To receive money states could not deny the tuition-free benefits based on “citizenship, alienage, or immigration status" (Photo by Nick Youngson via Creative Commons 3 – CC BY-SA 3.0).

WASHINGTON — The massive economic policy package Democrats are trying to muscle through Congress could open the door to free community college for undocumented immigrants.

But that lifeline for many people now denied access to higher education could also reignite controversies in Republican-leaning states over immigration and federal overreach.

The provision on immigrants was included in a plan drafted by House Democrats to provide two years of tuition-free community college for students. The proposal calls for the federal government to dole out $111 billion to states from 2023 to 2028. The states would use that money to cover tuition for community college students.

To receive the money, though, states could not deny the tuition-free benefits based on “citizenship, alienage, or immigration status.”

That would run afoul of current laws in several states.

Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina prohibit unauthorized immigrants from enrolling in at least some of their public universities and colleges.

Missouri, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Tennessee and Wisconsin bar undocumented students from receiving in-state tuition. Other states impose other restrictions on tuition benefits for undocumented students.

Helping undocumented students develop skills and earn academic degrees has the same benefits for the larger economy as helping other community college students, said Miriam Feldblum, the executive director of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, a group of more than 500 higher education leaders.

“The reason this is a big deal,” Feldblum explained, “is that, up until now, undocumented students have not had access to federal financial aid. They have not been included in federal financial aid or loan programs. They’ve not been included in Pell Grants.”

“But now there’s a new program being considered for free community college tuition, and the administration is recognizing from the very start of this program that there should not be arbitrary barriers set up against undocumented students,” she said.

GOP blowback?

Undocumented students make up about 2 percent of all college students in the country, but Census data doesn’t indicate how many are in community college or other undergraduate institutions.

Still, the Democrats’ idea could face blowback from conservatives.

U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican and outspoken opponent of expanding benefits to undocumented immigrants, criticized the move already to Fox News.

“Illegal immigrants skipped the line and broke our laws—they should not be rewarded with free tuition,” Cotton said, according to Fox. “But Democrats want to use your money to pay for them to go to college.”

“That’s not fair, and it will only incentivize more illegal immigration,” he added.

The community college plan may not happen, though, since everything about the Democrats’ proposals is up in the air at the moment.

Democratic lawmakers are fighting over the size of the social spending package, with demands ranging from $1.5 trillion to $3.5 trillion over the next decade. With such wide disagreement, almost any part of the package could end up being left out of the final deal.

But the sweeping social spending plan is President Joe Biden’s top legislative priority. Also, first lady Jill Biden is a community college professor, increasing the likelihood that at least some community college component will be part of an agreement.

Pell Grants and more

The U.S. House Education & Labor Committee developed a blueprint last month for what community college aid could look like.

The education panel would allow many immigrants to qualify for Pell Grants. The proposal specifically lets Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, recipients (often called “Dreamers”), immigrants who have temporary protected status and others who have been granted deferred enforced departure be eligible for federal financial aid.

Second, it would only let states get federal money to pay for free community college tuition if those states allow undocumented students to go to community college for free, too.

Congressional Democrats hope states will sign on to the free community college idea because, initially,  the federal government would pay virtually the full tab.

Some costs would slowly shift to the states, though, with the state share hitting 20 percent in 2027-2028.

The structure of the grants, in other words, is remarkably similar to the framework that congressional Democrats have relied on to entice states to expand their Medicaid programs under Obamacare.

Yet 12 states, concentrated in the South, have resisted calls to expand Medicaid despite the generous financial incentives. Many of those same states have also put restrictions on tuition benefits for undocumented college students.

North Carolina is one of them.

State Sen. Mujtaba Mohammed, a Democrat, has tried unsuccessfully to pass a bill in the Republican-controlled legislature to allow DACA recipients to pay in-state tuition rates at public universities.

He enthusiastically backs the efforts by congressional Democrats to make college easier to afford for undocumented students. But Mohammed worries about making aid to those students a condition for grants to the states.

“Two years of free community college education for every single North Carolinian should be a basic standard and a North Carolina value,” he said.

“But I don’t think we should be withholding funds for North Carolinians who want to go to community college. We shouldn’t deprive those individuals because our state legislature hasn’t been compassionate or reasonable when it comes to tuition for undocumented students.”

Mohammed hopes that, if the federal legislation passes, his fellow lawmakers would re-examine North Carolina’s approach to federal incentives.

“Why should our federal tax dollars go to other states that have in-state tuition for undocumented students, that have expanded Medicaid?” he asked. “It makes absolutely no sense.”

National push 

Nationally, education advocates have largely supported the efforts to help immigrants attend community college.

Martha Parham, the senior vice president for public relations for the American Association of Community Colleges, said giving undocumented students a chance to go to community college would boost their productivity and earnings, and that would benefit the regional economy.

Making tuition free would boost those benefits, she said. “Our students are older, with an average age of 28. The huge majority of them are working. Whatever we can do to remove barriers for them to complete their education… would be an investment in the nation’s middle class.”

Feldblum, from the group of college presidents, said state programs have already shown those benefits.

Many states now allow undocumented students to receive in-state tuition. Meanwhile, some, but not all, state-level “promise” programs that provide free tuition for community college allow undocumented students to participate.

Programs in California, Delaware, Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island and Washington state include coverage for undocumented students.

“When [undocumented students] have been included in in-state tuition programs and promise programs, they have proved their worthiness and their economic value,” Feldblum said.

Several states have only extended in-state tuition and other benefits to DACA recipients—people who came to the country as children and attended U.S. schools—but that leaves out a growing number of immigrants, Feldblum noted.

To qualify for DACA, students have to show they have been in the country since June 15, 2007. That is now more than 14 years ago. A federal court has blocked the Biden administration from expanding DACA any further. So many younger students who are entering college now don’t qualify for DACA.

