Regulating Facebook and Google Won’t Save Journalism

This has been the journalism industry’s worst week in recent memory, with around 1,000 people losing their jobs. Layoffs at Gannett cost dozens of jobs at newspapers across the country, from the Indianapolis Star to the Tennessean to the Arizona Republic. Verizon announced it was cutting seven percent of its total workforce, leading to significant cuts at HuffPost, including the elimination of its entire opinion desk and distinguished investigative reporters. On Friday, BuzzFeed began laying off 15 percent of its staff, including its entire national desk and national security desk.

This industry is broken. Print outlets, particularly local newspapers, have been decimated for years—first hamstrung by the loss of their classified advertisement monopoly, and then ultimately undone by a lethal combination of digital disruption, mismanagement, and private equity. But now web outlets, once held up as the future of news, are also struggling to survive. “It’s clear that we have a digital content bubble,” Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, the director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University, told the Guardian. “There’s no question we’re going to see more cuts, both in legacy media and digital-born ones.”

The blame increasingly has been laid on two culprits: Facebook and Google, whose ad duopoly presents an existential crisis for the industry, starving digital and print media outlets of essential revenue. “The problem seems to be that it’s gotten harder and harder for news outlets to make money off of the readers they have because such a huge share of advertising spending is sucked up by Facebook and Google, with what’s left increasingly going to Amazon,” Slate’s Ben Mathis-Lilley argued, noting that many of the outlets hit by layoffs, including BuzzFeed and Vox Media, have hundreds of millions of readers.

There’s no question that breaking up Facebook and Google would have a number of positive social and economic effects in America and around the world. While it would clot some of the bleeding in print and online journalism, though, it won’t save the industry. That will require much more ambitious and holistic acts: public funding, philanthropy, and increased taxation, particularly of internet service providers.

The arrival of the internet, and Craigslist in particular, was devastating to newspapers and magazines, which had enjoyed a longstanding monopoly on print ads, classified, and otherwise. But this disruption merely accelerated existing trends. Newspapers’ market penetration began a moderate decline after the advent of television in the 1950s, while print circulation began to dip during the Reagan administration, years before the digital revolution.

Surveillance has been the key to the rising dominance of Google and Facebook. The old model could only offer a localized readership: If you were a shoe store in Scranton, Pennsylvania, you would advertise in the Scranton Tribune and hope to reach people looking for new Air Jordans. Today, Google and Facebook can provide detailed information about millions of users, allowing national outlets to micro-target sneakerheads. These sites, as Mathis-Lilley notes, have also become the source of news and information for hundreds of millions of people:

Moreover, many people now use the two tech giants’ sites/apps as their “front page” for finding news—all told, for example, Google and Facebook users click links to Slate about 18 million times every month. And the tech giants get to show users ads next to those links, ads that relate to the stories’ subject matter. News sites don’t get a cut of that either, and they can’t bargain for it by threatening to make their sites inaccessible from Google and Facebook because doing so would instantly cut their audiences in half if not more.

This is a big problem for just about everyone hoping to reach a paying audience—with Facebook and Google essentially taking a finders fee for all online advertising. But it’s especially tricky for news outlets, who struggle to monetize stories that appear in Facebook and Google. Breaking up their ad duopoly would undoubtedly help, as it would add more competition to the online advertising space—though a ban on tracking, and therefore making advertising less efficient, would probably also have to be implemented. This would create a more equitable economic arrangement, but there’s no reason to believe that this alone will solve the journalism industry’s financial woes.

Other changes will be necessary, such as increased regulation of hedge funds and private equity and a commitment of public investment, particularly for local journalism. Some large-scale digital companies like BuzzFeed can make the case to investors that scale will lead to profitability—even if they may be incapable of producing the level of returns that venture capitalists demand. But smaller outlets, especially those tied to a geographic area, face a host of greater hurdles: diminishing readerships, a decline in small businesses (and thus in the advertising base), and the increasing centrality of New York and Washington, D.C., which drain talent and investment from elsewhere.

Last year, New Jersey took a miniscule step in the right direction, pledging $5 million to fund local news. Facebook and Google have also taken minor, mostly inconsequential steps to boost local reporting: Google’s Bulletin provides crowdsourced news, while Facebook pledged to put more local news into its News Feed. But what’s needed is sweeping reform and an allocation of billions to help fund local reporting. CJR’s Emily Bell has suggested that tech companies spend billions funding journalism, in part as a kind of reparations for the economic harm that they’ve caused. “What independent journalism needs more than ever from Silicon Valley is a significant transfer of wealth,” she wrote. “If, instead of scrapping over news initiatives, the four or five leading technology companies could donate $1 billion in endowment each for a new type of engine for independent journalism, it would be more significant a contribution than a thousand scattered initiatives put together.”

