What is the Department of Education?

Dismantling the Department of Ed? It's been tried before.

During his campaign, Donald Trump promised several times that he woulddo just that. So today we wanted to explore what such a dismantling would look like, as well as what the DoED does in the first place. 

Turns out, while the Department does an awful lot of things, there is much for which it is criticized that it does not do. Taking us through its creation, its history, and its powers is Adam Laats, professor of Education at Binghamton University. 

Link to our episodes on School Lunch here and here.

And here are some good resources for anyone who wants to know a little more about Jonestown. My 8th grade report is, sadly, unavailable:

https://www.npr.org/2017/04/11/523348069/nearly-40-years-later-jonestown-offers-a-lesson-in-demagoguery

https://www.nytimes.com/1979/11/18/archives/jonestown-the-survivors-story-jonestown.html

Transcript

Note: This transcript was AI-generated and may contain minor errors.

Nick Capodice: I do have a quick interruption that's not related to education. Is there any chance in your room you have a different chair?

Adam Laats: Oh, this one's squeaky.

Nick Capodice: Yeah.

Adam Laats: Yeah, it's. Well, um.

Nick Capodice: You don't have to.

Adam Laats: You got time? I'll get a different chair.

Nick Capodice: Look at that old chair. Shut up. You're listening to Civics 101 Nick Capodice.

Hannah McCarthy: I'm Hannah McCarthy, and.

Nick Capodice: Today we are talking about the United States Department of Education.

Hannah McCarthy: Who is that in that squeaky chair just now?

Nick Capodice: That was. That was repeat. Civics 101 guest, Adam Laats.

Adam Laats: Yeah, yeah, I'm Adam Laats. I'm a professor of education and history at SUNY Binghamton.

Nick Capodice: Uh, Adam got another chair, by the way, so we were all set.

Adam Laats: All right. How's this one?

Nick Capodice: Fantastic. I would like it if you came in with, like, a series of progressively older chairs. Enough about chairs, Hannah. Let us talk about the Department of Education and some quick abbreviation clearing up. When we say the Doe, we are usually referring to the Department of Energy. So we can't say it for education. Most folks say Department of Ed or Doe ed. I'm going to say d o e d a few times today, even though I'm not sure if it's right.

Hannah McCarthy: And I know the Department of Education has been in the news as of late, primarily because president elect Donald Trump has stated that he plans to dismantle it.

Archive: And one other thing I'll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education in Washington, D.C..

Nick Capodice: Yep. He has. And we are going to get to that, as well as his nominee for secretary.

Archive: The woman he has chosen to lead that charge, Linda McMahon, a well known businesswoman who helped to build the wrestling empire WWE. Can McMahon, if confirmed, bring the changes the president elect is looking for?

Hannah McCarthy: But as of right now, January 2025, the DoD is not DOA. So before we talk about why someone would want to dismantle it, what does the Department of Education do? Why was it was it created in the first place?

Nick Capodice: Absolutely, Hannah, but I have to say up front that this story takes a lot of pretty bonkers twists and turns.

Adam Laats: Is it? I don't know how much normal people know. Like, there's a there's a suicide cult involved. Like, do we want to talk about that suicide cult?

Nick Capodice: Yeah, and that is just the beginning.

Adam Laats: There's also, uh, anti-brotherhood school movement. Like we can't teach the children that humans are all brothers. That's part of the story also. And bombing, blowing, blowing up schools is part of it.

Hannah McCarthy: Wow. Okay.

Nick Capodice: But before all that, to your question, what does the deed.

Adam Laats: Do people, even if they know a lot about education and the United States, the Department of Education, I think is, is sort of mysterious because it doesn't do what I think a smart layperson would think. It doesn't actually decide much about what's going to go on in K-12 schools or colleges for that matter.

Nick Capodice: So, Hannah, pretty quickly this interview became about what the department doesn't do. Now, there is an awful lot that they do do, but it is not what I had thought.

Adam Laats: That's the way the US works, which is different from like almost everywhere else. That's all, you know, district and state level, like mostly states. Like what's the curriculum going to be? Are there are we going to have history tests like in New York to graduate? That's all state. And even like almost all of the money is local. So the the federal Department of Education doesn't pay for schools. It doesn't decide what's going to go on in schools because it's so new. You know, only since the Carter administration, it exists as a kind of mishmash of different pre existing federal programs that got put together under Carter as a as a new cabinet level post. And it matters. I mean, it matters that it's in the cabinet instead of like as part of the Department of Health, Education and welfare. Like, it's symbolically super important that Carter Carter did the same thing with energy. You know, we're going to emphasize how much this matters to us by making this a cabinet level post that matters, but it doesn't do what I think a informed, intelligent observer would think, which is it doesn't decide what's going to happen in K-12 schools or colleges.

Hannah McCarthy: Now, just to clarify, the Department of Education does not decide what is taught in schools.

Nick Capodice: Not in the slightest.

Hannah McCarthy: I mean, I'm fairly sure that most people do think that the Department of Ed is in charge of all of that. I mean, if I'm not mistaken, much of the current outrage toward the department is tied to what schools teach and how they teach it, as well as how our schools are doing compared to other nations schools.

Nick Capodice: Yeah, and politicians reinforce that thought. At the Conservative Political Action Conference last year, Donald Trump said, quote, across the country, we need to implement strict prohibitions on teaching inappropriate racial, sexual and political material to America's schoolchildren in any form whatsoever.

Archive: And if federal bureaucrats are going to push this radicalism, we should abolish the Department of Education.

Nick Capodice: But that aside, Adam says, one of the reasons why people might take issue with the department is due to people's interpretation of how schools are doing, generally in the United States.

Adam Laats: Gallup polls over and over. And this has been, you know, from the 80s till now, they've asked people, how do you think America's schools are doing? And large majority, 75%, 80% are like, oh, they're doing terrible. Like, what grade would you give them D. And then the follow up question, um, how are your kids schools doing? Oh, fantastic. Hey. And in the same proportion 80% go A or B for their kids schools. 80% go D or worse for the school in general. America's schools are fantastic. Not all of them. But America's schools in huge proportions are very beloved by the people who use them. What's not beloved is this idea of a distant educational bureaucracy. And before the Department of Education, there were other bugbears out there for conservatives, and there are some for progressives, too. So, for example, ask a progressive what the danger is for school, and they have a list of distant, bureaucratic, well-funded entities the Heritage Foundation. For conservatives, it's been things like Teachers College at Columbia University where, you know, left wing professors were spreading these ideas. John Dewey as like a an idea has always been seen as like, you know, harming local schools. Once there's a Department of Education, it takes on all that fear of a distant, out of touch elite harming my local schools. And so I think it becomes super unpopular, even though the things that it does in practice tend to be extremely popular.

Hannah McCarthy: Has it pretty much always been this way that the Department of Education is viewed by conservatives as, you know, as Adam put it, a bugbear, a quote unquote distant elite always.

Nick Capodice: And this is where we get to how people viewed it at its creation in 1979. But I can't talk about its creation without mentioning its first incarnation.

Hannah McCarthy: We had a different Department of Education.

Nick Capodice: We did. We had an earlier one right after the Civil War.

Adam Laats: Right after the war, Andrew Johnson started a Department of Education, being encouraged by congressional leaders. And he did. But it was extremely unpopular because the Freedmen's Bureau was actively and energetically educating former enslaved people. The Department of Education, even though it wasn't that wasn't what it was doing, becomes very unpopular.

Hannah McCarthy: So the Freedmen's Bureau was invested in educating formerly enslaved people. But the Department of Education was not.

Nick Capodice: No.

Nick Capodice: It wasn't. Adam said that the creation was sort of an empty gesture to appease northern politicians who asked for it.

Adam Laats: Henry Barnard I was just working in in archival materials. It's pretty sad. He, uh, he was the Connecticut state superintendent. He was a colleague of Horace Mann in Massachusetts. He thought he was gonna ride in, uh, to the federal department and transform the United States education system. What he found, though, was not only did he was he not able to do much, he did some stuff. He collected a lot of statistics, which is great, but when he asked for more than four employees, they took employees away and they cut his salary by 25%. So he just Rodney Dangerfield his way out of that. I mean, he got no respect.

Archive: Well, that's the story of my life. No respect. I don't get no respect at all.

Adam Laats: And they closed the office after, you know, 18 months I think about two years. They just closed it down.

Nick Capodice: So fast forward 111 years, and we get to our modern incarnation of the Department of Education under Jimmy Carter.

Adam Laats: Governor Carter made a deal with the National Education Association. If they swung to him in the election and gave him their support in 1976, he would push hard to elevate education to a cabinet level post. And this was the that kind of politics. Nothing illegal about it. It's just, you know, that's politics. An interest group promises you their support. They deliver. So then Carter was pressed to deliver a Department of Education again. Not that it would have the power to actually do the kinds of things I think street level people think it would, but it's a huge symbolic statement to say education is up there with defense. This is a priority of our federal government, and it wouldn't happen if not for a suicide cult. Bom bom bom.

Hannah McCarthy: Bom. I was waiting for this part.

Nick Capodice: Okay. Jimmy Carter gets elected. He owes the National Education Association for backing him during the election. And he starts to advocate for creating the department.

Hannah McCarthy: But he cannot do it all by himself because it's Congress and not the president who creates departments.

Nick Capodice: Exactly. So the Senate is pretty much for it. The House is a little more against it. Specifically, one man in the House of Representatives who is determined to block any legislation that creates a Department of Education. This is California Democratic Congressman Leo Ryan. Do you know that name?

Hannah McCarthy: I don't think I do.

Adam Laats: He's not as famous now as as he is once you get into the 20th century archives. But in the, in the in the 60s, 70s, he was a very sort of high profile congressperson. He did things like, um, at the time of the La Watts riots, he was a teacher before he went into politics. He went in undercover to teach at a school to see what the deal was.

Nick Capodice: So Congressman Leo Ryan went to Newfoundland to investigate seal killings. He went undercover as an inmate at Folsom Prison to report on conditions there.

Hannah McCarthy: Really?

Nick Capodice: Yeah.

Adam Laats: So he's this, like, TV show, perfect Congress person. Leo. Ryan. And he hates the idea of a department of Education. And he has a committee role that allows him to block it pretty successfully, even though he's a Democrat. He's super opposed to the idea of a federal Department of Education, and he blocks it, and he has the power to block it. But because he's a crusading, high profile congressman, he flies down to Guyana to investigate a murder cult led by the notorious James Jones.

Archive: The charismatic Reverend Jim Jones controlled a cult based in San Francisco to escape scrutiny. He moved the group to a jungle commune in Jonestown, Guyana.

Nick Capodice: So for anyone out there who hasn't heard of Jonestown, it was a settlement in the jungle in Guyana. And it was also the topic of my very first history report in Mr. Zeki's class in eighth grade. Jonestown was a religious commune under the leadership of Reverend Jim Jones, and a lot of people who went to the commune came from San Francisco. So they were technically Congressman Ryan's constituents. And Ryan had heard of some horrible, horrible things going on down there.

Adam Laats: So he as is his want. He smells publicity. He takes a trip. Uh, there's there's journalists, there's hangers on, there's relatives. They go down to Jonestown to investigate. They are ambushed. They are murdered in cold blood at the at the airstrip because of the murder of a US congressman. Jim Jones knows their time is up. He dishes out the Kool-Aid because he's like, well, they're coming for us, but we're going to go out on our own ticket. We're going to we're going to decide how we go out. We're not going out. We're not going to jail. We're not going to fight the US.

Archive: We're out. Good evening. Here's what's happening. We're interrupting our special broadcasting to bring you this special report. A new C news break on the Peoples Temple, mass suicides in Guyana, and the murder of Congressman Leo Ryan. I would mention to you now, tonight's movie will run in its entirety immediately following this special report. I also have to warn you, as we begin this special report, that what you're about to see almost defies description. And some of you may not want to watch it.