More than in-state tuition

Another benefit of the free community college program, which is sometimes referred to as America’s College Promise, is that it would go beyond just offering students in-state tuition.

“In states that have in-state tuition, that’s still largely inaccessible, because college is not affordable to folks who can’t get financial aid,” said Wil Del Pilar, the vice president of higher education policy and practice for The Education Trust. “Undocumented students don’t qualify for federal aid, and in some states, they don’t qualify for state aid, either.”

Del Pilar said the free community college program could be the “biggest shift in higher education since 1965,” when the Higher Education Act first passed.

But Del Pilar, who previously worked in Pennsylvania state government, cautioned that states might opt out of the free community college program for financial reasons that have nothing to do with immigration policy.

The House Democratic proposal requires states to meet certain financial thresholds for supporting higher education, and those could be tough to attain for states that have not spent a lot of money supporting public colleges and universities.

Vermont, in fact, would have to nearly double its higher ed spending. South Dakota, meanwhile, would have to bump up its spending by 50 percent and Pennsylvania would have to increase it by 41 percent, according to an analysis by the Century Foundation.

“It is difficult to predict whether state legislators and governors will opt in or out of [the free community college plan] in the same way they did for Medicaid expansion, but Congress should consider an option for covering a higher share of costs in states such as these to incentivize participation,” Peter Granville of the Century Foundation wrote.

Del Pilar said the better solution might be a universal program for community college tuition. That would benefit not just undocumented immigrants, but other students that struggle to pay for college, too.

It doesn’t make sense, he said, that students in California would be able to take advantage of free tuition and maybe even financial aid to pay for non-tuition expenses, while students in Georgia are left out of the program completely.

But House Democrats, Del Pilar said, are working with the state-based system of higher education with their proposal. “The House is using incredible leverage to create access,” he said. “To me, it’s a way to encourage states to move in the direction of fairness.”

The Conservation Reserve Program pays farmers to set aside their land from agricultural production to boost soil quality, sequester carbon and prevent fertilizer runoff, among other environmental benefits (Sam Gellman Photography/Getty Images).

WASHINGTON — Agricultural groups and farm-state lawmakers notched a significant win when U.S. House Democrats chose not to touch a big tax break for inherited property, avoiding for now a confrontation.

But opponents remain wary that the idea could come back at any time as Democrats shape their massive $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation package, and search for ways to help pay for the most significant expansion of the social safety net since the New Deal.

Farm lobbies and Republicans, along with influential Democrats like House Agriculture Chairman David Scott of Georgia, strongly objected to tax changes that President Joe Biden proposed in his “Build Back Better” plan for farmland and other assets handed from one generation to the next.

Biden, along with Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, wanted to end the “stepped-up basis” for determining capital gains taxes on those assets. Vilsack, the former governor of Iowa, has taken to the pages of The Wall Street Journal and popped into a White House press briefing to make the case that closing loopholes like these is necessary to make sure the wealthy pay their fair share.

Over the next decade, the administration’s plan for taxing farmland inheritances could bring in as much as $322 billion in new federal tax revenues.

But U.S. Rep. Randy Feenstra, an Iowa Republican, said farmers in his district have been complaining to him about the proposal ever since it was unveiled earlier this year. The farmers, he said, are worried that a new tax scheme would make it impossible to keep farms in the family.

“Let’s say a mom and dad bought their farm at $2,000 an acre, and now it’s worth $12,000 an acre. If they want to give it to their son or daughter or whoever, [the heir] would have to pay tax on the difference of that,” Feenstra told States Newsroom in an interview.

“A son or a daughter wouldn’t have that money, so they’d have to sell the land to pay the tax,” he continued. The buyer would most likely be a large corporation, not a local farmer, he said. “That’s why so many people are worried that it will destroy the family farm, literally destroy the family farm.”

Emotional pleas

Proponents for the change say those concerns are overblown or easily addressed through policy tweaks. But the emotional pleas to save small-town America appear to have won this round.

Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee, the group that handled the tax aspects of Biden’s economic revival plan, left out the president’s proposed changes to the stepped-up basis when they approved their piece of the reconciliation bill last week.

The idea could reemerge later, as the package continues its journey through the House and Senate. But the committee’s decision reflects how politically radioactive the idea has become.

Several Democrats balked at Biden’s proposal, as well. Scott, the chair of the House Agriculture Committee, wrote the president in June, arguing that the stepped-up basis was “a critical tool enabling family farming operations to continue from generation to generation.”

“I have been working tirelessly to ensure that stepped-up basis is protected,” Scott said in a statement last week, “and I am very pleased that the package released does not impact the benefit’s operation.”

But Vilsack, who owns 600 acres of farmland, argues that the stepped-up basis is really just a way for rich people to avoid paying taxes.

“This policy has allowed the wealthy to amass large fortunes,” Vilsack wrote earlier this month in The Wall Street Journal.

“Millionaires and billionaires borrow against their assets, usually stock or real estate, but also art and collectibles, really anything a bank will lend against. When those assets are transferred upon death, their heirs can sell the property without being taxed to pay off the debt. This is one of the most popular ways the rich avoid taxation, and it must end.”

The agriculture secretary said Biden’s proposal had special protections for family farms.

First, the administration wanted to impose the capital gains tax only when the heir sold the property. So in Feenstra’s example, the son or daughter wouldn’t have to pay taxes when they inherited the farm, only when they sold it.

Second, Vilsack said that the Biden plan would exempt all capital gains of up to $2.5 million. He claimed that 95 percent of family farms would not owe anything with that level of an exemption.

A no-brainer?

Marc Goldwein, a senior vice president and senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said the fact that House Democrats so far have not included changes to the stepped-up basis was a “discouraging starting point.”

Getting rid of the policy, he said, should be a “no-brainer.”

“You want tax policy that treats people in similar situations similarly, that doesn’t create bad incentives and that raises revenue in a progressive way,” he said. “Stepped-up basis fails all three of those.”