Given the increased scrutiny Google and Facebook have received, and the latter’s growing hostility to the media, this seems unlikely. Thus far, with the exception of The Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, investments in journalism from techno-capitalists have been insignificant.

There are some signs that Congress and the FTC will act against the tech giants in the coming years, but few Democrats (and even fewer Republicans) seem to have the stomach for the sweeping reforms that would yield a massive impact for struggling news organizations. More states may take action to fund local reporting. But there is no momentum on the federal level for such funding, or really for anything meaningful to help this hemorrhaging industry. In the time it will take to build such momentum, many organizations will fold entirely. We can only hope that, once there’s a plan in place to save American journalism, The New York Times and The Washington Post aren’t the only ones around to report on it.

Criminal indictments are typically written in the dry, terse active voice of American legalese. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s criminal indictment of Roger Stone, who was arrested by FBI agents in the wee hours on Friday, is no different—with one notable exception.

According to the 24-page court filing, the longtime Trump adviser “made multiple false statements” to Congress as it investigated Russian interference during the 2016 election. Stone “falsely denied possessing records” relevant to that inquiry, the indictment alleges, and “attempted to persuade a witness to provide false testimony” to cover his own tracks. Then, four pages in, Mueller uncharacteristically switches to the passive voice.

“After the July 22, 2016 release of stolen DNC emails by Organization 1,” the indictment reads, “a senior Trump Campaign official was directed to contact Stone about any additional releases and what other damaging information Organization 1 had regarding the Clinton Campaign.” (Organization 1 refers to WikiLeaks, an anti-secrecy organization that published tranches of Clinton campaign emails stolen by Russian hackers during the 2016 election.)

It’s not clear which “senior Trump campaign official” contacted Stone about WikiLeaks. What is clear, at least from Mueller’s perspective, is that the official didn’t contact Stone of their own volition; he or she “was directed” by someone higher in the campaign food chain to pursue it. That small turn of phrase carries serious implications for President Donald Trump and his inner circle. It suggests that not only did Trump campaign officials try to coordinate with WikiLeaks through Stone, but that the effort came from the campaign’s highest ranks.

The Justice Department, multiple congressional committees, and many of the nation’s major news outlets have spent the past two years probing whether the Trump campaign illegally conspired with the Russian government during the 2016 election. I’ve argued before that what they’ve uncovered so far amounts to “soft collusion” at minimum—an implicit understanding between Trump Tower and the Kremlin to damage Hillary Clinton’s candidacy that didn’t quite amount to an explicit quid pro quo. Friday’s indictment of Stone, and that curious use of the passive voice by Mueller, do not prove “hard collusion,” of course. But it moves the narrative one step closer in that direction.

Stone, a longtime Republican political operative, is the first person indicted by Mueller since last year’s midterm elections. Though there has been widespread speculation that the special counsel’s investigation is wrapping up, the new charges confirm his work will continue well into 2019. It also brings the investigation deeper into the president’s inner circle: Stone worked briefly for the Trump campaign in the summer of 2015, then acted as an informal political adviser of sorts to Trump for the rest of the election. What’s more, it sheds new light on other Trump campaign officials’ eagerness for damaging material on Hillary Clinton, no matter how dubious its provenance.

The indictment itself comes as no surprise. Much of what Mueller describes in Friday’s court filing was already public knowledge, and most observers expected that Stone would face some kind of charges since last summer. Stone had publicly claimed in August 2016 that he had inside knowledge of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s future disclosures after Assange published emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee. He also sent a tweet signaling that it would “soon be [John] Podesta’s time in the barrel” two months before the Clinton campaign chairman’s stolen emails became public. When those remarks came under scrutiny after the election, Stone repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

Stone’s contentious relationship with Randy Credico, a New York radio host who appears to be the person described as “Person 2” in the indictment, also became public knowledge last year. Credico had previously interviewed Assange; Mueller’s indictment says that Stone described Credico as an “intermediary” between himself and the WikiLeaks founder. While Congress and federal investigators dug into the circumstances surrounding Russian election meddling in 2016, Stone allegedly began pressuring and threatening Credico to lie about what had transpired.

