Source document: https://docs-lawep.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/1696589654542.pdf (United States)
Congressional Progressive Caucus Executive Action Proposals for the 118th Congress Top Priorities At A Glance Hold Corporations Accountable ● Crack down on airline misconduct and boost competition by fining airlines for failing to refund passengers for delayed flights or canceling flights for insufficient staffing.

Improve gate access and slotting for smaller air carriers at major airports to increase available flights, seats and affordability for consumers.
● Take aggressive action to improve worker and community safety in the rail industry through regulatory action to spur adoption of technology like electronic pneumatic brakes, heat and vibration detectors, and safer tank cars.

Expand the list of substances regulated as “highly hazardous” and shorten the length of trains to limit derailment damage.
● Expand oversight of banks that have avoided enhanced regulatory supervision by subjecting all banks above $100 billion in assets to the Federal Reserve’s strong supervision, mandating strong capital requirements, updated stress test compliance and yearly resolution plans.

Advance strong Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rulemaking to curb incentive-based compensation arrangements at financial firms that encourage excessive and inappropriate risk-taking.
● Ensure federal funding opportunities go to contractors who do not do stock buybacks, building on Commerce Department’s recent guidance for the CHIPS and Science Act ● Pursue action to curb predatory behaviors of for-profit colleges through rulemaking, enforcement, denying contracts, and informing students of risks.
● Protect nursing home residents and workers and improve quality of care through minimum staffing standards, fines for misconduct, and bans on binding arbitration clauses in resident contracts.

Raise Wages and Empower Workers ● Strengthen overtime protections to give millions of full-time salaried workers making less than $80,000 a year time-and-a-half pay for more than 40 hours on the job per workweek and provide automatic updates to prevent the erosion of the federal threshold.
● Use all of the Department of Labor’s (DOL) available enforcement tools to hold employers accountable for labor violations, including breaking laws related to wage and hour, health and safety, and the use of goods produced in violation of federal minimum wage, overtime, and child labor provisions.
1 ● Require all federal contractors to remain neutral in union organizing campaigns, narrow the gap between CEO and worker pay, have no major violations of labor rights or environmental protection laws on record, and divulge political activities and contributions, parties or third-party political groups in the past two years.
● Explore ways to invoke the Federal Railroad Administration’s (FRA) authority to establish paid sick leave for rail workers by promoting safety in all areas of railroad operations under the Federal Railroad Safety Act (FRSA).

Lower Costs of Essential Expenses ● Reduce prescription drug prices through increased transparency, competition, and government negotiation, and bring patent-free and government-owned innovations to market.
● Increase patient access to health providers, medicines, benefits, and improve cost savings in Medicare Advantage (MA) plans through holding plans accountable for fraud and abuse and blocking algorithms from denying seniors coverage.

● Protect renters from landlord price gouging and excessive rent increases, discrimination, and unfair evictions through rulemaking and enforcement action at federal agencies.
Climate Action and Environmental Justice ● Implement strong and rapid Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rulemaking on fossil fuel-fired power plants, air pollutants, and water contamination.

● Pursue aggressive rulemaking to accelerate clean electricity transmission and achieve the President’s emissions-reduction goals through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).

● Equitable and ambitious implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) climate and environmental justice provisions.
Advance Equity and Justice ● Prioritize companies offering workers childcare for federal contracts across all agencies.

● Ensure fairness in the immigration court system by removing nonpriority cases from the 2.1 million case backlog, expanding government-funded legal counsel for adults and children, and ending the use of expedited dockets that compromise due process, including immigration adjudication centers that operate without oversight.
● Declare a public health emergency for reproductive health care access using the authority of the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP) Act to redirect federal funds toward out-of-state travel for abortion care and grant civil immunity to licensed abortion providers practicing in states where they do not hold a license.
● Instruct the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) to mandate the disaggregation of affirmative action goals in federal contractor hiring in order to create a more robust and comprehensive accounting of diversity in the workforce.
2 Top Priorities — Full List Hold Corporations Accountable ● Use the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) authorities to crack down on misconduct and anticompetitive behaviors in the airline industry by fining airlines for failing to refund passengers for flights delayed over two hours and canceling flights for insufficient staffing.
Reform airports’ slotting systems, improve gate access for smaller carriers, and prevent larger airlines from hoarding limited slots at major airports that deny entry to lower-cost airlines.
● Pursue aggressive rail safety measures to prevent and mitigate future derailments through: a revised cost-benefit analysis to implement more advanced technology, such as electronic pneumatic brakes; expand the list of substances regulated as “highly hazardous” and define “high hazard flammable trains” to include any train transporting at least one rail car containing flammable material; move up the phase-out date for unsafe tank cars and ensure tank manufacturing standards are updated to prevent spills of hazardous materials with thicker steel shells, thermal protection, fuel-size metal shields at each end, and improved outlet valves at the bottom; require more heat and vibration detectors, and shorten the length of trains to limit derailment damage.
● Crack down on risky behaviors and deregulatory efforts of financial institutions by subjecting all banks above $100 billion in assets to the Federal Reserve’s enhanced regulatory supervision.