It makes no sense, he argued, that someone who sold their property the day before they died would have to pay capital gains on it, but that someone who inherited the same property and sold it a day later would have to pay none.

The policy encourages people to hold on to their assets longer than they otherwise would, just to avoid taxation. And it disproportionately benefits rich taxpayers, Goldwein said.

He also said the policy mostly affects people with assets other than farms.

A 2014 U.S. Treasury study, for example, found that farm assets made up only 2 percent of the fair market value of assets that are protected by the policy.

Stocks and bonds, on the other hand, made up more than half of the value of protected assets.

Consequences for farmers

But Dustin Sherer, the director of congressional relations for the American Farm Bureau Federation, said the administration is underplaying the potential consequences for farmers if stepped-up basis is removed.

While Vilsack touted the administration’s proposed exemption of the first $2.5 million of capital gains, Sherer noted, that would not be enough to shield farmers with a typical 500-acre farm in Vilsack’s home state of Iowa.

There are more than 18,000 farms in Iowa that are bigger than 500 acres, Sherer said.

“More to the point,” Sherer asked, “if you’re trying to go after billionaires, why is $2.5 million your exemption level?”

And the administration’s proposal to impose the capital gains tax when property is sold, rather than when it is inherited, still causes problems, Sherer said.

The lingering tax obligation would make it harder for the new property owner to take out a loan, for example.

“It completely changes the dynamics of the transfer,” he said.

Sherer said he was encouraged that the policy hasn’t gained traction in the House so far, but he worries that it could become part of the deal later.

“As long as politicians in D.C. are looking for money to offset their spending, it’s not over,” he said.

The reconciliation bill now goes to the House Budget Committee, which will consolidate input from other House committees. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said she wants the full chamber to vote on the package before the end of the month, but that deadline could slip.

This year, more than 50 employers will take part in a job fair for ex-offenders, along with more than 100 participants (Getty images).

Sen. Nick Schroer, during his time in the Missouri House, engages in debate with his fellow legislators (Tim Bommel/Missouri House Communications).

WASHINGTON — From statehouses to Congress, Republicans have launched into a fight against the teaching of “critical race theory,” which just a year ago was a niche academic term.

Experts in critical race theory say it’s about acknowledging how racial disparities are embedded in U.S history and society, and the concept is being mischaracterized by conservatives. But GOP lawmakers in the past few months have succeeded in pushing it to the top of state legislative agendas.

Governors in Idaho and Oklahoma have already signed measures to forbid the teaching of critical race theory in schools this year. Arkansas’ Republican governor let a similar measure become law without his signature, while proposals in Iowa and Tennessee are waiting for their governors’ approval.

In Missouri, a legislative push to ban the New York Times’ “1619 Project” from public schools received extended debate in the state House but lost traction as the session wound down.

Lawmakers in Arizona, Louisiana, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and other states have waded into the debate, as well, although some of those efforts have failed.

Meanwhile, a group of Republican attorneys general from 20 states, including Missouri’s Eric Schmitt, this week sent the Biden administration a 10-page letter chastising federal officials for using two grant programs as “a thinly veiled attempt at bringing into our states’ classrooms the deeply flawed and controversial teachings of Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project.”

On Capitol Hill, U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, is trying to prevent the U.S. military from incorporating elements of what he characterizes as critical race theory in its training programs.

Thirty House Republicans, led by Dan Bishop of North Carolina, have also signed onto an effort to ban critical race theory from training for the armed services and federal employees.

The origins of the new drive track back to President Donald Trump, who warned about the academic approach during his final months in office, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer. The Trump administration called critical race theory “un-American” and sought to ban its influence from the federal government.

Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, has taken credit for calling Trump’s attention to critical race theory.

Now with Trump out of the Oval Office, other Republicans are taking up the battle on new fronts.

“There’s no room in our classrooms for things like critical race theory,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said in March. “Teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other is not worth one red cent of taxpayer money.”

“Critical race theory,” South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and former Trump Cabinet official Ben Carson wrote for Fox News earlier this month, “is a deliberate means to sow division and cripple our nation from within—one brainwashed and resentful student at a time.”

But those who teach about critical race theory say that conservative politicians are not correctly describing the approach, and the extent to which it is used in schools and workplaces.

Critical race theory, they say, came about in the 1970s and 1980s to explain why Black people and other people of color in the United States have not made more gains after the victories of the civil rights movement.

One of the theory’s central tenets is that U.S. society and government have always promoted racial disparities. Another key idea is that, after the country has made progress toward racial equity, there is often a backlash that erodes some or all of those gains.

“If you’re going to say that racism can’t be discussed, or critical race theory cannot be in civics or any type of history courses, you’re saying that racism did not exist in America and does not exist in America. That’s not true,” says Dana Thompson Dorsey, an education professor at the University of South Florida.

“You’re going to be mis-educating students, un-educating students and not allowing them to learn the real history of the United States of America.”

It’s also in this polarized atmosphere that the University of North Carolina’s board of trustees, under pressure from conservative activists, earlier this month backed down from offering tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones. Hannah-Jones is the New York Times journalist who led the 1619 Project, which describes the role of slavery in shaping American society.

Racial inequities

In political back-and-forth, the term “critical race theory” has been used as a catch-all term to describe many attempts to address racial inequities.

Conservatives often link it to the 1619 Project and the work of Ibram X. Kendi, the author of “How to Be an Antiracist” and the director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University.

But the field of critical race theory actually started as a way to analyze the U.S. legal system. Its founders were a loose group of legal scholars from various racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Proponents of critical race theory argue that, because race is a social construct, not a biological one, laws and other social norms are what perpetuate racial inequities. They examine the many ways society creates those lopsided conditions.

