Change for America: Domestic Policy
A Progressive Blueprint for the 44th President
Chapters:
Overview:
America’s Changing Demographics, Maria Echaveste and Christopher Edley, Jr.
Overview:
Building a Vibrant Low-Carbon Economy, Bracken Hendricks and Van Jones
Overview:
Health Care Coverage, Costs, Chronic Illness, and Demographics, Karen Davenport
Overview:
Teaching All Our Children Well, Cynthia G. Brown
Overview:
Immigration Reform Can Be Orderly and Fair, Cecilia Munoz
Overview:
Government Transparency in the Age of the Internet, Ellen S. Miller
Overview:
Renewing Our Democracy, Michael Waldman
Department of Justice:
Restoring Integrity and the Rule of Law, Dawn Johnsen
Department of Health and Human Services:
Delivering Efficient and Effective Health Care for All Americans, Jeanne M. Lambrew
(full chapter available here)
Food and Drug Administration:
Protecting Public Health Through Science, Virginia A. Cox
Department of Housing and Urban Development:
Meeting 21st-Century Metropolitan Challenges, Bruce Katz and Henry Cisneros
Department of Education:
Restoring Our Nation’s Commitment to an Equitable Education for All Americans, Judith A. Winston
U.S. Department of Transportation:
Green Reforms for Environmental and Consumer Safety, Joan Claybrook
Environmental Protection Agency:
Restoring Scientific Integrity, Sound Regulation, Fair Enforcement, and Transparency, Carol M. Browner
Department of Agriculture:
Tackling Food and Energy Crises Amid Global Warming, James R. Lyons
Department of the Interior:
Natural Resources Serving Society, John Leshy
Federal Communications Commission:
Preparing the Way for Ubiquitous Broadband, Larry Irving
Federal Trade Commission:
Consumer Protection and Competition for a 21st-Century Economy, Joan Z. Bernstein and Ann Malester
Corporation for National and Community Service:
Supporting Civic Action to Solve America’s Problems, Shirley Sagawa
America’s Changing Demographics
Maria Echaveste and Christopher Edley, Jr.
Overview:
America is constantly redefining itself within a framework of deeply held beliefs that value individual freedoms and a social compact that strives—at its most idealistic—to create opportunity for all. But this model is facing a significant challenge: an increasinglyaging white majority supported by a growing, racially and ethnically diverse ,younger workforce. The question is whether that workforce will have the education, skills, and social safety net required to generate the human capital that America must have to compete successfully in the global economy. The confluence of demography—age, the growing Latino population, and immigration—with political ideology suggests that this will be a challenge. America must overcome its disability from the “color lines” and its obsession with “the other” to ensure our country makes the critical investments needed to ensure that America in the coming decades will lead the world in innovation, creativity, and opportunity.
Maria Echaveste,former assistant and deputy chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, and is a lecturer in residence at UC Berkeley’s School of Law, Boalt Hall. She is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
Christopher Edley, Jr. served in two White House administrations and was a professor at Harvard Law for 23 years. He is dean of UC Berkeley’s School of Law, Boalt Hall.
Building a Vibrant Low-Carbon Economy
Bracken Hendricks and Van Jones
Overview:
Reversing global warming and reducing our crippling dependence on imported and polluting energy present perhaps the greatest chance for the new president. His choices will shape the economic destiny of the nation and the welfare of the planet for generations. The best way to address our climate and energy crises is to build a more prosperous green economy—strong enough to lift millions of Americans out of poverty and into a stronger middle class. We cannot “drill and burn” our way out of our energy, economic, and environmental problems, but we can “invest and invent” our way out. Averting the social and economic disruption of a warming planet will take a major mobilization of public and private investment, driven by smart policy and newfound political will. The benefits of a green economy will be felt broadly in many industries and sectors of the economy, every region of the country, and every country of the world. To realize this opportunity will take a serious early commitment to pass climate legislation, and require a set of complementary energy policies that spur new technology, create new markets, and prepare a clean energy labor force.
Bracken Hendricks, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund working on climate change and energy independence, was a special assistant to Vice President Al Gore and served with the Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Van Jones, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund working on climate change and energy independence, is the founder and president of Green For All; a founding board member of the Apollo Alliance and 1Sky; and author of the bestseller The Green Collar Economy (Harper One, 2008).