Require such banks to submit yearly resolution plans, mandate strong capital requirements, and subject them to updated stress tests including scenarios like increasing interest rates.
Quickly advance strong SEC rulemaking to curb incentive- based compensation arrangements at financial firms that encourage excessive and inappropriate risk-taking.

● Build on the achievements of the Commerce Department by prioritizing federal contractors across agencies that have not engaged in stock buybacks or pledge to refrain from engaging in stock buybacks over five years.

● Crack down on predatory behaviors among colleges.
The Department of Education should protect students by expediting and strengthening a reinstated Gainful Employment rule, bring enforcement actions against predatory colleges to terminate or suspend participation in federal student aid and collect more than $1 billion of unpaid liabilities they owe the Department of Education, stop renewing the contracts or program participation agreements of predatory actors that take in Title IV Federal Student Aid funds, and inform applicants if they are applying to an institution on the low-value college list that risks leaving students with high debt and low earnings prior to administering financial aid.
● Continue the progress with requirements of nursing home ownership and management transparency to further protect nursing home residents and improve quality of care.

Establish minimum staffing standards for skilled nursing facilities, including 0.75 registered nurse hours per resident per day, 0.55 licensed vocational nurse or licensed practical nurse hours per resident per day, and 2.8 certified nurse assistant hours per resident per day.
Establish mandatory civil monetary penalties for staffing ratio violations, inappropriate resident discharges, failure to maintain a month’s supply of 3 personal protective equipment, fraudulent data reporting, and other violations of federal requirements.

Expand training opportunities and tying Medicaid payments to adequate wages.
Reinstate the 2016 nursing home rules, including banning binding arbitration clauses in resident contracts and restoring per-day civil monetary penalties as the default, and increase nursing home survey frequency to every 6-9 months.
● Finalize the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) proposed rulemaking on Preventing Digital Discrimination, which would address digital discrimination of access to broadband internet service, and move forward with Federal Trade Commission (FTC) rulemaking that protects consumers from harmful, unfair, or deceptive commercial surveillance and data collection.
● Limit abuse of the Opportunity Zone program by promulgating new regulations that require the Treasury Department (USDT) to annually certify that Opportunity Zone funds fulfill all the program’s requirements, including similar standards as the New Markets Tax Credit program with 90% of an investment must be made in an Opportunity Zone itself, robust information reporting requirements, and anti-abuse rules to curb firms from gaming the system.
The USDT should release data on these questions that would inform legislative decisions on whether to sunset the program.

● Protect the U.S. tax base from profit shifting by multinational corporations by closing the offshore tax loopholes and the check-the-box regulations that have long enabled offshore tax dodging.

Promulgate new regulations closing transfer-pricing loopholes, prevent earnings stripping, reform the abuse of foreign tax credits, and protect and expand the U.S. source taxation base.
Raise billions by closing the carried interest loophole that lets Wall Street executives managing other peoples’ money disguise part of their salary as investment returns to cut their taxes.
● Reduce anticompetitive behavior in healthcare by directing the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to use authority under Section 1861 (e) of the Social Security Act to add a condition of Medicare participation for hospitals to prohibit the use of anticompetitive contract terms, such as anti-tiering and anti-steering clauses that restrict insurance plans from incentivizing patients to use other providers and facilities.
The HHS should also ban all-or-nothing clauses that require insurers to contract with all providers in a hospital system.
● Fight consumer cost increases for working families and protect workers by developing an inter-agency task force to investigate, prosecute, and deter white-collar crime, including: anti-competitive and price-gouging business behaviors, as well as firms’ exploitation of heightened inflation to pad profits, tax fraud and evasion by corporations and wealthy individuals, employer workplace-safety violations, wage theft, anti-union retaliation, and other violations of labor law.
Raise Wages and Empower Workers ● Combat employers underpaying their workers and mislabeling rank-and-file workers as managers to deprive them of the wages they deserve, by ensuring that the DOL’s strengthened overtime protections cover millions more workers.

