ+ community without the support and mentorship they need.
“You’re going to charge me thousands of dollars every quarter to come here and to get an education, but you’re not going to provide me the education that I deserve as a queer person by having queer staff and faculty?” asked Leah Duff, 22, who has been camped out at the sit-in nearly every day. “You talk about being ecumenical, being so diverse. And it’s like, where is it?”
Duff, who grew up in Maryland in a church that supported the LGBTQ+ community, said she hadn’t been aware of the policy when she enrolled at the university.
In a statement last month, Cedric Davis, chair of the SPU board, described the decision to keep the rule as a “thorough and prayerful deliberation”.
He added: “The board made a decision that it believed was most in line with the university’s mission and statement of faith and chose to have SPU remain in communion with its founding denomination, the Free Methodist church USA, as a core part of its historical identity as a Christian university.”
SPU is not alone
The policy stands out in the liberal Pacific north-west city, where, according to the Pew Research Center, more than one-third of residents reported no affiliation with a religion. But the school is certainly not alone in the US.
Nearly one-third of US Christian colleges and universities have bans on such things as “homosexual acts” or “homosexual behavior”, according to a 2019 study published in Sociological Spectrum. The higher education association Council for Christian Colleges & Universities includes more than 140 schools around the world that have agreed to support such policies as “intimate sexual relations … are intended for persons in a marriage between one man and one woman”.
These policies can exist thanks to religious exemptions under Title IX, the federal education law barring discrimination based on sex, and Title VII, the law prohibiting employment discrimination based on sex, among other things, explained Evan Gerstmann, a political science professor at Loyola Marymount University.
Paul Southwick, director of the Religious Exemption Accountability Project, a program working to empower LGBTQ+ students at religious schools, described the sit-in as “unprecedented” but said it seemed to fit into the broader trend playing out among college students.
“More and more of the current generation of students, more and more of them are identifying as LGBTQ+, or somewhere along the spectrum,” said Southwick. “And the attitudes of young people have shifted pretty dramatically, as has the wider culture.”
Last year, the Religious Exemption Accountability Project filed a class-action lawsuit against the US Department of Education, challenging the Title IX exemption. It names 46 plaintiffs, including a student who attended SPU.
The school has not filed for a religious exemption.
At SPU, students launched the sit-in after the board of trustees announced in May that it would not change its policy stating that the school’s employees are expected to refrain from “sexual behavior that is inconsistent with the University’s understanding of Biblical standards, including … same-sex sexual activity”.
It adds: “Employees who engage in any of these activities may face disciplinary action up to and including termination of employment with the University.”
Before the board announced its decision, the Free Methodist church USA warned that if the university changed its policy, it would lose its affiliation with the denomination.
The church does not have any legal control over the school but has contributed $324,000 “through its various entities” over the past 40 years, according to Tracy Norlen, a spokesperson for the university.
“We recognize a diversity of opinions within our community on the topic of sexuality, and we continually seek to honor differences and create space for all voices on our campus,” Norlen said in an email. “We seek to be a supportive community to all our members.”
The Free Methodist church USA declined to comment.
Earlier this month, the SPU faculty senate passed a resolution stating that it supported revising the school’s policy to allow same-sex sexual activity within the context of marriage.
The weeks ahead
Christopher TF Hanson, an assistant professor of music at SPU who described himself as the only out queer full-time faculty member at the school, said when he had interviewed for his current position, in 2019, he had not brought up being queer. When he questioned the policy, he said, he had been told not to worry about it because it was merely a historical document.
But after he started, he said, he began hearing of people who had left the school or dropped out of the hiring process because they are queer, as well as from current faculty members afraid to come out because of the policy.
Last year, after a nursing instructor at SPU sued the school, claiming it had discriminated against him because of his sexual orientation (the case was settled out of court), the stories only increased, Hanson said.
Hanson recently decided to publicly come out as bisexual at the school and said he received widespread support from his colleagues. He said he had not faced professional fallout, probably due to the fact that he is married to a woman, but also, he said, because the policy’s power lies primarily in fear tactics.
“How can we move forward if we’re perpetuating this culture of fearmongering – that if you’re here, and you don’t follow these lifestyle expectations … something bad will happen to you?” he said. “But no one actually knows what will happen, because nothing can happen because nothing has been institutionalized for something to happen. Just the fear. The rumors are what’s safeguarding the board of trustees and this sort of conservative rhetoric.”
As of Monday evening, the students were still camped out. It is clear they have no intention of leaving.
They have coordinated meals and sit-in shifts through Google sign-up sheets, making sure there are at least three students there at any given time. They have created a kitchen area filled with bins of donated snacks and two large coolers.
They have set up a line of cots and air mattresses, a lost and found and a bathroom converted to non-binary by way of a sign reading “It doesn’t really matter”. Taped on the wall was a list of “house rules”, including “Be clean, be safe, be kind, and be gay”. And they have even had alumni with protest experience give presentations on what to do if you’re arrested and how to coordinate jail support.
Chloe Guillot, 22, an organizer and senior at the school, said they planned to stay into the summer. They have given the school until 1 July to reverse the policy, or the students expect to file a lawsuit arguing that the board breached its fiduciary duty. As of Monday, they had raised over $26,000 for the lawsuit (they plan to donate the money to the school if the policy is changed by their deadline).
“By refusing to remove this policy, it is discriminatory and it is homophobic, but it also just really puts our university in jeopardy,” said Guillot, who is studying Christian theology and social justice and cultural studies.
But Guillot, who is Christian and non-binary, said it went beyond that.
“It’s really important to me to not let these Christian institutions continue to weaponize Christianity and use religion to hurt people.”