Nick Capodice: So the oft used expression is Kool-Aid, but technically it was called Flavor Aid. But that's not really the point. Jim Jones Administered cyanide laced flavor aid to his parishioners, killing about 900 people. Jones himself did not drink the cyanide. He died by a gunshot wound. It's a horrific story. It's a fascinating story. I'm going to put some links for anyone who wants to know more in the show notes.

Adam Laats: But because of that, the opposition to the Department of Ed disappears from the House of Representatives, at least on the Democrats side. The legislation goes through.

Hannah McCarthy: That is. I had no idea that that is how the d e d came about. I mean, that's a really remarkable turn of events, isn't it? So Carter got his new department right. What did he end up doing with it?

Nick Capodice: Well, not a whole heck of a lot. Carter didn't do much because it was created towards the end of his administration. His first secretary was Shirley Hufstedler, and she had just gotten started establishing the department. And then Jimmy Carter lost reelection to Ronald Reagan, who had promised on the campaign trail. Wait for it. That one of the first things he would do would be to eliminate the Department of Education, which we are going to talk about, as well as what the DoD is doing as of this minute, right after a quick break.

Hannah McCarthy: But first, if you want to hear more about things like Nick's eighth grade report on Jonestown, that is the sort of slightly tangential stuff that we put in our newsletter. Extra credit. You can subscribe to it at our website, civics101podcast.org. We're back. We're talking about the Department of Education. And, Nick, we had just gotten to the creation of this department, the second creation, I should say.

Nick Capodice: Right. And this new department didn't really create anything new right off the bat. The same thing happened with the newly created Department of Energy. It just sort of sort of moved existing things from other departments under a new umbrella.

Hannah McCarthy: And you said that Reagan wanted to dismantle it immediately.

Nick Capodice: He sure did. Here again is Adam Latz, professor of education at Binghamton University.

Adam Laats: Reagan comes in swearing to get rid of it. Get rid of education. Get rid of energy.

Archive: We propose to dismantle two cabinet departments Energy and education, by eliminating the Department of Education less than two years after it was created. We can not only reduce the budget, but ensure that local needs and preferences, rather than the wishes of Washington, determine the education of our children.

Adam Laats: But he doesn't. It's kind of obvious in retrospect. He doesn't. Because as soon as, um, Terrell Bell is his first secretary. Terrell Bell takes the job knowing he's supposed to dismantle this department. And so he makes it super popular. Or he makes its work super popular among Reagan conservatives by by assembling a commission to prove that Reagan policies are correct.

Hannah McCarthy: Okay, so once they got a little taste of the power that comes with running a new department, they were not as interested in dismantling it.

Nick Capodice: Exactly. And they get right to work and publish a famous, still cited report called A Nation at Risk.

Adam Laats: And it says what a lot of conservatives at the time really wanted to hear, which is that American education had been hijacked by left wing radicals. The phrase that pays back. Then what really stick was if this system had been imposed by a foreign power, we'd consider it an act of war. You know, there's a rising tide of mediocrity that has taken over our schools. So the Department of Education does that. That's like its first big thing is to say that education in America has been attacked successfully by the left.

Archive: The report states bluntly that the very future of our nation is at risk. Sabotaged by a rising tide of mediocrity in our children's education. The statistics are alarming.

Hannah McCarthy: But if the Department of Education didn't decide what was taught in schools, who took the blame for this so-called rising tide of mediocrity?

Nick Capodice: No surprise the teachers did.

Adam Laats: It was because of of communist leaning teachers unions that the mediocrity had been so triumphant. But it's kind of surprising because we keep hearing, you know, conservatives attacking the Department of Education. And they still and they did at the time. But even as they did it, conservatives always loved what the department did when it was in like their hands. Like anything else, it's a government tool. And when it's been like in the Reagan administration and the first Trump administration that the Department of Education has done things that have been very popular among conservatives.

Hannah McCarthy: Like what? What sorts of things.

Nick Capodice: Well, for example, in Donald Trump's first term, Secretary Betsy DeVos advocated for block grants for all money from the department that went to schools that gave them fewer restrictions on how to spend it. And also, Donald Trump pushed for abolishing preexisting loan forgiveness programs.

Hannah McCarthy: Right. That's the thing where if you work in the public sector for ten years, your loans get forgiven.

Nick Capodice: Right.

Hannah McCarthy: Exactly that. How much money does the Department of Education get every year? What is their budget?

Nick Capodice: Well, of course it changes from year to year. But in 2024, they received $102 billion.

Hannah McCarthy: And how is that money spent?

Adam Laats: Title one is huge. And that's, I think, probably the most obvious, biggest federal impact. But that came before the Department of Education.

Hannah McCarthy: Can you give me a quick explanation of title one?

Nick Capodice: Yeah, sure. This goes back to Lyndon B Johnson. Title one pays federal dollars to schools that have a certain percentage of students who are low income. That money is spent on meals for students. It's spent on classroom materials, teacher salaries, and a whole lot of other stuff.

Hannah McCarthy: By the way this is a fascinating rabbit hole. We have gone down the school lunch path before here on Civics 101. There's a link to those episodes in the show notes if you're interested.

Nick Capodice: I do love those episodes. But anyways, after title one, the largest chunks of the budget are money for special education. That is, money for grants that go to staff and facilities for students with special needs. And finally, as we just mentioned earlier, college funding. You know, this is federal loans, grants and tuition forgiveness programs. But the department doesn't just give dollars to schools. Another role of the Doe is to enforce laws in an education setting.

Adam Laats: Here are some other things that that every school everywhere knows about. And they're not. It's not money, but it's super physical. Every single school doorway has a ramp. So to get into any school, you have to be able to wheel your way in. That's federal. That's Ada. The feds don't provide the money for those ramps. Uh, the money is generally local and state. Uh, but the federal government said you have to do this stuff. And same thing with a lot of, uh, things like special education law. Those are federal things that really changed dramatically. Changed schools.

Nick Capodice: Your school must be Ada compliant. And if it's not, it can be sued.

Adam Laats: And let's not forget the most obvious one from the 20th century. Racial desegregation is a federal thing. States absolutely did not choose to desegregate. The federal government backed up with the 101st Airborne in Arkansas. You know, that's that's that's such raw federal power. It's direct federal soldiers implementing state and local school decisions.

Archive: President Eisenhower sends 500 troops of the 101st Airborne Division of the United States Army to Little Rock by night. They are to keep order and to see that the law of the land is obeyed.

Adam Laats: So if federal influence shows up all over the place, it's just not in the biggest ways that you think. Like, for example, what do you learn in 10th grade about math?

Hannah McCarthy: One thing I am curious about is the relatively recent push toward what is called school choice, where families can get vouchers to help pay for tuition at a private school, a charter school, a parochial school, or the like. Does that money come from the Department of Education?

Nick Capodice: That's a great question. As of right now, it does not. Currently, money for programs like those come from state departments of education, though I have to add, Donald Trump said in October, quote, school choice is one of the most important things we're going to be doing.

Archive: We're fighting for school choice, which really is the civil rights of all time in this country. Frankly, school choice is the civil rights statement of the year, of the decade and probably beyond.

Nick Capodice: School choice programs are in direct opposition to the Department of Education, because the Department of Education supports free public K-12 schools.

Adam Laats: In Kentucky, for example, in Texas. In these red states, you have these voucher programs that are very popular among governors, among policy makers. They're very unpopular among conservative rural populations. So if the Texas story is really fascinating, Texas, very red, very conservative, they try to push with billionaire funding from Pennsylvania. They try to push a new ESA education savings account program vouchers. It gets pushed back on by, you know, Trump supporting Make America Great Again conservatives from rural districts because it would really take money away directly away from the public school districts, and nobody wants that. You know, the number of people who would advocate for, you know, getting worse schools for your children, that's vanishingly small. You know, choice works as a slogan when people can legitimately say, of course I want a better public school for my child. Choice doesn't work in a rural New Hampshire, Kentucky, Colorado Texas area. When choice in practice means money taken away from your public schools.

Archive: School leaders across the state have been speaking up about possible ripple effects for public schools. Investigator Kelly Wiley takes us to Seguin, Texas, where the superintendent fears lawmakers are considering legislation that would deal a financial blow to an already strained system.

Adam Laats: But not just from the academic programs, but from community programs like football. Like if you threaten a town's football program and I'm not I'm not poking fun at all. That's that's a center of their community. It's it's it's it's woven entirely into their public school culture. So no matter your politics, people really don't like the idea of having money taken away from their public school budgets.

Nick Capodice: The last thing I want to add here about school choice programs, which I am promising Hannah to do an episode on this year, is that the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy recently published a report on school choice credits. And this report revealed that wealthy families are the overwhelming majority of people that use them. This report said, quote, in all three states providing data. Most of the credits are being claimed by families with incomes over $200,000.

Hannah McCarthy: Last thing, and who knows whether or not you know, by the time this episode goes to air, things are going to be different. But as of this recording. Right. So this is January 15th, 2025. The Department of Education exists. So I do think it's worth mentioning that Donald Trump's nominee for the department, Linda McMahon, is a staunch proponent for school choice programs, very much like Trump's former secretary, Betsy DeVos.

Archive: Can you tell us more about McMahon's background in education?

Archive: So she's not well known as, uh, as an education policy person. She's never worked in the field. Um, she did graduate with a teaching certificate. Um, but then she got married young and went into the wrestling promotion business with with her husband, Vince McMahon.

Hannah McCarthy: So is this appointment a prelude to the end of the department? Is the DoD in danger of being eradicated? Well.

Nick Capodice: Adam doesn't think so.

Adam Laats: I will be shocked and amazed if the Department of Education goes away. I should mention I've been shocked and amazed for about eight years now in general. So. But I will be again shocked and amazed if this actually if that if they actually get rid of the Department of Education. But it wouldn't get rid of other things, and it wouldn't get rid of a lot of the things that are already in the Department of Education. It would most likely just move them around and move the get rid of the cabinet secretary. But the programs would just move again, most likely to other departments, because that's what they did to create the department.

Nick Capodice: First off, like you said earlier, Hannah, it is Congress, not the president, that creates departments. And that goes for closing them as well. A president cannot do it by themselves. And secondly, a lot of Republican majority states get an awful lot of title one funding for their schools. So I don't think it's something their constituents necessarily want. And last thing, Hannah, picking someone for a secretary for the intended dismantling of a department. That we've seen this before.

Adam Laats: I think people now in 2024 are sometimes surprised that someone like Linda McMahon might come in and be a secretary of education. Someone like Betsy DeVos could come in and be a secretary of education. But Terrel Bell, in the 70s, he was giving white House support to school boycotters in West Virginia, who had firebombed and dynamite bombed school buildings and the district headquarters after the bombings. Terrel Bell from the white House sent his support, implying the White House's support for this boycott of schools. So, you know, the idea that somehow suddenly school politics have gotten rough. Um, school politics have gotten rough. Uh, but school politics have always been rough, and the federal politics have always been pretty shockingly willing to get in bed with violent, aggressive. Extreme. School activists.

Nick Capodice: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I know that chair.

Adam Laats: This one, I think, came from a Milwaukee, uh, supper club. Uh, if you're not a midwesterner, you might not know the supper club scene, but they all have chairs like this. Like.

Nick Capodice: Well, this episode was made by me. Nick Capodice with you, Hannah McCarthy. Thank you. Christina Phillips is our senior producer, Marina Henke, our producer. And Rebecca Lavoie, our executive producer. Music in this episode from Epidemic Sound. And also Cass Blue Dot sessions bio unit. And if music be the food of civics.

Nick Capodice: Play on Chris Zabriskie. Give me excess of it.

Nick Capodice: Civics 101 is a production of NPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

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What are Trump's climate plans?

What has Donald Trump claimed he would do when it comes to environmental policy in the U.S.? What happened during his last administration?  And what are the limits on executive powers when it comes to treaties and global agreements?

