US Politics

Martin Kettle’s review of Joe Biden’s approach to economic regeneration (In the US, Joe Biden is backing the unions. Britain can only look on in envy, 7 April) was welcome, but we question whether it went far enough in its endorsement or reach. The success of Franklin D Roosevelt’s original New Deal owed much to the positive role offered by a confident and expanded union movement in governance of the project.Furthermore, there is little doubt that, both in the US and UK, at times of national emergency during two world wars, trade unions made significant contributions to the war effort, politically and on the manufacturing shop floor. After the second world war, it was British unions that encouraged the introduction of worker directors and the co-determination system, which provided the means for reviving the German economy – a system still operating in that country and across Europe, to the benefit of employees and employers.The case for supporting union revival becomes even clearer as we confront not just the consequences of the pandemic but also the emerging climate emergency. There is little doubt that while British industry has done regrettably little in confronting environmental despoliation, trade unions have been actively engaging with other partners in developing the green new deals that will be essential for securing sustainable economic development. These deals can offer tripartite supervision of the economy to oversee progress toward the 2015 Paris accord and the UN’s sustainable development goals; partnership agreements between unions and employers to ensure just transitions to green and secure jobs; and progress towards reducing the growing inequality that blights the UK.Jeff Hyman Professor emeritus, University of AberdeenChris Baldry Professor emeritus, Stirling University Martin Kettle is right that Joe Biden’s decision to promote decent conditions and respect at work, and to tie this into the collective organisation of trade unions, is something that is much-needed in Britain. Ten years of a Tory government should be sufficient reminder that in the present day only a Labour government will do anything on this agenda.However, that is the first, not the last, word. Kettle thinks some unions are stuck in the past, but then criticises those leaders who are critical of Keir Starmer, as if himself wanting a return to the days when unions sometimes represented not so much the interests of their members as the perspectives of the leaders and their desire for political careers.Certainly, many trade unions and trade unionists would hope and work for a Labour government. They’d also expect to shape and influence its policies in relevant areas. That is surely what US unions have successfully done with Biden.Keith FlettTottenham, London More

Late August 2017 was supposed to be a celebratory time for Joe Arpaio. The former Maricopa county sheriff had just received Donald Trump’s first presidential pardon after being found guilty of criminal contempt of court.The pardon meant Arpaio was spared a criminal sentence for a federal misdemeanor that could have included up to six months in prison. At a family dinner at a local restaurant the night he received it, he was barely able to touch his linguine with clams and calamari – he had been too busy fielding congratulatory phone calls and media inquiries.But Trump’s pardon could not redeem the political brand of Arpaio, then 85, who was once known as “America’s toughest sheriff,” nor would it help the president’s own long-term popularity in Arizona. Arizona’s electorate was changing, quickly. The state’s extreme immigration laws and Arpaio’s style of enforcement – which in both cases, federal courts had found some aspects unconstitutional – had inspired an energetic, grassroots resistance movement that was reshaping the politics of the state.Instead of having his reputation reinstated with the Trump pardon, Arpaio was met with a fierce backlash. “I’ve got two new titles now,” Arpaio told us weeks after he was pardoned. “‘The disgraced sheriff,’ that’s everywhere, ‘disgraced sheriff.’ And the other one is ‘racist.’ … I lost my ‘America’s toughest sheriff’ title.”Elected sheriff of Maricopa county – which includes Phoenix and Arizona’s most populous county – in 1992, Arpaio once was one of the state’s most popular politicians.He grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts. His father, Ciro Arpaio, an Italian citizen, had immigrated to the US in the 1920s, a time when many Americans viewed Italian immigrants as criminally inclined, disease-spreading, job-stealing, shifty, swarthy-skinned invaders.As a child, Arpaio said, he took in the anti-immigrant taunts, and pretended to ignore them. That’s what you did back then, he said.The immigrant’s son grew up to be an unapologetic immigration enforcer, delivering the hardline policies that a growing base of Republican voters in Arizona supported. His deputies helped turn tens of thousands of immigrants over to Ice for deportation. They rounded up day laborers, raided businesses to bust unauthorized immigrant employees working with fake papers, and swarmed neighborhoods where they arrested undocumented drivers and passengers found after stopping cars for minor traffic infractions.His tactics had helped nurture a climate of vitriol against Mexican immigrants in Maricopa county, not so unlike the anti-immigrant hate he had experienced first-hand. Arpaio launched an immigration hotline in 2007 “for citizens to report illegal aliens.” Sheriff’s office records show the move unleashed a flood of tips.County residents wanted Arpaio to investigate their immigrant neighbors and check out a local McDonald’s where the staff suspiciously spoke Spanish. An anonymous hotline caller expressed a desire to “shoot” a Mexican-born activist who was one of Arpaio’s vocal critics, “if I could get away with it.”Arizona’s bitter immigration wars, and Arpaio’s role in them, helped his political brand – for a time. He had been re-elected to a fifth term, his last, in 2012 when he was 80. But his immigration stance led to his political downfall the following election cycle.In 2016, a Latino-led grassroots movement that had spent the previous decade protesting the sheriff’s immigration enforcement tactics, collecting evidence for lawsuits, empowering immigrant communities to know their rights, and registering new voters, had focused their energy on their biggest voter mobilization drive yet. Young people, who had come of age fearing Arpaio’s deputies might deport their immigrant family members, had become eligible voters and registered others.At the same time, moderate Republicans, irritated by Arpaio’s mounting legal fees and controversies, had backed his Democratic challenger. Even as Maricopa county voters helped Trump win the presidency, they rejected their longtime sheriff.Meanwhile, Arpaio was facing legal backlash. Along the years, Arpaio had ignored a federal judge’s order that barred his law enforcement agency from detaining undocumented immigrants who had not been suspected or accused of crimes – and turning them over for deportation.In 2016, the Obama administration’s justice department had announced plans to prosecute Arpaio for criminal contempt of court.Trump’s 2017 pardon provided relief, and hope for a political rebirth. “He is loved in Arizona,” Trump told reporters of Arpaio days after the pardon. “Sheriff Joe protected our borders. And Sheriff Joe was very unfairly treated by the Obama administration, especially right before an election – an election that he would have won.”It did not take long, however, for legal scholars, newspaper editorial boards and historians to pen the rebuke, labeling the pardon an abuse of power, an impeachable offense, unconstitutional, a dog whistle to white supremacists in Trump’s base, cronyism, or any combination of these.“Trump’s pardon elevates Arpaio once again to the pantheon of those who see institutional racism as something that made America great,” read an editorial in the Arizona Republic.The same piece called a federal judge’s guilty verdict against Arpaio “a dose of hard-won justice for a too-flamboyant sheriff who showed little respect for the constitution as he made national news as an immigration hardliner – and let real crimes go uninvestigated.”News outlets revisited years worth of negative coverage about Arpaio, including a class action federal lawsuit filed a decade earlier, in which Latino motorists in Maricopa county had shown that Arpaio’s immigration tactics had violated their civil rights and resulted in racial profiling.By September 2017, it seemed the controversy had left Arpaio surprised, angry and bewildered.