Update the eligible salary threshold in line with the historical high point of the 55th percentile of earnings of full-time, salaried workers nationwide – amounting to $80,000 annually.
Provide one- and-a-half times the regular pay for any hours worked in excess of 40 hours per 4 workweek and implement automatic updates to prevent the erosion of the salary threshold over time.

● Use all of DOL’s available enforcement tools to hold employers accountable for violations of labor laws, including violations related to wage and hour, health and safety, and the use of goods produced in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act’s minimum wage, overtime, and child labor provisions.
● Require all federal contractors to remain neutral in union organizing campaigns; narrow the gap between CEO and worker pay; have no violations of labor union rights on record; divulge company and individual contributions to candidates, parties or third-party political groups in the past two years; have no penalties paid or claims settled for violations of EPA regulation in the preceding five years.
● Explore and pursue the FRA’s authority to promote safety in all areas of railroad operations under the Federal Railroad Safety Act to establish paid sick leave for rail workers.

● Direct the DOL to strengthen the unemployment insurance system by ensuring that clawbacks in the unemployment system only apply to intentionally fraudulent claims and do not siphon off worker’s wages or benefits to cover overpayments.
● Build on the progress of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)’s rulemaking to protect workers from heat injury to create a federal wind safety standard to require employers to protect workers from injuries, including setting maximum wind speeds during which scissor lifts, window-washing harnesses, and other equipment may be safely used at workplaces.
● Restore the Obama Administration’s Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces Executive Order to require prospective federal contractors to disclose labor law violations and give agencies guidance on how to consider labor violations when awarding federal contracts.
● Create a central repository of evidence from labor law investigations and enforcement relevant to violations of wage-and-hour law, workplace health and safety law, discrimination law, and antitrust law, including unlawful monopolization, wage-fixing and information sharing, mobility restraints, market allocation agreements, or other vertical agreements.

● Direct the SEC to promulgate rules that require companies to disclose when they have settled workplace harassment claims.
● Create a confidential domestic worker hotline to ensure that low wage and immigrant workers feel protected in reporting workplace abuse and exploitation.
● Direct the labor agencies – DOL, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB,) and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission – to establish, and share with other agencies, labor market bargaining power indicators in the form of union membership rates, labor market concentration, strike activity rates, organizing drives, antitrust and labor law violations, including employer refusals to recognize nascent unions or collectively bargain.
● Issue a presidential proclamation recognizing care workers that includes specific guidance to federal agencies that will better address the needs of the care economy and identify gaps in America’s care sector following a summit of care workers.
The summit would bring together a wide array of organizations, policymakers, and experts to provide recommendations to address the needs of parents, children, aging Americans, those 5 living with complex medical needs, and individuals with disabilities; strengthen pay and benefits for care workers.
● Direct the Department of Education and HHS to issue new guidance on ways to ensure home- and family-based childcare providers qualify for federal support programs, including Child Care and Development Fund subsidies for their own families and other financial supports from the Small Business Administration (SBA) and other agencies.

● Reestablish the National Equal Pay Enforcement Task Force to improve compliance, public education, and enforcement of equal pay laws.
The Task Force panel should consist of representatives from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Department of Justice (DOJ), the DOL, and the Office of Personnel Management.

● Promote the protection and robust enforcement of labor, employment and civil rights by ensuring that all workers, regardless of immigration status, can exercise their rights, by providing immigration protections and access to work authorizations to safeguard against retaliation.
● Grow strong child care unions by encouraging widespread adoption of strong labor standards and bedrock funding, creating opportunities for worker engagement and voice, and using rulemaking to stabilize the workforce and create a path to unionization for child care workers.
● Robust implementation of the Medicaid Equal Access Rule to reflect the important role of the workforce in ensuring access to health services, including establishing a public process to ensure that payment levels for home care providers are adequate, and that rate increases are passed on to workers in the form of higher wages.
● Provide generous sick leave, overtime, vacation, and other benefits by strengthening Service Contract Act regulations and guidance, addressing misclassification of low-wage workers and use existing authority to ensure that bidders prioritize retention and quality staffing.
● Ensure that all grants for infrastructure projects, to the extent allowed by law, require the use of a trained, certified workforce and apply labor standards— particularly on projects aimed at deployment of electric-vehicle charging stations.
● Build on existing memoranda of understanding between the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division and the NLRB that coordinate efforts to enforce labor and wage standards by creating new memorandum of understanding between other executive branch organizations like the Department of Defense.

