Zohran Mamdani and President Donald Trump had a surprisingly chummy meeting in the Oval Office last week, especially after Trump had described Mamdani during the New York City mayoral campaign as a “100 percent Communist lunatic,” a “total nut job,” and a “Jew hater.” A reporter asked the mayor-elect, often depicted in the press as a class-baiting socialist, if he thought Trump was really a “fascist.” In the awkward moment that followed, Mamdani had barely time to respond before Trump interrupted in a jovial fashion, assuring him that it was “okay” to call him one. Mamdani acknowledged that he did, while Trump relieved the tension by laughing it off. During the meeting, the two New Yorkers from the polar ends of the political spectrum discussed immigration, real estate and crime, zoning laws, and utility costs, and agreed on one issue that is one of the president’s passions: They both want to build more in New York City. As Trump told reporters while he sat behind his desk, with Mamdani standing behind him, “Some of his ideas really are the same ideas that I have. We agree on a lot more than I would’ve thought.” New York’s next mayor has made housing the centerpiece of his political identity, promising to unleash the public sector to build affordable homes that the private market has failed to build. Affordable housing is a major problem all over the country, but especially in New York. A controversy over one garden spotlights a broader policy question—whether urban planners can deliver both housing and ecological health in an era of climate stress. Or will New York and other American cities continue to trade one public good for another? Like President Trump in his past as a real estate developer building glass skyscrapers, Mamdani is facing serious opposition to his desire to replace green space with residential housing. Consider his quest to construct public housing for elderly on the site of the Elizabeth Street Garden—a whimsical pocket of Manhattan filled with neoclassical statues, pear trees, and rosebushes. In one of his final official acts to block his path, on November 3, after Mayor Eric Adams had already stepped down as a candidate but one day before the election, he quietly designated the garden as parkland “permanently.” Now, Mamdani will need the approval of the State Legislature to construct housing on the site. Building housing for the unhoused was one of Mamdani’s campaign promises. When Adams’ decision came to light, Mamdani expressed his annoyance: “It is no surprise that Mayor Adams is using his final weeks to cement a legacy of dysfunction and inconsistency.”  Adams countered that his decision was about “protecting his legacy.” Yet, in pursuing this cause, he is doing an about-face. Adams, too, once tried to bulldoze the garden to build housing for low-income seniors. He lost to a fierce coalition of neighborhood activists. It’s easy to see both sides. The city’s affordable housing shortage has reached crisis proportions—more than 91,133 people sleep in the main New York City shelter system, and 25 percent of renters spend more than half their income on housing. Yet green space, too, has shifted from luxury to necessity. Trees and gardens cool the air, clean the lungs, and soothe the mind. Environmental justice advocates rightly insist that a healthy city requires both roofs and roots. But as real estate prices soar, New York’s leaders are pressed into what feels like an unforgiving binary—homes or habitats, people or plants. > As real estate prices soar, New York City’s leaders are pressed into what > feels like an unforgiving binary—homes or habitats, people or plants. It doesn’t have to be that way. There was a time when common green spaces were part of everyday urban life. In colonial New England, villagers foraged, grazed animals, and gathered wood on the green and in shared forests. Commons provided the material cornucopia that powered essential common law rights to food, fuel, and shelter. When commoners moved to cities, they brought these practices with them—transforming waste ground and food scraps into fertile soil for small gardens. Shared land served as the foundation for civic infrastructure that we hold dear today. Before it became a jewel of the elite in the 1850s, sections of Central Park were once a patchwork of green shantytowns, built by working people who grew food and raised animals on “wasteland.” The same was true of Hyde Park in London, Rock Creek Park in Washington, DC, and the Fenway in Boston.   As a historian, I look to the distant past, but you don’t have to go too far back in time to see the service of urban greenspace. In Washington in 1950, the US Department of Agriculture counted more than 2,000 hogs and 74,000 chickens, long after laws had banned both types of animals from the city. As late as the 1950s, in cities as different as New York, Washington, Cleveland, Detroit, and Memphis, large numbers of working people relied for subsistence on their backyard gardens and on food grown on roofs and balconies. Home-grown provisions saved people money to pay rents and mortgages. In 1940, some of the poorest neighborhoods of Washington, east of the Anacostia River, where 94 percent of the population was Black, had some of the highest rates of homeowner occupancy, second only to the high-income DuPont Circle neighborhood. The green lungs of our cities were born not of wealth, but of necessity. In the decades that followed, regular people, not business or city leaders, held cities together during economic downturns. They cleaned up unregulated dumping and generally kept their neighborhoods from descending into a scene from Planet of the Apes. In the 1970s, as New York City teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, developers abandoned buildings, and landlords torched their properties for insurance money. New Yorkers stepped in to claim the ruins. By 1990, neighbors in all five boroughs, but especially on the Lower East Side, the Bronx, and Brooklyn, turned vacant lots into an estimated 800 community gardens. (In the 2000s, Mayor Rudy Giuliani sought to auction off many of the garden lots, but protestors saved most of them.) In the same spirit, in 1991, Allan Reiver—a scavenger of forgotten art and architectural fragments—leased several lots on Elizabeth Street to save them from becoming a parking lot. He filled them with plants and sculpture, creating the lush, eccentric sanctuary that stands today. The real question is not whether to preserve one garden, but how to reclaim the idea of the urban commons. For the last 100 years, New York City’s shared spaces have been shaped not by the people who live in them but by the infrastructures built to move them—or exclude them. In the 1940s, Robert Moses, the “master builder” who never held elected office, remade the city for the automobile. His parkways to Long Island’s beaches, deliberately engineered with low overpasses, barred buses and thus working-class visitors. His web of expressways gutted neighborhoods from the Bronx to Red Hook in the name of progress, displacing hundreds of thousands of working poor to house the middle and upper classes. He famously declared that “a city without traffic is a ghost town.” Moses’ ghost lingers in the grid: nearly a quarter of New York’s land area is devoted to streets and parking lots. Each car registered in the city effectively enjoys one and a half parking spaces, while the city’s human residents scramble for housing. Streets and parking lots, devoted to moving and storing cars, are the commons of our age.  > “To change a community, you have to change the soil.” But the era of the city-as-parking-lot is ending. In 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency launched the “Green Streets Program,” encouraging communities to redesign streets with gardens, bioswales, bike paths, and permeable pavement, a green infrastructure that naturally manages stormwater, reduces pollution, and creates more resilient and healthier communities. Mamdani’s proposal for high-speed bus lanes, pedestrian walkways, and the transformation of parking lots into public housing promises to turn New York toward a viridescent horizon. As the city is reconfigured with fewer cars, New Yorkers could, as in the past, take it further, transforming the new wastes (pavement) into a blooming bounty. Curbside gardens could replace idling cars. Parking lots could be transformed into orchards and community plots. Major avenues could be reborn as edible forests of fruits, nuts, herbs, and flowers, as the famed “Gangsta Gardener” Ron Finley has been doing in South Central Los Angeles. “To change a community,” Finley says, “you have to change the soil.” Cities in Europe are already showing what that might look like on a large scale. In the past two decades, the socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has replaced more than 50,000 parking spaces and hundreds of car lanes with parks, bike paths, and tree-lined promenades. The banks of the Seine, once choked with traffic, are now a riverfront park. And Parisians appeared to be fully supportive of the transformation. Earlier this year, they voted to ban cars from an additional 500 streets. Nitrogen dioxide levels that once sat in the red zone have fallen into the green. Amsterdam is doing the same. So is Copenhagen, where a devastating 2011 flood led engineers to rip up asphalt and replace it with wetlands, ponds, and rooftop gardens to absorb the next deluge. London, improbably, is reintroducing beavers to help manage stormwater—and in the process, Londoners are learning how to care for and live with beavers. These European projects configure civic infrastructure differently. Climate infrastructure, equity infrastructure, and survival infrastructure are what students of urban planning study today. The impasse between the former and future mayor over the Elizabeth Street Gardens is a false conflict. Climate adaptation and social justice are not competing priorities. They are two sides of the same project—a new vision of the urban commons visible in Mr. Mamdani’s campaign plan to turn 500 asphalt school yards into 500 neighborhood green spaces. “When we stand up and say that we have an agenda to transform our city schools, to renovate 500 public schools, to build 500 green schoolyards, to create thousands of union jobs, to transform 50 schools into resilience hubs, and to prioritize those that have long been forgotten,” he told a Nation reporter, “that is an agenda we are willing to fight for. That is an agenda we are willing to defend.” Kate Brown is the Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at M.I.T. and author of Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City, which will be published in February by Norton.