Elizabeth Bomberg, Professor of Politics at the University of Edinburgh, tells us what we can expect when it comes to emissions regulations, drilling, climate research, the Paris Agreement, and so much more.  

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Transcript

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:03] This episode is coming out just a week before former President Donald Trump once again becomes President Trump. Now, Trump laid out plenty of intentions over the course of his campaign. We'll be returning to his day one promises in an upcoming episode. But for today, we're going to take a closer look at an issue that has long been inciting and activating in this country. [00:00:30]

Archival: [00:00:32] I'm a 15 year old climate warrior spokesperson for my generation, and I'm suing the United States government for violating my constitutional right to a healthy atmosphere.

Archival: [00:00:41] Scientists have concluded the growing number of fires is a result of climate change. But some voters still remain skeptical.

Archival: [00:00:49] Our colleague said, why are we having this discussion? There is no climate crisis. It's all a hoax.

Archival: [00:00:55] The scientific consensus is clear climate change is real.

Archival: [00:00:58] I think there are a substantial [00:01:00] number of scientists who have manipulated data. You know.

Archival: [00:01:04] All these politicians were talking about the economy. There is no economy. There is no functioning society on a planet that is in ecological collapse.

Archival: [00:01:12] And so the reality is more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change.

Archival: [00:01:20] Polls show more than 60% of Americans disapprove of President Trump's handling of climate change.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:35] This [00:01:30] is Civics 101 I'm Hannah McCarthy.

Nick Capodice: [00:01:38] I'm Nick Capodice.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:39] And I think it's important to note that while I am recording this episode, wildfires, including the most destructive in Los Angeles history, a raging in California. While there is a strong consensus among scientists that climate change increases both the frequency and severity of forest [00:02:00] fires. President elect Trump and other Republicans have already blamed Democratic policies, not climate change, for the devastation. But one way or another, we are definitely talking about the environment here. So looking forward, what has Donald Trump promised to do when it comes to environmental policy in the US? What do we know? What do we not know? We're turning to someone who does know this issue pretty well Elizabeth Bomberg.

Elizabeth Bomberg: [00:02:28] Yeah, I'm Elizabeth [00:02:30] Bomberg, and I'm a professor of environmental politics here in Edinburgh, Scotland, but I'm actually originally from California.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:38] All right. So before we take a look to the future, we're going to gaze into the past. We cannot know for certain what president elect Trump will do when he takes the office again. But we do know what he's done in the past.

Nick Capodice: [00:02:52] And real quick, can we just remind everyone what the president is actually allowed to.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:57] Do when it comes to climate policy, we [00:03:00] can.

Elizabeth Bomberg: [00:03:00] What presidents generally, including President Trump, can do is. Literally, the day they enter office, they can issue a whole series of executive orders. And those aren't legislation, but they are orders that, say, could eliminate certain. Regulations on environmental protection or climate. Or they could eliminate certain. Sources of funding. [00:03:30]

Nick Capodice: [00:03:30] And executive orders, while swift and decisive, aren't necessarily long lasting.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:36] No. For one, they can be overturned by a new president. Trump signed 220 of them in his first term. President Joe Biden rescinded 62 of those in his first 100 days alone. For another, they can be rendered ineffective by Congress if lawmakers so choose by failing to provide funding, for example. They are also frequently challenged in court. One other thing that presidents have the power to do, and [00:04:00] we'll talk about this later, is join or reject global agreements.

Nick Capodice: [00:04:05] And we're talking environmental policy in this episode. So what did that look like under the first Trump administration?

Elizabeth Bomberg: [00:04:11] So I think overall, it would be difficult to characterize his first term as particularly promising for environmental protection or for climate emissions. His first term is, [00:04:30] in my view, having studied this, better characterized as one dominated by a desire to slash funding for scientific expertise and for research, but also to eliminate many of the really significant environmental protections That the federal government had put in place for the last couple [00:05:00] decades. And the third plank of my characterization would be a general hostility towards the idea of climate as a serious threat. He has characterized it in the past and also more recently as a hoax or a scam. So he does not take climate change seriously.

Speaker12: [00:05:27] All of this with the global warming and that [00:05:30] a lot of it's a hoax. It's a hoax. I mean, it's a money making industry, okay? It's a hoax.

Nick Capodice: [00:05:35] And this hoax claim definitely stuck. Hannah.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:39] Yeah, very much so. And to be clear, climate change is not a hoax. In his first term, Trump opposed policies that limited carbon, mercury and methane emissions, opposed protections for wildlife and wetlands, and energy efficiency standards. He also shrunk two national monuments, one by 85% [00:06:00] and the other by about half, to open the land up for fossil fuel and gas leases. A big motivator here, as Elizabeth pointed out, is that Trump sees a direct contradiction between environmental protection and economic growth.

Elizabeth Bomberg: [00:06:15] He doesn't see these as mutually compatible, and he favors economic growth. I think that's how I would sum that up. So he thinks that those who are concerned [00:06:30] about climate or want to take really ambitious measures are doing so because they have some other political agenda, or maybe they just don't know the science. Maybe that's what he would say. But if climate change enters his vocabulary, it is inevitably linked to the to the idea of this is a hoax, or this is a scam, or this has been exaggerated, or this is another element [00:07:00] of wokism or something of that sort.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:07:03] So I feel like we do have to mention that Trump has called himself a great environmentalist president.

Archival: [00:07:09] But it's true, number one, since Teddy Roosevelt. Who would have thought Trump is the great environmentalist? Do you hear that? Do you hear that? That's good. And I am, I am I believe strongly in it.

Nick Capodice: [00:07:22] So, Hannah, what exactly is the plan for the future here? Like we know how Trump feels about environmental policies. We know what he's done [00:07:30] in the past. So what does he plan to do with his next term.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:07:35] In terms of Trump's promises or plans to protect or strengthen the environment? Here is what we know.

Elizabeth Bomberg: [00:07:40] What he would focus on is policies, say, around tree planting. He has endorsed and said we need to plant more trees and he wants clean air and water. And he says, you know, the US does have the cleanest water and air of any nation. And while that's not statistically true, it does [00:08:00] show that there might be some areas that he wants to strengthen as far.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:04] As his other promises go.

Elizabeth Bomberg: [00:08:05] And so what he had promised quite consistently and probably will deliver on, is that he will do his best to scrap many of these regulations so that industry, and especially above all fossil fuel industries, can get on with their job, as he puts it, because he wants to expand enormously fossil fuel extraction in all kinds of [00:08:30] areas through fracking, which we can talk about later, but also through increased drilling, including on public lands, including in wilderness areas.

Nick Capodice: [00:08:39] So when we hear drill, baby, drill and.

Archival: [00:08:42] We will drill, baby drill.

Nick Capodice: [00:08:47] Is this what we're talking about?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:50] Yeah. Oil from federal lands and water accounts for nearly a quarter of US oil production. And we will talk about current American oil production levels in a bit. And [00:09:00] Trump wants to ramp that up and cut regulations on fossil fuel extraction. He also promises to reduce support for low carbon energy sources.

Nick Capodice: [00:09:09] And by that we mean.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:11] Think solar, thermal, geothermal and nuclear power, wind power, low carbon biofuels made from algae or plant waste, or zero carbon fuels like ammonia or hydrogen. Electric vehicles, for the record, fall under this category for Trump as well. He has equated new car emission standards [00:09:30] with electric cars themselves, claimed that people could be forced essentially to buy only electric cars. He talks about an electric vehicle mandate that does not exist. Trump also happens to have chosen Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has made a lot of money from electric vehicles for his new government efficiency department. But so far, Musk is on Trump's side on this.

Archival: [00:09:53] And I will end. The electric vehicle mandate on day one. Thereby [00:10:00] saving the US auto industry from. Complete obliteration, which is happening right now and saving U.S. customers. Thousands and thousands of dollars per car.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:10:16] Trump also vows to revoke the Inflation Reduction Act, which incentivizes the transition to, quote unquote, clean energy and, of course, to withdraw from the Paris Agreement.

Nick Capodice: [00:10:30] All [00:10:30] right. These are the promises. But you know what I always say about promises, Hannah from The Cremation of Sam McGee. A promise made is a debt unpaid. And to that, may I add, may we all be Lannisters.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:10:45] I mean, I'm not entirely sure that's how politicians see it. Nor do I think that we should aspire to be Lannisters. But I do take your point, and I do think a lot of American voters care about promises. So what is the near [00:11:00] future of American climate policy? We'll get to that in the future after this break.

Nick Capodice: [00:11:07] But before that break, a reminder that Hannah and I wrote a book. Holy cats. It's called A User's Guide to Democracy How America Works. We think you're gonna need it. Anyways, you can get it wherever you get your books. We're [00:11:30] back. You're listening to civics 101. We are talking about the future, specifically what we might expect from president elect Donald Trump in terms of environmental policy. And Hannah, before the break, you promised me a little something that is to tell me what's gonna happen.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:49] Well, we're not in the business of forecasting here at Civics 101, but we are in the business of speaking with people who know a lot more about what's going on than we do. That's where Elizabeth [00:12:00] Bomberg comes back in. So let's start with a highly likely event.

Elizabeth Bomberg: [00:12:05] A major executive action of Trump's, which is not about domestic policy, but it was to withdraw the US from a really major international climate change agreement called the Paris Agreement.

Nick Capodice: [00:12:22] Okay. We do hear about this one a lot. Uh, two things we got to take care of here. First off, what is [00:12:30] the Paris Agreement?

Elizabeth Bomberg: [00:12:31] The Paris Agreement was signed by nearly 200 countries in 2015, and it's a major United Nations agreement. And this Paris agreement stipulates Relates that all the countries who sign up for it, including the US, pledge to set national targets and put in place kind of domestic measures that will reduce their own climate [00:13:00] emissions. Okay. It's not itself binding. It's not as though a UN officers are going to go in and check. It's voluntary, which is why it was agreed to by 190 something states. And the idea is that let countries themselves figure out what can they do to put forward a pledge that collectively will ensure that countries across the globe are able to [00:13:30] reach a global emission target that keeps the climate warming to under two degrees, or ideally, even 1.5.

Nick Capodice: [00:13:42] All right. And we know that Trump has taken us out of this agreement before.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:47] Though Biden did put us right back in when he won the presidency.

Nick Capodice: [00:13:50] And this agreement. It's not binding. There's no giant penalty for not meeting your targets.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:56] No, but promise made debt unpaid, right? You say you're [00:14:00] going to do something. So do you do it? Are you showing that you're a climate leader? Are you going to prove your country to be a source of new environmental technology, a good potential partner, a country other countries want to make deals with? It's the social, political and economic pressure that keeps this agreement rolling.

Nick Capodice: [00:14:22] And given that Trump is promising to take us out of this agreement yet again, what does that actually mean?

Elizabeth Bomberg: [00:14:28] It doesn't change [00:14:30] what the US is likely to do domestically. There are disadvantages for the US of pulling out. It means we domestically we lose an incentive Of to further cut our emissions and share our innovations and work harder to achieve a goal that is good for everyone across the globe. Okay, so we don't get to be a part of that. Um, but it also means more strategically if you're not a part of that treaty, [00:15:00] um, you no longer have a seat at that table. So you're not able to shape these global targets. So leaving the Paris Agreement, which almost certainly Trump will do, this will have slightly negative effects, but it won't be devastating.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:16] Before we move on, we do need to touch on one maybe related thing here. There's the Paris Agreement and then there's the Unfcc.

Nick Capodice: [00:15:27] I'm listening.

Elizabeth Bomberg: [00:15:30] What [00:15:30] we don't know is whether the Trump administration will go beyond just leaving this agreement. There is some talk and some of his advisers and some of the more conservative think tanks who have shaped his campaigns and continue to shape his policies. What they would like is for the US to withdraw not just from one agreement, but from the entire UN framework that [00:16:00] underpins all climate negotiations. Right. That would be much more serious. So that is called the UNFCCC or the UN Framework Convention for Climate Change.