Health Care Coverage, Costs, Chronic Illness, and Demographics
Karen Davenport
Few challenges facing the new president and his administration will be as intricately intertwined with American life as those facing the health care system. America’s businesses, workers, and families are deeply affected by exploding health care costs and eroding health coverage. Individuals with chronic illness face daily limitations on their lives, while the cost of their care absorbs a significant portion of our national health care spending. And changes in the makeup of the American population challenge policymakers and health professionals to redouble their efforts to correct inequities in health and health care. These trends of coverage, costs, chronic illness, and changing demographics will occupy the health policy experts of a new administration. Reforms to improve coverage—ideally through expansion of group coverage options paired with financial help for those who cannot afford coverage on their own—are a critical component of cost containment and represent a major opportunity for the new administration. Other strategies include investments in prevention and comparative effectiveness information, improvements in care coordination, and quality and infrastructure initiatives.
Karen Davenport, director of health policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, was a senior program officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and a legislative assistant to Senator Bob Kerrey (D-NE).
Teaching All Our Children Well
Cynthia G. Brown
Overview:
All of America’s young people need a high-quality education to prepare them for the changing needs of our workforce and increasingly intense global economic competition. Yet our public education system continues to fail many of America’s students. Inequality continues to plague our public schools and many children do not get the support and opportunities they need before they start formal schooling. Given the international and domestic challenges that better publicly supported education would help allay, the new administration must increase federal investment in effective programs, redesign those that fall short in meeting their goals, and recommend new programs in important but unaddressed areas. The existing and unmet federal commitments to disadvantaged preschoolers and students in elementary, secondary, and postsecondary education institutions must be honored in the short term. Specifically, the new administration should pursue a new pre-school program to be integrated with Head Start, set standards when an education system should reward teachers with more pay who assume greater responsibilities, make substantial investments in middle schools and high schools with high concentrations of low-performing students, and find ways to increase learning time for all students in low-performing schools.
Cynthia G. Brown, director of education policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, was the first assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education, and has spent over 35 years working in a variety of professional positions addressing high-quality, equitable public education.
Immigration Reform Can Be Orderly and Fair
Cecilia Munoz
Overview:
The new administration will have to contend with the fractious issue of immigration both because the nation’s security—including economic security—depends on a rational immigration system, and because it may be difficult to accomplish any other domestic policy agenda while the immigration problem remains unresolved. In the short term, the 44th president must shift focus away from destructive workplace and neighborhood raids, and focus instead on abusive employers. This shift should be accompanied by an overhaul of the immigration detention infrastructure, an improved process for processing backlogs for visas and naturalization applications, and a renewed commitment to human rights among the leadership at the Department of Homeland Security. Yet long-term change that ensures that immigration to the United States is orderly and legal will require the new president to work closely with Congress to ensure that comprehensive immigration reform is front and center on the legislative agenda.
Cecilia Muñoz, a noted immigration expert, is senior vice president for the Office of Research, Advocacy, and Legislation at the National Council of La Raza.
Government Transparency in the Age of the Internet
Ellen S. Miller
Overview:
The new administration will have the opportunity to embrace government transparency and the potential for citizen engagement offered by the Internet and new communications technologies, making government more open, more responsive, more accountable, and thus more trusted by the American people. Putting online all the public disclosure information that is currently available only to visitors to Washington, D.C., would mark a big change from the culture of secrecy of the Bush administration. The new administration should also expand the amount of data available to the public by working with Congress to reform the Freedom of Information Act and ensure that there are adequate resources to provide the public with information. The new administration should reverse the trend toward the classification of documents; provide timely, accurate information to the public in searchable, sortable, downloadable formats; and require all government agencies to engage the energy of citizens online.
Ellen S. Miller, a noted campaign finance and ethics expert, is co-founder and executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington-based, non-profit catalyst that is using new technology to open up Congress.
Renewing Our Democracy
Michael Waldman
America’s democracy badly needs repair. The new president boasts a tremendous opportunity to tap the energy of the civic surge of 2008, and in so doing reform government policies long stymied by special-interest gridlock. Vital reforms all push toward greater participation. In voting, the new president should lead the fight for universal voter registration, which would add up to 50 million American citizens to the rolls. He should also fix electronic voting and push for public funding of elections, with an emphasis on boosting the power of small contributors. And he can use the bully pulpit to urge the states to curb gerrymandering after the 2010 census and to move to a national popular vote for president.
