Note: The Roosevelt Rundown will be on hiatus until December
4.
Personnel Is
Policy
When President-elect Joe Biden
takes office on January 20, he’ll need an administration staffed and
equipped to meet this moment: to confront the still-raging health and
economic crises of COVID-19, climate change, and systemic racism with
transformative thinking and structural solutions.
The appointment of Roosevelt
experts to agency
review teams this
week is a vital first step.
- Roosevelt Fellow Mehrsa Baradaran and board member Lisa Cook
will serve in the Federal Reserve, Banking, and Securities Regulators
group, with Baradaran also serving in the Department of Treasury
group.
- Roosevelt Director of Governance Studies Todd Tucker will work
on both the Department of Commerce and Office of the United States
Trade Representative teams.
“There are about 4,000 presidential
appointees, and we are trying to get as many in on day one as
possible,” Roosevelt President & CEO Felicia Wong—and member of
the transition advisory board—told
TIME. “. . . the clarity of messaging is
really important: This is what we’re here to do, this is what we’re
going to do, these are the tools to do it, even given the
uncertainty.”
The Next Stimulus
Package
As Wong told
Marketplace Morning Report host David Brancaccio this week, a
much-needed new relief plan will be an early priority:
“It will . . . include stronger
unemployment insurance. It’ll include an improved mechanism for
helping small businesses, maybe through rent relief, maybe through
more funding to keep workers on payroll. And I think it will also
include funding for state governments and for city governments, which
of course are under such crisis. That crisis, that economic crisis, is
only going to get worse as the winter wears on.”
It’s crucial, though, that any
stimulus package be designed with a climate-forward
approach.
“There is no such thing as
climate-neutral policy—measures either help or hurt. This moment of
crisis is a rare opportunity to fix the future by healing the
present,” Roosevelt Director of Climate Policy Rhiana Gunn-Wright told
Bloomberg Green’s Eric Roston. “We need to start now and apply . . .
[Green New Deal] principles to everything that moves.”
Read more from Gunn-Wright in
“The
41 Things Biden Should Do First on Climate
Change.”
Cancel Student
Debt
Though the Senate’s composition
won’t be known until January, “there’s a tremendous amount that can be
done without Congress,” Wong told
the New York Times. One immediate action item: $50,000 to $75,000
in student debt relief for low- and moderate-income people, which would boost the
economy and disproportionately benefit Black and brown
debt-holders.
Amid a weak and unequal recovery,
debt relief has become a necessity, as Roosevelt’s Suzanne
Kahn explains
to MarketWatch: “It might have felt like a
nice-to-have nine months ago; now I think there are real questions of
if we can afford not to do it.”
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