“I’m not a racist,” he told us. “You know that. Everybody knows that.”When Arpaio now checked his email, he said, he found a message that called him a “Sicko. Sadist. Depraved vile criminal,” and expressed cruel, violent wishes. Another letter used anti-Italian slurs to address him as a “Fat, Greaseball Dago Piece of Shit,” and referred to the author’s desire to one day “piss on that WOP grave of yours”.In January 2018, Arpaio announced he would run for an open US Senate seat in that year’s election. But he had lost his once loyal Republican base. He came in third place out of three candidates in the GOP primary.I think the defeat of Arpaio made it tangible that we can defeat the villains that haunt our dreamsEven though Arpaio was sidelined in the 2018 election, his legacy continued to galvanize activists and voters. From 2014 to 2018, Latino voter turnout in Arizona jumped from 32% to 49%. In those four years, a few Latino activists who had organized against Arpaio and Arizona’s spate of extreme immigration laws, won seats as Democrats in the Arizona statehouse, chipping away at the Republican majorities. The Latino vote helped Democrat Kyrsten Sinema defeat the Republican Martha McSally for the Senate seat that Arpaio had wanted.Some on the ground organizers credited the surge in Latino turnout in part to voters seeing Arpaio’s defeat two years earlier.Alejandra Gomez, a Mexican American activist with Living United for Change in Arizona who helped mobilize voters in 2016 and 2018, said seeing Arpaio lose and a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage pass had helped convince some first time voters the following election cycle that the act of voting could make a difference.“Every step of the way we have been saying we are going to fight for our community. By that point – we actually delivered,” Gomez said.That same momentum, Gomez predicted at the time, would spill over to the next presidential cycle in 2020.“We demonstrated that it is possible to defeat someone like Arpaio, so it is possible also to defeat someone like Trump,” she said.Still Arpaio’s political ambitions weren’t over. In 2020, he ran for his old job as sheriff in the Republican primary. He crisscrossed the county in a campaign bus plastered with a photo of him with Trump and the slogan, “Make Maricopa county safe again.” The race was close, but again he lost.Meanwhile, the grassroots organizers who had learned how to inspire voters in their fight against Arpaio channeled their energy to mobilizing voters of color.Arizona voters by a narrow margin, picked a Democrat for president for only the second time since 1952, helping cement Joe Biden’s win and Trump’s defeat. Democrat Mark Kelly won his race for a US Senate seat.Maria Castro, a 27-year-old Mexican American activist who first began registering new Latino voters in Maricopa county as a high schooler in 2011, noticed the people whose doors she knocked on in 2020 were unusually eager to vote.“This time around, people were like, ‘Yes, we’re ready to get rid of Trump,’ ” Castro told us. “I think the defeat of Arpaio made it tangible that we can defeat the villains that haunt our dreams.”Arpaio, now 88, may have lost his last three races, but he is holding out hope that the same will not hold true for the man he calls his hero, Trump. “I got beat, came right around and ran again,” Arpaio told us. “So I would like to see him run again.”
Jude Joffe-Block and Terry Greene Sterling are the authors of DRIVING WHILE BROWN: Sheriff Arpaio versus the Latino Resistance, a new book that tells the story of Arpaio’s rise and fall as the sheriff of Arizona’s most populous county and the determined Latino resistance that fought his unconstitutional policing. Driving While Brown is published by University of California Press and is available on 20 April. More

Nearly 158-years after its founding West Virginia – a state forged from the fires of America’s civil war – remains stuck between north and south. Now lawmakers are considering a bill that would protect Confederate monuments from removal or renaming. Supporters claim they are protecting everyone’s history. Opponents call the bill “traumatic and mentally exhausting”.
At a moment of national reckoning on race, the debate is fierce. “We were the Union. West Virginia was born out of seceding from Virginia, if i’m not mistaken,” said Delegate Sean Hornbuckle, one of the state’s few Black lawmakers. “We’re advocating for people who wanted to kill us.”

The bill being considered by West Virginia’s Republican-controlled legislature would criminalize the removal of Confederate statues unless that removal is first approved by the state’s historic preservation office.
Last year some 168 Confederate symbols were removed in cities and states across the US according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the majority after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.
The national shift has clearly given impetus to the West Virginia bill. “We’ve seen a lot of attacks on historical monuments and names, and I think West Virginia is uniquely situated, historically, to have an interest in that,” said delegate Chris Phillips, a Republican and the bill’s lead sponsor.