Stone, according to the indictment, told Credico before his House Intelligence Committee testimony that he should pull a “Frank Pentangeli,” referring to a fictional mafioso in the second Godfather film who commits perjury before a congressional committee to refute allegations that the Corleone family runs a nationwide crime syndicate. Last April, Stone’s efforts to pressure Credico took on a more violent overtone. “On or about April 9, 2018, Stone wrote in an email to [Credico], ‘You are a rat. A stoolie. You backstab your friends-run your mouth my lawyers are dying Rip you to shreds,’” the indictment states. “Stone also said he would ‘take that dog away from you,’ referring to [Credico]’s dog. On or about the same day, Stone wrote to [Credico], ‘I am so ready. Let’s get it on. Prepare to die [expletive].’”

Stone appeared before a judge on Friday morning in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. His bond was set at $250,000, and likely will be arraigned in D.C. court next week. It’s not yet known whether he will plead guilty to the seven charges against him, which include obstruction of Congress, witness tampering, and five counts of making false statements. Stone, who is 66 years old, may feel pressured to accept a plea deal rather than face the possibility of a lengthy prison sentence if he goes to trial. He wouldn’t be the only Trump associate who’s turned state’s witness over the past two years: Longtime legal fixer Michael Cohen, former national security advisor Michael Flynn, and deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates have all cooperated with Mueller.

The timing of Stone’s indictment could hardly be worse for Trump, who is already facing immense political turmoil over the partial government shutdown. The president’s refusal to budge on his demand for border wall funding has placed 800,000 federal workers and countless others in financial limbo, shuttered vital government functions, and impacted the nation’s economy. Trump proudly boasted last December that he would be willing to take the blame for the shutdown, and Americans have responded accordingly: His approval rating has sunk to new lows, even among his core supporters.

Sarah Sanders, the White House press secretary, quickly tried to distance Stone’s arrest from the president himself. “This has nothing to do with the president and certainly nothing to do with the White House,” she told CNN in a Friday morning interview. “This is something that has to do solely with that individual, not something that affects us in this building.” That may be wishful thinking on her part. The shutdown’s widening repercussions already turned this week into one of the most damaging of Trump’s two years in office. The special counsel’s latest move only deepens the sense that Trump’s presidency is increasingly in danger.

On Tuesday Cristiano Ronaldo, smiling and bedizened in a black coat and diamond earrings, arrived at court in Madrid, Spain, to receive a $21.6 million fine for tax fraud. It is roughly what the Portuguese star, worth around $450 million, makes each quarter. And while the 33-year-old—who’s also currently under investigation for an alleged rape in Las Vegas—may be a particularly distasteful example, it’s just the tip of the international tax-evasion iceberg in modern soccer, which thanks to whistleblowers and investigative journalism is now slowly being revealed.

Ronaldo, a five-time FIFA world player of the year who last summer moved from Real Madrid to Italian giant Juventus, has become a human billboard since bursting onto the global stage as a teenager with Manchester United. He owns businesses in footwear, fragrances, gyms, a creative agency, hotels and underwear. He endorses watches, shampoo, online gambling–even steelworks. His sponsored social media posts can fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars. His legs are insured for $144 million.

The star’s tax strategy is similarly diffuse. In accusing the player of four counts of tax evasion between 2011 and 2014, a Madrid state prosecutor said Ronaldo “intentionally” did not declare income, falsely reported income as coming from real estate, and funneled cash through a Virgin Islands-incorporated firm to “create a screen in order to hide his total income from Spain’s tax office.”

The deal cut with the Madrid court includes both the hefty payment to the Spanish state, and 23 months in jail. But first offenders with a custodial sentence below two years in Spain almost always avoid time behind bars. The same day, former Real teammate Xabi Alonso visited the same court, accused of defrauding the taxman of $2.3 million. His case continues.

Spain’s current interest in these prosecutions stems from a peculiar history. In the early aughts the country enjoyed an economic boom. Soccer, by far its most popular sport, spent big. Real Madrid threw hitherto unseen amounts of cash at the game’s biggest stars, christening what was soon known as the “Galactico”—Spanish for “galactic”—era. Real smashed transfer records for Zinedine Zidane, Luis Figo, Kaka and other household names. In 2003, it prised David Beckham from Manchester United. The international superstar would become one of the first to benefit from—and thus unintentionally nickname—a Spanish Tax Decree passed in 2005 that aimed to attract top international talent.

But Spain’s economy tanked amid the global financial crisis in 2008. Two years later, the government began amending the “Beckham Law.” Authorities have since spied out tax arrangements they believe are defrauding the state–Croatian Real Madrid midfielder Luka Modric, Colombian Radamel Falcao, Brazilian Marcelo Vieira, and Argentines Angel Di Maria, and Javier Mascherano have all faced charges. The Argentine FC Barcelona striker Lionel Messi and Brazilian former teammate Neymar da Silva Santos, now of French champion Paris St Germain, also faced high-profile cases.