Pastor Oliver Carter is in a strange predicament. For the last few years, he’s run a food bank serving the needy through No Limits Outreach Ministries, his church in a Maryland suburb just outside of Washington, DC. Now, his family is among those struggling to make ends meet. His wife, Pamelia, works for the US Department of Agriculture. As a result of the government shutdown, she is one of more than 700,000 federal employees who have been furloughed—or forced to take a temporary, unpaid leave of absence—since October 1. Her last paycheck was about half of its usual amount, and her most recent one was $0. That’s what she will receive until the government reopens. “Thank God for the food bank,” Carter says, noting his family’s piling bills. “Because that’s one thing we don’t have to worry about.” As we talk, hundreds of furloughed federal workers have lined up on a sidewalk outside the Hyattsville church. Even though food distribution won’t begin until noon, people began arriving in the brisk 40-degree weather with folding chairs and blankets as early as 7:30 AM. There’s only enough frozen meat—the most sought-after item—for the first 50 to 100 people of the nearly 500 who will likely appear. Everyone else will get shelf-stable items, like tuna pouches and peanut butter. Near the front, a woman who was furloughed from the Department of Health and Human Services tells me that she’s been applying for second jobs to pay her daughter’s tuition and provide for her aging mother. She says she’d also apply for food stamps, but as of Saturday, the program won’t have any funds. These struggles are replicated all over the country and embody the string of compounding food crises created by the government shutdown. While hundreds of thousands of furloughed workers are going without pay, food stamps (formally called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) are due to run out on Saturday. Normally, the federal government would use contingency money to keep SNAP going, but the Trump administration said last week it had no intention of doing so. (More than 20 states sued over the suspension of benefits on Tuesday, arguing that not making use of the available funds is illegal.) Virginia and New Mexico have announced plans to temporarily fund SNAP beneficiaries with electronic transfers, but the vast majority of the 42 million Americans who rely on the program—including 14 million children and 1.2 million veterans—will lose their modest grocery assistance by the end of the week. But there’s another wrinkle, too. As individuals look for help putting dinner on the table, the food banks themselves are also down resources because of previous budget cuts. “There’s absolutely more need, but less food,” Carter tells me in his cluttered church office, located in a small strip mall. “It’s bad.” A Federal Bureau of Investigation Police officer receives food as World Central Kitchen workers distribute free meals to federal employees and their families in Washington Canal Park in Washington, DC, on the 29th day of a government shutdown.Francis Chung/POLITICO/AP Coincidentally, while DC-area federal workers lined up at the food bank in Hyattsville and at pop-up tents organized by José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen at the Navy Yard in the Southeast corner of the city, dozens of nonprofit leaders, members of Congress, food industry experts, and other stakeholders were convening at George Washington University for a previously planned food and agriculture policy summit. There, keynote speakers and panels explored big-picture topics like food waste and sustainability. But in between sessions, attendees were also pondering more imminent problems. “There’s the stuff happening on the plenary floor, and then there’s [the conversations] happening in the hallway corridors, where you have a lot of people who are preparing for a very different, challenging landscape next week,” explains Alexander Moore, the chief development officer at DC Central Kitchen, a nonprofit that has prepared full meals for homeless shelters and other food-insecure groups since it was created in 1989. Moore says nonprofits like his are already operating at capacity. DC Central Kitchen, for example, serves 17,000 people daily and operates around the clock seven days a week. And that is when government programs were still functioning. Anticipating increased demand once SNAP funding runs dry on November 1 and about 137,500 DC residents lose their benefits, the nonprofit is preparing to serve up to 500 additional meals per day. > “It’s hard to fathom this severe a blow to food security.” “It’s hard to fathom this severe a blow to food security,” Moore says, adding that the last time things felt as dire was when the pandemic began. Food banks are still recovering from earlier crises, too. Earlier this year, the Trump Administration canceled $500 million worth of food shipments from the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP). In DC, that resulted in 780,000 fewer meals, according to a spokesperson for Capital Area Food Bank, which distributes pallets of food to smaller food banks in the area, like Carter’s. In March, the Trump administration also ended the Local Food Purchase Agreement Program, a $1 billion outlay that enabled food banks and schools to purchase food from local farmers. Together, these two initiatives had been vital in helping food banks procure fresh produce and meat. USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins told Fox News that the latter program, which began during COVID, “was an effort by the left to continue spending taxpayer dollars that were not necessary.” Back in Hyattsville, Carter has started to plan for the near future should the government shutdown extend into the holidays. Without SNAP and other programs, he has decided to reach out to grocery stores and local farmers, asking for anything they might be able to give. Recently, he received six frozen turkeys from a donor. They are a drop in the bucket compared to the growing demand, but still cause for celebration. He leads me to the dual-purpose church worship room and food bank storage space to show them to me. A nearby freezer sits empty, ready to accommodate future donations, big or small. After all, Carter will have thousands more struggling people to feed over the next few weeks, especially as the holidays approach—including his own family.

The Covid-19 pandemic’s stimulus checks and tax credits helped mainstream the idea that government could help unwealthy people through hard times by simply giving them cash—without conditions like work requirements or stringent income limits. Since then, the push for guaranteed income for the poorest Americans, for whom wage stagnation, inequality, and the disappearance of blue-collar jobs continue as a plodding catastrophe, has bloomed into a nationwide movement. Dozens of direct cash transfer pilots have sprung up, from rural Oregon to Chicago and South Texas, spearheaded by nonprofits, city governments, and even states. There’s no shortage of evidence that no-strings-attached cash helps. Research has shown that, with extra money, participants buy necessities, increase savings, or even start businesses. They have an easier time holding onto housing and fleeing domestic violence. Advocates for cash transfers argue they could be more efficient than aid programs that waste money administering rules that supposedly protect the government from being hoodwinked by the “undeserving” poor—like food stamps that can buy cold rotisserie chickens, but not hot ones. The punitive mindset that makes traditional welfare systems so unwieldy is also the reason guaranteed income hasn’t gained more of a foothold. Because even a slight rise in income can disqualify someone from receiving a wide array of public benefits, poor households considering enrolling in a GI program are often forced to choose between a cushion of cash or other income, health, or housing benefits—they can’t have both. Not only can that leave desperate people locked out of extra help, it has made the purported administrative advantages of the GI model harder to prove. Among the many experiencing this guaranteed income dilemma is Portia, who was in high school in Flint, Michigan, estranged from her mother and bouncing between homes, when an autoimmune disease struck. The steroids doctors prescribed broke down her spine, leaving her in agony and paralyzed below the waist. She couldn’t manage the service jobs—Kohl’s, Walmart, McDonald’s—she’d come to rely on. It took a lawyer and more than a year before she was approved for the federal low-income disability benefits known as Supplemental Security Income (SSI). Now a 27-year-old mother of a toddler and an infant, Portia, who asked that her real name not be used out of fear she could lose her $936 monthly check, says SSI barely covers their expenses—subsidized rent, clothes and diapers, medication, and groceries beyond what she buys with her meager SNAP benefits. Some months, it’s not enough, and her fridge runs empty. Last year, Portia signed up for Rx Kids, a budding guaranteed income program in Flint giving $1,500 to expectant mothers, plus another $500 per month for the year after birth, with no work requirements or rules about other income. The goal of the program’s founders, prominent Flint pediatrician Dr. Mona Hanna and Luke Shaefer, a University of Michigan poverty researcher, was to combat “the lifelong consequences of early adversity.” But the federal government doesn’t make handing cash to young mothers like Portia easy. Social Security would consider each $500 from Rx Kids income, triggering a nearly equal reduction in her monthly SSI. If Portia managed to save more than $2,000 of the money, she could be cut loose from the disability program altogether. But she couldn’t afford to think that far ahead. “If I wouldn’t have taken the $500, that would have been another two weeks before I was able to put anything in my refrigerator,” she told me. “These are the decisions that people are forced to make.” Guaranteed income programs do their best to compensate. In Jackson, Mississippi, a program called Magnolia Mother’s Trust gives Black mothers living in subsidized housing $1,000 per month for up to a year, knowing that, after the state reduces other benefits like food assistance, it nets