The West Virginia Monument and Memorial Protection Act of 2021 seeks to prevent city councils, county commissions, boards of education, universities and any other public entity from removing statues or renaming structures dedicated to people who participated in a United States military conflict – unless the removal or renaming has been approval by the West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office.
The bill would affect monuments to every military conflict in United States history, from the French and Indian war to the second Gulf war. It would also prevent the removal or renaming of monuments to the labor movement, civil rights movement, Native American history or natural disasters.
Anyone who does not go through this process could be fined $500 and spend six months in jail.
Phillips says it’s important to take away local governments’ authority to remove monuments because history belongs to everyone, not just locals.
“If there’s a legitimate desire and need to remove monuments or rename anything in the state, then I think it behooves us to have a process in place that’s calm and thoughtful,” Phillips said. “And have historians involved in it.”
Critics say there’s another motivation behind the bill.
“I don’t see any other reason for it,” said David Fryson, a lawyer and minister who previously served as West Virginia University’s vice-president for diversity, equity and inclusion. “It’s not like we have Nazi monuments in West Virginia. It’s not like we have any other kind of historical challenge. This is all about the Confederate monuments.”

In particular, Fryson suspects the bill is a response to debates about the monument of Confederate general Stonewall Jackson that stands on the West Virginia capitol grounds. Jackson was born in what would become West Virginia, but fought against the state’s creation.
West Virginia was born during the American civil war when state lawmakers from western Virginia decided to remain loyal to the United States as the rest of Virginia seceded to join the Confederacy.
Hornbuckle, a Democrat, echoed Fryson’s concerns during debate about the bill.
“Why this? Why now?” he said. “All of us witnessed back in the summer our country at a boiling point.”
Hornbuckle is also concerned the legislation would strip local governments of the power to make decisions for their communities.
“It’s told the people they don’t matter anymore, and the people here in Charleston are going to make the decision for you,” he said in an interview with the Guardian.
He points to a recent example from his district: students and staff at Marshall University wanted to change the name of the campus education building. It was named for Albert Jenkins, a Marshall alumni and Confederate general whose men captured free Black people in Pennsylvania to sell them into slavery.
The school’s board of governors initially resisted changing the name. They reconsidered after George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police in May 2020 and the protests that followed.
Under Phillips’s bill, the school would not have had the autonomy to change the name.
Hornbuckle attempted to add an amendment to the bill, deleting references to the state historic preservation office and replacing it with “local government municipalities”.
House leadership didn’t even put his amendment to a vote, although Democrats were able to get the bill amended so any citizen could directly petition the historic preservation office to remove a statue or rename a structure. The bill passed the house of delegates with a 70–28 vote. The majority of opposing votes came from Democrats.
Hornbuckle says when the legislature considers changes to the state’s court system, lawmakers rely on the experience of the attorneys in the room. When they work on education bills, they rely on the educators in the chamber.
“But when it’s a bill like this, people are not listening to the historians in the room. Or the people that this impacts the most in this room,” Hornbuckle said. “It’s traumatic and mentally exhausting, working for the betterment of all West Virginians and you’re reminded you’re not valued.”
Phillips insists the bill isn’t racially motivated.
“This isn’t a Confederate protection act that some people try to make it (out to be). I’m truly interested in preserving history,” he said. “I do truly feel there’s a risk of losing historical perspective.”
He credits his own interest in history to seeing a statue of Stonewall Jackson in Clarksburg, West Virginia, the Confederate general’s hometown.
“His military genius is still studied today, and that doesn’t make him admirable for the cause he’s fighting for, but it’s still very important. And certainly very important to West Virginia and the area,” he said.