Thompson Dorsey, the USF professor, says when she instructs people using critical race theory, she hews closely to historical documents such as the three-fifths compromise of the U.S. Constitution, the Supreme Court decisions in Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson, immigration laws, and laws that deprived women of legal rights.

“I’m not making things up,” she says. “I talk about racial history, because we don’t learn this in school. And we don’t learn how deeply embedded racism and white supremacy and patriarchy were embedded in every part of our country.”

“None of this is a hatred of white people,” adds Thompson Dorsey, who is Black. “None of this is blaming anybody for things that happened hundreds of years ago. But we need to recognize what happened hundreds of years ago still [affects] today because of how deeply ingrained it is in our society.”

From Tucker Carlson to an executive order

Rufo, the Manhattan Institute scholar, wrote several pieces in the summer of 2020 that scrutinized diversity training programs held in the wake of Floyd’s killing.

He criticized programs put on both by the city of Seattle, where he lives, and by federal agencies such as the U.S. Treasury and Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. He alleged that white employees were singled out and shamed in the training exercises.

“‘Anti-racism,’ as the diversity hustlers define it, doesn’t teach Americans to judge each other according to the contents of their character,” Rufo, who did not respond to a request for comment from States Newsroom, wrote for the New York Post last July. “Rather, the ideology stands for precisely the opposite: a rigid and simplistic account of race, in which minorities are permanent victims and whites are forever tainted by racism.”

Rufo’s pieces landed him an appearance with Tucker Carlson on Fox News. “What I’ve discovered is that critical race theory has become, in essence, the default ideology of the federal bureaucracy and is now being weaponized against the American people,” Rufo said on the show.

“[Trump] saw this monologue and instructed his team to call me the next morning, bright and early West Coast time,” Rufo related in a webcast for the American Legislative Exchange Council, known as ALEC, in December.

“Within three weeks, they issued an executive order banning these trainings from the federal government [and] banning these trainings from federal contractors.”

Indeed, the president’s directive repeated many of the allegations that Rufo made.

“Many people,” Trump’s order said, “are pushing a different vision of America that is grounded in hierarchies based on collective social and political identities rather than in the inherent and equal dignity of every person as an individual.”

His order prohibited federal agencies or contractors from using training that taught “divisive concepts,” including, among other ideas, the notion that the United States is fundamentally racist or sexist, or that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

President Joe Biden rescinded the order as soon as he took office.

Spotlight on schools

Conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation and ALEC have stepped up pressure on conservative state lawmakers to rein in the teaching of critical race theory.

Particularly at the state level, the focus has primarily been on schools. In Tennessee, for example, a bill passed by the legislature would prohibit local school districts or charter schools from teaching or including materials that “promote or include” 14 different concepts. Many of those “divisive concepts” were included word-for-word in Trump’s executive order.

If schools don’t comply, they could lose state funding. The exact amount would be up to the state’s education commissioner.

The proposals to curb critical race theory have been politically explosive.

After Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed one such law, he got kicked off a commission to commemorate the 100-year anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre.

A Louisiana lawmaker lost his position as chair of the House Education Committee for saying students should learn “the good, the bad and the ugly” about slavery, while promoting his bill to prohibit critical race theory.

In Utah, Democratic lawmakers left the floor of the state House when Republicans brought up resolutions to condemn critical race theory.

But the stakes are also high for school administrators and teachers who would be governed by the new laws.

Lawrence Paska, the executive director of the National Council for the Social Studies, a group that represents social studies teachers, worries about the amount of control lawmakers are trying to exert over teachers’ classrooms.

“This goes against what we know good instructional practice to be,” he says. “We’re a little baffled at the idea that we’re going to legislate away certain types of freedoms and responsibilities that teachers have.”

“We’re concerned with this notion of … limiting discussion about things like racism, sexism and discrimination, that we can’t talk about those things. That’s both against what we do in social education but more importantly, it’s against the very definition of First Amendment freedoms and academic freedom for both teachers and students,” Paska added.

Paska says the goal of teaching the faults of the country is to help make students better citizens, not to shame them.

“I don’t know an educator who thinks, ‘My job at the end of the day is to shame a student, is to shame a child, into feeling anything less than their full potential,’” he says.

Amtrak Missouri River Runner train #313 pulling into Kirkwood Missouri Amtrak Station (Bhockey10, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons)

Stu Nicholson has been trying for decades without success to get Amtrak—or any other passenger rail service—to come to Columbus, Ohio.

That could soon change. A plan Amtrak is floating would not just restore passenger service to Columbus, but also across Ohio and spanning the U.S., from Colorado to Florida to Georgia to Wisconsin. Whether the plan might become reality has yet to be seen, but it’s sparked hope in states and cities that, like Columbus, are now passenger rail deserts.

Amtrak is pitching a vast expansion of its network of routes less than 500 miles long. The railroad wants to create 39 new routes, improve 25 current routes, serve as many as 166 new cities and add shorter-haul routes to 16 new states.

It estimates that it could increase its yearly number of passenger trips by 20 million by 2035, on top of the record high it set in 2019 of 32.5 million.

And on Friday, America’s No. 1 rail passenger, President Joe Biden is traveling to Philadelphia to help Amtrak celebrate its 50th anniversary and no doubt talk up the benefits of passenger rail. Biden, nicknamed “Amtrak Joe,” rode the train back and forth daily to his home in Wilmington, Del., while a member of the U.S. Senate.

“This is the very first time that Amtrak has ever gone on offense in their 50-year history,” Nicholson says. Amtrak has had to defend against budget hawks who wanted to cut its subsidies or eliminate them altogether, he says.

“Consequently, they’ve never had enough of a budget to go out and do what really needs to be done for a long time, which is a major expansion of service.”

Under Amtrak’s vision for Ohio, the route connecting Cleveland in the north to Columbus in central Ohio and Cincinnati in southern Ohio would finally be completed. The number of trains coming to Cincinnati, Cleveland and Toledo every day would increase on other routes, too.