Beyond the sports world, of course, major corporations worldwide bounce profits from territory to territory, paying minimal amounts of tax. But part of this tax fraud reckoning is also specific to soccer, a sport whose ingrained corruption is now starting to be recognized. Since a 2015 investigation into graft at FIFA, the sport’s highest international body, hackers, whistleblowers and journalists have unearthed hundreds of examples of fraud involving soccer’s biggest brands. A series of stories from published by German outlet Der Spiegel and others, relying on over 18.6 million leaked documents from the website Football Leaks have hinted at elaborate tax dodges by players’ agents in the UK, offshore shell companies to funnel money to managers, and elaborate “backroom” deals with officials and businesspeople from Gulf nations, including a “billion-euro deal with Qatar Tourism Authority reported to have violated European soccer’s Financial Fair Play regulations.

In 2016 London club Chelsea reportedly created a firm in the British tax haven island of Jersey solely to deposit 10 percent of newly signed French midfielder N’golo Kante’s salary. Kante, who last year led his country to World Cup glory, refused. British media hailed Kante as a “hero.” He is “perfect,” international team-mate Blaise Matuidi told a press conference, sardonically. “He doesn’t cheat. Just a bit when he plays cards.”

Kante is the exception. Last April the Mirror reported that almost 130 Premier League soccer players owed a combined $326 million in tax back payments, having poured cash into a failed London tax avoidance scheme. Six months later UK tax authorities announced that a probe of almost 200 footballers had netted the British government $430 million in extra tax. As with Spain’s post-2008 economic hangover prompting greater tax vigilance, these British scandals have been particularly galling given the country’s current economic predicament over Brexit, and given skyrocketing ticket prices cutting off match day experiences to most all poorer Britons.

The problem extends well beyond tax dodges highly-paid players in European countries, thanks to the sport’s overpopulation of hangers-on and ten-percenters waiting to capitalize on young men who are, for the most part, bureaucratically naive. Grim stories abound of young players in Africa conned by bogus scouts and talent agents. Few in FIFA or other governing bodies appear truly keen to combat corruption.

As Ronaldo left the hearing in Madrid for his private jet, where he would later post a photo to his 76.3 million followers captioned by a thumbs-up emoji, he told a crowd of reporters that “everything was perfect.” The U.S.-based rape investigation still hangs over the star’s head, relating to a 2009 encounter at a Las Vegas hotel over which Ronaldo paid an American woman, Kathryn Mayorga, $375,000 as part of a non-disclosure agreement. In November, Der Spiegel cast serious doubt on the player’s professed innocence when it reported on a damning set of documents, “most of which,” the magazine wrote, were obtained through Football Leaks. That case will take some time to conclude.

On January 16, police in Budapest arrested Rui Pinto, a Portuguese national, believed to be behind the Football Leaks information. Pinto’s lawyer, William Bourdon, who previously represented Edward Snowden, has suggested he will offer a very particular line of defense: that precisely because Pinto’s revelations led to the investigation of cases like Ronaldo’s, he must be protected under a Hungarian whistleblower law. “It will be a historic decision for a judge to make,” Bourdon told The New York Times.

That so much of soccer’s bad behavior would have remained shrouded in secrecy without Pinto says much about the way the world’s most popular sport is run. Now Pinto’s case, as much as Ronaldo’s, will test “The Beautiful Game’s” accountability.

When the last of my parents’ “cool” friends got divorced, certain things became apparent to me. First, that being a creative, interesting woman makes it more rather than less likely that your husband will leave you for an improved model in your middle years. Second, that the vibrancy beamed out from a marriage gives no indication of how likely it is to fail. Third, that I would never understand why any of this had happened.

When I turned the final page of Tessa Hadley’s new novel Late in the Day, therefore, it was with the stunned feeling of having finally received an explanation. Hadley’s seventh novel is the story of Christine’s disintegrating marriage, and what she gains from its loss. The book begins with Christine married to Alex, and her best friend Lydia married to Zachary. Then the telephone call comes: Zachary is dead.

Amidst the grief and chaos, Lydia is folded in the bosom of Christine’s family. Hadley then takes us right back to the beginning, about how these couples were formed. Once we have caught back up to the present day, we know enough for Hadley to progress into autopsy: Christine and Alex are done for, and for once we know exactly why.

We meet Christine in domestic medias res, no idea what is coming. It is nine o’clock in the evening, and she is listening to the music “with intensity” shortly before the telephone rings with the news of Zachary’s death. She doesn’t know what the music is exactly: “Alex had chosen it, he hadn’t consulted her and now she stubbornly wouldn’t ask—he took too much pleasure in knowing what she didn’t know.”

