2026 New York Working Families Party Federal Questionnaire

The debt ceiling is an arcane law that forces Congress to separately authorize increases in the debt obligations the Treasury issues to pay the government’s bills from the legislation that directs the government to spend the money in the first place. If Congress does not raise the debt ceiling, the Treasury will find itself unable to pay all of the government’s bills, causing a historically unprecedented default, which many believe would result in a financial crisis and economic disaster. Several times in the last two decades, Republicans have taken the debt ceiling hostage as a way to force Democrats to agree to brutal spending cuts, including to Social Security and Medicare.

The American healthcare system still leaves millions of Americans uninsured and millions more underinsured. Working families face staggering out-of-pocket costs, especially through sky-high deductibles. Our system delivers among the worst health outcomes of any rich country and at double the total social cost. A dizzyingly complex system of billing and payments brings stress, anxiety and exasperation to patients who should be focusing on their health, while costing doctors and hospitals a fortune. Hospitals have become corporate behemoths, maximizing profits and executive salaries under the guise of non-profit status. We have a private insurance industry whose business model is built around employing tens of thousands of people to find ways to not pay for their customers’ health care needs.

The promise of a democratic society is visible in few places more than public schools. And yet in the United States today, the grim reality is that public education is a driver of inequality, not a weapon against it. Thanks to an education system funded overwhelmingly by local property taxes, residential segregation by class and race produces educational segregation by class and race, and vice versa. School segregation is greater now than it was 30 years ago. Federal Title I money is insufficient to make up the gap, and state-level equitable funding programs either don’t exist, or go dramatically under-funded.

We support measures to end the school-to-prison-and-deportation pipeline, end school pushout policies that have harmed particularly Black and other children of color, and to achieve police-free schools, including through efforts such as the Counseling not Criminalization in Schools Act, which would provide federal incentives to districts to invest in fair and equitable practices towards young people in schools, school counselors and restorative justice infrastructure, rather than punitive disciplinary policies or school policing.

While wages for average Americans have been stagnant for decades, the cost of health care, housing, and education has gone through the roof. One of the most glaring manifestations of this is growing college unaffordability and $1.6 trillion in student debt, $1.5 trillion of which is backed in some way by the Federal Government. Black and brown borrowers acquire debt at higher rates and earn less coming out of college. For all borrowers, student debt is a millstone around their necks. It leads young people to put off marriage, childbirth, and buying a home. Missed payments hurt their credit, and defaults can destroy their credit for life. Thanks to the 2005 Bankruptcy Law, student debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy and can follow borrowers to their graves. High tuition and student debt exacerbate inequality, as wealthy parents can pay whatever it costs to give their children first-class educations and send them into the world free of debt, while everyone else begins their working life weighed down.

Across the United States, there is a housing crisis, as decades of stagnant wages have lagged behind surging real estate values, in urban, suburban, and rural communities. Generations of racist policy have locked people of color out of opportunities to build family wealth that was afforded to white Americans after 1945, and yet housing has become so unaffordable that all but the wealthiest young Americans, including white Americans, are completely cut out from the prospect of ever owning a home. Those same surging real estate values have massively enriched the wealthy and real estate speculators, who happen to own property in places where jobs are concentrated, exacerbating wealth inequality. Meanwhile we have seen near total disinvestment in the country’s already limited stock of public housing, and housing subsidies are provided only to one fifth of the people who need them, even as the tax code provides gigantic subsidies to homeowners. Houses and apartment buildings are among the major sources of US carbon emissions - and they are also one of the easiest places to reduce emissions. Housing has been one of the public goods most aggressively attacked by Republicans and pro-corporate Democrats. Few domains of American life more urgently require massive public investment.

Beginning with the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, and continuing across many decades, the Federal Government has steadily narrowed the legal basis of workers’ right to organize and collectively bargain. More than 40 years after the corporate class and their political allies launched an all-out war on union power, we have seen the results: stagnant wages coupled with skyrocketing CEO pay; the near-elimination of retirement security; worsening workplace safety; more states adopting “right to work”; and everywhere you look, more and more egregious forms of exploitation.

The WFP believes that a strong labor movement is essential to the economic well-being of working people, and a bedrock of democracy. We support comprehensive and aggressive measures to shift the balance of power from bosses to workers. Right now one of WFP’s top priorities is passing the

Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act. The PRO Act would repeal much of the anti-worker legislation that has been enacted in this country, starting with Taft-Hartley, including the ban on so-called secondary boycotts and the allowance for states to enact Right to Work laws that allow free-riding at unionized employers. PRO would levy strict penalties on employers for violations of workers’ organizing rights, and would ban a number of anti-union practices that employers have perfected in recent decades, especially so-called captive audience meetings. It would protect the right to strike, and impose mandatory first contract arbitration, so that employers can’t undermine successful organizing efforts by dragging out negotiations.

The second Trump administration has established an aggressive mass deportation campaign, carried out through indiscriminate and often violent raids and arrests. These arrests have resulted in family separations and disappearances of community members to inhumane prisons in the US and abroad. As part of this campaign, the Trump administration has deployed National Guard and military units to several American cities, purportedly in response to protests or crime. 

The fact is, this administration has only just begun spending billions of dollars to unleash a violent and hate-filled agenda—money that should be used to build our communities up, not tear them down. In addition to this immediate pain to those whose families are being torn apart, the Trump administration’s immigration agenda directly harms our collective economy, health, and safety.

Without greater outcry by elected officials, businesses, civic leaders, and the public leading to a change in direction, we may be in for much darker days. New York, and elected leaders at all levels of government, must lead the way in welcoming and protecting immigrant families and communities.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health represents the most outrageous assault on women’s rights and bodily autonomy in our lifetimes. The product of an out-of-control Supreme Court installed through flagrantly undemocratic means, it is an outrage that must be undone. While the Court ruled in Dobbs that the Constitution does not provide a right to abortion, nothing about the ruling prevents Congress from enshrining the right to abortion into federal law.

For decades, the federal government has been governed by one simple rule: regardless of which party controls the Presidency or Congress, Wall Street wins. Whether it’s no-strings attached bailouts, massive subsidies, or sweeping deregulation and special tax breaks, Americans know that our government works for a predatory financial industry with the power to tank the entire economy, at the expense of working people.

According to research by the Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman, the top 0.1% of American households - about 185,000 tax filers out of 185 million US households - own 19% of all wealth. The top 1% own 37% of the wealth. Meanwhile the bottom 90 percent of American households together own 26%. In spite of all of this, in 2017 Republicans in Congress passed a tax bill which is one of the most egregious transfers of wealth from working people to the extremely wealthy in history.

The Trump administration, with Congressional acquiescence, increased the Pentagon’s budget by $133 billion even as the Defense Department failed its first two audits, continued to produce faulty weapons systems and programs with cost overruns, and remained one of the world’s largest polluters at a time when climate change presents an existential threat. That Trump-era surge capped nearly two decades of endless war with a price tag of more than $6 trillion that could have been invested in diplomacy, domestic infrastructure, green jobs, health care and more. In absolute terms, the Pentagon’s budget is at historical highs, currently greater than any point during the Cold War, including the heights of the Korean and Vietnam wars. Under the former President and a Democratic Congress, the Defense budget has only continued to soar.

There are numerous proposals on how to rein in the Pentagon budget while increasing national and global security, and we are eager to work with Congress to support these or other long-overdue efforts to scale back Pentagon spending.