OFF-KILTER with Rebecca Vallas

Following the rare leak of a draft majority opinion in the Supreme Court case Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization , the prospect of partial or wholesale rollback of Roe v. Wade —and with it, the bodily autonomy of women and people who can become pregnant—now looms larger than ever in the United States. So in the wake of the leak that has everyone shook up, Rebecca sat back down with Ian M...

For more than two years, student loan repayment in the United States has been on pause, and interest on those debts has been frozen in light of the pandemic. In April, that pause was extended to August 31 of this year, offering another temporary reprieve for borrowers, many of whom were struggling to make often-crushing payments well before COVID-19 became a household name. Now, after years of cal...

This week, we're taking a break from Off-Kilter 's regularly scheduled programming to share a special virtual discussion hosted by The Century Foundation earlier this week with Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, and other leaders to mark the official launch of the new Disability Economic Justice Collaborative. Off-Kilter previewed the colla...

How would you feel if you found out your elected leaders had voted to hand out huge sums of public money to corporations, with some of them not even knowing who the recipient is, and the rest bound by contract not to divulge its identity or what its specific plans are? Now what if we told you this happens all over the country, all the time, in deals involving wealthy corporations such as Amazon, F...

This week, Rebecca hands the mic to Ryan Prior for an Off-Kilter takeover episode. Ryan is a longtime journalist , former CNN reporter, and like Rebecca, someone who lives with invisible chronic illness. They first crossed paths when Rebecca was at the Center for American Progress (CAP) and more recently reconnected in the COVID era because of his forthcoming book The Long Haul —which looks at how...

This week, Rebecca took a break from Off-Kilter' s regularly scheduled programming for a sit-down with the newest members of The Century Foundation's brand-new Disability Economic Justice Team, which officially launched last month. Kim Knackstedt comes to TCF from the Biden administration, in which she served as the first-ever director of disability policy on the White House Domestic Policy Counci...

"We believe that it is possible to create an economy where all Black, Latinx, Asian, Indigenous, and Pacific Islander people thrive—in one generation. To accomplish this we must fight to dismantle what we call the Oppression Economy. Today, elite institutions use racism as a tool to expand their wealth and power and suppress the wealth of people of color through theft, exploitation, and exclusion....

Sixty-one million Americans, or roughly one in four, live with disabilities. Yet people with disabilities have at best only been an afterthought when it comes to housing policy in the United States, without a seat at the metaphorical table to inform how it gets made.  Now, a new organization called The Kelsey is working to change that.  So, after a great set of conversations with some of the folks...

Over the course of the past few weeks, Rebecca's been having a series of conversations with some of the folks behind Next100 —a think tank that's turning the traditional think tank model on its head, to create a public policy sector where those with the most at stake are driving the change they and their communities want to see. We at Off-Kilter enjoyed what started as a single episode conversatio...

Last week , Rebecca sat down with some of the folks behind Next100 —a think tank that's turning the traditional think tank model on its head, to create a public policy sector where those with the most at stake are driving the change they and their communities want to see. We at Off-Kilter enjoyed that conversation so much, we decided to turn it into a three-part series.  So, continuing last week's...

Last month, the newly launched Congressional Progressive Staff Association published a survey of more than five hundred Congressional staff. The results were damning. Half of Capitol Hill staffers who weren't in management reported their pay was so low they were struggling to make ends meet. Roughly one in four of those who weren't managers said they didn't have the equivalent of even one month's...

With the Senate announcing they're heading into recess without passing the Build Back Better Act, we figured why not get out of the news cycle for Off-Kilter' s last episode of the year and instead have a far more good-news conversation that Rebecca Vallas has been meaning to have for a while with her dear friend Rebecca Cokley about what she's got underway at the Ford Foundation, in her history-m...

With the clock ticking on Democrats' "Build Back Better" legislation, which passed the House last month and now awaits Senate action, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin has cited yet another in a never ending string of "new" reasons for withholding his support for the bill. This time? Inflation.  On Tuesday, during a Wall Street Journal CEO Council Summit, Mr. Manchin said of inflation to a roomful...

​​ With the biggest threat to abortion rights in fifty years reaching the Supreme Court this week, in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization —which centers around Mississippi's fifteen-week abortion ban—Rebecca sat down with two of The Century Foundation's top experts on reproductive rights and health: Dr. Jamila Taylor, director of health care reform and senior fellow at TCF, and A...

Earlier today, the House of Representatives passed President Biden's Build Back Better economic recovery legislation—which includes historic and long-overdue investments in child care, pre-K, home care for people with disabilities and seniors, an extension of the monthly expanded child tax credit, and more.  But Democratic leaders caution that the bill still faces immense hurdles in the Senate: na...

Some twenty months into the COVID-19 pandemic, estimates suggest that between 3 million and 10 million Americans may have "long COVID," which can bring long-term and, in some cases, debilitating symptoms ranging from chronic pain and fatigue to brain fog, respiratory problems, organ damage, and more.  While experts may still be fuzzy on the exact number of so-called COVID "long-haulers," two thing...

A major contributor to poverty among U.S. families with children today is the incredibly high cost of child care. Statistics abound, underscoring how unaffordable child care in America has become, left to the whims of the private market: In more than half of states, care for an infant in a child care center costs more than in-state college tuition. For low-income families, child care expenses for...

In recent months, a wave of champions of the "tough on crime" approach to criminal justice have been trumpeting a spike in U.S. homicides in 2020 as fodder for rolling back critical reforms to America's broken criminal legal system, and for scaremongering about the so-called defund the police movement. Meanwhile, criminal justice experts caution that efforts to blame the uptick in homicides on cri...

The Federal Reserve, better known as "the Fed," has been in the spotlight quite a bit in recent weeks, following an apparent insider trading scandal embroiling several high-level officials at America's central bank. And in the latest shoe to drop, disclosure documents made public in recent weeks reveal that the scandal of stock trading during the pandemic extends all the way up to the chair of the...

Last month, the U.S. Census Bureau put out its annual snapshot of income, poverty, and health insurance in the United States—which serves as something of an annual report card on the economic well-being of America's families.  One of the most significant takeaways was the effectiveness of government relief at keeping people above the federal poverty line last year at the height of the COVID-19 pan...

As the debate over President Biden's sweeping "build back better" agenda continues in Washington, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin hasn't been shy about laying out his demands, as Democratic leadership in the House and Senate and the White House bend over backwards to garner his and Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema's votes for reconciliation bill that's been moving through Congress. High on Senator...

This week in Washington has featured no shortage of drama, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell saddling Democrats with the threat of both a government shutdown and default on the nation's debts by withholding Republican votes for keeping the government funded or raising the debt ceiling. Meanwhile, despite months of forward momentum in Congress to craft sweeping "build back better" legisla...

For all the talk about what's in "Build Back Better" recovery legislation that Democrats are trying to move through Congress, one thing that's not currently in the bill, in what many workers' advocates say is a glaring omission, is anything to do with Unemployment Insurance—which was badly in need of a refresh long before the COVID-19 pandemic, to ensure that when workers lose a job, they have the...

This week, millions of families across the United States are receiving their third monthly child allowance payment as implementation of the expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC) authorized by the American Rescue Plan Act earlier this year continues. Meanwhile, as "Build Back Better" legislation continues to come together in Congress, with key House committees marking up their portions of the legislation...

Thirty-one years ago, the fabric of America's legal and policy landscape changed dramatically for people with disabilities in the United States when the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, was signed into law by President George H. W. Bush, on July 26, 1990. But, as far we've come these past thirty-plus years, we still have incredibly far to go. Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, disabled p...