And what do they do?

Yes.

So they bring generators onto a set that's filming a commercial or a movie.

And there's a lot of moving parts in these setups because the production company is bearing the cost and they use unions and the unions actually go and get the fuel and actually feed the generators.

and they have union people working the floor, and they may be jockeying a few generators up and down, depending on the power needs of the scene.

So there were definitely a lot of logistics involved in that.

That was not the generator company's cost.

Exactly.

Who were the people that you wanted to talk to about this and what was your core inquiry with them?

Right.

Well, I wanted to get a range from the pundits.

I wanted to get some candidates.

I wanted to get some analysts, political strategists, and I wanted to get some everyday voters.

So really casting a wide net.

And the question was, we know that affordability is number one.

So how does the link between this economic inequality lead to this erosion of our political system or the system upon which our government is based?

Talk to me about this kind of threat to some of these programs.

Well, the status quo that a lot of social service providers use for housing the homeless is called permanent supportive housing.

And it sounds a little jargony, but basically the idea is let's get these folks into shelter somehow.

without conditions, and then we can help them with services, whether they have an addiction or mental health issues.

And this is kind of in the status quo.

It's the basis of the program called Continuum of Care that's been around for quite a long time.

So the Trump administration wants to really turn this on its head.

So with it all being uncertain and even just a temporary stay from a judge, what kind of timeline might we be looking at, knowing that it's all really up in the air?

Tell me about this forum's focus and where you started with this.

Well, if you look at the big, beautiful bill that was passed by Congress last summer, they really took a hatchet to Medicaid.

And this is, of course, the big program that supports health care for low and some middle income people.

Those cuts are expected nationally to save $900 billion.

But the downside is it's going to make a lot of people uninsured.

First, why is it bad for a recipient? Well, if you have preventative care, it's gonna take care of a lot of your day-to-day issues.

And if you don't have insurance, you are probably going to forego preventative care because you're probably not going to pay out of pocket.

Where's the fix? Where's the solution? And who's working on that?

Tell me about this piece and what you discovered as you started reporting.

Sure.

So the SNAP cuts, SNAP, also known as food stamps to a lot of folks, although it's changed over the years, was a subject of cuts in the big, beautiful bill that was passed by Congress in early July 2020.

And there's kind of two levels of inconvenience for everyone.

The first is that they changed the work rules for eligibility, which will just make it harder for certain folks to get the benefits.

They increased the work requirements.

There have always been work requirements, but now they are more stringent.

I think the role that farmers play in this conversation is really interesting too.

What did you find in terms of how that's impacting Chicago federal workers?

Well, it's certainly been a chaotic situation.

There's really no definitive data on how many people are affected.

So many people were laid off or called back or put on administrative leave or they're waiting to be fired.

So it's a very chaotic situation.

These numbers haven't shown up in the unemployment rate yet.

We're at 4.6%.

I don't know if you could unpack that a bit too.

through your reporting, it seems like faculty members are kind of more vocal than leadership at a lot of these universities.

Right, right.

So going back to kind of the start of Trump's attacks, you know, we know that Columbia very, very publicly capitulated to some of Trump's demands.

And at the same time, Harvard, you know, just stood its ground and actually countersued the Trump administration.

So we have these two polar opposites, although we have to say none are as clear cut because some say Columbia is actually trying to work it out.

And, you know, is Harvard really hurting itself or not? But given those two examples, A lot of faculty say, well, why is everyone else so quiet? Well, sure, there's a lot of research funding at stake.

And I'm sure these presidents don't want to outright antagonize the Trump administration, but they don't want to be bullied either.

What will you be watching most going forward connected to this?

And then what could be on the horizon?

This has been going on for a while, as we've said.

Around 2017, the public schools got relief with, they call it like resource-based funding or need-based funding that would direct more funding to schools that really need it.

And so some of the education advocates said, aha, maybe we can get more state funding to these schools that really need it.

So there was a commission that was authorized by the General Assembly back in 21 that I've been working for about two years on how can we kind of rectify this.

And they came up with a formula.

They analyzed which schools are under-resourced.

So there's kind of all these converging forces that are really making this so problematic and making it kind of this really tough nut to crack.

I still, I think that's only gotten deeper.

Well, it opened this divide, this nationwide divide over public health and masks and vaccines.

And I mean, in a way, we were probably a little more compliant in Chicago, in blue Chicago than elsewhere.

Although we noted that it may have cost Lori Lightfoot the election because she wanted to get the schools reopened sooner then the teachers union felt it was safe to, and that really opened a big to do that probably contributed to her loss.

So there were so many interesting divides like that.

There's also sort of a class divide, right? Because some of us work in an office and a lot of other workers don't have that luxury if we consider the ability to work at home.

So think about health care workers and police and fire and sanitation.

What did you hear in your reporting around the pandemic's impact on education for the kids?