out at more like $700. “We do $1,000 a month because we wanted to make sure that we were doing good without harm,” says Aisha Nyandoro, the program’s founder. The problem has been around since at least the early 1970s, when the federal government funded a series of “income maintenance” experiments in Seattle and Denver. Researchers were puzzled by the fact that, even though the programs offered more money than what was available through welfare, eligible residents passed. Why? Those who signed up not only lost other benefits, but their subsidized rents were raised, too. The program secured waivers from relevant agencies so participants could keep their benefits, but only after enacting a tangle of rules to prevent families from deliberately or accidentally double-dipping, creating a situation in which they could not receive public benefits and the income maintenance payments in the same month. The result was a frustrating and time-­consuming ad hoc bureaucracy. > The federal government doesn’t make handing cash to young mothers like Portia > easy. Some federal agencies and states have taken notice of the problem: The Department of Housing and Urban Development recently stopped counting up to a year of GI payments when calculating rental assistance, and last year started looking into using cash transfers to replace its cumbersome Section 8 housing vouchers. According to Shaefer, the Rx Kids program, recognizing the lessons from Seattle and Denver, worked with Michigan officials to waive income caps for state-run benefits like child care and energy assistance. Despite these creatively structured pilots, researchers have found it difficult to properly study the potential of cash transfers to deliver public aid at scale. Stacia West, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Guaranteed Income Research, is coordinating a study of 35 GI pilots with roughly 20,000 participants nationwide. “We have the biggest dataset in the world of guaranteed income recipients,” West told me. But people on SSI, for example, more than half of whom have no other income, rarely opt into these studies for fear of losing their benefits, and West says they’re largely absent from the data. “I can’t research anything about how this may impact folks who are experiencing homelessness, veterans who might be on these benefits due to disability. All of these subpopulations that are impacted by a disability that would prevent them from being able to work are not included.” West says the signal of GI’s efficiency often gets lost in the noise of the broader social safety net. Guaranteed income pilots are generally temporary, only running a year or two, and once the cash stops, participants often have to recertify their eligibility for benefits. Welfare agencies spend time calculating how much they overpaid guaranteed income recipients, then spend more clawing the money back. All this red tape around GI efforts makes studying their net cost difficult, but it’s not clear that even reams of definitive data would matter. For all their talk of shrinking unnecessary bureaucracy, neither the Trump administration’s DOGE hatchet squad nor its allies in Congress seem interested in reducing administrative burdens in the welfare system. This past winter, Republican lawmakers weighed making it even more difficult to get public benefits by subjecting more SSI recipients to financial scrutiny and adding restrictions on their behavior—like disqualifying truant kids and people with outstanding felony warrants. “All of these things would really burden [Social Security Administration] staff to implement, and at a time when they’re having trouble answering the phones,” says Kathleen Romig, who studies Social Security policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “Democrats and Republicans alike scream out for the need to simplify SSI,” says former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who served as Social Security Administration commissioner in the Biden administration. “Yet those same congresspeople want to make it harder than hard for anybody to stay on SSI.” The Social Security Administration can, in some cases, act on its own. Last fall, Rx Kids appealed to the agency to update its regulations so that payments like theirs would not put recipients’ SSI benefits at risk—in essence, to ensure someone like Portia could keep both food in her fridge and clothes on her children. O’Malley was all for it. “We were on our way to putting forward regulations that would make clear the fact that you don’t want [SSI], a program that helps the poorest of the poor, helping them less because they happen to live in a state where legislators, in their compassion, decide that they should receive more,” O’Malley told me. Romig, temporarily working at the agency, was helping iron out details. Then the election happened, O’Malley soon resigned, and the effort to accommodate guaranteed income evaporated. “We were so close,” Romig says.

On July 24, President Donald Trump issued an executive order for a nationwide push to involuntarily commit unhoused people to institutions—claiming that roundups would “restore public order,” and demanding the reversal of legal precedents and consent decrees that “impede” the policy, a draconian move that disability rights groups argue violates civil liberties. The resultant crackdown in Washington, DC—where an estimated 5,000 people live without permanent shelter, around 800 on the street—began on August 14. DC’s largest encampment was destroyed on Monday, and although it’s unclear how many people have been civilly committed, the sweep has left unhoused people scrambling to find new places to stay, often losing the few possessions they have. Dr. Sam Tsemberis, who developed the evidence-based Housing First approach Trump has abandoned, spoke to my Reveal colleagues last week about the futility and violence of the White House’s crackdown. “People will get discharged from the hospital. They will get released from the jail. And they’ll be back out on the street and the thing will be going in a circle again,” Tsemberis said. “The only way to end homelessness is to provide housing.” Trump has always backed brutal crackdowns on visible homelessness and disability, part of a lifelong pattern of hostility to poor people, disgust for disabled people, obsession with “good genes” and cleanliness, and a sense of Washington, DC—until fairly recently, a majority Black city—as a somehow fundamentally unsavory, unsightly place. His encampment sweeps and ramp-up of policing mirror familiar scenes in the San Francisco Bay Area, where an influx of wealth has sparked a major housing crisis, intense economic inequality, and public hostility towards the growing ranks of homeless locals. > “Disability has always functioned as a rationale, an alibi, an excuse, and a > bottom line for all kinds of oppression.” In fact, there’s a throughline from San Francisco to Trump’s anti-disability, anti-homeless agenda: as far back as 1867, San Francisco was the epicenter of a spate of “Ugly Laws,” a legislative crackdown on poverty and disability that closely parallels the Trump program on housing and institutionalization. Sparked in part by an influx of disabled Civil War veterans, ugly laws fined and enforced the arrest of poor, often disabled people for begging, or just existing, on city streets—often followed by institutionalization in brutal 19th-century facilities that offered little or nothing in the way of treatment. Ugly laws quickly spread across the country, and never entirely went away. Pushes to police, incarcerate, or drive out unhoused and disabled people have been a constant in American life—and hardly just a Republican thing, with high-profile Democratic politicians like California Gov. Gavin Newsom or New York Mayor Eric Adams prominently endorsing encampment sweeps and forced institutionalization. To understand more about the Ugly Laws and their legacy, I spoke with University of California, Berkeley professor emeritus Susan Schweik, who is also the author of the book The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public. What societal issues contributed to the first Ugly Law in San Francisco in 1867? Let me first say that we know about this law because of the disability movement in the 1970s. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Helen Keller were never going to get arrested under this ordinance, which prohibited diseased, maimed, deformed bodies from exposing themselves to public view. It was a status offense. This law was directed against poor people. It’s extremely important to understand it as part of a big cluster of vagrancy laws that were being practiced in the South after the Civil War, and that US northern abolitionists who went down to fight slavery, unfortunately, saw the effectiveness of the vagrancy law in the South was being used to substitute for slavery. Abolitionists brought that back up to the cities in the north, which were under all kinds of pressure. People no longer knew the people they passed on the street. Streets were crowded. Poverty was extreme. There were no safety nets. So it targeted poor people. It targeted poor people who were begging, or who were understood to be begging and disability. Being disabled on the street at all could be construed as begging; whether you were putting a hand out or shaking a cup or saying anything to anyone, it was possible to be understood as asking for people’s pity. What types of punishments did poor, disabled people face under the Ugly Laws?  