● Raise wages and improve labor safeguards and protections so that employers can no longer use the H-2A and H-2B visa program to underpay and exploit migrant workers and U.S. workers.
Increase wage requirements in the H-1B visa program so they reflect true market rates and allocate H-1B visas by prioritizing employers seeking highly skilled workers and paying fair wages.

Ensure wage requirements in the H-1B visa program reflect true market rates and allocate H-1B visas by prioritizing employers seeking highly skilled workers and paying fair wages.
Lower Costs of Essential Expenses ● Ensure widespread and equitable access to taxpayer-funded pharmaceuticals and medical technology through increased transparency, competition, and funding federal clinical trials for patent-free or government-owned pharmaceutical innovations to bring 6 open-source generics to market.
Use existing legal authorities to dramatically lower costs of essential drugs like insulin, naloxone, hepatitis C drugs, HIV/AIDS drugs, Xtandi, EpiPens, and inhalers, and establish a definition of “reasonable terms” under the Bayh- Dole Act march-in rights provision that includes price as a metric of whether an invention is made available on reasonable terms.
Establish new rules on pharmaceuticals and medical devices that require transparency on price, discounts, costs of development, sources of R&D funding, marketing and advertising expenses, and executive compensation.

Establish a competitive, pre-grant opposition system for patents similar to legal challenges permitted for trademarks.

Modify the “inventiveness” standard for patents so that non-inventive and common evergreening practices are prohibited.
And direct funding for clinical trials of inexpensive, patent-free innovations like the Corbevax vaccine and booster to foster competition against patent monopolies.

Make medications cheaper by allowing the personal importation of drugs.

Develop public manufacturing capacity to ensure availability of critical medicines, such as insulin.

● Expand patient access, benefits, and cost saving in Medicare Advantage (MA) plans.
Require MA to cover services from any medical provider that accepts Medicare's approved rate.

Return to the Obama Administration policy of prohibiting plans from forcing seniors on MA to try multiple cheaper medications before receiving the correct treatment.

Reduce Medicare Advantage overpayments by updating the MA risk scoring system to prevent unscrupulous profiteering by private insurance companies.
Protect vulnerable seniors’ health care from being cut by issuing guidance prohibiting the use of algorithms in Medicare Advantage coverage, provider payments, and coding decisions.

And protect seniors’ ability to manage their own care in traditional Medicare by quickly transitioning away from the ACO REACH pilot program, which allows third-party middlemen to manage care without seniors’ full understanding or prior consent.
● Protect renters from price gouging and excessive rent increases, discrimination, unfair evictions through a variety of rulemaking and enforcement action at federal agencies.

This includes: New FTC regulations defining excessive rent increases as unfairly affecting commerce and enforcing action against unfair rent gouging practices.
Renter protections at the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) for individuals residing in multi-unit properties financed with government-backed mortgages, including anti-price gouging protections, just-cause eviction standards, habitability standards, and protections against source-of-income discrimination.

Encourage Departments of Transportation and Commerce to use all available tools to condition funding on jurisdictions reforming land use and zoning to encourage more affordable housing development.
Support Public Housing Authorities to use all flexibilities available to provide assistance to address costs other than rent, such as security deposits and moving expenses.

Use Housing and Urban Development (HUD)’s rule for Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing to issue guidance to entitlement jurisdictions to mitigate cost burdens and adopt anti-rent-gouging measures.
Encourage the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in conjunction with the DOJ and HUD, to investigate instances of corporate landlords discriminating against tenants unlawfully, including through unfair tenant screening, source of income discrimination, or debt collecting practices.

Activate Federal Emergency Management Agency resources to help move people experiencing homelessness into permanent, affordable homes and provide longer-term rental assistance to help keep renters stably 7 housed.
● Add infertility treatments, gender-affirming care, and off-label prescription drugs prescribed by a healthcare professional to the list of essential health benefits that all health insurance plans are required to cover.