But David Trowbridge, a Marshall University history professor, says many of the Confederate monuments in West Virginia are themselves an attempt to erase history.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy sponsored a massive monument-raising campaign from the group’s founding in the late 1800s through the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th century. The statues and plaques were part of an effort to change the historic narrative about the civil war. They insisted the civil war was not about slavery and that slavery “civilized” African Americans. The group helped to popularize the Gone with the Wind-style image of a glamorous pre-war south and attempted to paint its military leaders as tragic heroes.
“They were attempting to erase history. They wanted to create a false narrative,” Trowbridge said.
Trowbridge created Clio, a location-based app that provides histories of thousands of sites in the United States, written by scholars. According to the Clio entry for the Stonewall Jackson statue that inspired Phillips’s love of history, the monument was erected by the local chapter of United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1953, just 16 years before the delegate was born.
It is unclear how the monument protection bill will fare in the West Virginia state senate. The legislation has been referred to the senate’s judiciary committee but, as of this writing, the committee has not yet taken action. The legislature’s regular session ends 10April.
Fryson suspects the bill might backfire if passed. When removing a monument becomes an even slower and more frustrating process, members of the public might decide to take direct action.
“It very well could end up being a cause célèbre to pull them down,” Fryson said. “I think people might – and, I suggest, should – resort to civil disobedience.” More

The US will restore more than $200m (£145m) in aid to Palestinians, reversing massive funding cuts under the Trump administration that left humanitarian groups scrambling to keep people from plunging into poverty.
“[We] plan to restart US economic, development, and humanitarian assistance for the Palestinian people,” the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said in a statement.
The aid includes $75m in economic and development funds for the occupied West Bank and Gaza, which will provide food and clean water to Palestinians and help small businesses. A further $150m will be provided to the United Nations relief and works agency for Palestine refugees in the near east (UNRWA), a UN body that supports more than 5 million Palestinian refugees across the region.
After Donald Trump’s row with the Palestinian leadership, President Joe Biden has sought to restart Washington’s flailing efforts to push for a two-state resolution for the Israel-Palestinian crisis, and restoring the aid is part of that. In his statement, Blinken said US foreign assistance “serves important US interests and values”.
“The United States is committed to advancing prosperity, security, and freedom for both Israelis and Palestinians in tangible ways in the immediate term, which is important in its own right, but also as a means to advance towards a negotiated two-state solution,” he said.
Palestinian leaders and the UN welcomed the resumption of aid. Israel, however, criticised the decision to restore funds to UNRWA, a body it has long claimed is a bloated, flawed group.
“We believe that this UN agency for so-called refugees should not exist in its current format,” said Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan. Pro-Israel US lawmakers joined the country in opposition to the aid and said they would scrutinise it in Congress.
From 2018, Trump gradually cut virtually all US money to Palestinian aid projects after the Palestinian leadership accused him of being biased towards Israel and refused to talk. The US president accused Palestinians of lacking “appreciation or respect”.
The former president cancelled more than $200m in economic aid, including $25m earmarked for underfunded East Jerusalem hospitals that have suffered during the Covid-19 crisis. Trump’s cuts to UNRWA, which also serves Palestinian refugees in war-stricken Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, was described by the agency’s then head as “the biggest and most severe” funding crisis since the body was created in 1949. The US was previously UNRWA’s biggest donor.

To outcry from aid workers, leaked emails suggested the move may have partly been a political tactic to weaken the Palestinian leadership. Those emails alleged that Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner had argued that “ending the assistance outright could strengthen his negotiating hand” to push Palestinians to accept their blueprint for an Israeli-Palestinian deal.
The cuts were decried as catastrophic for Palestinians’ ability to provide basic healthcare, schooling and sanitation, including by prominent Israeli establishment figures.
