CHANGE Illinois is a nonpartisan, nonprofit leading systemic government and election reforms. CHANGE (the Coalition for Honest and New Government Ethics) champions ethical and efficient government and democracy and includes a diverse group of civic, philanthropic, business, labor, professional, and nonprofit organizations representing millions of Illinoisans. CHANGE Illinois works in collaboration with like-minded reform organizations, playing a leadership role in convening and facilitating efforts around shared policy agendas. The coalition works to improve challenges that undermine our democracy, including gerrymandering, restricted ballot access, voter suppression, uncompetitive elections, corruption, lack of government transparency and unethical lobbying, all of which have led to disillusionment and a decrease in civic participation.
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Coins falling into a white piggy bank
Photo by Sasun Bughdaryan on Unsplash
Love Him or Hate Him, Open a Trump Account
Oct 11, 2026
Last year, Congress established 530A tax-advantaged investment accounts for children under the age of 18. These accounts are now open and eligible children born between January 1, 2025 and December 31, 2028 receive a $1000 contribution from the federal government. This August, philanthropists Michael and Susan Dell gave $6.25 billion to supercharge these so-called Trump accounts, $250 goes into the accounts of the first 25 million children who have an account, are 10 and under and live in qualifying zip codes. Two hundred and fifty dollars was deposited into our children’s 530A Trump accounts.
However, as of July 2026, less than 10% of children eligible to open an account actually had an account. Too many of those who are economically worst off have not opened these 530a accounts. Research shows that families with higher incomes, older people, men and white people are more likely to be aware of this opportunity compared to families with lower incomes who are younger, women and Black and Latino. Given the historical, persistent racial and growing economic wealth gap, opportunities to build wealth should not be overlooked.
Regardless of how we feel about Trump, there are benefits to opening a federal investment account. For many of us, our instincts to most things Trump are eye rolls, deep sighs and gag reflexes. Like us, it might feel blasphemy to open this account. But, as researchers who study child development and stratification, we know that context matters and “it depends” is a legitimate scientific answer. While important questions remain about these accounts, it is possible to open a Trump account without adding any personal contributions. Thus, it makes sense to open one, so as not to leave money on the table.
In a world where the wealthiest among us are tied to investment accounts and investment in the stock market is highly stratified, expanding access is socially sustainable. Yes, a majority of Americans own some stock (62%), but stock ownership varies substantially by income, race and ethnicity. Lower-income adults are considerably less likely to own stocks (28%) compared to other income groups. And, while 70% of white adults own stock, only 53% of Black adults and 38% of Latino adults own stock.
Similar stark disparities also play out with 529 plans, one of the best known college savings plans that up to 54% of parents don’t even know exist. Most children do not have a 529 plan and family contribution varies by race and income with wealthy white families being the most invested. California’s ScholarShare 529 tracks its account owners by race and ethnicity. Black account owners make up 1% of their account owners, Latinos 8%.
As social and developmental scientists, we consider how factors such as race, ethnicity, and discrimination influence the development and economic circumstance of minoritized children and their families within US society. We understand that so many of these wealth building accounts were not created with Black and Latino families, women, or low-income people in mind, yet these populations have much to gain if these accounts remain stable and grow wealth.
To be sure, the outcome of these accounts is unpredictable. Beyond his actions which make him a social pariah to so many, such as the racism, the sexual abuse and his general animosity to anyone who doesn’t prefer and obey him, Trump’s uniquely long track record of failed ventures might be a deterrent. But, if Trump’s detractors are less likely to open an account than those who vote for and support him, then a pathway is set for a President to effectively grow the wealth of mainly his supporters. And, according to United States constitutional law, Trump will not be in office at the end of business January 20th, 2029. Perhaps instead of putting their names on buildings, landmarks, monuments, etc. the next President can change the name of these accounts to a more neutral one.
Until then, in these times of such extreme wealth inequity, social instability and racialization, we need to be willing to take what works for us, regardless of our feelings towards any given political actor. We may think Trump is abhorrent, that doesn’t mean we need to deny ourselves a broadly accessible public wealth-building program. It may mean we need to double down on any such crumb.
Love Him or Hate Him, Open a Trump Account was first published by Latino News Network and is republished with permission.
Megan Thiele Strong is a Sociology professor at San José State University and a Public Voices Fellow at the The OpEd Project and a member of the Scholars Strategy Network.
Sabrina Mendez-Escobar is a mom, Ambassador with The OpEd Project, researcher with an interest in empowering Latino families, and Child Development professor at City Colleges of Chicago.