“This was a major pick-your-jaw-off-the-floor moment for a lot of us that have been around passenger rail advocacy … when we found out what Amtrak was planning and what they were proposing,” Nicholson says.

A flurry of excitement

Indeed, Amtrak’s expansion plans set off a flurry of excitement around the country, as people pored over a route map that the railroad produced of potential new routes.

The publicly owned railroad, of course, also benefits from the fact that its most famous passenger— Biden—has proposed a massive infrastructure package that could pay for many of the improvements Amtrak is pushing.

The reason advocates like Nicholson are excited about Amtrak’s proposal, though, goes beyond just the cities and lines on its much-tweeted map. The railroad appears to be trying to avoid some of the pitfalls that stymied previous expansion plans, particularly under President Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus package.

So, for example, the plan does not call for bullet trains or other forms of high-speed rail. The ongoing drama over California’s high speed rail project has tarnished the public’s view of that technology.

Private companies trying to build faster projects in Florida and Texas have also run into opposition from residents who live along their routes but not close enough to a station to use it, something that’s far less of a problem for regional rail.

Amtrak also wants to be in charge of— and foot the bill for —any construction that would be needed to add more routes.

Importantly, it would also pay for the costs of operating the trains for the first two years, before gradually transitioning to a 50-50 split with the state governments along the route. Political leaders have used the issue of state subsidies to oppose Obama-era rail expansions.

Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, for example, came to power by campaigning against the construction of a route between Madison and Milwaukee. The federal government agreed to pay the $810 million to build the new route, but Walker objected to the state being on the hook for about $7.5 million a year to support its operations.

Nicholson says Amtrak’s plan for bearing the operational costs for the first few years will build political support for the new services and give state governments time to develop a way to pay for it.

In a place like Columbus, for example, state and local leaders could work out a way to capture some of the value created by a new rail station and nearby developments to help pay for the state’s share of the rail service.

Amtrak’s proposed improvements also include many expansions that state and local officials have already been advocating.

The plan, for example, envisions rail service connecting Denver to Colorado Springs and Pueblo in the south and Cheyenne, Wyo., in the north. That route is strikingly similar to a proposal that lawmakers and state transportation officials are studying to introduce a Front Range passenger rail system.

The overall Amtrak proposal includes all three rail projects stopped by Republican governors in the Obama era: Ohio’s Cleveland-Columbus-Cincinnati corridor; a route between Orlando and Tampa in Florida; and the Milwaukee-to-Madison leg in Wisconsin.

Biden jobs plan

The main reason Amtrak’s proposal is so salient right now is because of Biden’s infrastructure push. The president’s American Jobs Plan would include $80 billion to help Amtrak catch up on overdue repairs, replace outdated equipment, make upgrades along its Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington, D.C., and fund its expansion efforts.

The Amtrak proposal is in line with the Biden plan, but the two are separate for now. The White House has only provided broad outlines for how it wants to dole out money in its infrastructure package. It hasn’t yet provided the kind of details Amtrak released, and the final outcome would also likely be shaped by Congress.

“I keep trying to tell people [Amtrak’s] map is not THE map. It is A map. There was a totally different map last September, and there’s likely to be a different one in the next few weeks or months,” says Jim Matthews, the president and CEO of the Rail Passengers Association, a national advocacy group. “There are a lot of proposals. They are all very generous.”

There will also be several chances for Congress to take on Amtrak funding, he notes. The first is whatever it does with Biden’s infrastructure plan.

But Congress will also have to reauthorize the multi-year law that pays for highways, transit and Amtrak, which expires in September. So lawmakers could address it when they handle that bill, too.

But Matthews says that Congress has become more receptive to funding Amtrak in just the last few years. As recently as 2015, he says, Amtrak was still fighting lawmakers who wanted to completely eliminate its subsidy.

“The steely knives were out,” he says. “I think we managed to shift the conversation in subsequent Congresses… The conversation among Amtrak critics went from ‘Why do we have Amtrak?’ to ‘Why is Amtrak so bad?’ I know that sounds a little strange, but, honestly, that’s a win.”

Back on track

The freight rail industry also seems open to expanded Amtrak service, an important consideration because private freight rail companies own most of the track Amtrak trains travel on. (The federal government took over passenger rail service from the private railroads 50 years ago and created Amtrak, as a way to prop up what was then a financially beleaguered rail industry.)

The Association of American Railroads, which represents freight and passenger rail companies, says that any passenger rail operations on privately owned tracks should be safe, should not impede freight rail operations, should compensate the freight companies and should have arrangements tailored for each route.

The industry backed Biden’s call for better infrastructure, but it strongly opposes Biden’s suggested way of paying for it with higher corporate taxes.

“Railroads would urge the administration and Congress to abandon these divisive, unrelated funding sources and instead work toward bipartisan solutions to restore the Highway Trust Fund to a true user-pays system,” AAR President and CEO Ian Jefferies said in a statement.

The freight railroads have encouraged Congress to shore up regular funding for Amtrak by moving from fuel taxes to a system where motor vehicle owners are charged for the number of miles they drive, as well as the weight of the vehicles driven.

The railroads have also called on Congress to impose an emissions surcharge on motor vehicles, which could generate money specifically dedicated to funding passenger rail.

“A reliable passenger rail network is the most environmentally-friendly mode to move people over land and is essential to helping address transportation-related emissions,” the group wrote in a recent paper on freight railroads and climate change.

“Intercity passenger rail is the only mode of passenger transportation in the United States that does not receive any dedicated federal funding through a trust fund, leaving Amtrak completely dependent upon annual discretionary appropriations. This fiscal uncertainty makes it difficult for Amtrak to plan its operations and capital needs for the long term,” it added.

Imposing extra fees on heavy vehicles and vehicles that produce more greenhouse gas pollution would make transporting goods by trucks more expensive, and could make freight rail a more attractive option.