Last April, as the coronavirus pandemic hit, Trump’s government announced it would send money to Palestinians. The $5m one-off donation was roughly 1% of the amount Washington provided a year before Trump began slashing aid. More

Michael Regan has perhaps the most fiendishly challenging job within Joe Biden’s administration. As the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Regan not only has to grapple with the unfolding cataclysm of the climate crisis, he must do so at the helm of a traumatized, shrunken institution still reeling from the chaos of the Donald Trump era.“I was deeply concerned as I watched the previous administration,” Regan told the Guardian. “We all witnessed a mass exodus of scientists and qualified people the agency needs. I was really concerned coming into the job as to how morale would be and how much of a setback it would be to tackle the challenges before us.”Trump vowed to reduce the EPA to “little bits”, and although his plans to wildly slash the agency’s budget were largely rejected by Congress, the environmental regulator is now left with its fewest employees since the mid-1980s, during which time the US population has grown by nearly a third.Scientists were routinely sidelined, with an average of three a week fleeing the agency during Trump’s term. “It was a sort of painful hell,” said one career official, who weighed up leaving but decided to stay.There were plenty of sources for angst.Trump’s EPA laid siege to dozens of environmental regulations – from limits on pollution from cars and trucks to rules designed to stop coal plants dumping toxins into rivers to a ban on a pesticide linked with brain damage in children – often contrary to scientific advice and sometimes shortly after meetings with industry lobbyists. Mentions of climate change were not only scrubbed from the EPA website, the Trump administration mulled holding a televised debate as to whether it existed at all.Scientific panels were purged of various experts and replaced with industry representatives who appeared to hold sway. Andrew Wheeler, Regan’s predecessor, is a former coal lobbyist who said acting on climate change was merely “virtue signaling to foreign capitals”. Scott Pruitt, Trump’s first EPA chief, was embroiled in an extravaganza of scandals, including living in an apartment paid for by a lobbyist, using his position to get his wife a job at Chick-fil-A, spending agency funds on foreign trips and even deploying staff to obtain a cut-price mattress from Trump’s Washington hotel.“It was incredibly frustrating,” is how Regan sums up watching the agency unravel. “I was incredibly frustrated.”Regan, the first black man to lead the EPA in its half-century of existence, previously worked at the agency during Bill Clinton and George W Bush’s administrations. “I worked here for a decade and I knew the staff were not being utilized properly,” he said. “I know the people, I know the quality of work they can do.”Regan has made a good first impression – colleagues say the 44-year-old is affable and charismatic. Mentions of the climate crisis are no longer verboten at the EPA, experts are ushered into decision making and intertwined issues such as the anti-racism protests that swept the US last year are no longer glossed over. Regan is a “smart, savvy guy who knows the issues”, said Peggy Shepard, a longtime environmental justice campaigner and now White House adviser.Even Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican senator who voted against his confirmation because she opposes Biden’s climate agenda, said she “really liked getting to know Michael Regan”. The new administrator is a “dedicated public servant and an honest man,” Capito acknowledged.Regan peppers his statements with promises to listen and engage with “stakeholders”, including industry. “The worst thing we can do is be paternalistic in our first actions,” he added.But he also knows the sting of pollution’s unjust burden – growing up in eastern North Carolina, Regan suffered from the proximity of highways, hog farms and other polluting industry. He needed an inhaler in childhood, part of a broader American experience where black children are five times more likely to be hospitalized with asthma than white children. Communities of color in general are also far more likely to live directly alongside sources of pollution.“During days of high ozone and high pollution I did suffer respiratory challenges,” he said. “I’ve been keenly aware of the impact of pollution from an early age and what that means, from lost school days or from preventing me enjoying the outdoors with my grandfather and father. That’s always been part of my knowledge base.”Later in life, Regan was to be the top environmental regulator in his home state, garnering praise for his work to clean up piles of toxic coal ash but also sometimes vexing environmentalists who wanted a more full-throated champion.Emily Zucchino, a campaigner at Dogwood Alliance, a North Carolina group that opposes chopping down forests for biomass energy, said Regan had a “mixed record” in the state, on the one hand creating a new environmental justice board but