Nick Capodice: [00:16:14] Hold up. Is the UNFCCC a treaty like a treaty? Treaty?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:16:20] It is indeed.

Nick Capodice: [00:16:21] So can the president actually pull us out of a treaty agreement? Isn't that like an advice and consent of the Senate thing? Operative [00:16:30] word here being consent.

Elizabeth Bomberg: [00:16:33] There's some ambiguity whether the Trump administration can pull the US out of the whole framework convention without the support of the Senate. Because the Senate, your listeners might know, the Senate gets to approve whether the US can join a treaty. What we don't know is whether we need Senate approval, two thirds approval. [00:17:00] So a big approval to pull the US out of the treaty. So this will be really interesting legally, if the Trump administration does try, it wouldn't take place right away, but it's something to watch.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:12] All right. Moving on. Let's drill a little deeper here.

[00:17:15] Drill baby drill.

Elizabeth Bomberg: [00:17:21] Drill baby drill. Yes. Yeah. There's a couple disincentives for companies who might want to drill. And one is [00:17:30] gaining access to the land, especially if it's public land, because much of the drilling and extraction is done in public land. And then what kind of controls and permits and permissions. Do you need to put in place before you start drilling? So if those are relaxed, then those fossil fuel firms will have an easier time in drilling in more places, including quite pristine wilderness. So I think we will see more of that.

Nick Capodice: [00:17:59] More of that [00:18:00] though I will say we have had plenty of drilling during Biden's presidency, haven't we?

Elizabeth Bomberg: [00:18:05] Record breaking and ironically, fossil fuel firms, energy firms have some of the highest profits. This is not something that the Biden or the Harris campaign made a big deal of, but it is one of the reasons that those who were environmentally or climate very focused voters, including many young voters, did not enthusiastically support [00:18:30] the Democratic ticket.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:18:35] Elizabeth did add that this is all complicated by permits that were already issued. Disruptions in the fossil fuel supply from Russia. The ongoing war in Ukraine increased global demand. Et cetera. All of which led to an energy crisis. Also opening areas and providing leases for drilling. That's one thing, but the government cannot control the oil market or whether oil companies choose to drill. [00:19:00] Still, drilling was at an all time high under President Biden. Biden did very recently, by the way, issue an offshore drilling ban, which Trump promises to revoke on day one.

Archival: [00:19:12] They took away 625 million acres of offshore drilling. Nobody else does that. And they think they have it. But we'll put it back. I'm going to put it back on day one. I'm going to have it revoked on day one. We'll go immediately if we need to. I don't think we should have to go to the.

[00:19:28] Courts, but if we do have to go to court. [00:19:30]

Nick Capodice: [00:19:33] And I know we have mentioned it, Hannah, but there are a lot of regulations at play here, right? Regulations that Trump wants to dismantle to allow the fossil fuel industry to ramp things up. So who's in charge of that?

Elizabeth Bomberg: [00:19:47] The Department of Energy traditionally has been in charge and responsible for energy extraction. So rules and also incentives for how [00:20:00] the US gets its energy, as well as regulation of how that energy should be extracted and what should happen to the waste from that energy extraction. So here I think we'll see something quite dramatic, especially if Trump's nominee to lead the Department of Energy, that's Chris Wright is his nominee and again, has to be approved. But if he is approved, he is [00:20:30] himself a climate denier. And also he's made his millions through fracking. What he has already vowed as his Trump is to remove significantly the controls that are now put on how fracking is done.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:20:47] Fracking, by the way, also known as hydraulic fracturing. It's a process that cracks open rocks beneath the surface of the Earth to extract trapped natural gas and oil. Fracking [00:21:00] is thought to pose a threat to drinking water, both the supply and the cleanliness. It has been tied to increased earthquakes. The process itself, as well as the use of natural gas and oil, also contributes to air pollution. Okay, so we've talked about regulations before. They come from executive branch agencies. And it is Congress that gives those agencies the authority to issue regulations. And environmental regulations are, of course, not exclusive to fossil fuel extraction. [00:21:30] We're also talking about emissions, pollutants, all sorts of things that poison or diminish the air, water and soil.

Elizabeth Bomberg: [00:21:40] What we will probably see in the first couple of days is, first, a slashing of funding and support and power for particular regulatory agencies. So one target would be the Environmental Protection Agency. So this is the federal agency that [00:22:00] is in charge of protecting human health and the environment more generally. And it is the agency that issues regulations that limit the amount of carbon that can be released into the air, or limits the amount of chemicals that can be sprayed, or limits the kind of pollutants that can be dumped in waterways. So basic, but, you know, crucial environmental protection. The EPA, the Environmental [00:22:30] Protection Agency, relies on regulations that it can then implement. But these many of these regulations can be removed by executive order because they're not congressional legislation. It's an executive regulation.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:22:46] Now, just to be clear, there are processes in place when it comes to how regulation happens or goes away. There's a rulemaking procedure governed by law. But as we learned in the previous Trump administration, [00:23:00] breaking with common practice does not necessarily amount to breaking the law, especially when the courts are on your side on.

Nick Capodice: [00:23:08] That particular subject. I feel like our episode on the Chevron Doctrine might have some useful background. There's a link in the show notes.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:23:15] Yet courts no longer have to defer to executive agency expertise, so they are way more empowered to reject agency regulations. Okay. Moving on. Trump [00:23:30] has promised to either defund or reduce funding for lowering carbon emissions.

Nick Capodice: [00:23:39] This is what we talked about earlier. Wind and solar and stuff like that. Uh, renewable energy.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:23:45] Yeah. And there's a significant hitch when it comes to pulling government support of renewable energy. And that hitch isn't just political, it's also economic.

Elizabeth Bomberg: [00:23:56] On one hand, we have without a doubt, and this is something that [00:24:00] Trump or no one person could stop, is that we have this inexorable trend. We have an unstoppable trend towards renewables globally and also in the US. Renewables are increasing, including and this is what makes it very interesting. The most dramatic increases has been not in the blue states like California and New York. No, it's been in the red states. It's been especially in Texas. So you've [00:24:30] got these states who are benefiting enormously from renewable energy. But then you also have an incoming administration that wants to get rid of renewables, or certainly doesn't endorse renewables as a way towards energy independence.

Nick Capodice: [00:24:48] Okay, so basically, Trump vows to withdraw support for renewable energy, but renewable energy is making money.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:24:58] And one not insignificant [00:25:00] factor is that there are a lot of conspiracy theories out there about what else renewable energy is doing.

Elizabeth Bomberg: [00:25:08] Some very powerful but unfounded claims or conspiracies.

Archival: [00:25:13] They're dangerous. You see what's happening up in the Massachusetts area with the whales, where they had two whales wash ashore, and I think a 17 year period, and now they had 14 this season. The windmills are driving the whales crazy.

Elizabeth Bomberg: [00:25:32] Some [00:25:30] of the key purveyors of those unfounded claims are potential nominees, including Robert Kennedy Jr, who does think that offshore wind is a danger to health. What that means for investment? We still don't know because the government can set incentives and subsidies, but I don't think those statements are enough to stop this really powerful trend. [00:26:00]

Hannah McCarthy: [00:26:04] Elizabeth did say that even if the United States reduces or withdraws support for renewable energy development and production, and by the way, that support often comes in the form of tax subsidies, aka tax breaks for companies that are exploring and manufacturing renewable energy sources. Anyway, even without that government support, Elizabeth doesn't see this upward trend toward renewables going away. It's [00:26:30] a global thing. What she does see potentially happening is renewable startups struggling in the US and America, potentially losing its footing in the renewable energy race.

Elizabeth Bomberg: [00:26:43] If you're someone just starting and you need that government subsidies to help you, the way that those government subsidies helped Elon Musk with his, you know, electric cars or what have you, that won't happen. And it also means and this is harder to measure, but I think we'll have really significant [00:27:00] implications is that if the US government withdraws that support, both rhetorical support but also financial support, that means others will step in. So the main threat to the production of US green energy right now is a competition from China. So if the US steps back, then China production will increase to supply those to others.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:27:27] Basically, Elizabeth says. Watch what happens on that [00:27:30] front. Trump is also, of course, promising tariffs on goods imported from China. Listen to our episode on tariffs to understand exactly what that means. But if the United States isn't buying renewables from China, it might encourage domestic production. Assuming, of course, there are incentives like tax subsidies to get that production off the ground.

Elizabeth Bomberg: [00:27:53] Producers, you know, business people whom Trump does listen to more [00:28:00] than an environmentalist. If they say, look, you know, we need this for jobs and we need this to make us energy independent. Trump is somewhat agnostic. You know, I think he can be open. We know he's a transactional person who just sees a deal and he likes to get that done. So he might listen to that and decide to change his opposition to renewables. That wouldn't surprise me. I could see him coming out. It would be interesting to interesting to watch.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:28:28] Okay. Last big environmental [00:28:30] policy promise Trump made to revoke the Inflation Reduction Act.

Elizabeth Bomberg: [00:28:35] Trump cannot revoke the Inflation Reduction Act. Okay. It's a congressional piece of legislation. That doesn't mean that he can't try. And he has allies in Congress and his party controls both houses. But key here is that he will need to go through Congress. He will need to work with [00:29:00] Congress to revoke all or parts of that act. As we were speaking about before, the Republican states are the most significant beneficiaries of the Inflation Reduction Act. So that act provided oodles of money for investment in green transition and to jumpstart renewable energy production. Did a whole host of host of things. Many Republicans don't want that repealed. [00:29:30]

Nick Capodice: [00:29:30] So that really makes it sound like the Inflation Reduction Act isn't going anywhere.

Elizabeth Bomberg: [00:29:36] Well, there could be regulations that undermine some of the dimensions that are in the Inflation Reduction Act. So that's that's a way of that's a more a sneaky way to undermine some of the goals and aims of the Inflation Reduction Act without revoking the act itself. The Inflation Reduction [00:30:00] Act set aside particular pots of money for particular communities. There was a very strong justice element attached to the Inflation Reduction Act. So these would be particularly deprived communities, generally communities of color who are suffering the most from pollution or the effects of climate change, and there were certain programs that are funded [00:30:30] to help address some of that because they haven't been implemented yet. It could be that the Trump administration, then is able not to get rid of the pot, but stop the implementation of that money being dispersed. For instance.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:30:47] The Biden administration, by the way, is currently trying to get as much of that money dispersed as possible before they're out of the white House. But moving billions of dollars from federal coffers to state and local governments is not an easy [00:31:00] task. There are also tax incentives for individuals and families buying electric vehicles, solar panels, even heat pumps. But these require paperwork and navigating supply chain problems so that one might be a race against the clock.

Nick Capodice: [00:31:16] So, Hannah, I think it's important to point out here that there are promises and there are Possibles and there are probables. Right. But ultimately we [00:31:30] can't know what this new administration will do with and to environmental policy in the United States, especially when so many of these plans involve existing law and procedures.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:31:43] We really can't. We just have to wait and see. So I think for those invested in the fate of climate policy, one way or another, Elizabeth is really just saying, here's what to look for, here's what to watch. Basically, pay attention to X, [00:32:00] Y, and Z because here's what it could mean. But policy and law and legality aside, Elizabeth says that Trump has already accomplished a meaningful and likely lasting change when it comes to American attitudes toward the environment.

Elizabeth Bomberg: [00:32:17] I think this idea of an ideational or the role of narratives kind of shaping the narratives, because those can outlive any particular president [00:32:30] and they're much harder to shift. So I think in Trump's first term, he already sought to change in significant ways the way that Americans think about the environment and the way they think about climate and the way they think about America's leadership role or America's role in the world. And I think in all these areas, we [00:33:00] are still witnessing the impact that he had in his first term. One of the areas is how do Americans view expertise? How much do they trust international and national institutions to identify a problem and then address the problem? And there has been such a significant drop in Americans trust of scientists. America's trust in expertise [00:33:30] more generally, and even Americans trust in the role of federal or state institutions to deliver a common good.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:33:40] And Elizabeth says there is the fact that the incoming administration has a much better handle on how things work than it did the last time around. A much stronger team that knows exactly what it wants and has a pretty good idea of how to get there. Deregulation is a pretty common name of the game here, not just with environmental policies, [00:34:00] but beyond. By the same turn, though, Elizabeth believes that those who are concerned about losing climate and environmental protections have learned a thing or two as well.