Reading Late in the Day feels both prurient—we are so deeply inside the emotional rhythms of this home—and marvelous, in its elevation of a boring middle-class marriage into a fable of warring identities. Alex is the person who chooses the music but withholds his knowledge; Christine listens and enjoys, but cannot meet her husband at his level. We immediately learn that their power struggle has been mapped over every single aspect of their shared life.

It is a long, long journey to that kind of charged terrain. Christine and Lydia made friends at school, the former thin and awkward and the latter charming, gorgeous, disarming. Before we hear anything of the men in their lives, we read of the way they became themselves, as they felt the void of adulthood yawn before them. Lydia senses that “something more was called for, and she dreaded testing her reserves of imagination and energy, finding them empty.” Christine works on a PhD but “couldn’t really fill all the hours of her day, or all the space inside her. And so she too, like Lydia, lived in a strange suspended state, expecting to discover something more serious to be the business of her life.” To fill those hours, Christine begins to draw.

Although Hadley gives us no big announcement that something crucial is happening, the girls are, in a way, doomed. Alex, the object of Lydia’s affections, decides that he loves Christine. Lydia is left with Zachary, who until then had dated Christine, because it just seems the obvious match. Everybody is happy in love, happily procreating, and happy in their friendship. Both couples are artistic, living among the stimulating abundance of liberal London. Life is comfortable and life is good.

When Zachary dies unexpectedly, however, both women lose their means of expression. The loving sensualist Lydia loses the person who defines her. Christine, who produces drawings and prints, suddenly, without explanation, can no longer work. On the day that Zachary dies, she turns the key in the lock of her study door and does not re-enter it throughout the novel’s chief action.

The creative arts and romantic love become braided themes in Late in the Day. Alex is a poet, Zachary a gallerist, Christine an artist. Lydia does nothing, but her daughter Grace is a sculptor. Isobel, Christine’s daughter, has no art in her life, but she loves Grace like a sister, and the implicit threat is that she will end up like Lydia, a woman who can only express herself through devotion to other people. Art becomes allegory for the problem of identity in Hadley’s hands.

Christine and Alex are both artists, and that in the end is their relationship’s fatal flaw. Christine, because she is a woman, is able to love Alex, create art, and appreciate Alex’s work all at once. But Hadley shows us in a conversation between the husbands that Alex is not as generous. Alex is stuck, unable to write. Zachary wonders, consoling him, whether he feels an “inhibition” because men live “in the aftermath, with nothing left to say.” Zachary himself has pondered whether “women have been exempted from certain forms of self-doubt, which might be gendered.”

“Gendered?” Alex does not know what he means. But Zachary has struck upon a truth. “Now that women have picked up the pen—for writing, for painting, for everything,” he says, “they may feel all kinds of doubt but not that one. Because they’re not belated. As women they’re still near the beginning.” Still, Alex does not get it, thinks it’s a political pose. But Zachary goes on, describing Christine’s work, of which he is a fan. “How has she been able to make her art so freely? It’s poured out of her, hasn’t it? Why hasn’t she felt the heavy hand on her shoulder?” With a shock, Zachary sees on his friend’s face that he has never taken his wife seriously, is startled “to have Christine’s work invoked in the same scale as anything he, Alex, might have done.”

And so Alex is, in the end, no artist at all; he cannot see quality when it is in front of him. Lydia is no artist either, only a connoisseur of men. So, after Zachary’s death, the inevitable happens. Without him, there is nobody left to be Christine’s audience, and so she cannot create. Without being seen, she cannot love; without love, there is no marriage. On the other side of divorce, at long last, Christine realizes that the key to her study is still within her reach.

Fiction about women in midlife is sometimes marketed insultingly. Barnes & Noble has a section on its website called “Women of a Certain Age,” and it’s full of Danielle Steele pulp and books like The Hot Flash Club. But Late in the Day joins a tradition of literature about women who, later in life, realize that they have trapped themselves in bourgeois prisons of their own making, and break free.

These books range from the cheeky fun of Colette’s Break of Day (1928) to Simone de Beauvoir’s pompous but elegant Force of Circumstance (1963), a book full of derisive portraits of men still desperate to find themselves, while she sits pretty in her hard-won self-awareness. More recently, readers have met women brutalized by time into a radical intelligence in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Jane Alison’s Nine Island.