At some point, I realized that if I could figure out when a city opened its first almshouse or poor house, it was quite likely that the unsightly begging ordinance would happen, because they had a place to sweep people off the street. Once big medicalized institutions for the so-called feeble-minded [were established], then it’s easier for a city to pass a law like this without somehow feeling or seeming heartless. It’s very tied to institutionalization and to shutting people away. People were much more likely to be stuck behind those walls for good when it was understood that they were being kind of medically and charitably helped by being given a place. > “Trump, many decades ago, cut his political teeth by trying to shut down > vending stands by disabled veterans on Fifth Avenue.” Very often, the law was unenforced. The police were uncomfortable with it. They didn’t want to do it. A huge thing was sorting out the deserving and the undeserving, and so police often didn’t do it. Even if police did do it, very often, courts didn’t sentence anybody. There’s very little evidence that anybody actually was legally penalized at the level of the municipal courts. [But] that didn’t mean it didn’t have major catastrophic effects. I had thought for a long time that there was no record of resistance by disabled people to this oppression, and I was wrong. There was an amazing man who lived on the street named Arthur Franklin Fuller, who became the hero of my book, who traveled from town to town until he got kicked out. He self-published books, and one of them was like a legal treatise on the unconstitutionality of the unsightly beggar ordinances. I couldn’t believe it when I found it. It wasn’t like people didn’t try to organize. They did. There was an attempt to unionize disabled beggars in LA to negotiate with the city as a union. How did the “othering” of disabled people lead to the Ugly Laws not getting the backlash that it should have? I think the ugly laws were part of a variety of systems and structures, most notably institutionalization. They were tied to the development of various kinds of institutions that were eugenic because they very deliberately removed people from the social world where they might have relationships that might lead to childbearing. Discrimination in the US has always justified itself on disability grounds. The great historian Douglas Baynton makes this very clear in the realm of immigration: when groups are excluded from being able to enter the US, there’s always a language of disability. They’re contagious, they’re feeble-minded, they’re weak, they’re going to be a burden on the state. Disability has always functioned as a rationale, an alibi, an excuse and a bottom line for all kinds of oppression. Women couldn’t vote because they were hysterical and too emotional. Black people were too volatile or cognitively impaired, or whatever term was going to be marshaled at the moment. Donald Trump, many decades ago, cut his political teeth by trying to shut down vending stands by disabled veterans on Fifth Avenue, and he was absolutely explicit about them being repulsive and unsightly. He has a very long line of operating out of that terrorizing repulsion. Did the fight for disability civil rights help lead to the dismantling of the Ugly Laws?  There was a case in the 1970s in Omaha where a policeman wanted to arrest an unhoused person and didn’t know how—so he goes to the ordinance books, finds this [ugly] law, and he’s like, “Oh, that guy has a scar, so I’ll use this.” He goes to court. The judge was like, What does this mean? If my neighbor’s homely kids ask me for something, they should be arrested? Like, what? What is unsightly? Even though the judge threw it out of court, the DA held a press conference and said [it was] still a good law—and then it [was] reported as “Begging law punishes only the ugly.” Disability activists in Omaha read that headline, and working with disability activists in other Midwestern cities, decided that they were going to make a fuss about that law. An April 21, 1974 article from the Omaha World-Herald.Omaha World-Herald/Newspapers.com Chicago disability activists went to their city council as a form of [political] theater, and said this law is still on the books. Nobody was being arrested under it, [but] nobody had ever cared about removing it, and so poor Chicago got a bad rep for being the site of the ugly law, when it really was the site of the activism. So we know everything we know about these laws because of the disability movement in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. It was invoked explicitly in the campaign for the Americans with Disabilities Act. There are books all over the country, city code books, where they’re still sitting. Do you think that Trump’s executive order targeting homeless people with psychiatric disabilities is reminiscent of the Ugly Laws?  Two things that are conjoined in that executive order [are] endemic vagrancy and mental illness, the combination [that] the way in which these unsightly, bigger ordinances got passed after cities had institutions that could be stocked full of people who other people did not want to see on the street. How is endemic vagrancy and unsightly encampment and the presence of what gets called mental illness? How is it going to be tackled by the executive order? It’s going to be tackled by civil commitment, by institutionalization. I think about the important disability advocate and activist Rebecca Cokley, who put out this call and pointed out that people were tending to reduce the possible impact of that executive order to the realm of homelessness or unhoused people or mental health, but that potentially it had a much broader reach. It could target dissent, and that was true of the history of unsightly beggar ordinances. Someone trans could be identified as a mentally ill person. There are so many ways to contain and hurt and banish immigrants, especially Black and brown people, and to disappear them, as Rebecca says. Ugly laws basically disappeared after World War I, because the existence of large numbers of disabled veterans produced rehabilitation and systems that were, at least at in theory, meant to include people in every aspect of society. [But] here we are again. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

With an estimated net worth of $76 million, Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) is one of the top 15 wealthiest members of Congress. On Thursday, Jacobs, the granddaughter of a successful early tech entrepreneur, plans to introduce legislation that would—if enacted—work against her own self-interest. The measure, which she discussed first with Mother Jones, is called the “Leveraging Estate Gains for America’s Children and Youth (LEGACY) Act” and proposes reducing the threshold at which very wealthy families pay taxes on their estates at death. Congressional Republicans recently approved a $30 million minimum exemption for joint filers, meaning they don’t have to pay that tax until the assets being passed down exceed that sum. But Jacobs’s LEGACY Act would lower the threshold to $14 million for joint fillers and designate 15 percent of the increased revenue towards reducing childcare costs to no more than 7 percent of a family’s income. “I think of it as taxing trust-fund kids,” says Jacobs, who identifies as one, “to create a trust fund for all American kids.” Acknowledging that the LEGACY Act “won’t pass” with Republican control of both chambers, she argues that her timing isn’t just performative. Less than a week ago, President Donald Trump signed a sweeping reconciliation package that is expected to strip 3 million Americans from food stamps and cut Medicaid access for 11.8 million people. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent of households will receive an average tax cut of about $66,000, and an estimated $3.4 trillion will be added to the federal deficit over the next 10 years. (Financially speaking, Jacobs says she may benefit from the GOP package, but she still calls the bill “an abomination.”) > “The joke among people I know these days is that you know someone is making > good money if they have a third kid.” The GOP budget bill “cements and worsens income inequality and keeps people trapped in poverty or on the edges of poverty,” she says, “all to give wealthy people and corporations help that they don’t need.” In contrast, her proposed legislation presents an alternative economic playbook in which the wealthiest Americans pay more in taxes “to make sure that every kid has the opportunity to succeed in this country.” “The whole Republican narrative,” Jacobs adds, “is that we have a scarcity of resources. But it’s not actually true. There’s plenty of resources—if we’re willing to actually tax them and use them.” This is not just theoretical, for Jacobs, but personal. Her self-made billionaire grandfather, Irwin Jacobs, founded Qualcomm, a company that pioneered wireless communications in the 1980s. (The still-profitable company reported total assets above $55 billion in 2024.) Thanks to Qualcomm’s success, the Jacobs family heirs enjoy a sizable estate; decreasing the threshold at which estates are taxed, Jacobs says, would affect the inheritance she or her beneficiaries might receive in the future. Increasing what’s owed to the government via estate taxes could be used for all kinds of government programs, but Jacobs says her bill directs some of the revenue to the childcare industry because of its untenable economic quandary: In 45 states plus Washington, DC, the cost of child care for two children is more than the average mortgage payment. Yet, the median pay for childcare workers is less than $33,000 per year, with many earning below the poverty line.  “It’s too expensive to provide childcare that’s both high quality and affordable for families, while paying providers a living wage,” Jacobs says, “and that’s why the government should step in.” Among adults under 50 who say they are unlikely to have children, Pew Research Center reports that more than two-thirds say a key reason is their concerns about affordability, of which childcare is a major component. Childcare affordability is also a major issue for parents who may be trying to decide whether or not they can afford to have more children. “The joke among people I know these days is that you know someone is making good money if they have a third kid,” says Jacobs. For many families, the cost of childcare for three young children would exceed one parent’s wages, making it more economical for one parent to stay home and do the childrearing.  A growing contingent of conservatives, including Vice President JD Vance, have suggested that mothers should prioritize raising their kids at home over chasing a career. But that perspective is restricted to only some families. In Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, benefits for jobless people and their children were eviscerated. “Republicans can’t decide if they hate people who are getting support, who aren’t working more, or if they want mothers to stay home more,” says Jacobs. “And so instead, we get bad policies.”