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U.S. Deaf athletes celebrated at the Opening Ceremony of the 25th Summer Deaflympics on November 15, 2025, in Tokyo, Japan.
(Hugh Carey, USA Deaf Sports Federation)
The USOPC Ought to Reassess the Ted Stevens Act
Oct 10, 2026
Last month was National Deaf Awareness Month.
It is a time to raise awareness of Deaf culture and language and to advocate for the rights and inclusion of Deaf and Hard of Hearing individuals.
Since 1997, we have celebrated National Deaf Awareness Month every September.
Despite nearly thirty years of promoting Deaf Awareness Month, Deaf activists' unwavering dedication remains truly inspiring. We believe they still understand the frustration USA Deaflympians feel.
The most disappointing moment of 2025 for our Deaflympians was the lack of national news media coverage of the 2025 Summer Deaflympics in Tokyo, Japan, held November 15 to 26. Despite Team USA bringing home 36 medals and competing against 81 countries, major news outlets (outside of YouTube) ran no on-air reports or feature articles during or after the Games. By comparison, the Olympics and Paralympics consistently receive extensive daily coverage and athlete profiles across television and online media. This absence limits public awareness and recognition of the Deaflympics in the United States.
Therefore, Congress and the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee (USOPC) ought to reassess the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act of 1998 (the “Ted Stevens Act”) to include the Deaflympics.
Four Reasons to Include the Deaflympics
No. 1 - Consistency with the Olympic Movement: The IOC fully recognizes the Deaflympics; therefore, U.S. law must do the same.
Law: 36 U.S.C. § 220503(2) is a provision of the Ted Stevens Act that requires the USOPC to have the statutory mandate to “coordinate and develop amateur athletic activity in the United States, directly related to international amateur athletic competition.”
Fact: Since 1924, the Deaflympics have been the world’s second-oldest Olympic-style event, following the Olympic Games. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has officially sanctioned the Deaflympics since 1955. However, the 1998 expansion of the Ted Stevens Act explicitly mandated USOPC governance over the Olympic and Paralympic Games but omitted the Deaflympics. In 2001, the IOC granted the International Committee of Sports for the Deaf (ICSD) the right to use the term Deaflympics (formerly the World Games for the Deaf). The USOPC does not officially recognize the Deaflympics, primarily because of governance autonomy and the specific statutory language of the Ted Stevens Act.
Recommendation for Congress: The USA Deaf Sports Federation (USADSF) and the ICSD strongly support including the Deaflympics under the USOPC, viewing it as essential to equity and recognition. The USOPC has neither publicly opposed nor supported such inclusion but has cited legal and structural reasons for maintaining the status quo. Lawmakers should expect broad support from Deaf advocacy groups and some international bodies, though those focused on preserving existing governance distinctions may resist.
No. 2 - Equity for Disabled Athletes: Deaflympians are the only Olympic-style athletes not included in the Ted Stevens Act
Law: 36 U.S.C. § 220503(13) authorizes the USOPC to “encourage and assist amateur athletic programs and competitions for amateur athletes with disabilities”.
Fact: The USOPC does not officially include purely Deaf athletes in its primary Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I) frameworks.
Recommendation for Congress: In the 277-page 2024 Final Report of the Commission on the State of U.S. Olympics and Paralympics (CSUSOP), the Commission recommends that “Congress should also further study the challenges faced by deaf and hard-of-hearing athletes and proposals to integrate deaf sports into the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic movement.”
No. 3 - Congressional Intent of Inclusion: Congress intended to include all Olympic-style sports without exception.
Law: Under the Ted Stevens Act, Congress granted the USOPC exclusive jurisdiction over Olympic-style sports.
Fact: Excluding the Deaflympics from the Ted Stevens Act would not legally require the USOPC to track Deaf athletes or integrate them into its broader equity, resource allocation, and organizational compliance mandates.
Recommendation for Congress: Now is a pivotal moment for Congress to act to address these inequities and prevent another generation of Deaf athletes from being lost to systemic neglect.
No. 4 - Leadership and Legacy: Updating the Act honors Ted Stevens’s legacy of fairness and inclusion.
Law: The 1998 Amendment officially renamed the law the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act.
Fact: Senator Stevens introduced Senate Bill 2430 (1998) on the Senate floor on May 22, 1998, and stated:
“World Games for the Deaf--It has been suggested that both the bill and the Committee report which eventually accompanies the bill include language in support of the World Games for the Deaf and of deaf athletes. It is anticipated that this issue will be addressed by consensus before the bill becomes enacted.”
Yet that language never made it into the law.