Meanwhile, in Columbus, local leaders think they have a compelling case for adding new service if Amtrak can find the funding to do so. That’s true whether the trains go to Cleveland and Cincinnati or to Chicago and Pittsburgh.

“The Columbus region is one of the largest regions in the nation that is not serviced by passenger rail today,” says Thea Ewing, the director of transportation and infrastructure development at the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission.

“We are a growing region too. We’re talking about an area that’s thriving… We are a market that stands ready to receive and make the best of it.”

Joe Biden addresses the media and a small group of supporters with his wife Dr. Jill Biden on March 10, 2020 in Philadelphia (Photo by Mark Makela/Getty Images).

The U.S. Capitol dome, photographed June 17, 2019 (Kathie Obradovich/Iowa Capital Dispatch).

Pete Buttigieg answers questions from members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation during his confirmation hearing as secretary of transportation on Jan. 21, 2021 (Source: Screenshot/CSPAN)

U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos testifies before a U.S. Senate subcommittee on March 28, 2019, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Zach Gibson/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — In four years in office, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos failed to broaden her appeal beyond the moment she won a wild Senate confirmation fight by the closest of margins. She didn’t even try.

Instead, the billionaire Michigan native and Republican megadonor championed private and charter schools, often trying to funnel federal funding toward them. Her full-throated support outraged Democrats in Congress, riled the nation’s powerful teachers unions and never registered as a major priority for the Trump administration.

In higher education, she resuscitated for-profit colleges and wrote sweeping regulations on campus sexual assault to give more weight to the accused, generating an onslaught of criticism.

When COVID-19 upended education as never before, DeVos pushed overwhelmed local leaders to physically reopen their schools and attempted to use emergency funds to aid private education.

Now DeVos will leave office next month facing the prospect that many of her principles will be spurned and rules overturned by her Democratic successor. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that even her ideological allies are divided about her legacy.

“She certainly made her mistakes, and she was certainly different than anybody ever anticipated an education secretary to be. But I don’t think it’s as negative as people think,” said Jeanne Allen, the founder and CEO of the Center for Education Reform, and a DeVos supporter.

“You’re going to see in the years ahead that she had an impact on how people think about how kids are learning,” Allen said. “She says constantly that there should be no one-size-fits-all school for kids. Now a lot of people are saying that. I don’t think it’s a coincidence.”

But Mike Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank, views DeVos’ four years as a missed opportunity.

“Her tenure was a gift to the teachers unions, even though that’s not what she intended,” he said. “Her signature issue was school choice. The only fair way to assess the impact she had on that was that she hurt the cause. She made it harder for people on the center and the left to support school choice and charter schools.”

Petrilli acknowledged that any Trump nominee would have likely met intense resistance from teachers unions and liberal groups. But DeVos’ background reinforced caricatures that school choice supporters are wealthy and out-of-touch, Petrilli said, even though he said those stereotypes are false.

“She was just not the right messenger,” he said. “I wish she had stepped down earlier, because she hurt her own cause.”

DeVos’ office declined to comment for this article, beyond sharing a list of the secretary’s accomplishments in office.

As for President-elect Joe Biden, he has not yet announced his nominee for the job but has made it clear what he doesn’t want.

“First thing, as president of the United States — not a joke — first thing I will do is make sure that the secretary of education is not Betsy DeVos. It is a teacher. A teacher. Promise,” Biden said on the campaign trail in 2019.

What’s an education secretary’s supposed to do?

Americans have vastly different expectations from the U.S. Department of Education.

The agency plays a limited role in everyday schooling, since most decisions are made by states, school boards and school districts, and funding is mostly collected from state and local taxes.

Congress handed even more power to states when it passed the Every Student Succeeds Act five years ago. The new law relaxed many of the federal accountability measures that Congress put into place during the administration of George W. Bush.

“One of the most misunderstood aspects about the role of an education secretary, is that [people expect that the education secretary is] supposed to be engaged in every single policy effort going on around the country,” said Allen.

That hands-off approach explains why DeVos instituted a hiring freeze and oversaw a 10 percent decrease in the number of departmental employees, in tandem with a Trump administration initiative to trim the size of government.

DeVos also rescinded many Obama-era policies, ranging from accommodation of transgender students to racial disparities in student discipline. Her office counted 29 major “deregulatory actions” that the agency took under her leadership.

Liberals, on the other hand, view the agency as a critical player in enforcing civil rights and delivering more resources for disadvantaged students.

“If you’re someone who prioritizes equity as the goal, if you believe that there is a really important federal role play in ensuring education and civil rights, if you are really concerned about inadequate resources going to kids who have been through for generations have been beat down by racism, and fundamentally, if you support public schools, you have been waiting for January 20th for a long time,” said Phillip Lovell, the vice president of policy development and government relations at the Alliance for Excellent Education, a group that focuses on improving high school education for historically underserved students.

During the DeVos stint in office, Lovell said, the Department of Education gave too much deference to states when it came to crafting strategies to deal with inequities in the classroom. Under ESSA, states have to submit their plans to the federal agency. DeVos’ team did require some states to revise their plans, but Lovell said her agency didn’t scrutinize state plans enough.

In states like Michigan and Connecticut, he said, many of the schools that needed the most help did not qualify for additional federal aid. Because students of color are concentrated in lower-performing schools, they were disproportionately affected by those state formulas.

But Lovell and many other experts expect the department to dramatically shift under Biden’s presidency.

“Just as school choice was the beating heart for the DeVos administration, I think that educational equity will be the beating heart for the Biden administration,” he said.

Pitting public vs private schools

John Schilling, the president of the American Federation for Children, an organization that DeVos chaired before she was tapped as secretary, said DeVos made significant strides in advancing school choice.

Her office distributed more than $130 million for the federal Charter Schools Program, which it directed primarily toward schools in “opportunity zones.”