On March 31, the Social Security Administration will cease allowing people to confirm their identity over the phone when enrolling or changing their bank information, according to a memo obtained by journalist Judd Legum’s Popular Information. The policy change means that anyone who cannot confirm their identity independently online will have to appear in person, a shift framed as minor but likely to harm a large number of the program’s approximately 70 million beneficiaries. The move came as Elon Musk continues to claim—without providing any evidence—that there is a sweeping Democratic conspiracy to orchestrate supposed benefits fraud among noncitizens. This is not the only move that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has taken to undermine the Social Security Administration and the disabled and aging adults who need its services. DOGE is, among other things, closing 10 of the agency’s field offices throughout the country, which will compel some of those users drive up to 100 miles for appointments—like the in-person appearances the agency’s new phone rules would entail. SSA also plans to terminate 7,000 workers, around 12 percent of its workforce.  > Retirees of color are more likely to rely on Social Security as their sole > source of income. Last week, 13 senators—including Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.)—sent a letter to their colleague, Finance Committee Chairman Sen. Michael Dean Crapo (R-Idaho), urging him to hold a hearing on Musk’s attacks on Social Security. “At a time when the agency’s workforce is at a 50-year low,” the letter reads, the potential loss of centuries’ worth of agency experience will risk worsening backlogs, lengthening wait times, and interrupting benefit payments,” the senators wrote.  Advocates say that the changes will have a greater impact on aging adults living in rural areas, who are less likely to have steady internet service. The Affordable Connectivity Program, launched in 2021 under the Biden administration to ease the cost burden of internet use, ended in June 2024; moreover, not all older adults have access to a smartphone and computer, or the ability to use them unaided for sensitive, high-stakes tasks like identity checks. Pew Research Center reports that 61 percent of aging adults, defined as people 65 and older, have a smartphone; 44 percent, likely with some overlap, have a computer. There are also reasons to believe that Trump and Musk’s attacks on Social Security will disproportionately impact retirees of color. According to the National Academy of Social Security Insurance, retirees of color are more likely to rely on Social Security as their sole source of income in comparison to white retirees—a consequence of being more likely to have jobs that don’t contribute to retirement funds or provide pensions, and of being less likely to have generational wealth. “Adding additional barriers such as discontinuing some phone services, imposing new online requirements, and closing field offices will harm low-income older adults of color disproportionately,” Tracy Gronniger, managing director of economic security at advocacy group Justice in Aging, said in a statement to Mother Jones. “When Social Security is your sole source of income, losing even one month of benefits can lead to hunger, poor health, and housing precarity.” According to research from the National Equity Alliance, people of color across different income levels are also less likely to have access to a car, making it more difficult to travel between cities (or even within a city with less-than-robust public transit) to get to a Social Security Administration office for identity verification—none of which appears to be of any concern to Musk.

One day about 10 years ago, Alicia Mitchell-Mercer experienced one of those moments that change the course of a person’s life. She was a longtime paralegal in Charlotte, North Carolina, working for a consulting company that helps law firms with project management. In the lobby of a client firm that day, she overheard a troubling conversation. A receptionist was explaining the firm’s rates to a caller who was clearly in distress. Ray (a pseudonym) was a single father and fast-food manager with three girls between the ages of 7 and 12. His estranged common-law wife, struggling with addiction, had moved in with a man who’d done prison time. Ray had heard she was planning to leave town with him and take the kids, and he was desperate to prevent it. Despite the urgency of his situation, the receptionist was telling Ray the firm would be unable to help—he couldn’t afford their fees. Mitchell-Mercer reached out to Ray. It turned out he’d already been to the sheriff’s office and had consulted with a court advocate. Both said he needed an emergency custody order—and a lawyer. She knew how to help him, but she couldn’t do it on her own. Laws in all 50 states forbid what’s known as “unauthorized practice of law.” UPL statutes generally preclude the provision of legal services by nonlawyers, even old hands like Mitchell-Mercer, who, in addition to her decades as a paralegal, has served in state and national legal organizations and volunteered as a court-appointed child guardian. For Ray, she found a workaround. On her own time, she ghostwrote a complaint and had an attorney she knew review it. Ray filed the complaint as an unrepresented litigant and got his emergency order. But by the time his daughters were located, several weeks after Mitchell-Mercer reached out, the girls were living in another state and said they’d been assaulted and sexually abused. Mitchell-Mercer dreads to imagine how much worse things might have been had she not intervened. “This man had gone to everyone under the sun to try and get help and wasn’t able to,” she said. “That was one of the first times I realized how broken things were.”   With that realization, she would soon find herself drawn into an unusual coalition of left-leaning academics, grassroots activists, and libertarian lawyers, all striving to democratize civil legal services by suing states, including her own, to roll back their UPL laws. Strange bedfellows, to be sure, but their timing is impeccable. As the pendulum swings in favor of deregulation, even some progressive politicians and traditional fans of zealous government oversight have cast a skeptical eye on overbearing restrictions, like the zoning and environmental codes that are thwarting construction of desperately needed housing and clean energy projects. Depending on whom you ask, if Mitchell-Mercer and her allies can put their arguments before the Supreme Court, they could either smash barriers that have left millions of Americans helpless against abusive partners, bad landlords, and heartless corporations or usher in a bonanza of poverty predation—or both. Either way, their efforts have the potential to change the legal landscape profoundly.       The failings of America’s criminal justice system are common knowledge, but our civil legal system, which affects even more people, is no less compromised—and there’s no civil equivalent to the Sixth Amendment’s right to counsel in criminal cases. A 2022 report from the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), a nonprofit that Congress established during the 1970s to fund free civil legal aid for the poor, notes that “low-income Americans do not get any or enough legal help for 92 percent of their substantial civil legal problems.” More than 70 percent of low-income families encounter at least one such issue a year, the LSC reports. As in Ray’s case, these are often true emergencies—domestic violence, eviction, predatory debt collection—with life-altering stakes. A 2018 study found, for example, that tenants facing eviction in the Minneapolis area were four to five times more likely to be forcibly removed from their home if they lacked legal representation. But lawyers charge around $300 an hour on average, putting their services out of reach for even much of the middle class. State legal aid organizations, meanwhile, are independent nonprofits and, despite some government support, are badly underfunded. In Mitchell-Mercer’s home state, there is only one Legal Aid attorney for every 8,000 eligible people—those with annual household income of no more than $39,000 for a family of four (125 percent of the federal poverty level). The National Center for Access to Justice ranked North Carolina the third-worst state for access to civil attorneys—only Mississippi and South Dakota scored lower. About half of its counties are legal deserts, with fewer than one lawyer per 1,000 residents.       This dearth of affordable representation affects communities of color disproportionately, and Mitchell-Mercer, who is Black, is regularly approached by members of her church. A woman needs assistance getting a restraining order. A family facing eviction doesn’t know how to respond to court papers. The immediate solutions are often straightforward—a matter of properly filing standard legal documents—and well within her realm of expertise. But even such minimal assistance is verboten. In theory, the UPL laws are in the public interest—conceived, in part, to protect people from predatory charlatans and incompetent practitioners. But they’re also the primary mechanism by which lawyers maintain their monopoly on legal advice. Even as Americans have grown used to receiving basic medical care from physician assistants and nurse practitioners—including diagnoses, treatment, and prescriptions—UPL rules ensure that no equivalents exist for legal services. Most of the statutes are extremely broad, encompassing everything from giving legal advice to drafting documents and appearing in court. They are vigilantly policed by the state bars, and violating them exposes nonlawyers like Mitchell-Mercer to sanctions, even including jail time. Which is why, when someone comes to her for help, there’s often little she can do.       To a degree unmatched by other professions, American law is a self-governing fiefdom. There are no federal rules for lawyers. Officially, state supreme courts act as industry overseers, but as a practical matter, regulation is largely delegated to state bars. These are the licensing bodies that lawyers join upon passing the bar exam, as opposed to bar associations, which are professional groups. State bars determine not only who may practice law but what constitutes that practice—including tasks that people without a law degree are quite capable of handling.      