Michael Waldman, former assistant to the president and director of speechwriting for President Bill Clinton, is the author of several books, including My Fellow Americans and A Return to Common Sense. He is executive director of the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law.
Department of Justice
Restoring Integrity and the Rule of Law
Dawn Johnsen
The Department of Justice must be restored to its fundamental role as a principled enforcer and interpreter of our nation’s laws. From their first days in office, the next president and his attorney general should lead a dramatic change in direction and return DOJ to its best nonpartisan traditions: accurate and principled legal interpretation; executive branch compliance with all applicable legal constraints; a commitment to transparency and accountability to the maximum extent consistent with national security and other vital concerns; respect for Congress and the courts; and vigorous law enforcement efforts untainted by politics. DOJ also should reassess and improve its substantive priorities—in counterterrorism, civil rights, environmental protection, criminal law enforcement, and more—in order to promote an America that is safer and more just.
Dawn Johnsen, former acting assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, was legal director of NARAL and is a professor at the Indiana University School of Law, Bloomington.
Department of Health and Human Services
Delivering Efficient and Effective Health Care for All Americans
Jeanne M. Lambrew
Full chapter available here.
The new president and his new secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services face a difficult but necessary health care challenge—expanding and improving health care for all of us while also working to reduce the cost of that care for individuals, businesses, and the government. Fortunately, these are not contradictory goals. Our health care system is the most expensive but least effective at promoting health in the industrialized world. Making health coverage affordable would expand it, and covering all Americans would, after an up-front investment, reduce system costs. The new president and his HHS secretary can begin to meet our nation’s health care challenge quickly through a series of executive orders and HHS directives, then weigh in with key administrative and legislative reforms in the first year of the new administration, and then implement the long-term policy reforms necessary to deliver cost-effective, efficient, and affordable health care to all Americans.
Jeanne Lambrew, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and an associate professor of public affairs at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. From 1997 to 2000, she worked on health policy at the White House as the program associate director for health at the Office of Management and Budget and as the senior health analyst at the National Economic Council.
Food and Drug Administration
Protecting Public Health Through Science
Virginia A. Cox
American consumers today are understandably skeptical about the safety of their food and medical products, yet the Food and Drug Administration is struggling to keep pace with breakthroughs in science, an expanding global market, and years of underfunding. The new administration can begin restoring FDA’s place as a world regulatory leader by providing the resources it needs to do its job, guaranteeing there is a focus on science rather than ideology, ensuring the quality of imported products by increasing inspections abroad, and implementing several specific food and drug safety measures. Once the agency is able to effectively respond to these current challenges, it can begin to focus on strengthening its scientific base so that it can continue to protect and promote the public health through the use of emerging technologies, cutting-edge science, and long-term prevention measures, such as reducing obesity and tobacco use among adolescents.
Virginia Cox spent nearly a decade at the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services, and is now senior vice president at the Consumer Healthcare Products Association.
Department of Housing and Urban Development
Meeting 21st-Century Metropolitan Challenges
Bruce Katz and Henry Cisneros
Federal housing policy since the 1930s has responded to market trends, changing political circumstances, and the shifting philosophies of the day. The pressing housing challenges facing the nation at the start of the 21st century require federal housing policy to renew itself once again. Left unchecked, current housing trends threaten to undermine national economic, social, energy, and environmental priorities. The new president and his new secretary of housing and urban development need to reform HUD’s outdated housing programs, building on the energy and innovation that is emerging from state and local leaders across the country. That means immediately tackling the housing and foreclosure crises and helping New Orleans and surrounding communities finally put the ravages of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita behind them. HUD should also expand the supply of affordable housing, make housing part of the solution to climate change, and create a new White House Office on Metropolitan Policy. All of these steps are meant to be federalist rather than federal, fully acknowledging the pre-eminent role of state and local governments in setting the rules of housing production. Many housing constituencies would rather protect their piece of a shrinking pie at HUD than strike out for new, uncharted territory. Yet the new president and his HUD secretary must forge a new national compact on housing so that federal policies can align with the changing demographic, economic, and environmental realities of today’s metropolitan regions.