The opportunity zones are areas designated by governors as economically distressed, in order to attract investors seeking federal tax breaks. DeVos also tried, unsuccessfully, to use money from a March coronavirus relief package to support a broader swath of private schools.

Schilling said it takes time to get Congress on board for broader changes.

“When she was talking about elevating the issue of school choice, and rethinking and reimagining K-12 education, that’s where it’s all going,” he said.

But Nina Rees, the president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said in a statement that, even though DeVos supported charter school expansion, “her attention was mostly on efforts to expand access to private school choice.” By contrast, she said, the Obama administration left a “lasting legacy” in support for charter schools.

Charter school enrollment grew by 11 percent since the end of the Obama administration, according to the Center for Education Reform. There are now more than 7,300 charter schools teaching 3.3 million students.

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers union, said the Obama administration supported public schools. “The Trump administration does not, and has done nothing to help or support it. It essentially undermined [public education] for four years through budget cuts and destabilization,” she said.

Weingarten, who is rumored to be a candidate to succeed DeVos, faulted the Education secretary for budget proposals that would have cut funding to programs such as free student lunches, the Special Olympics and need-based federal aid.

“It was as if she was put there to be obstructionist,” Weingarten said. “It was as if she was put there to dismantle public schools.”

Lovell, from the Alliance for Excellent Education, agreed.

“It’s really unfortunate to have someone as the head of the U.S. Department of Education who fundamentally doesn’t seem to support public schools,” he said.

What’s next for the most well-known Education secretary in decades is unclear, though her home is in Michigan.

Advocates for school choice who know DeVos predict she will continue to be a force.

“As an education reformer and as her friend, I’m just deeply appreciative that she was willing to do this public service for the last four years. It takes a lot of courage,” Schilling said. “I think having been in the arena for the last four years in the way that she has, I have a feeling that she will come out of this even more determined to fight for the things that she believes.”

An aerial view from a drone shows a combine being used to harvest the soybeans in a field at the Bardole & Son's Ltd farm on Oct. 14, 2019 in Rippey, Iowa. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON—American farmers who have gone through the drama and turbulence of trade and agriculture policy in the Trump administration can expect a far more sedate and multinational experience when President-elect Joe Biden takes office in January.

On just the third day of his administration, President Donald Trump rattled world leaders and upended exports by announcing that he would pull the United States out of a trade deal with other Pacific countries that he claimed was a bad deal for American workers.

It was a sign of more to come. The Republican president threatened to leave NAFTA, gummed up the operations of the World Trade Organization and started a trade war with China.

American farmers often bore the brunt of those moves. Countries retaliated against Trump’s protectionist moves by levying tariffs on everything from soybeans to blueberries.

American whiskey exports to the European Union dropped by 27 percent, after the EU imposed retaliatory tariffs on the spirits in 2018. Likewise, pork exports to Mexico fell 28 percent from 2018 to 2019 because of a trade dispute. China went from buying $12.2 billion of U.S. soybeans in 2017 to $3.1 billion the next year, because of the trade war. In Maine, a blueberry boom suddenly went bust, as exports to China plunged by 97 percent in two years.

While U.S. subsidies and subsequent trade deals alleviated some of the heartburn farmers felt, the unrest throughout the Trump administration left American agricultural exporters on edge.

Nonetheless, Trump enjoyed wide political support in rural America, where farmers worried that a Biden administration could bring more environmental regulation. In September, Farm Futures reported that three-quarters of farmers they surveyed said they’d be backing Trump in the election.

While Biden may be less politically aligned with farmers, he is unlikely to make such a startling debut on agriculture and trade policy.

He will have many pressing matters domestically —starting with getting the COVID-19 pandemic under control—that will likely occupy his attention early in the administration.

And observers expect that Biden will work to boost trade by crafting multinational agreements, rather than the one-on-one deals Trump favored, that take months, if not years, to complete.

“I think it’s fair to say that the president-elect is not going to use tariffs in the same way the Trump administration has been using them. I think it’s also fair to say that in efforts to hold countries like China accountable, you’ll see a more collaborative effort with other nations,” said Tom Vilsack, a former Iowa governor and agriculture secretary in the Obama administration, in an interview with States Newsroom. Vilsack also helped the Biden campaign develop its agricultural platform.

“That means a more stable market situation, which I think farmers would appreciate,” added Vilsack, who is now the president and CEO of the U.S. Dairy Export Council.

Trump trade deals

Biden will also take over at a time when exporters are still optimistic about gains they made under Trump’s most significant trade deals.

Those are a “Phase One” agreement with China that Trump agreed to in January in order to stop the trade war, and the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement that updated a trade pact among the North American countries that was first crafted in the 1990s.

Both deals contain provisions that U.S. agricultural interests like, such as Chinese promises to increase their purchases of agricultural products and Canadian assurances that it would open its markets further to U.S. milk and dairy sales.

But it would be up to the incoming Biden administration to ensure that those goals are met.

Biden has also promised he “won’t enter into any new trade agreements until we’ve made major investments here at home, in our workers and our communities—equipping them to compete and win in the global economy. That includes investing in education, infrastructure, and manufacturing here at home.”

Relations with China

Biden, like Trump, has criticized China’s trade policies. He reiterated Thursday that he wants China to understand it has to “play by the rules.”

But the incoming president has said he would handle disputes with the Asian rival differently than Trump.

“I will do something Trump hasn’t done and can’t do: I will rally the world to support the U.S. in its fights with China and other countries that violate trade rules. [Trump] can’t build a coalition against our adversaries when he insults and embarrasses our friends. But, where needed, a Biden administration will fight for fair trade on our own,” he said in response to a questionnaire from steelworkers.

When it comes to agricultural products, though, relations between the two countries have been improving.

Under the Phase One agreement, China agreed to take steps to make its markets and regulatory processes more transparent. The changes, for example, could make it easier for U.S. companies to get approval to sell genetically modified crops.