Elizabeth Bomberg: [00:34:11] Those who are advocates for environmental action, they've seen this now before. This is not new and shocking. And oh my gosh, where did this come from and how do how do we react and what can we do? They know what the playbook is, how to reach those members of Congress who are benefiting, how to focus on state measures. [00:34:30] They will come even more important than in the past, and states are already building all kinds of alliances. But also, I think that those advocating for change have become slightly more sophisticated or or becoming more in tune with what motivates voters in the public more generally. And it's actually not to be green, and it's not because it's the right thing to do. It's making much more of the [00:35:00] interlocking between environmental and climate action and other things that Americans value. You know, whether that be future generations or whether that be, you know, the beautiful national parks and things around us, or whether if you're a person of faith, what does that bring or whether you care about social equality. So the idea of intersecting. More of linking climate and environment to other positive values. [00:35:30] I myself think that's the best way to communicate. And I think the more that that can get across, the more that whatever you think of a particular candidate, you can say, ah, I think there is a space for us to make sure that we're living in a unpolluted world, that we can habitate and, you know, live with others to prosper.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:35:53] So a savvy administration against a savvy environmentalist movement, one [00:36:00] promising a brighter future via unfettered or at least less fettered industry. And the other via a less polluted planet. We often talk about finding consensus, using that as the foundation for constructive and net positive change in America. Most people might be able to agree that they want to be safe, healthy, fed, clothed and sheltered. That they don't want to fear for their or their children's futures. [00:36:30] That they want their communities to thrive. That they don't want to worry about money. That might be some kind of American consensus, but agreeing on how to get there when the potential paths diverge so drastically in this America, that might be easier said than done. And at least for the next four years, our chief executive has told us what path he plans to take. We'll [00:37:00] just have to see where that leads and what Americans think about it.

Nick Capodice: [00:37:25] This episode is produced by Hannah McCarthy with Marina Henke and Me Nick Capodice. Our senior producers [00:37:30] Christina Phillips and our executive producer is Rebecca LaVoy. Music. In this episode by Diana Particle House, Craig Weaver, Lucas Got Lucky, Mind Me, mindless, Timothy Infinite, Sven Lindvall, and Zorro. You can get everything else Civics 101 has ever made and reach out to us at our website civics101podcast.org. And if you like us, consider leaving us a review. Throw us some stars. You can do that on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your audio. Civics [00:38:00] 101 is a production of NPR New Hampshire Public Radio.

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Made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

A midwife's early American story

Ariel Lawhon's novel The Frozen River is set in 1789 and tells the story of a real-life Massachusetts midwife.. Though the novel is fiction, the midwife was real, and the book was based on around thirty years of her personal diaries.

What were rights like for women in the brand-new state of Massachusetts? What about the courts? The practice of medicine?

In this episode, executive producer Rebecca Lavoie talks with Lawhon about The Frozen River, and why more people should know about the women's stories lost to conventional American history.

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Transcript

Hannah McCarthy: This is Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy. Today on the show, we're going to be breaking format and bringing you a conversation with author Ariel Lawhon. Recorded live at writers on a New England Stage in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The reason we're airing this in the Civics 101 feed is because Lauren's novel, The Frozen River, is about a time and a place in our country. We think about a lot around here post-revolutionary America, New England, to be precise. The book is historical fiction, but it's based on a real life midwife named Martha Ballard, who lived an extraordinary life providing care to more than a thousand women during her career. The novel takes place in 1789, in Hallowell, Maine. It's part murder mystery, but also explores timely themes through an historical lens women's rights, health care, the criminal legal system, all things we've touched on in our podcast. If you've read The Frozen River, you'll really enjoy this conversation. If not, we recommend it. But you can listen anyway because it's pretty fascinating and we're putting a link to more about the book in our show notes. So without further ado, here's our executive producer Rebecca LaVoy with author Ariel Lawhon, recorded live for writers on a New England stage.

Rebecca Lavoie: I am so glad that you're all here joining us for this conversation. Thank you for coming out for it. It feels like a really good time to curl up with a good book and talk about it. And thank you so much for joining us. Ariel.

Ariel Lawhon: Thank you so much for having me here. I am delighted this is my first time here. Really? Yes. First time.

Rebecca Lavoie: So The Frozen River. It tells the fictionalized story of a real life person, 18th century midwife Martha Ballard. How did you learn about Martha Ballard?

Ariel Lawhon: So Martha Ballard, if you're not familiar with her, there are three things you need to know. She was a midwife in the 1700s who delivered over a thousand babies in the course of her career, and she never lost a mother in childbirth. The second thing you need to know about her is that she kept a diary for over 30 years, at a time when most women could not read or write. And the third thing that I find fascinating is that she was the great aunt of Clara Barton, founder of the American Red cross, and she was the great great grandmother of Mary Hobart, who was one of the first female physicians in the United States. And I knew none of this until August 8th, 2008. And the.

Rebecca Lavoie: Specific date.

Ariel Lawhon: The specific date. I was pregnant with our fourth child. My husband and I had four kids in five years. I take that back. We did not have them. I had them, and I was pregnant with number four, and I had gone to a routine doctor's visit on August 8th, 2008, and my doctor was late for the appointment. So I'd been stranded in his waiting room and I had two options. I could reschedule and go home, but there were children there and I didn't miss them currently, and my husband had them, so probably nobody was going to die. The other option was I could stick it out and wait for my doctor to show up. And so I chose the latter, and I was in his waiting room for hours the entire afternoon, and I finished the book that I'd brought with me. And then I read all of the magazines in the office, and there was nothing left except for that pile of scary pamphlets they have in the corner that you don't want. To read because you don't want to know how you're going to die.

Ariel Lawhon: As I was flipping through those pamphlets and underneath I found a small devotional called Our Daily Bread, Really common in doctor's offices in Texas at the time. So I flipped open this devotional and to August 8th, 2008, I still have the page, which is why it's memorable. And I proceeded to read the story of a woman named Martha Ballard, who had delivered over a thousand babies in her career and never lost a mother in childbirth. And I remember sitting there thinking, the doctor that I'm waiting on cannot boast a record like that. But Martha Ballard did it in the 1700s without the benefit of cesarean section or modern medicine. And I just remember thinking that would make a great novel. So I ripped the page out and I put it in my purse. It is worth noting here because I got hate mail recently for ripping the page like, oh, come on, it's a disposable. Like, it's three months. You're meant to chuck it in the trash. After the three months, I did not desecrate the leather bound hardcover book.

Rebecca Lavoie: It's like desecrating Us Weekly in a doctor's office, right? It's fine. It'll be fine.

Ariel Lawhon: But I kid you not. Two minutes later, my doctor walked in. And I think about that sometimes. When I'll turn around, I look at my bookshelf and I see the frozen river there. I think if I'd gone home and rescheduled, this book would not exist.

Rebecca Lavoie: Mhm.

Rebecca Lavoie: So I listened to your author's note for the book. In it you describe yourself as a collector of people. Yes. And you also say that this book is different than the other ones you've written, because they could be described as biographical fiction, but this one can't. So can you talk about that?

Ariel Lawhon: I love people, I love collecting their stories. My favorite thing is to stumble across somebody or a moment in time, or a person that I'm vaguely familiar with, but I don't know the specifics. And then to do a deep dive into their world. The difference with this particular book is that, unlike my other four, there was so little research material available. We have Martha Ballard's diary, and we have a biography called a midwife's tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, which go buy it. It's amazing it won a Pulitzer. It is the definitive history of Martha's life. We have those two things. Her diary is this really intimate day to day look at the life of a woman in the 1700s. And then the biography is this 30,000 foot view of the overarching life and times. But I was writing one story set during six months of her life, and there was so little to go on. Unlike many of my other novels, there were no conversations recorded. There were no specifics about her relationships and her friendships. It had to be created out of whole cloth. And so in that sense, this is the most fictional of my stories, even though the vast majority of what happens in the book is real.

Rebecca Lavoie: Can you describe the way that Martha wrote her diaries? Because I think it's fascinating. They're not written like prose style. So you, I think, had to imagine, you know, the details around them, but also rethink the way she could have written them so that we could read them in your book. But how were they actually written?

Ariel Lawhon: We call it a diary. It's really not. It's not even a journal. Are you familiar with a daybook? My grandmother kept a daybook. That's more of what it is. She will give you the date. She will give you the weather. Oftentimes, she'll tell you what she cooked for dinner, whose baby she delivered, who came to visit. It is very truncated, very specific. There is no little to no editorializing in the 900 pages of her diary that we have left. If you were to read her diary, which you probably won't, because I will be honest. It's rough sledding. It's.

Rebecca Lavoie: And it's expensive.

Ariel Lawhon: It's expensive. My copy cost $350. It was a good investment. I think it paid off. Um, so you're not going to read it. But if you did, there is one phrase that you would find repeated thousands of times. She'll give you the date. She'll give you the weather. She made chicken, she delivered a baby. Her friend came to visit. And she will end the diary entry with this one phrase and she will say, I have been at home. And it was sort of this mantra that happened throughout her diary. But for me, I wrote this book during Covid and every day I would go to my desk, I would open the document, I would open my research material, things I needed to do, the notebook of what scenes I was going to write that day, and then I would open her diary and I would read several passages. And she did this, and she did this. I have been at home, so my mantra became me too, Martha. Also, yes, I have been at home for days and days and weeks and months and years. And when I think back to that girl in the doctor's office, pregnant with three other really little kids at home, I think that girl could not have written this book as it exists now. But also, I needed to write this book during that very specific time. It gave me this affinity for Martha Ballard because her entire life, her work and her home life was one piece. There was no separation. She was at home with all of her children, with her husband constantly. And I feel as though I understood her in a way that I would not have been able to understand her had I written it at any other time?

Rebecca Lavoie: So the novel opens with a dead body in an icebound New England river, and Martha is a midwife, but she also becomes a detective. In your book, how did you decide to do that construct, and are you a mystery writer now?

Ariel Lawhon: I've always been a mystery writer. I love a good old fashioned whodunit, I love them. I have not written a whodunit since my very first novel, but I grew up reading Agatha Christie. It's fun for me, and when I was trying to decide what I would write next, it's always the question, what will I write next? I was like, I don't know what the subject matter will be, but I know I want to do a murder mystery. And so I went into it specifically knowing I want to do a murder mystery. And how fun would that be to have a midwife detective? We don't get those very often.

Rebecca Lavoie: But our midwives perfectly suited to be detectives in a way, because as we learn in the book, she's a collector and keeper of secrets. Right?

Ariel Lawhon: So she's in your home. She is delivering your baby. But what we don't realize about midwives is that they were much, much more than the person who delivered your baby. If you got cut or burned, you called the midwife and they would give you stitches and they would come make a tonic. Make a salve. They were your primary care providers. They were your pharmacist. They were your general practitioner in most communities at the time. Because in the 1780s, in the wilds of what was then the District of Maine in the state of Massachusetts, many towns did not have their own physician. So if something goes wrong, you quite literally call for the midwife. But she was also the coroner. Somebody dies, they call her to inspect the body to see if she can try and determine the cause of death for any potential legal proceedings that happen. And so, yes, the book begins with a body. The first line in the book is the body floats downstream, and then it gets locked in the river when it freezes, which, for the record, I am from the southwest and I did not know that could happen.

Rebecca Lavoie: Welcome to New Hampshire.

Rebecca Lavoie: Yes.

Ariel Lawhon: They find the body, extract it from the river. They call Martha Ballard. She inspects the body, comes to a conclusion, and immediately is interrupted by the new town doctor who has a very different idea of what happened. And then we are off to the races.