Recommendation for Congress: The Ted Stevens Act could be amended as follows:
- In 36 U.S.C. Section 220502(a), insert “Deaflympic Games” after each instance of “Paralympic Games” to ensure the USOPC’s responsibilities explicitly include the Deaflympics.
- In Section 220501(b), add the following definition: (10) The term “Deaflympic Games” means the international athletic competitions sanctioned by the International Committee of Sports for the Deaf (ICSD) for athletes who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing.
- In Section 220503, add: “The corporation [USOPC] shall support, fund, and promote the Deaflympics and ensure that Deaf athletes have equal access to resources, training, and representation as Olympians and Paralympians.”
The final 1977 report of the President’s Commission on Olympic Sports (PCOS) recommended recognizing athletic events for individuals with disabilities as legitimate sports competitions for elite, highly trained athletes rather than dismissing them as mere therapy or rehabilitation.
The Amateur Sports Act of 1978 required the U.S. Olympic Committee to “...encourage and provide assistance to amateur athletic programs and competition for handicapped individuals, including, where feasible, the expansion of opportunities for meaningful participation by handicapped individuals in athletic competition programs for able-bodied individuals...”
Additionally, U.S. Deaflympic medalists are ineligible for the USOPC Operation Gold cash stipends awarded to medalists.
Therefore, Congress ought to amend the Ted Stevens Act to explicitly recognize the Deaflympics as an official part of the United States Olympic movement, ensure that Deaflympians receive the same support and representation as Olympians and Paralympians, and require the USOPC to fund and support Deaf athletes. The amended language ought to reference the “Deaflympics” and establish equal access to training, competition opportunities, and promotional activities.
It’s time for Congress and the USOPC to include the Deaflympics in the Act.
Howard Gorrell is an advocate for the deaf, a former Republican Party election statistician, and a longtime congressional aide. He has been advocating against partisan gerrymandering for four decades.
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Beginning in 1908, a corps of Black supervising teachers, almost all of them women, organized rural Black communities across the segregated South. They were called Jeanes teachers.
The Professions Have Gone Hollow. The Jeanes Teachers Knew How to Rebuild Them.
Oct 10, 2026
Trust in American institutions has fallen for decades, across nearly every sector, and the usual diagnosis blames the public. Citizens have lost faith; institutions must win it back with better communication, greater transparency, and proof that the proper procedures were followed.
This diagnosis is backward.
The crisis is not primarily in public attitudes. It is in institutional practice. In a democracy, trust is not simply a mood people have about an institution. It is something an institution does. It asks something of citizens, counts on their judgment, gives them responsibility, and shows them what comes of it.
Most institutions no longer know how to do that. They manage people. They do not form them.
American institutions have become very good at following procedure and very bad at earning authority. They can show us the process. They can document compliance. They can survey satisfaction. What they increasingly cannot show us is a public capable of exercising judgment and sharing responsibility for a common life.
That is one reason contempt for credentialed experts and professional managers has become such a familiar feature of American political life. The contempt often becomes crude, indiscriminate, and destructive. But it lands because it names something real.
This is ultimately a story about the professions, because professional practice is where most of us actually encounter institutions: the teacher, the nurse, the caseworker, the librarian, the pastor, the administrator.
Professionals help determine what kind of people institutions produce, and they do it through their ordinary routines: how they exercise authority, distribute responsibility, handle disagreement, and account for results.
They can form citizens capable of judgment and shared work. Or they can form consumers, clients, and managed populations.
Over the past generation, the second model has increasingly displaced the first. People who once belonged to institutions now receive services from them. People who once helped run institutions now fill out surveys about them.
This is a way of governing, not merely a way of managing, and it matters as much as many of the questions that appear on our ballots. Neither political party has escaped it. Their policies differ enormously, but both operate through a professional culture that too often treats citizens as audiences to persuade, constituencies to mobilize, clients to serve, or populations to manage.
On the narrower question of how institutions understand the people they govern and serve, red and blue America often look more alike than either side admits.
But this is not the only model of professional life Americans have ever had.
Beginning in 1908, a corps of Black supervising teachers, almost all of them women, organized rural Black communities across the segregated South. They were called Jeanes teachers, but the title is too small for what they did.
They trained local teachers, organized Improvement Leagues and Betterment Associations, raised money for schoolhouses and longer school terms, and organized adult literacy classes. From 1913 to 1928, Jeanes teachers raised approximately $5 million for Black schools.
