During the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt and his allies instituted a sweeping program of reforms to address the crisis. These reforms, known collectively as the New Deal, went beyond economic recovery, to reimagine the role of government in American life.

Today, our political debate is animated by talk of a Green New Deal. Like its namesake, the Green New Deal is a response to a crisis: climate change. It calls for a transformation of the American economy and social contract on a scale not seen since the days of FDR. Its suggested reforms include providing universal healthcare, creating a federal jobs guarantee and securing broader investment public goods. These measures tackle the core socio-economic injustices that underlie climate change.

In recent weeks, talk of a Green New Deal has moved to the center of our political debate. The Green New Deal aims to address climate change by tackling the underlying socioeconomic inequities that gave rise to the crisis. It calls for overhauling the country’s transportation system, providing universal healthcare, creating a federal jobs guarantee, investing in infrastructure, and other goals.

This ambition echoes the scope of the original New Deal, another wide-ranging political program that was born out of crisis. In the 1930s, President Roosevelt and his allies used the shock of the Great Depression to transform the relationship between government and citizen through a series of reforms addressing the injustices at the heart of the economic crisis.

In a 2017 Health Affairs piece, Peter Buerhaus, David Auerbach, and Douglas Staiger discussed an approaching healthcare challenge—the reality that many nurses of the Baby Boomer generation will soon retire, creating a shortage of experience among the remaining RN workforce. The article caused me to reflect on the broader condition of caregivers in the US, particularly that of non-professional caregivers, who face many of the same scenarios that confront professional nurses but must do so without the training and expertise of the experienced RNs who will soon leave the healthcare field. As these caregivers play an ever-greater role in safeguarding the health of our aging population, a note on the physical and mental health of caregivers, and how public health can best support these individuals, and, by extension, the populations they care for.

The U.S. just emerged from the longest government shutdown in its history, and was on the brink of another shutdown that could start again in a week. Much has been written about the human costs of the shutdown, which include the halting of critical government services like food safety inspections.

While the temporary loss of these functions was bad for all of us, the harm of the shutdown was most acutely felt by the roughly 800,000 federal workers who were forced to go for weeks without a paycheck. Many of these workers were already socioeconomically vulnerable—the average federal worker’s salary is 32 percent lower than that of private sector workers.

Additionally, close to one in five federal workers are black, a population with significant economic challenges of its own. Centrally, black Americans are more than twice as likely as their white peers to have a net worth of zero or negative zero. And they have far less wealth, accumulating just seven percent of the wealth enjoyed by white Americans.