In 1988, Carolyn G. Heilbrun wrote in The New York Times that it “is perhaps only in old age, certainly past 50, that women can stop being female impersonators, can grasp the opportunity to reverse their most cherished principles of ‘femininity.’” Here I do not think that Heilbrun means prettiness or sexuality. Instead she is writing of women’s approaches to the project of their own lives. While impersonating the idea of a woman, a person cannot survive the end of youth. But self-actualized women over 50, she writes, “differ from men, who if they need discover new courage, need not profoundly change their lives, need not dedicate them to something new, only perhaps more intensely to their old ambitions.” For women, new insight into one’s creative powers in later life requires a wrench, a rejection—even an abnegation of old responsibilities.

If Heilbrun is right, and older women must face down this crisis in a way that men do not, then it is a wonder that we do not read more great novels about post-menopausal artistic revelations. There is much in Hadley’s novel to distract you from its core discussion on gender and art: Christine is preoccupied by her duties as a mother, as the person who buys flowers and cooks pasta. And so she distracts us in turn, disguising her abilities as an artist from the reader.

Why did I witness all those divorces with such terror, as a child? I feared for my home, I suppose, but mostly for myself. If I had picked out these interesting women as role models, and then they had been discarded so easily, then my own life seemed fated to turn out the same way. But no style of living is compulsory, Tessa Hadley teaches. There is always a choice, even when somebody else chooses for you. For any reader interested in the relationship between romantic love and the creative life, Late in the Day unfurls into a tale both cautionary and motivating. The novel’s end is its heroine’s beginning; the sequel is there to be lived.

When it comes to the work she does, Chander Kanta is indistinguishable from a regular Environmental Protection Agency employee. For the last five years, the 70-year-old administrative assistant has put in 40-hour weeks at the EPA’s campus in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. The income she receives, about $2,000 a month, pays for everything: her mortgage, her car insurance, her grocery bill. But because of the government showdown, she hasn’t received a paycheck for more than a month.

There’s one key difference, though. When the government eventually re-opens, regular EPA employees will receive back pay for the time they weren’t working. Kanta will not. That’s because she’s one of approximately 900 enrollees in the EPA’s little-known Senior Environmental Employment (SEE) Program, a grant-funded initiative that allows retired and unemployed older Americans to work at the agency in exchange for salary, benefits, vacation, and sick leave.

Six national non-profit organizations currently administer SEE grants, and enrollees are considered employees of those organizations, not the EPA. Thus, they’re in the same boat as government contract workers from private companies, who also don’t usually receive back pay when a government shutdown ends. In an e-mailed statement on Wednesday, the EPA confirmed that all 900 seniors in the SEE Program are currently furloughed. The agency did not answer questions about whether they would receive back pay.

Kanta isn’t counting on it, and she’s worried. “Every moment I close my eyes, I think about it,” she said through tears in a phone interview. “Where will I get the money? What will I do? I’m all alone here. My children and my family are in India and Canada. They say, ‘Come here.’ But I don’t want to go anywhere. I just want to live. I just want to work.”

America is facing a retirement crisis. Working hard for four decades no longer guarantees a comfortable coda to one’s life. According to the National Council on Aging, one-third of all senior households either live paycheck to paycheck, as Kanta does, or are in debt after monthly expenses. More than 25 million Americans age 60 and over make less than $30,000 per year. At the same time, rampant age discrimination in hiring has made it difficult for many unemployed seniors to find jobs that could eventually allow them to retire.

The SEE Program was created to address such problems. In 1984, Congress passed the Environmental Programs Assistance Act, which allowed the EPA to partner with nonprofits “to utilize the talents of older Americans.” Through grant funding, Americans aged 55 and over could work to assist the EPA with “projects of pollution prevention, abatement, and control.” (The U.S. Census Bureau defines seniors as 65 and over, while some organizations like the AARP define them as 50 and over. The EPA’s program defines them as 55 and over.)

Today, SEE enrollees work in EPA offices across the country as receptionists, accountants, engineers, and grant specialists, among other positions. And though the paychecks are generally small—the hourly rate usually ranges from $10 to $15 an hour—people who’ve worked with SEE employees say their presence is large. “They were amazing,” said Judith Enck, who ran the EPA’s Region 2 during the Obama administration. One SEE enrollee, she recalled, was a woman in her 80s who lived alone in New Jersey, but worked from the EPA office in New York as an administrative assistant. “She would come to work even in horrible, horrible weather,” Enck said. “She was the most dedicated person.”

One reason SEE enrollees are so dedicated is that many of them live alone, said Joon Bang, president of the National Asian Pacific Center on Aging, one of the nonprofits that administers SEE grants. “You’re talking about group of folks who not only rely on this program to fill a financial need, but a lot of them are seniors who feel a sense of community and belonging and purpose though this program,” he said. Now, because of the extended government shutdown, “There’s a feeling of isolation they’re experiencing.”