The connection to the later civil rights schools is not a story of simple institutional descent. It is a continuity of practice and people. By 1916, Jeanes teachers were running moonlight schools for Black adults. Septima Clark, who later designed the Citizenship Schools, began teaching that same year in Charleston County, South Carolina, under the county’s Jeanes post, and she was still teaching in that county’s schools in 1956, the year before the first Citizenship School opened. Highlander’s own 1954 field notes for the Sea Islands counted on that same county post.
Their professional authority did not rest only on expertise. It rested on what their expertise enabled other people to become capable of doing.
The Jeanes teachers were what Harry Boyte calls citizen professionals: people whose work was not only competent but formative. They did not simply deliver services to communities. They enlarged the capacity of people in those communities to judge, organize, build, and act together.
Every profession still produces people like this. We usually treat them as exceptional: the remarkable teacher, the stubbornly civic pastor, the doctor who builds a community rather than merely treating patients, the administrator who gives away enough authority that other people begin taking responsibility.
Institutions celebrate such people.
They rarely reproduce them.
That leaves us with a more important question than whether Americans can be persuaded to trust their institutions again: Can institutions deliberately form citizen professionals?
Better management will not solve the problem. The professions are already managed to death, and management is part of how they were hollowed out. Protest alone will not solve it either. People can win a political fight and still leave the institutional arrangements that govern their lives untouched the next morning.
The professions will be rebuilt where two things meet.
The first is organized people with enough power to keep institutional design honest, enough to keep experts from designing democracy for everybody else without answering to them.
The second is institutions capable of carrying that power forward, so citizens don't have to organize from scratch every time they want responsibility, voice, or consequence.
The Jeanes teachers joined those things. They organized people while building institutions. They developed leadership while creating structures through which leadership could operate. They did not choose between power and institution-building.
That is what gave the work institutional staying power.
This fall, at Huston-Tillotson University in East Austin, the Politics Lab of the James L. Farmer House is convening a semester-long symposium built around a deliberately difficult question: What would it take to build the Jeanes teachers again, here, now, and not only as teachers?
Students and community members will take up that question together. Central Texas Interfaith, a broad-based organizing network, is helping lead the work, with organizers reading organizers. The Institute for Public Life and Work has joined as a partner. The organizers drew up the design before they joined; the test is whether they change it.
The point is not to admire the Jeanes teachers.
It is to test whether a university, a congregation-based organizing network, and ordinary citizens working together can intentionally begin forming citizen professionals, and to say honestly what happens when they try.
We do not know what will come of it, and we should not claim more than the record eventually shows.
But we know what the alternative looks like because we are living in it: institutions fluent in procedure and increasingly empty of authority, managing a public they no longer know how to form.
The professions were not always this way. Black women working under Jim Crow demonstrated another possibility.
Recovering it will require more than asking Americans to trust institutions again.
Institutions will have to become worthy of trust by doing something with citizens again: asking for their judgment, giving them consequential responsibility, and building with them rather than merely delivering things to them.
Trust will return when people can see themselves not simply on the receiving end of institutional life, but among its authors.
No one is coming to do that work for us. The question is whether we will do it ourselves.
Robert M. Ceresa is an associate professor of political science at Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, Texas, and founding director of the James L. Farmer House.
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A visitor pauses at the reflecting pools to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center at the National 9/11 Memorial & Museum on September 11, 2026, in New York City.
(Photo by Jeenah Moon - Pool/Getty Images)
The Moral Distance Between Our Dead and Theirs
Oct 10, 2026
Last month, I watched the ceremonies marking the 25th anniversary of September 11.
I listened as family members read the names of the dead. Children and grandchildren talked about people whose absence still shapes their lives. Nearly 3,000 people were killed that morning. At the 9/11 Memorial, they are remembered as individuals.
I found it deeply moving. Time has not diminished the grief, the courage, or the human cost of that day.
I think about the firefighters.
While thousands of people were desperately trying to get out of the World Trade Center, firefighters were going in. One of them was Battalion Chief Orio Palmer.
Palmer took an elevator to the 41st floor of the South Tower and then climbed 37 flights carrying roughly 50 pounds of equipment. He reached the devastated 78th-floor sky lobby, moving toward trapped civilians. The 9/11 Commission Report records that firefighters freed civilians trapped in an elevator shortly before the tower collapsed. Palmer did not make it out.
He did not know the people he was climbing toward, only that they were in danger. We rightly remember that as heroism.
But as I watched the commemorations, another thought kept intruding.
People are also dying violently elsewhere as I write this, in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran. Behind us are Afghanistan, Iraq and other wars.
As Americans read the names of people killed 25 years ago, families elsewhere were mourning loved ones killed in wars today.