Rebecca Lavoie: I'd love you to talk a little bit more about that, because the doctor character in your book is new to town. He can't not say that he was trained at Harvard like every other sentence.

Ariel Lawhon: Yeah.

Rebecca Lavoie: But what were doctors doing at this time? Like, how did they differ from what the midwives were providing?

Ariel Lawhon: So it's a really, really interesting point in American history and also medical history. Because we have this newly formed Harvard University, we have some of the first classes to graduate, their first medical students, all men, and they are going out into these communities to to doctor to treat these patients. But it was about that same time that the medical community that was entirely male looked at labor and delivery as a source of lost income. So modern obstetrics really began in a way that doctors were going, oh, that is medical. I should be treating it. I should be delivering these babies. I have studied anatomy in a textbook. I can do this many times. What happened, however, is that they did not bother to learn from the women who had been doing this for decades and decades, and had thousands of years worth of knowledge passed down one to another. So when this doctor shows up in this town, his name is Doctor Benjamin Page. It sets up this conflict between midwifery and obstetrics. But it was a real conflict that happened in Martha Ballard's world, because you have a 24 year old boy showing up with a degree and lots of book knowledge and no experiential knowledge, and he begins to encroach upon Martha's territory with really deadly results. And all of the births and the situations and things that go wrong in the book really happened. And they are recorded in her diary. And it was this really fascinating. Rivalry is the wrong word. It was just this conflict between these two ways of treating women in labor.

Rebecca Lavoie: I'm curious how many people in this book were based on real people, or was it all of them? Most of them. 

Ariel Lawhon: The vast majority. There might be 1 or 2 that are composite Characters. And then there were plenty that I had to strip out. There's a lot of people in this book. It is a very heavy populated village. And so I had to be judicious in who got time on the page and who fit into the specific story that I was trying to tell.

Rebecca Lavoie: One of  the funniest details in your author's note is you talk about how many of the women in the village were named Hannah. So you actually changed the name of some of those women.

Ariel Lawhon: Everyone’s Hannah. Lots of Hannah's, lots of Rebeccas. And then you get lots of really, um, archaic biblical names, like her husband is Ephraim, which took me half the book before I realized how that was pronounced. So it's kind of fun. You get to use some names that you don't typically find in a novel.

Rebecca Lavoie: How is Ephraim her husband represented in her writing? Because in the book, he manifests as this incredibly feminist, incredibly supportive man in 1789 feels very much like the ideal partner today. So how much did you know about him when you were writing about him?

Ariel Lawhon: We know basic facts. We know that they were married for the entirety of their lives. We know that they had nine children, six of whom were living at the time. The story opens. We know that they were business partners. They ran a mill together. They worked together. We know that at the very least, he was supportive of her career. She had a lifelong, thriving medical career as a midwife. It is not a stretch for me to believe that that translated into the rest of their life and their family. Um. Ephraim Ballard, it is important to note the version in this book resembles my own husband greatly. So that is, that's my influence. That's his right. His mother did a good job. Um, he's actually home. I'm here because he is home with our two sick teenage boys making them soup and taking them to the doctor. Good men have existed for all of history, and that is one thing that I think is very easy to forget. My personal pet peeve in fiction is that we so rarely get to see good men, and we so rarely get to see good marriages in particular. And as a novelist, I know why it is easier to write The Bad Marriage, because all of the conflict exists right there. If you write a good marriage, the conflict has to come from elsewhere. But when I sat down to tell this story, knowing that Martha was remarkable, knowing that she must have had support in her home, I wanted to tell the story of a good marriage.

Rebecca Lavoie: Something else that's somewhat rare is a novel where the protagonist is a woman in her mid 50s. What is that? What was that choice? Because you had 27 years of her life to choose from. So why did you make that choice?

Ariel Lawhon: Again, another pet peeve but also bred from life experience. Like I said, the girl in the doctor's office could not have written Martha Ballard, who is 54 years old when the novel opens. I also this is not the first. It's the first novel idea I came up with. It is not the first I've written. It's the fifth. And I kept going back to it and thinking, is it time? Is it time? I'd pull out that piece of paper that I stole.

Ariel Lawhon: And I'd go, ah. Not yet, not yet. And I used to think it's because it's a hard novel to write. It's a hard novel to pull off. I have since realized I just wasn't ready. I needed more life experience under my belt. A major theme in this novel is about having grown children, having kids grow up and leave you. And who are you as a person when the primary work that you have done for decades is now over? And I had finally reached that point in my life, but also not to being young myself. I find that I want to see more mature women on the page.

Hannah McCarthy: We'll be right back with more of writers on a New England stage with Ariel Lawhon after a quick break.

Rebecca Lavoie: Hallowell, Maine is where the book is set, but Hallowell also, to me became a character in the story. You're not from New England. How did you pull that off?

Ariel Lawhon: Tomorrow will be my first time to Maine in my entire life.

Rebecca Lavoie: Amazing. 

Ariel Lawhon: So my original plan was to go to Maine to research the book when I was writing. Because I have 900 children and I had them so close together. Research trips were just impossible for much of my career, but I was like, I can do it. I can get to Maine. I'm going to go research this woman in person. And Covid happened and we were all stuck at home. And listen, had I known Covid was coming, I would not have suggested to my husband that we buy a drum set for our youngest son for Christmas, December 2019. Alas, the book was written to the sound of a thousand drums over my head. But Covid ruined that opportunity completely, and so I was stuck doing this the way that I always have been, which is my research material, my imagination, Google maps, lots of pictures, and then a recreation. That is my version of a place, my version of an event, my version of what could have happened. But all towns are the same. Really. People are the same. That is one thing you learn when you have. My job is that people have been peopling since the dawn of time.

Rebecca Lavoie: You may or may not have intended it, but this novel speaks very much to many elements of where we are today. Except in many ways things seemed not necessarily easier for women, certainly, but simpler. Can you talk about the freedoms, the rights, the sort of things that surprised you? Learning about how women lived in 1789 and early America?

Ariel Lawhon: People always ask me, if you could go back in time, what era would you live in? And I say, none of them. History was awful  for women, really, prior to about 1900, in particular in America in the 1700s, what we know as our legal rights in general, not even just as women were bare bones, the court system barely existed. We were talking about this backstage. We'd had a constitution for two years. The Bill of rights had not been written in the Constitution. We had the first five articles, most of what we know as due process, most of the rights that we take for granted, do not even think about did not exist, particularly for women. And one of the things that I discovered early when writing this book is during Martha's time, women could not testify in court without the presence of their husbands or their fathers, with one exception if you were a midwife, you were granted legal status that would let you come in and testify in court Because one of the laws that had been written early on, I want to say it was in the 1500s, do not quote me. The hard drive has been halfway deleted because I'm working on a new book. But this law was called a law for the punishment of fornication and the maintenance of bastards children. And it was a law on the books in Massachusetts at the time. And it basically said, if a woman had a child outside of wedlock, she'd have to go to the court and either pay a fine, possibly spend a night in jail. The man had no requirements, there was no fee, there was no jail time. There was no nothing. But for a midwife, one of the things that they were required to do if they delivered a child that was born out of wedlock was ask the mother the name of the father. And this is the part that is kind of hilarious to me. The people who wrote the law genuinely believed that women were not capable of lying in childbirth. I'd have lied to you just for talking to me.

Ariel Lawhon: Clearly, they.knew nothing about women and less about childbirth. But Martha was required by law to inquire of the name. Sometimes they told her the name, sometimes they didn't. She would have to go to court and declare. The mother said this or the mother refused. This book takes place 50 years post Puritan era, and we tend to think of the Puritans as really pure. Ha ha. Not so much.

Rebecca Lavoie: Yes, there's so much extramarital, premarital sex in this book. Like, is that is that how it was?

Ariel Lawhon: Fascinating tidbit for you in Martha's time, based on her diary, based on the children that she delivered for in ten first pregnancies were conceived out of wedlock, 1 to 2 in ten were born outside of wedlock. So you had a lot of shotgun weddings and you had a lot of 9 pound premature children. Gosh, biology works man. It has worked from the dawn of time, and I loved that Martha approached this reality with a very, very dispassionate view and absolutely no judgment. And I thought, gosh, we have sanitized so much of human history, and we tend to think if it happened back then, they must have been really proper about it. No. Yeah. Though, as Shakespeare says, the world must be peopled.

Rebecca Lavoie: While you were writing this, though. I mean, the conversation was really shifting in the country about reproductive rights, women's rights. The Dobbs decision came down in June of 2022, for instance. And, you know, women's reproductive rights, how we talk about things like extramarital sex, premarital sex is really shifting during this time. Were you informed by some of that when you were writing this book?

Ariel Lawhon: That is a great question. So two things can be true. I was editing the book about the time of the Dobbs decision, which clearly was front of mind for the entire country. But also one of my jobs when I approach any moment in history, is to try to separate the modern era in which I live, because I learned early on history does not need me to editorialize it. And so to look at this story, I had to really focus every day to sit down and go, okay, Martha Ballard could not imagine the world that we live in. Martha Ballard could not imagine going and voting. She couldn't imagine most of the things that women today enjoy. So if that was her reality, what is she focused on? If she's living at a moment when these things don't exist? What is her focus? How does she view the world? And that is the thing that I worked really hard to build in. And in doing that, it became a story that you could read in the newspaper. Honestly, you could open any newspaper in the country today and read something similar, but because it's set several hundred years in the past. There's this level of separation that allows you to look at it in a way that you cannot. If you're reading a modern story. History changes, but it doesn't.

Rebecca Lavoie: There's a black character in your book, a traveling medical provider that you call doctor. Can you talk about this character and the real person that she was based on?

Ariel Lawhon: Again, you're not going to read Martha's diary. If you did, you would find a very small handful of references to a black female doctor that would occasionally come to Hallowell, Maine. And what's fascinating, other than she uses black female and doctor. She doesn't say nurse, she doesn't say midwife. She uses the phrase physician. Is that when this woman would come to Hallowell, Martha's friends and neighbors skipped over her medical care and went to this other woman. Mm. I do not think. Is it a stretch to say that means that she had superior medical skills to Martha? What is fascinating, however, is that this woman's name is never recorded in Martha's diary. But at the time there were 12 free black families living in Hallowell. Massachusetts was the first state to abolish slavery, and at the time there were 12 families in this town that Martha knew. She worked with. She delivered their babies. She bartered and traded and talked to them. She knew their names and recorded them in her diary, with one exception, this female physician. And it made me think, does she not know it? Or does she purposefully not record it? And so she is one of the characters that I loved most because again, this is the story of our world. Women so often get written out of history. Yeah, but Martha made sure that there was a mention of her.

Hannah McCarthy: Stay tuned for more of this edition of writers on a New England Stage with Ariel Lawhon after the break.

Rebecca Lavoie: You talked about this being a time when the Constitution was two years old, yet there's a legal procedure at the center of your book to in addition to the mystery, we also have this like law and order situation in court. What did you learn about that process when you were researching the going to court? Like the laws that how it worked?

Ariel Lawhon: It was bonkers.

Ariel Lawhon: The whole thing was nuts. I mean, imagine. So there were three levels, right? There's the the petty level. Your neighbor steals your cow, or your neighbor curses on the Sabbath and you want to lodge a complaint. So the lowest level is petty complaints. Somebody didn't pay a bill. Somebody punched you in the nose kind of thing. The next is more serious. It is theft. It is murder, it is rape, it is assault. And then the highest higher level was appeals court. So to say they would handle any issues that couldn't get resolved in the lower courts. And then you had the Supreme Court. And it was really fascinating for me to approach this from a modern mindset where we think of due process, we think of rights, we think there are things that are established and you are innocent until proven guilty, and you're given a lawyer. If you can't afford one and you read your Miranda rights, bupkis. None of it didn't exist. Most of the time, if a woman was assaulted, her daddy, her husband, her brothers were going to take care of it before it could ever get to the courts. And so you've got this kind of freewheeling vengeance aside, that was happening over here. And then you've got a baby country trying to establish the rules by which we live civilly. And those two things are constantly in conflict throughout the story.