The Chinese also promised to significantly increase the amount of agricultural goods they bought from the United States under the agreement. Their targets would amount to a 50 percent increase over what China bought in 2017, which was a good trade year.

China will almost certainly not make those targets, but it has been buying a significant amount of U.S. corn and soybeans since late summer, which has driven up prices.

“China is buying based on what its needs are,” said Randy Gordon, president of the National Grain and Feed Association, which represents grain elevators, processors and exporters.

Swine herds in China were devastated in recent years by the African swine flu, but now China is rebuilding those herds. That requires a lot of feed.

“Soybeans are going through the roof right now. We’re seeing record amounts of corn exports into China,” he said. “That’s been a real boon for American agriculture. It has really helped strengthen our farm prices.”

The big unknown factor, though, is what China wants, cautions Seth Meyer, the associate director of the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri.

In recent years, China has switched up its purchasing patterns to respond to both political and economic developments, but only temporarily, he noted.

So Meyer said it’s too early to tell whether the recent surge in Chinese purchases means that it will return to buying the same amount of American crops as it did before the trade war.

“It’s an open question right now: Is this demand transient, or is this a signal that we are back to Chinese demand really driving what’s going on in the market for now with row crops?” he said.

A return to normal?

One step the new administration could take to ensure more trade in the future, would be to reduce or remove the tariffs both countries imposed during the U.S.-China trade war, said Grant Kimberly, director of market development for the Iowa Soybean Association.

China, which buys 60 percent of all soybeans globally, agreed to let its buyers get exemptions from the tariffs that are currently under place. “But they could quickly put those right back in place if they wanted to, because they’re technically still there,” Kimberly said.

Mary Lovely, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute and an economics professor at Syracuse University, said those kinds of concessions would be key to returning U.S.-Chinese relations to normal.

“If there’s going to be some type of rapprochement with China on this, there’s going to have to be negotiations before that between the Chinese and the Americans that deescalate the conflict and result in some other wins from both sides,” she said.

Any adjustments in U.S. trade policy toward China could have ripple effects in other markets, too.

Earlier this month, China and 14 other countries signed onto a trade deal called the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. That lowers barriers between China and signatories including Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.

In response to the news, Biden said the United States should be aligned with other democracies “so that we can set the rules of the road instead of having China and others dictate outcomes because they are the only game in town.”

But when Trump decided to withdraw the United States from the Trans Pacific Partnership early in his presidency, the remaining countries forged an agreement without the United States.

President Barack Obama had argued that the TPP was necessary to act as a counterbalance to China in the Pacific region, but many of his fellow Democrats soured on the deal. Biden has said he would only consider joining the new agreement if more concessions were made.

In the meantime, the United States has tried to expand into new markets and increase its market share in other places to boost its agricultural exports.

“For example, we’ve seen [the Trump administration] push with several of our trading partners to get them to lower tariffs on … lobsters,” said Lovely, the Syracuse professor. “It’s not a main line agricultural product, but it was very important to Maine.”

“The problem is that farmers built those markets in China over a 20-year period. It’s very hard to instantly turn around and create new markets. They’re built on trust,” she said.

Many times, American exporters specialize their products for specific foreign markets. “This cannot be turned around on a dime. How President-elect Biden will approach this is difficult to see.”

Canada markets and U.S. dairy products

One of the concessions the United States gained in the USMCA was the promise from Canada that it would open its markets to more American dairy products.

“Canada has always been a tough one to work with on dairy. They’re very protective of their dairy industry,” said Rick Ebert, the president of the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau and a dairy farmer himself. “Hopefully, with a new trade agreement in place, some of the things they put into place to get more dairy into Canada will come to fruition.”

Still, as Canada has released more details about its plans, American dairy officials have grown concerned.

Vilsack, the head of the dairy exporters group, said the “spirit and the letter” of the USMCA made clear that Canada would “open new market opportunities that didn’t exist before.” But the way Canada has structured its rules, the companies that could import more American dairy products would have little incentive to do so.

“You want to make sure that, as [Canada] gets rid of its pricing systems… they don’t replace it with something that basically operates in the same way to distort the market,” he said.

Vilsack said dairy farmers would “hope that the president-elect’s approach to trade would be to make sure that the deals that have been negotiated… are implemented in the way they were intended.”

But Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said a bigger question might be how high of a priority the Biden administration would put on following up on those kinds of issues.

“I strongly expect the labor enforcement will be the top priority. If you look at the political problem that the Biden administration has on trade, it has to reassure union-leaning Democrats that whatever trade agenda it pursues is consistent with expansion of labor rights,” he said.

Environmental protection figures to be a top priority too.

Expanding dairy exports would likely be a lower priority for the Biden administration, he said.

“Canadian milk is a problem up in Wisconsin,” Alden added, “but it doesn’t move votes in the Democratic Party the same way labor rights in Mexico does, so I think [labor issues] will clearly be the priority.”

WTO, talks with the UK

One of the first tests the Biden administration will face on international trade is how it will respond to an impasse with the World Trade Organization, which resolves trade disputes between countries. The United States has long taken issue with aspects of how the WTO operates, but Trump escalated matters by blocking the appointment of judges to handle appeals and by blocking the appointment of a new director.

Meanwhile, the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union will require follow-up negotiations with Britain that have the potential to open new markets or to solidify the United States’ existing relationships there.

Most observers expect the Biden administration to avoid the fireworks of the Trump administration. Even if Biden wants to draw a hard line with countries like China, rallying countries to the cause could take longer than leaving—or threatening to leave—trade partnerships, as Trump did.

“It’s like entropy applied to economics and politics,” said John Beghin, an agricultural economist and faculty member of the Yeutter Institute of International Trade and Finance at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “It takes time to build things, but it doesn’t take much time to destroy them or to get out of them.”