Health workers screen passengers arriving from abroad for monkeypox symptoms at Anna International Airport terminal in Chennai, June 03, 2022. (photo: Arun Sankar/AFP/Getty Images)
“We can’t put this one back in the bottle,” said the researcher behind a recent study about the spread of zoonotic diseases.
“We know that species are on the move—we know that probably has relevance to other viruses,” said Carlson, an assistant professor of biology at Georgetown University. “And for a while, we really wanted to get into what does that mean for human health? What does it mean for pandemics?”
What it meant, Carlson and his co-authors found, was that it may already be too late to limit the spread of zoonotic spillover—when diseases move from animals to humans—because of climate change.
Over the next 50 years, the spread of pathogens between humans and animals in the wild will lead to the transmission of about 4,000 new viruses between species, their research found, and increase the risk of global pandemics.
“We can’t put this one back in the bottle,” Carlson said of his team’s findings.
In recent weeks, the epidemiological world has been focused on a global uptick in cases of monkeypox. Discovered in the 1950s, the virus that causes monkeypox—which was first identified in research primates—is in the same epidemiological family as smallpox. The virus is common in parts of Africa, is spread through close contact and it is treated using antiviral medicines. The smallpox vaccine is also effective in treating monkeypox.
While public health officials say that it has little chance of becoming a pandemic, the world will increasingly have to contend with monkeypox and as-yet undiscovered diseases like it as the destruction of natural habitats—a driver of climate change—brings humans and wild animals in closer contact, according to Carlson’s team.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is on alert after the emergence of monekypox cases in the United States over the last month. While it may not become the next pandemic — and CDC officials say the risk to the general population is low — public health experts ask that people seek medical attention if they develop a rash, fever or chills. Officials are also asking people to avoid contact with sick people, wear a mask and steer clear of wild animals, dead or alive.
Interactions between people and animals were at the heart of the findings of Carlson’s team, which were published in a peer-reviewed study in the journal Nature in April. It noted the existence of roughly 10,000 viruses with the potential to infect humans—the vast majority of which, researchers said, are already “circulating silently in wild mammals.” Global climate change and evolving land-use patterns will increase the potential for cross-species viral transmission as animals that were once geographically isolated begin to have increased contact with people, the study said.
One of the most surprising findings of the study, Carlson said, is not just that mitigation doesn’t keep this from happening, but that “a lot of this has probably already happened because we live in a world that’s one degree warmer.”
“We are going to just have to deal with the fact that climate change, as a choice that we’ve already made to some degree, means higher pandemic risk,” he said.
In the study, he and his colleagues wrote: “Whereas most studies agree that climate change mitigation through reducing greenhouse gas emissions will prevent extinctions and minimize harmful ecosystem impacts, our results suggest that mitigation alone cannot reduce the likelihood of climate-driven viral sharing. Instead, the mildest scenarios for global warming appear likely to produce at least as much or even more cross-species viral transmission.”
And there may be more than 4,000 viruses that are shared.
Carlson said in the study they counted the number of times two species that have never met shared viruses for the first time. He said “that could be one virus or it could be all of their viruses.”
“So when we’re saying 4,000, what we mean is there are going to be 4,000 pairs of species sharing viruses for the first time, and that could be 4,000 cross-species transmission. It could be 400,000,” he said. “We just don’t know.”
Carlson said a key takeaway from the research is the importance of monitoring diseases in wildlife and tracking early outbreaks so they don’t evolve into pandemics.
“The goal now is not to change what’s happening in these ecosystems—there’s not a ton we can do about that—but rather to learn to live more safely alongside wildlife,” he said.
Carlson and his co-authors cautioned that the results “should not be interpreted as a justification for inaction, or as a possible upside to unmitigated warming, which will be accompanied by mass defaunation, devastating disease emergence, and unprecedented levels of human displacement and global instability.
“Rather, our results highlight the urgency of better wildlife disease surveillance systems and public health infrastructure as a form of climate change adaptation, even if mitigation efforts are successful,” the study said.
That notwithstanding, scientists say, it is important to remain vigilant and to continue to monitor how animals migrate to new areas as their existing habitats warm or are razed for development, conditions that create opportunities for zoonotic spillover.
“It’s not entirely surprising that as habitats shrink and the climate warms, you see greater chances for animals to bump into each other—especially animals that have not historically been in contact with each other—and that creates interfaces where pathogens can move from one species to another,” said Aaron Bernstein, the interim director of the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
“What it means for us is that we have to really think hard about how we approach emerging infections like Covid-19,” said Bernstein. “And part of that has to take seriously the need to prevent spillover rather than trying to play catch-up.”
Right now the world is focused on what Bernstein says are largely containment strategies for emerging infections—how we can detect them once people have been infected, and how we can deploy vaccines and test drugs quickly, he said. Both are critical because disease emergence is unavoidable, “but we can’t really do as well as we might if we’ve failed to prevent spillover.”
Bernstein said we know that sharing of habitats, the wildlife trade and large livestock operations are engines that drive emerging infections risk. There’s value in protecting forests, he said, because the prevention of spillover doesn’t just matter to humans, it is also good wildlife conservation.
“To me, it’s about acting before diseases start,” he said.
Carlson’s research team found that bats, because of their ability to fly long distances during their lifetimes, will likely account for the majority of the disease spillover in decades to come.
Angela Bosco-Lauth, an assistant professor of biomedical sciences at Colorado State University who studies infectious disease, noted that roughly two-thirds of the pathogens that infect humans are zoonotic in nature.
“I think we’re going to see this more and more often,” Bosco-Lauth said. “As a species, we’ve grown to a point that this just has to be—I mean, I hate to use the term ‘the new normal’—but I think it’s going to be the new normal between climate change and population growth and encroachment.
“There’s just no way that humans and wildlife can avoid each other.”
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