Rebecca Lavoie: An audience member wants to know, have you ever visited a setting or location from one of your books and been disappointed that it didn't live up to your imagination?

Ariel Lawhon: So I've never really visited a location, but something fun has happened with every single book that I have written. I have been contacted after the publication by somebody that has a relationship with the book. With my first novel. It's called The Wife, the maid and the mistress is about a missing judge. I got an email from a woman and she goes, Mrs. Lawson would love to know where you did the research for your novel, The Showgirl. And your novel was my grandmother. I was like, oh, God, I did that to somebody's grandmother.

Rebecca Lavoie: Oh.

Ariel Lawhon: Um, with my second novel, I got to talk to a little tiny, tiny, tiny old German man whose father had taken him on a tour of the Hindenburg prior to its last flight. And he's like, you got it right. My third novel is set during the Russian Revolution, and it's about Anastasia Romanovna and the woman who is her believed to be her most famous impostor. And I got an email from a woman at the University of Virginia. She did genetic research, and she told me that she'd read the novel, that she loved it. And she's like, I just want you to know, I was the person that did the genetic research to determine whether or not Anastasia Romanov did survive the Russian Revolution. Wow. And she proceeds to tell me how she was walking across the campus that day, being the only person in the world who knew at that moment whether she had or hadn't.

Rebecca Lavoie: Another audience question. Did the Ballards really know Paul Revere?

Ariel Lawhon: That was a little fictional bit. The people asked me about a lot, and it was just fun. It was just fun I had, unrelated to the plotting of this book, stumbled across pictures of Revere Pewter and he signed it all. And then later on, I was researching the book and I realized that part of what she would do is she would mix her ink in small pewter dishes. And I thought, why not?

Rebecca Lavoie: I mean, New England's a small.place, right?

Rebecca Lavoie: We know each other.

Ariel Lawhon: They didn't.

Rebecca Lavoie: One of the things I love about your website, and I've never seen this on an author website before. This specifically is you show the room where you write and you actually give a tour of different elements of the room. What interests you about the spaces in which people write?

Ariel Lawhon: I cannot prove this. I don't even know how you would do a scientific study, but I think where a book is written informs the book itself. For me, that is room in my house that used to be a dining room that my husband closed off and turned into an office, and it's got this old desk. A number of years ago, he bought me this. It's tiny. It's not much bigger than this. It is a teacher's desk that was pulled out of an old one room schoolhouse. And it's got all the stains and chips and nicks, and I love to sit there and think what stories were told at this desk. Who taught here?

Rebecca Lavoie: You've written about all these different eras, World War two. You've written about the Romanovs, Russian Revolution. Is there a time that you are just dying to write about, that you are searching for a story to fit?

Ariel Lawhon: Oh yes and no. So my next one is set during medieval Ireland, which, if you think 1700s Maine is hard to write about. Geez. Also, I didn't think before I decided to write about a pirate. The fact that I get seasick.

Ariel Lawhon: Yeah, that’s turning out to be a bit of a problem. So that is the next book. Actually the one that I'm waiting for, the dream book for me, and I have most of it built in my head, is actually a Western.

Rebecca Lavoie: Of course, there is the Pulitzer Prize winning book about Martha Ballard, but she doesn't appear in women like her. Don't appear in any of our history textbooks when we go to school. You know, it's the Founding Fathers. It's very much for the perspective of the men of the time. How do you think our understanding of American history would shift if the Martha Ballard's of that time were just as present in our textbooks?

Ariel Lawhon: It would be revolutionary, if you think about it. When it comes to big conflicts, history is written by the winners. The losers never get to tell their version. But history is also written by those who were educated, who had the access to books, reading, writing. And throughout so much of history, women were in the sidelines. But I always say, if you want to know what really happened at any moment in history, go talk to the women who lived it. Find their records if you can, because they record totally different things. Men are obsessed with the wars and the bullets and the bombs. Not all of them. That's a gross generalization. But men do this. Women do this, and they focus on the people and the relationships and what they have lost, and the small betrayals and what it cost them at any moment in history. And the fact is, we need both. We need the big and we need the small, and we've lost so much of it. It's why I do what I do. And I could live a hundred years and never write enough books to really scratch the surface of the lives of women that we have forgotten. But I am trying.

Rebecca Lavoie: Ariel Lawhon I will read anything that you write after reading this book. Thank you so much again. Thank you.

Ariel Lawhon: Thank you for being here.

Hannah McCarthy: Writers on a New England Stage was hosted by our executive producer Rebecca Lavoie, who also produced this episode. The featured author was Ariel Lawhon. You can learn more about her book, The Frozen River by clicking the link in our show notes. The Music Hall president and chief executive officer is Tina Sawtelle. The producer for the live show was NPR's Sarah Plourde. Literary producer for the music hall is Brittany Wasson. The production manager is Zhanna Morris. Live sound and recording was engineered by Ian Martin. Lighting and house tech by Drew Fabrizio. Music in this episode by blue Dot sessions, Chris Zabriskie and Epidemic Sound, Civics 101 is hosted by me, Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice. Our senior producer is Cristina Phillips. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

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Secretary of Transportation with Pete Buttigieg

Transportation and infrastructure are massive (literally) undertakings here in the United States. So what does it mean to oversee it all? What is the Secretary of Transportation actually in charge of and what's going on with our roads, bridges, airports, etc.?

We spoke with Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg to find out.

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Transcript

This transcript was computer-generated, and edited by a human. It may contain errors.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:00] Nick, have you ever noticed that when we talk about the importance of government, the reason why you should care the way it affects your daily life? We almost always talk about things like intersections and stop signs.

Nick Capodice: [00:00:14] That is kind of true. It's like our own personal civics 101 cliche. And by the way, this is Civics 101. I'm Nick Capodice, I'm Hannah McCarthy.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:23] And back to this stop sign thing. I think the reason that we use this as an example for how government affects you is that it is such an everyday thing, right? So quotidian. And at the same time, it can mean the difference between a safe, straightforward, not at all annoying drive or walk or bus ride and a dodgy sloggy extremely annoying drive or walk or bus ride.

Nick Capodice: [00:00:55] Like that specific rage that comes with hitting the same pothole you always hit and screaming to the skies asking why your town hasn't fixed it yet.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:04] Infrastructure rage is extraordinary. I, for example, live in the Boston area where the subway system has ruined everyone's commutes and so basically lives for like 20 years. Up until very recently.

Nick Capodice: [00:01:19] I remember once getting lost on some backwoods country road in Vermont and the relief, Hannah, the utter relief of finding myself on a paved, smooth roads after hours of the exact opposite of that.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:33] Bridge closures, detours. Train delays. Flight delays, flight delays. Fun fact I partially wrote this episode while experiencing a flight delay, which was funny because the person we're talking about today has actually thought quite a bit about people and planes.

Pete Buttigieg: [00:01:52] Well, I think a lot of airline passengers find themselves in a situation where they feel like they don't have a lot of power. You get stuck in an airport, you can't get somebody on the phone, and the airline says, well, too bad, or we'd love to take care of you, but we don't have another flight for three days or something else happens and you feel powerless.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:10] This is the person who is thinking about infrastructure. So ideally you don't have to.

Pete Buttigieg: [00:02:16] Sure, I'm Pete Buttigieg, I'm the US Secretary of Transportation.

Nick Capodice: [00:02:22] Wait, so Pete Buttigieg is allowed to do something about airlines.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:26] Among many, many other things. So the Department of Transportation, or DOT, is an executive branch agency. These agencies are there to administer and enforce laws. They also make and enforce rules and regulations. These are not the same things as laws, but you do have to follow them, at least until the next secretary changes them.

Pete Buttigieg: [00:02:51] We're using our rulemaking power. And by the way, we don't just I don't just pull a rule out of the air and say, everybody has to follow this now. We have a whole process where everybody from an airline CEO to an ordinary passenger can submit their comments and weigh in before we finalize any rule.

Pete Buttigieg: [00:03:07] But the kind of rules we're having are ones that say, for example, that if you pay for something, you don't get it, the airline has to give you your money back without you having to ask. Or if you're booking a ticket and there's a bunch of extra fees and charges, they have to show you the fees and charges before you buy. Common sense stuff, I think. But we had to go through a whole process to make that take effect.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:28] That process, by the way, is the rule making process and it is involved. That's for another episode on another day. In terms of the enforcement part of being an executive branch agency, the DOT relies in part on people like us to tell them when something is afoot.

Pete Buttigieg: [00:03:46] We set up a website called Flightrights.gov about all of the things that you can expect and require your airline to do for you if they do get you stuck because information is a source of power. We have a complaints portal where you can complain to us if they're not following the rules, and we follow up because that's enforcement power.

Nick Capodice: [00:04:03] All right. So if the airlines aren't behaving the way the DOT told them to behave, they get penalized.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:09] They do, for now at least. Again, the interesting thing about these agencies is that they can shift drastically from administration to administration. But here is how Pete Buttigieg thinks about his job.

Pete Buttigieg: [00:04:24] Well, the thing about infrastructure is you tend to notice it least when it's at its best. Like if you got a perfectly smooth road between your home and your work, you're probably not thinking on your on your way like, oh, what a great road. I haven't hit a pothole this whole trip. You don't think about that unless it's just been resurfaced. And then you think about it for like a week and then you get used to it. If, on the other hand, there's a problem, you can't take the bridge that you're usually taking because it's been closed, or there's a limit on how many vehicles can drive on it because it's in poor condition, or you're getting on an airplane and you've got a four hour delay or anything else goes wrong, that's when you notice it.

Nick Capodice: [00:05:06] And that that is where the infrastructure rage comes in.

Pete Buttigieg: [00:05:10] So the paradox of our work is I've got to make sure there's enough attention on our work to maintain the support, to do it, to to have the funding to fix the road or to have the power to require the airlines to take good care of passengers, while recognizing that the better we do our jobs, the less people have to think about it. With one big exception, which is all of the people who work in this sector, there are so many people, from a flight attendant to an electrical worker involved in one of the projects we're funding to, let's say, fix an airport terminal, whose livelihoods depend on this.

Nick Capodice: [00:05:49] Can we take a quick step back here, Hannah, and say what Pete Buttigieg actually does, fix the roads, fix the airports, etc. but what does that actually mean? Like, what does the Secretary of Transportation actually do all day?

Pete Buttigieg: [00:06:08] Okay, well, if it's a Washington day, then I get up, I make my way to the office. We start with the around to check ins with the team, to find out anything that's happened overnight that I need to know about, our plans for the day, any interviews that I'm doing, what we're planning to do in the media, and then we jump into a lot of meetings and conversations. Might be an interview like this one, followed by a meeting with a senator who's interested in a project that they're hoping to get done in their state. Maybe they got a bridge that needs work, and they're hoping to get funding from our department to help get it done. I might address a larger group, vehicle safety advocates, who are concerned with making sure that there are fewer car crashes, or a gathering of consumer groups in the aviation industry who want to get more passenger protections. I might find myself at the White House to be part of the team that I'm part of, in addition to, of course, the work here at the Department of Transportation.

Nick Capodice: [00:07:06] All right. So Pete Buttigieg talks to the press and he talks to politicians, and he talks to advocates, and he talks to the president's people, and he talks to other cabinet members. And look, I know this like, I know the higher up you are, the more your job becomes talking. But it's got to be way more than that.

Pete Buttigieg: [00:07:24] If you've ever seen an ad saying "call before you dig 811", which is about pipeline safety, that's us, because we're responsible for pipeline safety. If you've ever heard of the US Merchant Marine Academy, that's part of our department. We issue the licenses for commercial space launches because that's part of what the FAA that's in charge of aviation and the national airspace does. We're not NASA, but in order to get to space, you have to go through the national airspace, and we're responsible for the national airspace. So it is really an extraordinary scope of different things that we work on. But what they all have in common is they have to do with moving people or goods safely in this country, and they require some level of federal involvement to make sure it goes well.