Bruce Katz, former chief of staff at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, is vice president and director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution.
Henry Cisneros, the former secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and a four-term mayor of San Antonio. He is now chairman of CityView, which provides an attractive project financing alternative for experienced homebuilders and developers who demonstrate a commitment to quality and want a long-term, multiple project relationship.
Department of Education
Restoring Our Nation’s Commitment to an Equitable Education for all Americans
Judith A. Winston
The quality of our nation’s public schools, colleges, and universities—alongside equitable access to all of these educational institutions—is a critical cornerstone of our national security, our economic prosperity, and our ability to compete globally. Although the role and scope of federal involvement in education is limited by our Constitution and the principles of federalism, the new president and his Department of Education must play a central role in ensuring that a high-quality, affordable, and accessible education is available to all at every level from preschool through college. The department can achieve this goal by leveraging limited federal education funds to build strong partnerships with state and local governments, and with institutions of higher education, business, social entrepreneurs, and other non-profit groups, in order to expand significantly our nation’s educational research to improve teaching and learning—especially for the nation’s poorest children. Key to this effort will be assembling a strong management team at the department to target funds to schools educating the poorest students while working to expand the federal education budget to support strong, consensus based, non-punitive education reform accompanied by effective educational accountability policies.
Judith Winston was general counsel and undersecretary of the Department of Education during the Clinton administration and formerly a law professor at American University. She is founder and principal at Winston, Withers Associates.
U.S. Department of Transportation
Green Reforms for Environmental and Consumer Safety
Joan Claybrook
The transportation sector consumes 70 percent of our nation’s oil and is the circulatory system of our economy. It is therefore essential that the new president and his secretary of transportation develop a national transportation plan to address the massive demands of infrastructure maintenance, environmental protection, and public health concerns. In the air, that means installing new technologies to keep the aviation sector safe and efficient, and overhauling oversight procedures at the Federal Aviation Administration. On the ground, it means tackling the misallocation of federal funds, which now tilts heavily in favor of highways over other surface transportation. And it means enacting stalled vehicle and truck safety rules to reduce highway fatalities and working closely with the Environmental Protection Agency to bettercoordinate fuel economy standards and greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles.
Joan Claybrook, former administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, is president of Public Citizen and founder of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch.
Environmental Protection Agency
Restoring Scientific Integrity, Sound Regulation, Fair Enforcement, and Transparency
Carol M. Browner
The Environmental Protection Agency during the Bush administration was continually plagued by White House interference. EPA staff were repeatedly forced to ignore or squelch their own science-based conclusions about a number of important matters, including the damaging effects of climate change on the quality of our air and water. Courts rejected the lax pollution regulations encouraged by the White House as being outside the requirements of the law and failing to provide important protections for the American people. The public was denied access to information about pollution in their communities—including the residents of lower Manhattan after the 9/11 attacks. Furthermore, the budget for enforcement was slashed. The new president and his new EPA administrator must restore scientific integrity at the agency, enact sound regulations that maintain the integrity of the laws and the science, and enforce our nation’s environmental laws. Fortunately, EPA boasts the tools and a committed staff to return the agency to its important work on behalf of the American people, which includes ensuring clean air, clean water, healthy communities, and the reduction of greenhouse gases.
Carol Browner, former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is a founding principal at The Albright Group, LLC.
Department of Agriculture
Tackling Food and Energy Crises Amid Global Warming
James R. Lyons
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is at the intersection of some of the most critical and vexing issues facing the nation and the world. From the first days in office, the new president and his secretary of agriculture should lead efforts to address the global food crisis, food safety, and the development and production of biofuels, as well as play a lead role in building strategies to address climate change and reverse the Bush administration’s harmful natural resource and environmental policies. The department’s otherhigh-priority concerns should include managing wildfires and repairing their ecological damage; improving nutritional standards to help reduce obesity and health care costs; restoring rural infrastructure; protecting the nation’s water quality, roadless lands, and biodiversity; promoting agricultural trade; and maintaining America’s farms and family farmers.
Jim Lyons served in the Clinton administration as undersecretary for natural resources and environment in the Department of Agriculture, and is vice president for policy and communications at Oxfam America.