Stanford law professor Nora Freeman Engstrom and researcher James Stone trace the current regime back to the 1930s, when bar associations launched a fusillade of litigation against unions, homeowners associations, and auto clubs that provided legal services to members, accusing them of violating incipient UPL laws. “In state after state,” Engstrom and Stone wrote in the Yale Law Journal, the bar associations prevailed, eliminating competition and decimating “a once-thriving system for the provision of group legal services to ordinary Americans.”     The industry’s evolution over the past half-century has only made access to lawyers more exclusive, said James Sandman, a Penn Law School lecturer and former LSC president. In 1973, less than half of law firm revenue came from corporate clients, as opposed to individuals; by 2023, the figure was nearly 75 percent. “They’re going after the clients that can afford to pay,” Sandman said. “Individuals who don’t have lawyers have to navigate an unbelievably complicated, opaque system designed by lawyers for lawyers.” He continued, “But the image people have of what goes on in a courtroom, where both parties have lawyers arguing facts on behalf of their clients, is a fiction in more than three-quarters of civil cases.” > “I’m not going to jail for you or anybody else,” says a social worker who > helps with visitation and custody issues at a free legal clinic. “People say, > ‘What would you do?’ Well, I can’t tell you.” The legal industry fiercely resists incursions onto its turf. In response to a 2008 proposal to loosen UPL restrictions in Washington, the state bar association claimed the move would create “second class, separate but unequal, justice” and deprive less-affluent lawyers of work. The North Carolina bar issued a cease-and-desist letter that year to LegalZoom, saying the tech firm’s document-creation service violated UPL law. (The company, which has faced similar challenges elsewhere—most recently in New Jersey—then sued the North Carolina bar and later settled, agreeing to have lawyers vet all of its documents.) Meanwhile, a 2015 proposal to relax California’s UPL rules would, one foe argued, be “detrimental to the honest attorneys who are trying to make a living.” But the image of a general-practice lawyer hanging a shingle on Main Street is largely a relic of the past. Today’s median lawyerly income is roughly $150,000, and law is increasingly a business of corporate specialists. From 2013 to 2023, the number of lawyers working at firms that have more than 500 attorneys increased by 36 percent. The bar’s proposed solutions to the affordability crisis—increasing legal aid funding and expanding pro bono requirements—are woefully inadequate. “Providing even one hour of attorney time to every American household facing a legal problem would cost on the order of $40 billion,” legal scholars Gillian Hadfield and Deborah Rhode wrote in 2016—almost 30 times the overall legal aid expenditures in 2013. To provide even this minimal level of counsel, they calculated, every licensed attorney in the United States would have to clock more than 200 pro bono hours a year. To make a dent in the problem, legal aid organizations would need a massive increase in support. Last year, Congress approved only $560 million for the Legal Services Corporation, about a third of its budget request. And even if LSC were fully funded, lots of low-income litigants would be stuck on the sidelines. Those who are ineligible for financial or other reasons, and who can’t find other pro bono legal help, are left to navigate a patchwork of free clinics and courthouse services that vary greatly in quantity and quality. Concentrated in urban areas, these clinics are generally staffed by nonlawyers who cannot offer clients any actual legal advice.  Daniel Stolle On a recent morning at a courthouse in downtown Raleigh, employees of the Wake County Legal Support Center were helping people fill out standard forms and offering instructions on how to serve court papers. The center, one of the few of its kind in North Carolina, opened in January 2023. A local judge had estimated that 2,000 people might use it each year. In 2024, it served almost 14,000.  Seated at a long plastic table, a court advocate who specializes in domestic violence issues was especially busy. “Does she have a concealed carry permit?” she asked a bearded Black man in an orange construction shirt and mud-caked boots. The man shook his head. He was filing for an emergency protective order against his partner for himself and his child. Still, he said, “she could tweak out at any moment.” He left the center visibly relieved, an envelope of completed forms tucked under his arm. But the two young women who came next couldn’t decide how to proceed. They wanted the advocate to advise them, but she wasn’t allowed. Both left empty-handed.    This happens all the time, Norma Boyd, who was sitting at an adjacent table, told me. Boyd, a veteran social worker whom everyone calls Ms. Norma, handles questions about child custody and visitation. Often, she said, people have difficulty understanding basic legal terms. “I ask, ‘Are you the plaintiff or the defendant?’ They don’t know.” Even if they file initial paperwork, their cases are frequently dismissed when, without further guidance, they miss follow-up steps such as serving documents and filing certificates of service. For people without an attorney, the courtroom is an intensely frustrating, alienating place. “I felt like this street rat showing up to a cocktail party uninvited, and everybody knows what’s going on except me,” one North Carolinian who’d represented himself in a custody trial against a lawyered-up former partner told me. Boyd, with her proximity to family law, often knows perfectly well what the center’s clients ought to do. But “I’m not going to jail for you or anybody else,” she said. “People say, ‘What would you do?’ Well, I can’t tell you. I tell people, ‘These are your options.’ People want you to tell them what to do, and I can’t.”       Mitchell-Mercer’s quest to reform the system took shape in 2020, when she and another paralegal, S.M. Kernodle-Hodges, founded a nonprofit called the North Carolina Justice for All Project. They were inspired by policy changes in a handful of other states, notably Arizona, Utah, and Washington, that permit nonlawyers who’ve undergone special licensing programs to provide limited legal assistance. In Utah, they can work on family law matters, including domestic abuse, child custody, and divorce, plus eviction and debt collection cases. In Arizona, they can handle certain criminal and juvenile law issues. In both states, they can give advice; review, draft, sign, and file documents; and accompany clients to court. (Similar programs are now under consideration in about a half-dozen other states.) Kernodle-Hodges, a former deputy sheriff who calls everyone by their last name—she goes by “Kernodle”—had been thinking about bringing such a program to North Carolina. On a colleague’s recommendation, she reached out to Mitchell-Mercer, who had served a stint in the Army and written her master’s thesis on legal services. They proved a good fit. Kernodle, too, is Black and a court advocate. Both women are extraordinarily disciplined and scheduled to the hilt with professional and volunteer obligations. Both have a precise, punctuated way of speaking and a kind of regal poise. In January 2021, they proposed a program comparable to those in Arizona and Utah to the North Carolina bar. At more than 100 pages, their plan was deeply researched, with rigorous citations. The bar’s Subcommittee Studying Regulatory Change, of which Mitchell-Mercer and Kernodle were members, held a series of meetings and hosted outside experts to vet the proposal. > “When you have this many disparate parties involved, the Supreme Court is > going to have to resolve it…It’s going to be one of the first big economic > regulation cases of our era.”   In January 2022, the subcommittee issued a report fully endorsing it. But the authors weren’t convinced they would get a fair shake. “What we were hearing was that there was some hesitancy to move forward,” Mitchell-Mercer recalled. “Our ideas were getting explained to other bar committees, and not necessarily being well received.” Indeed, the bar went on to create another subgroup, supposedly to address the access question, from which the two women were excluded. When that committee first met, in October 2022, they posted a message to the Justice for All Project’s website: “We are concerned that this new committee was formed solely to appear that state bar leaders are doing something about the access to justice crisis and to appear empathetic to the plight of North Carolinians,” they wrote. And “there is reasonable concern that North Carolina State Bar officers have no serious intention of acting on previously discussed initiatives.”   A prominent lawyer sympathetic to Kernodle and Mitchell-Mercer told them that bar leaders were describing them as “angry and aggressive,” an offensive stereotype. Mitchell-Mercer tried to take it in stride. Kernodle was upset. “Mercer is a look-at-the-bright-side person,” Kernodle explained. “She will give you the very proper language about everything. My thing is: What’d you say?!” But they had been careful not to frame their proposal in racial terms. “No matter how cordial we were, it was still upsetting to them,” Kernodle said. The bar took no further action, in any case. And so, in 2023, the women submitted a similar proposal to the state legislature, backed by more than a dozen legal entities, including the US Department of Justice, whose antitrust division commended their “thoughtful analysis and policy recommendations and looks forward to reviewing any related bills that ultimately are introduced to the North Carolina legislature.” None were forthcoming. Kernodle and Mitchell-Mercer had encouraging talks with several lawmakers, but their proposal, which asserted that UPL laws gave attorneys “no meaningful incentive to provide affordable services,” clearly ruffled some feathers.  