also handing out permits for new wood pellet operations. “Had Regan’s actions matched his words, we would have had an outcome more favorable to the communities and forests of North Carolina,” she said.It remains to be seen whether Regan’s collegiate approach will enable the EPA to pick its way through a tangle of challenges amid opposition from Republicans who have assailed Biden’s climate ambitions as a job killer. A key factor within this crucible is time – not only does the climate crisis remorselessly worsen by the day but a tranche of new EPA rules to reduce planet-heating emissions, not to mention clean air and water edicts, will take several years, probably via numerous legal battles, to materialize.It’s a pressure that Regan appreciates. “We definitely feel the responsibility. We aren’t going to shrink away from our obligations,” he said. “We are going to apply our statutory authority to solve as much of this problem [climate change] as we can as an agency. Yes, we have to revisit bad decisions, but the goal isn’t to get back to neutral: we have to make up for lost time. We are leaning in.”New directives around scientific integrity and environmental justice have already been rolled out, while strengthened standards for vehicle pollution and methane leaks from oil and gas drilling are expected in summer.Regan said he feels he also has a “clean slate” to write a new pollution rule that would curb emissions from coal-fired power plants, after the courts struck down a Trump EPA attempt to weaken a previous Obama-era version. All of this, and much more, will be crucial if the US, and the world, is to slow the disastrous heatwaves, flooding, storms and other ravages of the climate crisis.“He does have a lot on his plate and with a lot of these things we’d want rules finalized by the fall of next year,” said Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense Fund who worked with Regan for eight years at the environmental group.“He could well have the hardest job in the administration. It’s an enormous challenge, so it’s good that he’s so talented.” More

Calls are mounting for the Biden administration to set up a national tracking system of Covid-19 deaths among frontline healthcare workers to honor the thousands of nurses, doctors and support staff who have died and ensure that future generations are not forced to make the same ultimate – and in many cases needless – sacrifice.Health policy experts and union leaders are pressing the White House to move quickly to fill the gaping hole left by the Trump administration through its failure to create an accurate count of Covid deaths among frontline staff. The absence of reliable federal data exacerbated critical problems such as shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) that left many workers exposed, with fatal results.In the absence of federal action, Lost on the Frontline, a joint project between the Guardian and Kaiser Health News (KHN), has compiled the most comprehensive account of healthcare worker deaths in the nation. It has recorded 3,607 lost lives in the first year of the pandemic, with nurses, healthcare support staff and doctors, as well as workers under 60 and people of color affected in tragically high numbers.The Guardian/KHN investigation, which involved more than 100 reporters, is drawing to a close this week. Pressure is now growing for the federal government to step into the breach.Harvey Fineberg, a leading health policy expert who approved a recent National Academy of Sciences report that recommended the formation of a new national tracking system run by the federal government, backed the calls for change. He said his ideal solution would be a nationwide record that both looked back on the heavy human price paid in the pandemic so far and looked ahead to coming challenges.“There would be a combination of a selective look backward to gain more accurate tabulations of the past burden, and a system of data gathering looking forward to ensure more complete counts in future,” he said.Zenei Triunfo-Cortez, a president of National Nurses United, the largest body of registered nurses in the US, said it was unconscionable how many healthcare workers have died from Covid. The KHN/Guardian interactive found that almost third of those who died were nurses – the largest single occupation followed by support staff (20%) and physicians (17%).Triunfo-Cortez said the death toll was an unacceptable tragedy aggravated by the lack of federal data which made identifying problem areas more difficult. “We as nurses do not deserve this – we signed up to take care of patients, we did not sign up to die,” she said.Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, also sees a role for federal agencies in tracking mortality among frontline healthcare workers. In an interview with the Guardian, he expressed a desire for a definitive picture of the human toll.