● Ensure veterans’ access to home care, including by allowing veterans to use consumer- directed models to access crucial in-home care while providing direct-care workers serving veterans with support and pay to guarantee recruitment and retention of an adequate workforce.
● Ensure rapid, low-cost globally available solutions for the COVID-19 pandemic and future pandemics.

Negotiate licensing agreements that require manufacturers to share production methods and invoke legal authorities to ensure broad technology transfer so that new manufacturing plants can be built around the world.

Expand public manufacturing capacity for vaccines and therapeutics and other critical drugs.
Publicly release all Operation Warp Speed contracts with manufacturers in an unredacted form to provide greater transparency into pricing, intellectual property, delivery and distribution, and donation terms of agreement.

Redouble multilateral efforts to secure a global emergency waiver for monopoly rights on COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics.

Require manufacturers to share the vaccine and therapeutic recipes and manufacturing processes, and build new manufacturing plants.
Negotiate a Trade- Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) waiver for treatments and tests for all future pandemics.

Put government-owned intellectual property related to the Walter Reed pan-coronavirus vaccine candidate in the public domain, and actively share technology with the World Health Organization’s technology access pool and owned, contractor-operated facilities by building government-manufacturers throughout the world.
Climate Action and Environmental Justice ● Issue strong and rapidly promulgated EPA rulemaking to 1) control carbon pollution from new, modified and existing fossil fuel-fired power plants, 2) regulate criteria and hazardous air pollutants under the Clean Air Act, including mercury, air toxics, soot, smog, water pollution, haze, coal ash, power-plant loopholes, methane, and 3) limit water contamination under the Clean Water Act and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.
This should be done quickly to ensure adequate time to build robust guidance and implementation, and avoid the possibility of future Republican-led reversal attempts, and consider the cumulative impacts of air pollution where possible.
● Implement more aggressive FERC rulemaking to accelerate clean transmission and better implement the goals of the IRA, including on transmission planning and cost- allocation, interconnection, minimum transfer rules, resource adequacy, supporting community solar and distributed energy projects in wholesale energy markets, grid- enhancing technologies, and rules that require transmission regions to plan for a minimum set of benefits and interregional transmission planning that allocates costs more comprehensively.
FERC should also continue to prioritize public participation and equity, including through its Office of Public Participation.
● Implement the IRA effectively and transparently by promulgating timely federal guidance on the IRA’s tax credits and grant programs and the distribution of funds in a 8 way that maximizes carbon reductions and equitable economic opportunity; encouraging the FTC, FERC, and state governments to prevent utilities from obstructing renewable and distributed energy deployment and interconnection; direct the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to properly implement the two key IRA provisions that provide funding to these agencies for the oversight, monitoring, evaluation, and accountability of IRA investments that move us towards a more equitable and sustainable model for public investment; supporting robust outreach from agencies to underrepresented populations including people of color, low-income applicants and consultation with tribal groups who are seeking to access funds.
● Ensure at least 40 percent of the overall benefits from federal investments in climate and clean energy go to disadvantaged communities by establishing Justice 40 implementation guidelines for all agencies, including definitions and metrics; mandatory data collection, mapping, and monitoring of distribution of funds to disadvantaged communities; and oversight of the social, economic, and environmental impacts of funds.
Ensure that environmental justice communities receive the technical support needed to secure access to federal funds.

Publish a robust and transparent scorecard to track Justice40 and ensure accountability, and continue working to refine the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool for use in federal decision-making.
● Mandate that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the HUD prioritize mitigation and disaster relief funding for renewable energy systems over status quo fossil fuel systems.

● Declare a ban on new fossil fuel leases on federal lands and waters and in environmental justice communities.

● Save taxpayers billions of dollars by ending both domestic and international federal fossil fuel subsidies.
● Ensure the federal government leverages its vast purchasing power to accelerate homegrown clean energy technologies that cut costs for American families by developing strong rules for implementing the Executive Order on Catalyzing Clean Energy Industries and Jobs Through Federal Sustainability.