Kanta confirms this. “When I go to [the] office, I hardly feel lonely or alone,” she said. “You meet your friends, you’re busy the whole day at work.” But after more than a month without going to work, Kanta said she’s started to feel physically and emotionally isolated. It’s a familiar feeling for her—she’s an immigrant from India, and has lived alone in the United States since 2010. But it’s not something she’s felt much since the joined the EPA in 2014, the same year she became an American citizen.

During the shutdown, Kanta has kept busy by speaking to her family on WhatsApp—her daughter lives in India, and her son in Canada—and checking up on other SEE enrollees. “I try to call all of them to talk to them,” Kanta said. “They’re very upset.” But now that she’s alone all the time, she finds herself plagued with worry about what might happen if something happened to her. What if she were to experience a medical emergency? Who would be there to help her?

And then there’s the problem of the vanishing paychecks. “I need money,” Kanta said. “How can you just do without it?” Unlike the federal employees that Kanta sits next to, she and the other SEE enrollees likely won’t ever get paid for this lost time. “I went through 2 shutdowns during Obama administration but they were much shorter,” Enck said. “The SEE employees did not get retroactive pay.”

For Kanta, this means fresh food is nearly out of the question. She’s been cooking mostly dried lentils and rice. Last week, she received a $20 donation from a friend. “I was thinking of going to buy some bananas,” she said.

Another SEE enrollee, an administrative assistant in D.C. who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution at work, has more of a financial cushion than Kanta because her husband has a full-time job. But the loss of her $2,200 monthly wages means her family is “unable to buy the groceries we would normally buy, or put gas in our car.” Last week, she said, she started crying in a 7-Eleven after getting a notification that her checking account was overdrawn. “I had to transfer money in from my savings, and it just, emotionally, it all hit me,” she said.

What’s happening to SEE enrollees is happening to millions of other people across the country. “The federal government is effectively the nation’s largest employer of low-wage workers,” David Dayen pointed out in The New Republic this month. “It funds 4.5 million contractor jobs that pay less than $15 an hour...” That’s millions of workers who might have to chalk January up as a loss, unless Senate Democrats and protesters are able to convince the Republicans to promise back pay for contractors, as Congress has already done for federal employees.

SEE program enrollees aren’t the only low-income seniors negatively affected by the shutdown. Housing assistance, food assistance, and public transportation assistance programs for the elderly have been scaled back, if not halted altogether. And if the shutdown drags on much longer, the Department of Agriculture may run out of money for the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps, which serves approximately 4.8 million people over the age of 60.

The treatment of SEE enrollees reveals a distressing truth about how America values its older population, says the D.C.-based administrative assistant. When the government eventually reopens, and she returns to the office, all the younger people around her will receive a check for thousands of dollars. But she probably won’t get a penny. “We’re just like federal employees,” she said. “We do the same work. But they’re not talking about that. It’s like we’re nothing.”

On Tuesday night, in her State of the State address, Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo staked her second term on an ambitious promise. “Tonight, I pledge to be the governor who brings universal public Pre-K to Rhode Island,” she said. “By the time I leave office, there will be a Pre-K seat for every four-year-old whose parents want it. The budget I’ll submit later this week sets us on a path to make that happen. Let’s get this done.”

Across our divided nation, universal pre-Kindergarten is one of the few policies with bipartisan momentum. In announcing his candidacy for president earlier this month, Julian Castro touted his success in expanding full-day pre-K while he was mayor of San Antonio. “As president,” he said, “I’ll make pre-K for the U.S.A. happen!” On the other side of the aisle, conservative states like Alabama have been pouring money into expanding their state-funded pre-K programs, while Oklahoma was one of the first in the nation to implement pre-K for all.

Here’s the problem: Universal pre-K is bad policy. Public money for early childhood education would be much better spent on programs that support families.

The term universal pre-K refers to publicly funded education for 4-year-olds—and, increasingly, 3-year-olds—regardless of income or other eligibility criteria other than age. To address the challenge of school readiness, the policy treats the child as the unit of change. Give her extra time in an academic environment, the theory goes, and she’s more likely to arrive in Kindergarten with the building blocks needed to succeed. This is not strictly false, but it misses the big picture of how child development works.