Amy Galey, a Republican state senator and an attorney, sent the women a blistering email that March, copying her Republican colleagues: “So you want to create a two-tiered system of legal representation, one of well-educated licensed lawyers for people who can afford them, and a second tier of unlicensed, unregulated people of questionable education for low income people,” she wrote. “If your response would be no, they would be licensed, and we would regulate them, and they would be required to have a certain education—yes we have that already, and they are called attorneys.” She went on: “Your proposal would create an A-team and a B-team…and ultimately solve nothing.” Asked for further comment, Galey replied, “That’s a really good quote, glad I said it, and I don’t have anything to add.” Her message effectively ended the discussion. Kernodle and Mitchell-Mercer heard nothing more from the legislature.         Even as they contemplated defeat, the women were introduced to an unexpected ally, Paul Sherman, a senior attorney with the Institute for Justice, an influential libertarian public-interest law firm. Founded in 1991 as a nonprofit with a $350,000 grant from Charles Koch’s foundation, the IJ now spends about $44 million a year, much of it litigating in federal courts to “protect the constitutional rights of Americans” against what its funders and principals view as regulatory overreach. Professional licensing laws are among the firm’s favorite targets. In Louisiana, Florida, Kentucky, and elsewhere, the IJ has successfully challenged what it argued were onerous licensing laws for engineers, diet coaches, florists, and tour guides. Since the late 2000s, it has increasingly framed professional licensing as a violation of the First Amendment, relying on a series of Supreme Court decisions that eroded the right to limit certain kinds of speech. In one 2015 case, Reed v. Town of Gilbert, the court held that an Arizona town’s attempts to restrict public signage based on its content were unconstitutional. In another, National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra, in 2018, the justices rejected the idea that professional speech and commercial speech enjoy less protection than personal speech. “There’s never been a better time in American history to be litigating free speech cases,” Sherman told me. “The court has adopted a more or less libertarian interpretation of the speech clauses of the First Amendment.” > Without adequate guardrails, “there can be consumer fraud. There can be a > whole variety of issues…We need to be focused on: What’s good for the public?” In January 2024, Sherman filed a First Amendment lawsuit on behalf of the Justice for All Project that challenges the scope of North Carolina’s UPL prohibitions. Naming five local district attorneys and the president of the state bar as defendants, it builds on the IJ’s suit against New York state—where the firm represents a pastor and a legal-tech nonprofit called Upsolve, arguing that they should be able to advise clients battling debt collectors—and a similar case brought by the NAACP in South Carolina that centered on eviction. The Upsolve case is under review by the 2nd Circuit after a lower court issued a preliminary injunction in the nonprofit’s favor, and the South Carolina Supreme Court has granted the NAACP permission to train nonlawyers to provide eviction-related advice.    But the North Carolina claims are substantially broader, asserting the right of nonlawyers to advise clients on a spectrum of issues and charge for their services. This is by design. “The goal is for the Supreme Court to make clear that advice, no matter what the topic, is protected by the First Amendment,” Sherman said.  Legal experts figure this case, or a similar one, has a good shot at getting in front of the high court, and soon. “It’s not going to stop in North Carolina,” said Lucy Ricca, executive director of the Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession at Stanford. “These cases have the potential to blow through” the political morass. “When you have this many disparate parties involved, the Supreme Court is going to have to resolve it,” concurred Dan Rodriguez, a professor at Northwestern Law School. “It’s going to be one of the first big economic regulation cases of our era.”   Sherman acknowledges that taking on the bar is, well, a high bar. “We tried to think of occupations that are composed largely of speech, and of course, one of the first that occurred to us was our own: the practice of law,” he said, but “before we could challenge that system, we had to have some victories involving other occupations to establish the legal principles in a setting that would be less scary to judges.” He now believes the Institute for Justice has the precedents it needs. It doesn’t hurt that at least one Supreme Court justice has expressed displeasure with the status quo. Lawyers “have used the expansive UPL rules they’ve sought and won to combat competition from outsiders seeking to provide routine but arguably ‘legal’ services at low or no cost to consumers,” Neil Gorsuch wrote in a 2016 article. “It seems well past time to reconsider our sweeping UPL prohibitions.”   A Supreme Court ruling favoring the IJ in the North Carolina case could greatly expand access to civil justice for the people whom Mitchell-Mercer and Kernodle aim to help. But even some access-to-justice proponents are wary. If you wipe out all restrictions on providing legal advice, “there’s no logical stopping place,” Northwestern’s Rodriguez told me. That’s part of why more than a dozen civil legal services and rights groups in New York oppose the IJ’s suit there, including Legal Services NYC, the nation’s largest provider of free civil legal assistance. > “When we started making these arguments, people laughed at the idea that the > First Amendment could apply to professional speech…People aren’t laughing at > these arguments anymore.” “Plaintiffs would immediately relegate low-income New Yorkers, including low-income New Yorkers of color, to receiving questionable legal advice,” the groups wrote in an amicus brief. “The consequences,” they argue, “can be disastrous.” Incompetent legal guidance could pave the way for “creditors and debt collectors to secure an unaffordable settlement agreement or an easy judgment that they can then use to freeze bank accounts and garnish wages.” Critics also fear that artificial intelligence would unleash a firehose of dubious counsel. Without adequate guardrails, “there can be consumer fraud. There can be a whole variety of issues,” Andrew Perlman, the dean of Suffolk University Law School, told me. It’s not hard to imagine entrepreneurs akin to payday lenders and skeezy tax preparers opening outlets in low-income neighborhoods to peddle legal help. “We need to be focused on: What’s good for the public?” Perlman said. The fact that Sherman’s group takes money from dynasties like the Kochs and the DeVoses doesn’t exactly ease liberals’ concerns. “Open their books and it’s a cornucopia of ProPublica’s worst nightmares!” Rodriguez quipped. “There are going to be people drafting on these sympathetic plaintiffs, looking for economic advantage. You think you’re protecting access to justice, but actually, you’re feeding the Koch brothers’ wildest fever dreams!”   Hadfield, who teaches at Johns Hopkins University and is an influential voice on the access issue, is skeptical of the First Amendment framing. “I don’t think that [just] anybody should be able to say anything to anybody about legal matters,” she told me, and merely empowering competent nonlawyers to provide advice isn’t enough, given the scope of the problem. She dreams of a future in which large nonprofits and businesses harness technology, including AI, to furnish reliable, ethical, low-cost legal assistance on a massive scale. Many academics who study civil legal access share a similar vision. You could have Amazon get in on the act, and also retailers like Walmart, whose customers might one day obtain a simple will or even a divorce while picking up their prescriptions. “We’re worried about the impact of these companies in communities, but they’re also just better at serving consumers than lawyers are,” said Stanford’s Ricca. “Lawyers think we’re really, really special—a privileged class. But we’re just not serving regular people anymore.” Qualms aside, Hadfield does hope the First Amendment cases succeed, “because we need to break open a very, very harmful set of practices: this stranglehold that the legal bar has.” There’s no evidence that litigants have been harmed in the states that have relaxed UPL rules, she added—and a scorched-earth approach may well be a necessary first step in creating a more equitable and thoughtfully regulated industry.             The Justice for All Project hit a snag in December, when a federal judge dismissed its case. The court ruled that North Carolina’s UPL statutes regulate “conduct”—the practice of law—with only “an incidental impact on speech,” and thus do not violate the First Amendment. The decision relied, in part, on a recent appellate ruling against another IJ client, a drone photography company that North Carolina targeted for the “unlicensed practice of land surveying.” The December ruling is “disappointing but not surprising,” Sherman told me, arguing that both decisions clearly misapply Supreme Court precedent. He is appealing the Justice for All case while the high court considers whether to review the drone case. For Sherman, both losses are merely temporary setbacks: “We’ve been litigating these cases for 15 years. What’s amazing is when we started making these arguments, people laughed at the idea that the First Amendment could apply to professional speech. The Supreme Court agreed with us. People aren’t laughing at these arguments anymore.” Mitchell-Mercer, too, was skeptical of Sherman’s strategy at first. “I had never thought of this as a First Amendment issue,” she told me. But she’s come around, even adopting some of the language of her libertarian allies. “People should be trusted to know that they’re gonna get what they pay for,” she said. “Prohibiting people from even having a conversation is almost a weaponizing of paternalism. Telling people that we’re going to control who you can talk to about your issue, who you can hear from, is not benefiting the public. It benefits the lawyers.” 