Regulations should include equity, labor, and environmental standards.
● Declare a National Climate Emergency and invoke authorities under the Defense Production Act and Trade Expansion Act, mobilizing domestic industry to manufacture affordable renewable energy technologies with good paying union jobs for domestic use and international export; reinstate the crude oil export ban; and build reliable, distributed renewable energy systems in frontline communities most affected by the dirty and unjust energy complex.
● Issue a strengthened and more robust executive order on addressing environmental justice that will hold agencies accountable for reducing disproportionate environmental impacts on frontline communities.
● Direct the State Department, U.S. Export-Import Bank, the U.S. Development Finance Corporation, and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to meet the United States’ Glasgow statement commitments and phase out all U.S. government financing for fossil fuel projects and related infrastructure overseas and finance only clean energy infrastructure and climate mitigation and adaptation measures.
9 Advancing Equity and Justice ● Build on the progress set by the Commerce Department to include the provision of childcare in all future Notice of Funding Opportunities across all federal agencies wherever practicable.
● Ensure fairness in the immigration court system by removing nonpriority cases from the 2.1 million case backlog, expanding government-funded legal counsel for adults and children, and ending the use of expedited dockets that compromise due process such as immigration adjudication centers that operate without oversight.

Streamline and scale up overseas processing of refugee resettlement applications to meet the global displacement crisis.
Provide a meaningful opportunity for people who have been wrongfully or unjustly deported to seek to come back to the United States.

End the categorical Title 42 expulsions, which deny legal rights to asylum seekers, and rescind the proposed rule entitled “Circumvention of Lawful Pathways” to ensure that migrants arriving at the southern border are provided unrestricted access to asylum consistent with U.S. law.
● Instruct the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs to mandate the disaggregation of affirmative action goals in federal contractor hiring in order to create a more robust and comprehensive accounting of diversity in the workforce.

● Pursue an aggressive federal effort through various agencies to protect reproductive health.
This includes declaring a public health emergency for reproductive health care access using the authority of the PREP Act, which will enable the administration to redirect federal funds towards out-of-state travel for abortions and grant civil immunity to licensed abortion providers practicing in states where they do not hold a license.
Enforce the women’s health preventive services benefit under the Affordable Care Act to ensure affordable access to birth control methods and enforce “free choice of provider” requirements for Medicaid recipients to protect the right of access to care.

Ensure veterans, service members, beneficiaries, and other federal employees can access abortion care.

Use all existing authorities, such as enforcement discretion, to ensure mifepristone remains available nationwide.
Allow licensed health providers to practice interstate telehealth for the prescription of medication abortion.

Ensure readiness of providers and pharmacies to dispense medication abortion after FDA removal of restrictions is finalized.

Ensure no one is denied contraception or other medications that are inaccurately portrayed as abortion-inducing.
Aid individuals accessing abortion care across state lines by providing funds to pay for transportation, lodging, child care, and other costs associated with travel, and issue guidance detailing Americans’ right to travel under the interstate commerce clause.

Explore the use of federal property and resources to expand abortion access while ensuring the safety of patients and providers.
Assert the supremacy of federal law where states try to restrict ability to travel for reproductive care, access to medication abortion, and to criminalize pregnancy related complications such as miscarriage.

Ensure undocumented individuals seeking abortions and other crucial medical care, and those who assist them, can receive those medical services without fear of detention or deportation.

Ensure those held in federal custody can access abortion care.
All federal agencies, including the DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security, should expand and enforce existing protections to safeguard the right to 10 abortion for those who elect to receive these services while being held in federal care or custody.
Rescind executive orders which restrict reproductive healthcare access, including Executive Order 13535, “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s Consistency with Longstanding Restrictions on the Use of Federal Funds for Abortion;” and Executive Order 13798, “Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty,” which set the stage for the creation of the discriminatory HHS Conscience and Religious Freedom Division.
Require the provision of abortion care as a condition of participation for hospitals in Medicare.

● Promulgate a slate of reforms oriented toward formerly and currently incarcerated individuals to guarantee needed healthcare, reporting of deaths in custody, and curtailment of the use of death penalty.

Eliminate the copay Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) inmates must pay when visiting a BOP-provided health care provider, just as the BOP has similarly waived halfway house and home confinement fees.
Fully implement the Death in Custody Reporting Act.

Rescind the federal execution protocol and internal DOJ guidelines on litigating death row cases, establishing clear guidelines prohibiting federal prosecutors from seeking the death penalty, and withdrawing authorization for all pending death penalty trial cases.
Direct the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to issue guidance to State Medicaid Directors on how states can pursue waivers to provide coverage to Medicaid-eligible individuals in the critical period prior to release from a public institution, and address pending state Medicaid waivers focused on providing coverage as part of the reentry process.
● Build on the success of alleviating prison overcrowding and mass incarceration made by the pandemic home confinement program, by ensuring that the Bureau of Prisons effectively implements the Attorney General’s strong Office of Legal Counsel memo, including by granting clemency to those who have complied with the terms of home confinement regardless of the length of their sentences.
The administration should also create an independent, permanent clemency board to review more than 18,000 pending clemency petitions.