“We certainly want to find an accurate count of the people who died. That’s something that I think would fall under the auspices of the federal government, likely Health and Human Services (HHS).”The lack of federal intelligence on deaths among frontline healthcare workers was one of the running failures of the Trump administration’s botched response to the crisis. The main health protection agency, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, does curate some information but has itself acknowledged that its own record of 1,527 health worker fatalities – more than 2,000 fewer than the joint Guardian / KHN tally – is an undercount based on limitations in its data collection.Overall, healthcare workers were revealed to be singularly at risk from the pandemic. Some studies have shown that they were more than three times as likely to contract Covid as the general population.To date there is no sign of the Biden administration taking active steps to set up a comprehensive data system. An HHS spokesperson said they currently have no plans to launch a comprehensive count. However, Triunfo-Cortez said there is a new willingness on the part of the White House and key federal agencies to listen and engage.“We have been working with the Biden administration and they have been receptive to the changes we are proposing. We are hopeful that they will start to mandate the reporting of deaths because if we don’t have that data how can we know how effective we are being in stopping the pandemic?”The responsiveness of the new administration is likely to be heightened by the fact that Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, has a track record in fighting infectious disease outbreaks. In 2014 Barack Obama appointed him “Ebola tsar”.In an article in the Guardian last August, Klain drew on the findings of Lost on the Frontline to decry the ultimate price paid by healthcare workers. “Although America has applauded health workers, banged pots in their honor and offered grateful video tributes, we have consistently failed them where it mattered most.”David Blumenthal, the national coordinator for health information technology under Obama, said a national tracking system is an important step in healing the wounds of the pandemic inflicted on frontline staff. “So many healthcare workers feel as though their devotion and sacrifice weren’t valued. We must combat the widespread fatigue and disappointment.”Christina Jewett of KHN contributed reporting to this article More

Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterCaitlyn Jenner, the TV star and Olympic champion, is reportedly considering a run for California governor.The Axios reporter Jonathan Swan on Tuesday reported that Jenner is working with GOP fundraiser Caroline Wren to explore running against the California governor, Gavin Newsom, in an impending recall election. Maggie Haberman of the New York Times said on Wednesday that former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale is advising Jenner on building her team.The recall campaign against Newsom, a Democrat, is spearheaded by Republicans who opposed the governor’s pandemic-era business shutdowns, as well as his immigration and tax policies.The campaign said in March it had filed the signatures needed to call an election to remove Newsom from office. If election officials are able to validate at least 1.5m signatures by the end of this month, the state will hold a recall election this year. Voters will choose first whether they want to recall Newsom and then who they would like to replace him.The recall campaign gained traction amid the previous coronavirus surge, with support from big business donors and a few Silicon Valley venture capitalists. The Republicans currently running against Newsom include the former San Diego mayor Kevin Faulconer; the conservative activist Mike Cernovich; and John Cox, who lost to Newsom in 2018 by 23 points. Strategists say that none of these candidates have an easy path to victory in a state that leans heavily Democratic.Some recall supporters say that a big-name Republican like Jenner would change the dynamics of the race. In the 2003 recall of former California governor Gray Davis, it was the actor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s decision to run against Davis that helped energize the effort. Schwarzenegger ultimately replaced Davis.Jenner, a former Olympic medalist who starred in Keeping Up with the Kardashians, has been critical of Donald Trump’s views on trans rights, but has ultimately aligned with the Republican party on many major issues. Wren, who worked for Trump’s 2020 campaign fundraising committee and helped organize the rally that preceded the 6 January Capitol attack, connected with Jenner through a GOP nonprofit focused on LGBT issues, according to Axios.Democrats in California and in DC have aligned themselves with Newsom. The progressive Vermont senator Bernie Sanders has thrown his support behind Newsom, and Kamala Harris – a longtime friend of the California governor – appeared alongside him Monday during her visit to the state and praised him as “a real champion in California and outside of California”.The governor’s approval rating dropped from an early-pandemic peak, but it remains relatively strong in recent polls. A recent poll by the Public Policy Institute of California found 56% of likely voters would oppose a recall. More