We remember our dead by name. We can remember theirs only by numbers.
The Moral Distance
Families grieve their own differently from strangers. Communities and nations preserve their own tragedies. No human being can feel every death in the world with the intensity of losing a spouse, a child, or a friend. Our concern naturally begins close to home.
Emotional distance is understandable, but it can also become moral distance.
This human tendency is not uniquely American. But for the United States, it operates alongside extraordinary power. American military forces can reach almost anywhere on Earth. Our national wealth, geographic security, and military superiority have insulated most Americans from the consequences of wars fought in our name.
Our cities stay intact. Our lights stay on. Our children go to school. We know war mostly through reports, not through lived experience.
For much of our recent history, war has happened somewhere else. September 11 was the exception. For a few hours, the distance collapsed. Nearly 3,000. We know the names behind that number.
Names Are Buried In Numbers
Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that more than 940,000 people died directly from post-9/11 war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan between 2001 and 2023. When indirect deaths from war’s damage to health systems and infrastructure are included, the project estimates at least 4.5 million deaths.
Many actors caused those deaths in very different conflicts. They are not a count of people killed by the United States. Deliberately murdering civilians, military action against legitimate targets, strategic error, and unintended civilian deaths carry very different moral and legal responsibilities.
But numbers this large tell us almost nothing about the people behind them. Distance does not make those lives less human.
One of them was Hami.
Hami was 11. He loved soccer and riding his bicycle. On February 28, his grandfather, Heydar Sadeghi, drove Hami, his 9-year-old sister Nila, and their mother, Neda Salehizadeh, a teacher, to their school in Minab, Iran. He planned to pick them up at 1 p.m.
At least one U.S. missile struck the school that morning, according to an Associated Press investigation. Hami and his mother were killed. Nila was pulled alive from the rubble. When Sadeghi reached the school, he searched through the destruction, calling their names.
One important fact should not be pushed aside. The school stood next to a compound operated by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Some of its students were children of officers at the base. Many were local children from Minab.
The circumstances of the strike and the Guard compound matter. So do questions of military necessity, intent, and responsibility. U.S. military investigators reached a preliminary assessment that American forces were likely responsible, although the investigation had not reached a final conclusion when Reuters reported on it.
None of that makes Hami less human.
The number is how we encounter the death. His name is how Hami’s grandfather remembers him.
My Own Moral Distance
I know something about the insulation I am describing.
Around 1980, part of my professional work involved analyzing the impacts of Agent Orange from U.S. military use during the Vietnam War. The analysis included what had happened in Vietnamese villages: studies, exposure information, impacts, and numbers.
That was how I saw it then: numbers and facts. I did not stop to ask about the people inside those numbers. That was my insulation.
I am asking the question now as I experience 9/11’s 25th anniversary.
What “Never Forget” Asks of Us
For 25 years, “Never Forget” has been a promise.
We should remember who died, what was endured, and the courage and sacrifice. We should preserve the story so later generations understand what happened that morning.
But remembrance carries an obligation forward as well.
If remembering only preserves our own wound, its moral reach remains limited. The intimacy with which we understand the suffering of September 11 can help us grasp what violent death does to a family anywhere.
We need not feel guilt for everything done in our country’s name. But we should ask what price was paid, what proved wrong, what humanity was lost, and what was easier to overlook because it happened far away.
Remembrance should enlarge our moral imagination. It should take what we learned from our own suffering and change how we see the suffering of people we do not know.
Moral imagination should guide how we use that power.
Sometimes military force may be necessary. But a country with our reach and power should be especially careful about using it. Those who bear the consequences usually live far from us, and distance makes them easier to ignore.
America’s power places a greater responsibility on us. When we can use force without experiencing its consequences ourselves, we have an obligation to understand what those consequences mean before we act.
The question is whether we clearly see the people who may pay the price before we decide to use force.
The People Who Ran In
Orio Palmer climbed the stairs.
He moved toward strangers. He did not need their names to decide their lives mattered.
We cannot know every name in every war. We cannot grieve every loss as we grieve our own. But we should not confuse distance with insignificance.
Orio Palmer had a name.
Hami had a name.
Twenty-five years ago, firefighters entered burning buildings to reach people whose names they did not know. Remembering those we lost that day is where “Never Forget” begins.
For me now, “Never Forget” also means seeing the names inside the numbers when our power puts distant lives in our hands.
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Edward Saltzberg is the Executive Director of the Security and Sustainability Forum and a Visiting Scholar at George Washington University. He writes the Substack, The Stability Brief.
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