● Direct HHS and the DOJ to expedite the review of marijuana as a Schedule I controlled substance and publicly document the progress and planned timeline for rescheduling or de-scheduling, and expedite DOJ guidance reinstating protections against federal prosecution and interference in state- and tribal-legal cannabis programs.
● Establish a Commission on Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation and a Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans to lead comprehensive national processes to address the historic and contemporary effects of racism in American communities and institutions and bring about transformational and sustainable change.

● Eliminate all eligibility barriers to health services under the Affordable Care Act for DACA recipients.
● Reduce the 100-mile border zone that curtails due-process and privacy rights, by reinterpreting the “reasonable distance” from external boundaries and providing border enforcement with strong guidance to respect civil liberties and protections against arbitrary stops and seizures.

● Provide immediate relief for those coming from countries in crisis by designating or re- designating Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for people already present in the United 11 States.
Newly designate or redesignate TPS-eligible countries to the fullest extent possible under current statute, which dictates that countries are eligible for TPS conditions if the country is experiencing an ongoing armed conflict, an environmental disaster, or an epidemic – along with other extraordinary and temporary conditions.
● Stop the expansion of private prisons to detain immigrants, terminate or decline renewal of all current private prison contracts, and close facilities with bad human rights records or substandard conditions.

Support community-based alternatives to detention, including community-based case management.
Specifically, transition ICE’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP) to alternatives to detention that are operated outside of ICE by non-profit community-based organizations with expertise serving immigrant communities.
● Direct the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to make available firearm trace data for use by cities, states, researchers, litigants and members of the public, as well as obligate gun dealers to submit their inventories to law enforcement and for the FBI to retain gun purchase records.

Update the firearm sporting purposes test and issue strengthened rulemaking on ghost guns to combat gun violence.
Conduct a comprehensive review of semi-automatic assault rifles under the sporting purposes test and issue new criteria.

Close loopholes in ghost gun enforcement, which allow for the proliferation of hammer-fired 1911-style pistols and AR-style rifle receivers.

Direct the HHS Secretary, in partnership with the Surgeon General, to develop a report in 180 days that would provide evidence-based approaches to respond to gun violence as a public health emergency through a whole-of-government effort.
Build on the current strategy to combat gun violence by establishing an Office of Gun Violence Prevention and Victims’ Resources to streamline, coordinate, and implement relevant executive orders across federal agencies.

Create an associated Advisory Council that identifies, promotes, coordinates, and disseminates to the public information resources, and best practices to help victims of gun violence.
● Direct the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's Ending the HIV Epidemic (EHE) Plan to require EHE jurisdictions to include clear commitments to support state efforts to reform or repeal HIV criminalization laws as a condition for funding, and develop consistent national standards at the HHS on HIV data security, sharing, and storage that explicitly prohibit sharing HIV genomic sequence data with law enforcement, immigration enforcement, employers, and other relevant entities and which limit the use for further criminalization and the amount of time HIV data can be stored.
● Require agencies to issue annual reports on how they've reduced administrative burdens and eased program enrollment processes, including through measures such as: streamlining applications, reducing onerous paperwork for social programs, removing asset tests and limits, cutting work requirements, and reducing the frequency and difficulty of recertification requirements.
● Combat racial profiling while fostering greater public safety and community trust by ending all–and not entering into any new–287(g) agreements, which deputize state and local law enforcement officers to perform certain functions of federal immigration agents, including both Warrant Service Officer and Jail Enforcement Model agreements.
● Collect and implement best practices and innovations at the state and local levels of prosecutorial discretion to reduce over-criminalization, such as ending cash bail and 12 declining to prosecute smaller crimes to advance racial and economic justice.
● Establish a new Division of Safety within the HHS to advance non-carceral responses to safety, including overseeing research, providing technical assistance for jurisdictions, funding grant programs on initiatives like violence interruption, mentorship, assistance for survivors and vulnerable youth; and coordinating among other federal agencies around non-carceral community safety approaches.
● Support a new issuance of International Monetary Fund global emergency reserves called Special Drawing Rights, at no cost to U.S. taxpayers, so that developing countries can purchase vaccines, treatments, protect public health budgets, and spur global demand for U.S. exports.

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