Nick Capodice: [00:08:11] Would it be fair, Hannah, to say the Department of Transportation is all over the place?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:16] Very good. Yes. A little all over the place, but literally, yes. The Department of Transportation includes the federal highway, railroad, transit, aviation and motor carrier safety administrations. We're also talking about the Maritime National Highway Traffic Safety Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administrations, even the Saint Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation.

Nick Capodice: [00:08:44] I'm sorry, the what?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:45] So you know how for a long time, people were looking for the Northwest Passage to get from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.

Nick Capodice: [00:08:51] Oh, I certainly do. Hannah. Stan Rogers even has a whole song about it.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:55] Well, this is not that, but people thought it was. It's a series of waterways that the United States and Canada turned into a water highway from the Atlantic up to Montreal, and the Saint Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation helps take care of the US part of it.

Nick Capodice: [00:09:12] And the Secretary of Transportation is in charge of the people taking care of it.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:16] Right.

Nick Capodice: [00:09:17] All right. So it really is all about moving people and goods. And given the fact that we have hundreds of millions of people and billions of tons of goods.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:27] I mean, it takes the GDP of a mid-sized country.

Nick Capodice: [00:09:30] Yeah, about that. So what is all that money actually doing?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:36] Planning, fixing, building, maintaining. Roads, bridges, Seaways, aviation infrastructure, the things that we use to move people and things. A big part of the Secretary of Transportation's job is to get the money to the people doing the transportation projects, of which there are currently a lot, for reasons we will get to shortly.

Pete Buttigieg: [00:10:03] Go to something like Investor.gov and you can see it's called Investor.gov, because investing in America is our our framework for everything we're doing. You can see DOTs all over the map. You'll find a project close to where you live, wherever you live, because we're doing 66,000 of them. So I have I've been to every single state in the US, and I have only seen a tiny fraction on this job of the projects we're doing.

Pete Buttigieg: [00:10:25] Another thing I want people to know is that a lot of the decisions are actually being made closer to where you live. So much of our funding is set up through a process. It's a competition. Different states and cities come in. They say, we got this project, they've got that project, and our team works through them. And then I sign off on the winners who get the limited funding that we have. But actually, most of our funding doesn't work that way.

Pete Buttigieg: [00:10:50] Most of the billions of dollars that come out of this building where I'm sitting go into the hands of a state, and the state in turn, often distributes them to more local units, like what's called a metropolitan planning organization, an MPO.

Nick Capodice: [00:11:04] Hang on. I want to make sure I get this right. So your state or your city can basically make a pitch to the DOT and hope you have the best pitch. And it's Pete Buttigieg who decides what the best pitch is.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:18] Yeah, basically there are grants which are competitive, and then there are appropriations, which are based on a formula approved by Congress and distributed to state DOTs, tribal governments, various transit agencies. These entities get to decide, to a degree what to do with that money. And Pete Buttigieg wants you to know that you actually get to weigh in if you want.

Pete Buttigieg: [00:11:42] This is getting pretty wonky, but the reason I want people to know about this is often the meetings of those bodies that decide what to do with this money, like an NPO, are open to the public. So unlike here in Washington, where you only get to speak in a committee meeting in Congress, if you've been invited, a lot of these processes closer to home, you can just show up. And back when I was a mayor, I saw decisions made differently sometimes because young people, high school students, even, not old enough to vote, showed up, stood in line and said their piece. And I hope people remember that because if you know, for example, that on your walk to school or on your drive to soccer practice, there's an intersection that's unsafe, there might be a chance to do something about that by getting that intersection on the radar of people in your state legislature or state Department of Transportation, or just your city council or county who are figuring out what to do with some of these funds, or putting together a process for community input, which we require on many of the projects that we're funding. So find ways to get involved. Even though the dollars are federal, you don't have to come to Washington in order to be involved in how they get used. In fact, the whole point is that everything we fund is a local project somewhere that's designed locally, and then all we do is prepare the funding and make sure that it follows the rules of what to do with federal taxpayer dollars.

Nick Capodice: [00:13:11] All right. I was going to ask about this. You can't just go willy nilly all over the place with your federal money, right? Like the DOT is watching.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:19] DOT is watching. We talked about airline consumer regulations earlier, but a lot of these rules and regs are about safety. Is something being planned, built or repaired the right way? Will it be safe for people and the environment in the future?

Nick Capodice: [00:13:35] So while we're on the subject about doing something about transportation.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:40] That is, in fact, the singular subject of this episode. Right.

Nick Capodice: [00:13:43] But I would like to, if I may, draw your attention to the elephant on the bridge here.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:48] Go for it, Mr. Barnum.

Nick Capodice: [00:13:50] So, Hannah, if there is one word that I have heard more than any other to describe infrastructure in America over the last two decades, it is crumbling.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:59] Ah, yes, the crumbling infrastructure. And you know what? We're going to get to that after a quick break. But before that break, a reminder that Nick and I wrote a book. It's called A User's Guide to Democracy How America Works, and it's the book that you can reach for whenever you find yourself wondering, is that legal? Why is that happening? What does that even mean re America? You can get it wherever books are sold.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:48] We're back. We're talking about the secretary of transportation with Pete Buttigieg, the current secretary of transportation. But we're also talking about what the Department of Transportation the DOT actually does. And a big part of what the DOT does has to do with how much the DOT has to work with in terms of money and laws. And Nick, before the break, you mentioned this pretty common buzzword that we have heard a lot when it comes to talking about infrastructure in America. That word is crumbling.

Archival Audio: [00:15:24] Our roads and bridges are crumbling, our airports are out of date, and the vast majority of our seaports are in danger of becoming obsolete.

Archival Audio: [00:15:32] The best interstate system in the world, which is now falling apart.

Archival Audio: [00:15:35] It was a stark reminder of this nation's crumbling infrastructure.

Archival Audio: [00:15:40] According to levy expert Jeff Mount, our nationwide system of levees is old, poorly designed and in desperate need of repair.

Archival Audio: [00:15:47] It's safe, Steve, but it's not reliable, and it's getting less reliable. It's old. It's systems are breaking down.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:58] So there's this annual infrastructure report by the American Society of Civil Engineers. And the US has not fared well for decades. We're talking a D, maybe a D plus for a grade.

Nick Capodice: [00:16:11] Which is a scary grade for the stuff that moves people and things.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:16:16] It's not great. So since the 1970s and until very recently, infrastructure investment has gone down and down. A lot of the stuff that we use to move people and things is at least 50 years old or much older. It was built in and for a different world. The older it gets, the more expensive it becomes to fix or replace it. And then there's the question of, well, do you fix it or do you replace it? And can you get enough votes to get enough money to do either of those things? Is it politically popular? How do you get people to agree on what to do with the money, even when you have the money? And who is actually in charge when we're talking about thousands of state and local departments and agencies.

Nick Capodice: [00:17:07] So federalism and politics are kind of the answer as to how things got so bad.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:14] You know, that's the answer to most questions here on Civics 101. Also, infrastructure is often so big and takes so much time. An infrastructure decision is not the same thing as a tax decision, but its effects tend to last a lot longer.

Pete Buttigieg: [00:17:31] You know, a lot of decisions that are made in here in Washington are kind of year to year decisions. Sometimes a piece of tax policy or some regulation and it happens. And then that's that's the rule for next year. But if we build a bridge, we better put it in the right place and design it in the right way, because 50 years from now, people are still going to be counting on it. And one way this hits close to home is that we're living with decisions that were made 50 years ago or 100 years ago. And some of those decisions were good. Some of them were not. Many of us live in neighborhoods that are cut off or cut in two, because somebody put in a highway right in the middle of it, when it could have been designed in a way that wouldn't impact the neighborhood. And right now, we're deciding what to do about that.

Nick Capodice: [00:18:17] All right. So let's get to the right now part. You said that investment has been declining until very recently.

Pete Buttigieg: [00:18:23] So right now we're in the middle of an infrastructure package. In other words, we're doing a round of repairs and construction. This is bigger than anything we've done since the 1950s, when we set up the highway system in the first place. And it would be easy to think that that was just happening. But actually, for most of our first year in this job, most of 2021, we didn't know if we were going to be able to do that. President Biden said that it was going to be a priority, but we had to negotiate it with Congress, and we were working very hard to get Democratic and Republican votes to make it happen.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:19:00] The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was signed in 2021 and provided over $1 trillion for transportation, infrastructure, environmental mitigation and things like broadband, quote unquote, clean energy and the electric grid.

Nick Capodice: [00:19:16] This is the one that's also called the bipartisan infrastructure law, right? Was it actually bipartisan?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:19:23] It was. But also some of the politicians who voted for it received threats for voting for it, so don't go thinking it was easy. But after years of what we called Infrastructure Week being a big joke not just in Washington but nationwide, this was a significant thing. And transit wise has been funding the very, very big like bridge projects and airport renovations and also the smaller but more immediate like new school busses.

Archival Audio: [00:19:54] The $1.2 trillion bill includes $550 billion in new spending, including $110 billion for roads and bridges, $25 billion for airports, and the largest federal investment in broadband ever, $65 billion.

Archival Audio: [00:20:10] All of this is extremely, extremely important and needed all over the country. The biggest investment and by.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:20:15] The way, our latest grade from that report that I mentioned earlier, we're up to a C minus, which is better than we've done in a while.

Nick Capodice: [00:20:23] Hannah, is this why so many people actually know who the Secretary of Transportation is these days because there's a ton of money to do transportation stuff.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:20:33] I mean, I think that and also a lot of people already knew him.

Pete Buttigieg: [00:20:38] Well, you know, two years before I came, became secretary of transportation, I was a mayor of a mid-sized Indiana city, and nobody outside of that city would have much reason to know who I was. But about one year before I became Secretary of Transportation, I was running for president. And so a lot of people got to know me, and I tried to use that visibility that followed me into this job. When President Biden asked me to to take this role, I tried to use that tool to help get things done, especially when we were negotiating this big infrastructure package. So because people knew who I was, I spent a lot of time arguing on television and calling up senators and members of Congress making the case, and was in rooms negotiating, sometimes with the president, sometimes on my own, uh, working on how to get this done.

Nick Capodice: [00:21:28] You know, this really hammers home the point to me, Hannah, that cabinet members, in essence, have political jobs. I mean, they have very specific responsibilities. Right. And for Pete Buttigieg to keep it really simple, that is moving people and things safely. But but to actually get things done, it helps if you know how to politic.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:21:52] Yeah. You know, how we often ask the question is this thing that we're talking about political on its face, for example, is a bridge political is flying through the sky at 42,000ft, political? Is that stop sign political? I mean, maybe not in isolation, but none of it happens without politics. It's about money and jobs and consumers and citizens and safety and fairness and talking to people. Which is maybe why, when I asked Secretary Pete Buttigieg if he has time for a life in all of this, he did take the chance to remind me why he's actually here to begin with.

Pete Buttigieg: [00:22:39] The pace can be pretty extreme, but, you know, my husband definitely expects me to be available to either take care of the kids while he's running to target or go to target so he doesn't have to. So at least on weekends, we try to have somewhat of a normal life. The days can be packed. I couldn't help but notice today I was glancing at the schedule and I'm not certain where lunch is going to happen. But you know, that's because there's so much good work today.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:23:15] That does it for. This episode was produced by me, Hannah McCarthy with Nick Capodice. Christina Phillips is our senior producer. Rebecca Lavoie is our executive producer. Music in this episode by El Flaco Collective. Commodity. Spring gang drama beats Ryan, James Carr, Casey Wilcox and Beigel. If you have any questions for Civics 101, we want to hear from you. Go to our website civics101podcast.org and submit your questions about America. You are our main source of ideas for these episodes and we of course are here to serve. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR New Hampshire Public Radio.

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