Children are making over a million neural connections per second in the earliest months in life, and there is now a scientific consensus that brain architecture is being built long, long before a child enters pre-K. This means that pre-K, as an early childhood policy, is pointing at the wrong part of the developmental arc; it’s adding a second floor before ensuring the foundation is sturdy. What determines the strength of a child’s neurological structures is a dizzying interplay of environmental factors centered on the home. An interdisciplinary panel of experts put it this way in a landmark report in 2000 titled Neurons to Neighborhoods:

The scientific evidence on the significant developmental impacts of early experiences, caregiving relationships, and environmental threats is incontrovertible. Virtually every aspect of early human development, from the brain’s evolving circuitry to the child’s capacity for empathy, is affected by the environments and experiences that are encountered in a cumulative fashion, beginning early in the prenatal period and extending throughout the early childhood years.

Put another way: When families thrive, children thrive. Policymakers and child-education advocates acknowledge this truism, but rarely take the next logical step of promoting greater family support. A 2017 report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, making the “Business Case for Child Care,” put a fine point on the problem with focusing mainly on formal pre-K. “The commonly made distinction between ‘care’ and ‘education’ in early childhood is a false one,” the author, Katherine B. Stevens of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote. “Childcare is early education, regardless of the building it occurs in or what we call it. The question is only whether it’s advancing or impeding children’s learning.” And yet, that same report’s recommendations never mention the idea of expanding family support.

American families need it. All but the highest income levels are struggling to get by, thanks to a combination of sky-high child care costs, rising debt, and stagnant wages. This is causing them tremendous stress: A 2014 study found that more than three-quarters of parents reported money being a “somewhat” or “very” significant source of stress. And chronic parental stress is inherently opposed to optimal child development; one study notes it has been “associated with numerous undesirable outcomes,” including heightened rates of parental depression and marital conflict, as well as less attentive, harsher parenting—none of which is good for an impressionable, developing brain.

The obvious policy solution for improving early childhood education, then, is to give families money in one form or another—such as child allowances, tax credits, or child care subsidies.

Researchers have been able to consistently show that doing so has a tremendously positive impact on all child outcomes, including educational outcomes. The evidence is not theoretical, but gathered through natural experiments. A Chalkbeat report last year on more than 20 studies of income-boosting programs concluded that “over and over, [researchers] find that more money or benefits helps kids in school.” These benefits regularly outweigh the estimated impact of giving a child an excellent versus an average teacher, as well as outweighing the impact of pre-K on its own.

There’s no doubt that universal pre-K, implemented well, helps the children who attend. This was recently reaffirmed by the largest study of pre-K to date, which found that a quality pre-K program substantially boosts the likelihood of attendees ending up with a college degree. It is far better than doing nothing at all, and there’s a place for pre-K in the early childhood landscape. There is, however, a key question of opportunity cost. Pouring tens of millions of dollars into universal pre-K leaves a pittance for more effective family-support programs.

Because development in the earliest months and years are so inextricably relationship-based, there is no “one best system” for early care. Between half and two-thirds of young American children—who number in the tens of millions—need outside care because their parents are in the workforce. These parents may have a strong preference for a caregiver who is related to them or who speaks their language, or they may want a smaller home-based care, or they may desire a Montessori experience, and so on. Right now, due to a lack of affordable, available, quality care, most don’t even a choice at all; two-thirds of parents report having “only one” or “just a few” viable care options.

The solutions are myriad, and not mutually exclusive. Perhaps we should pay stay-at-home-parents their long-deserved due. I’d argue that it’s time to make child care a common, free good by providing a voucher to cover all costs. A generous child allowance, longer paid family leave, tripling the child tax credit, boosting the EITC—there are no shortage of options. All of them move towards what Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst, a former Department of Education official who first framed the family support vs. school readiness tension, suggests as the goal of family support policies: providing “the best possible conditions for families with children.”

There’s broad support for this idea. A recently released poll by the First Five Years Fund found that more than 80 percent of Americans—including over 60 percent of Republicans, 80 percent of independents, and 90 percent of Democrats—support ideas like increasing the Child Tax Credit or increasing funding to help provide affordable child care for working parents. It’s even more popular than universal pre-K.

The current state of affairs isn’t sustainable. American day care is on life support thanks to tapped-out parents and a lack of public investment. The future of America quite literally depends on implementing the right early-childhood policies, as new CDC data confirmed once more that our birth rate has plummeted below the replacement rate. Two major reasons for that are the absurd costs of child-rearing and the lack of family support.

Universal pre-K comes from a good place. It’s a recognition that early education matters, and that children from historically disadvantaged backgrounds have the least access to formal care settings. But a universal family support policy would accomplish so much more per dollar, and can address the problem at its roots. Give struggling parents the financial means to do what is best for their children, and it will help to relieve the stress that has burdened American families—and held back millions of kids—for far too long.