Department of the Interior
Natural Resources Serving Society
John Leshy
The Department of the Interior will be a key player in the new administration’s efforts to control carbon emissions, forge a sound energy policy, and adapt to climate change. That should be its immediate priority. The department’s near-term priorities should include expanding the young National Landscape Conservation System, revitalizing the government-to-government relationship with Indian Tribes, launching a multipronged initiative to protect biodiversity, and partnering with the states to forge management policies for critical water resources challenged by a destabilized climate. Over the longer term, the department must put management of publicly owned natural resources on a fiscally sound basis, improve the scientific credibility of its decisions, revitalize the nation’s world-renowned systems of national parks and wildlife refuges, expand the national wilderness and wild and scenic river systems, and make better use of its lands and resources to promote environmental education, a conservation ethic, and volunteerism.
John Leshy was associate solicitor of Interior in the Carter administration, and solicitor (general counsel) of Interior throughout the Clinton administration. He is currently the Sunderland Distinguished Professor of Law at Hastings College of the Law, University of California, San Francisco.
Federal Communications Commission
Preparing the Way for Ubiquitous Broadband
Larry Irving
America is at a watershed moment for the telecommunications industry. We are shifting from a regulatory structure based on managing spectrum scarcity to a period of spectrum abundance driven by technological innovation. The new administration’s highest priority will be to develop and implement a national broadband strategy that ensures every American household has affordable access to a broadband network of at least 100 megabits per second by the year 2012. Providing a ubiquitous broadband network is a national imperative, but ensuring consumers have nondiscriminatory access to the network, as well as the content and applications they desire, are also critical goals. There has been an unprecedented increase in media concentration over the past decade, which has reduced the number and quality of local voices and elevated commercial interests at the expense of the public interest. The new president and the Federal Communications Commission should restore the primacy of the public interest standard and our national commitment to diverse voices and diversity of ownership. The FCC should also prioritize including all of our rapidly diversifying population in the mainstream of the technological revolution so that women and members of minority and immigrant communities are not just consumers of technology, but also owners, producers, and creators of content, applications, and facilities.
Larry Irving, former assistant secretary of commerce for communications and information for President Bill Clinton, is president of the Irving Information Group, an information technology consulting firm.
Federal Trade Commission
Consumer Protection and Competition for a 21st-Century Economy
Joan Z. Bernstein and Ann Malester
The Federal Trade Commission must play a key role in assuring that the marketplace is safe and fair for consumers and that the U.S. economy remains healthy and globally competitive. The new administration should appoint a chairman who will use the FTC’s broad jurisdiction to reexamine antitrust and consumer protection doctrine in order to make the agency more effective in dealing with the latest forms of marketing, emerging technologies, and globalization. The FTC should speak out on important consumer issues and make greater use of its rulemaking authority to set national consumer standards, especially in emerging areas such as data privacy. It should reinvigorate its enforcement agenda and empirical research to target anticompetitive business conduct in key economic sectors such as health care, energy, and technology. The FTC must also address information technology needs and critical internal management issues, such as developing and retaining human capital. Because the FTC has a small budget but broad jurisdiction over much of the economy, strong and innovative management will be vital to its success.
Jodie Bernstein, former director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission and general counsel and assistant administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, is of counsel to Bryan Cave, LLP.
Ann Malester, former deputy director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Competition, is a partner at Weil, Gotshal & Manges.
Corporation for National and Community Service
Supporting Civic Action to Solve America’s Problems
Shirley Sagawa
The new president should focus the Corporation for National and Community Service on four long-term goals: growing AmeriCorps-style national service to make opportunities universally available to young adults who want to serve; making service learning a common experience for all young people growing up in America; leveraging service by volunteers of all ages, including baby boomers, to solve pressing problems; and positioning the corporation as a lead agency for promoting social entrepreneurship, fostering cross-sector solutions to national challenges, and building non-profit capacity. Key steps to achieve these goals include appointing a presidential commission to examine crosssector solutions to America’s problems, creating a new fund to grow innovative resultsbased organizations, and making a substantial federal investment to expand national service targeted to solve specific problems and engage key populations.
Shirley Sagawa, an appointee in the administrations of President George H.W. Bush and President Bill Clinton, is a visiting fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund with the goal of creating a comprehensive national service policy.