For all the talk of a new class-conscious GOP, the Republican Party sounded much like its old self when, in December, Vivek Ramaswamy laid out the mission of the nascent Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). “Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security,” Ramaswamy complained. “The dirty little secret is that many of those entitlement dollars aren’t even going to people who they were supposed to.” There it is again: “entitlement” reform. Drawing from his own presidential campaign pitch, Ramaswamy urged Donald Trump to deploy DOGE as a beachhead in a war on spending, arguing for using executive powers to slash “wasteful” federal expenditures without congressional approval. (Although Ramaswamy has since departed—reportedly rather messily—as co-lead to run for Ohio governor, President Trump officially established the temporary entity within the White House on Monday through one of his many day-one executive orders.) DOGE apes the language of a Silicon Valley slide deck, but it has so far presented little more than a memeified version of well-trodden right-wing austerity politics. Ramaswamy and Elon Musk—now DOGE’s sole leader—have pushed cuts in the corporate speak of “efficiency.” But what they offer makes little sense. Musk has talked of slashing $2 trillion. How would such a change not destroy programs Trump has promised not to kill? The billionaire does not have an answer, later backtracking his goal to consider $1 trillion to be “an epic outcome.” > “Entitelements” originally had a much different meaning. Musk has offered the same logic that undergirded past calls for cuts: Tough love is good for the poor. He agreed in an October town hall on X that Trump’s policies would deliver “temporary hardship” but “ensure long-term prosperity.” Here, he sounds much like former House Speaker Paul Ryan, whose Path to Prosperity budgets proposed scaling back Medicare and Medicaid and repealing the Affordable Care Act to offset tax cuts for the wealthy, and like former Rep. Matt Gaetz, who said in 2023 that he did not “think hard-working Americans should be paying for all the social services” of “couch potatoes.” Entitlements originally had a different meaning. When Franklin D. Roosevelt adopted Social Security in 1935, the program was pitched as “social insurance,” one that Americans “earned” and were “entitled” to. But Republicans have flipped that meaning by associating these programs with notions of dependence: lazy people asking for handouts—an “entitled” culture. This argument traces back centuries, but the core of the discourse came during the New Deal and its aftermath. In the 2019 book Free Enterprise: An American History, professor Lawrence B. Glickman recounted how Roosevelt’s critics divided the country into “productive makers” and “unproductive takers.” As opposed to the early labor movements of the 1800s, wherein “makers” were workers and “takers” were business owners, free-market proponents “turned an image of class warfare on its head.” In this view, anti–New Dealers claimed taxation as theft. “The affluent declared themselves the victims” who were forced to support welfare, Glickman wrote. The 1960s solidified anti-entitlement ideas amid a backlash to the civil rights movement, notes Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. “By 1967, most of the stories about welfare and the poor were illustrated with pictures of Black people,” she told me. This laid the groundwork for Ronald Reagan to huff in 1987 that “millions of Americans became virtual wards of the state” through government assistance. The party has continually found rhetoric to suggest poor people are to blame for each new crisis. When the Tea Party took over the GOP, a key frustration was that “taxpayers” were supporting a population of the unworthy. Mitt Romney almost rode a similar “47 percent” sentiment to the White House. This “free enterprise” mindset has assumed strange textures as venture capitalists take the vanguard of the GOP. Tech billionaire Marc Andreessen pointed to the New Deal as Roosevelt’s “personal monarchy.” We need a Caesar-like CEO in Trump, he said, to undo FDR’s grasp. Given the upper crust’s latest New Deal backlash, the left’s challenge goes far beyond lawsuits against DOGE—it is how to revert “entitlements” back to its original meaning. In Williamson’s view, mainstream liberals have failed to show how government is good. Progressives, she says, need to start promoting a different version of government “efficiency.” Namely, the adoption of policies that better the lot of regular people and protect them from the excessively rich and self-entitled DOGE boosters.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. As the Los Angeles area fires rage on, tens of thousands of people are left displaced. Those who lost homes to the flames are scrambling to find new or temporary housing, but face a massive barrier: Many listing prices on the market have shot up—by a lot.  Last Tuesday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency, which bans any rent increase above 10 percent for the period of the crisis. But a number of news reports found this week that asking rents for homes have skyrocketed across Los Angeles County—sometimes by as much as 86 percent. With focus on a new wind and fire threat issued for today, government enforcement of “price gouging” could be problematic.  Jacking up the rent to meet surging demands is a common and often illegal practice after climate-fueled disasters like fires and hurricanes. For Los Angeles specifically, a fire-squeezed and pricey rental market could exacerbate an existing housing crisis and further widen the gap between the rich and poor in the city, experts say.  In September, a furnished, four-bedroom home in the ritzy LA neighborhood Bel Air was listed at $15,900 per month on the online real-estate marketplace Zillow. On Saturday morning, as firefighters struggled to contain the still-burning Palisades fire a few miles away, the same home was relisted for $29,500, LAist discovered.  When the news outlet asked the listing agent about why the advertised rent for the Bel Air home had surged, “she said she was getting another call and hung up,” LAist’s David Wagner wrote. The listing was later taken down. But it’s far from the only instance in which a landlord or agency is looking to profit off the city’s fire-fueled housing plight. A New York Times’ analysis of Zillow active rental listings revealed that several property rental prices in West Los Angeles have risen by more than the legal 10 percent since last Tuesday.  Officials are asking people to report any instances of price gouging to the California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office. In a press conference on Saturday, Bonta warned that the practice is “a crime punishable by up to a year in jail and fines.” Research shows that housing changes often extend beyond the affected area of a city as people try to avoid future fires. For example, after the Camp fire decimated the northeastern California town of Paradise in 2018, a mass exodus of survivors flooded the nearby town of Chico, nearly doubling its population of 92,000. One year later, the median asking rent for a two-bedroom home was 25 percent higher on average, NBC News reports.  The same thing often happens after hurricanes. A 2023 study analyzing 19 eastern and coastal states from 2009 to 2018 found that the occurrence of a hurricane in a given year or the previous year reduces overall affordable rental housing, especially for counties with higher percentages of people of color. Experts stress that renters can be more vulnerable than people who own homes because they are less likely to have adequate insurance or qualify for as much immediate financial assistance from the government after a storm.  “[It’s] the fundamental sin in our disaster policy in this country, that everything is based on property and possession,” Carlos Martín, a housing and climate researcher at Harvard University, told NPR in July. “It compounds these differences between the landed-gentry haves and the rest of the country that are have-nots.” Since 1960, the Los Angeles metropolitan area’s population has nearly doubled from more than 6 million to over 12 million today. But housing availability is lagging behind: LA had a shortage of about 337,000 homes as of 2022, according to data from Zillow.  Journalist Jireh Deng wrote for Inside Climate News last week about how housing policies have encouraged development in hillsides and mountains to fill some of the gaps, which put people directly in fire-vulnerable areas and made it difficult for emergency responders to access certain areas quickly.  The fires did not discriminate between high- or low-income neighborhoods in LA, damaging or destroying celebrity homes and affordable housing complexes alike. However, recovery will undoubtedly look different for those who were already struggling to manage in one of the most expensive cities in the US. In the short term, Airbnb’s nonprofit wing and a local nonprofit group, 211 LA, are coordinating free temporary housing for displaced people, while some hotels are offering discounted stays.  But people who lost their homes are currently facing a tough decision: to stay and try to rebuild or leave the city altogether. Experts say the fires will likely trigger a surge in homelessness. While some people may be able to afford a new house, the impending rise of insurance costs in the wake of the LA fires could make home ownership too much of a stretch for many.   On Monday, Gov. Newsom proposed $2.5 billion in additional funding for emergency response efforts and to help kickstart recovery in LA, though President-elect Donald Trump and a group of House Republicans have discussed tying wildfire aid conditionally to a debt ceiling increase agreement in Congress.  It’s difficult to know how LA’s housing crisis will play out as the fires rage on and threaten to wreak even more havoc across the distressed city. The impacts will likely endure for years, experts say.  “A lot of people were barely scraping by, and this will push more people over the edge,” Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Columbia Climate School, said in a post on the university’s website. “For most people, the recovery doesn’t take weeks or months. It can take years and sometimes even decades for communities to recover.” 

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalized a rule on Tuesday that will bar medical debt from being included in credit scores. Medical debt impacts people’s ability to qualify for home mortgages, car loans, and even renting. The rule will go into effect 60 days after it has been published in the Federal Registrar, which has not happened yet. The rule was proposed in June, and there was concern after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election that the Biden administration would not have enough time to finalize it. Such anxieties have been especially acute considering long-held conservative antipathy for the CFPB. Elon Musk has been especially vocal about his desire get rid of the CFPB. “Today, we are building on this meaningful work by announcing an unprecedented final rule that will make it so medical debt is no longer included in your credit score,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in a statement. “This will be life-changing for millions of families, making it easier for them to be approved for a car loan, a home loan, or a small-business loan.” The Trump administration could potentially reverse this move through its own rulemaking process. Collection companies are all but certain to oppose the finalized rule. As the CFPB notes, its rule “will help end the practice of using the credit reporting system to coerce payment of bills regardless of their accuracy.” In other words, it could slow down collections for medical debt, which people may not want to pay off if it is incorrect. Disabled adults are disproportionately impacted by medical debt. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, around one in five families with at least one disabled family member have medical debt, versus one in 10 families without a disabled family member. Given that disabled people are two times more likely to live below the poverty level than non-disabled people, it can be much harder for them to pay off debt. In addition, Black people are 2.6 times more likely to have medical debt than white people. Some states, including California, already have laws that prevent medical debt from being reflected in credit scores. In addition, in July 2022, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion announced that all paid-off medical debt would be excluded from consumer credit reports. This led to the percentage of people with medical debt reflected in their credit scores dropping from over 15 percent to 5 percent. “I know that our historic rule will help more Americans save money, build wealth, and thrive,” Harris concluded in her statement.