“Attorneys serving the public interest are saddled not only with the constant stress of a demanding and under-appreciated profession, but also with the anxiety of whether they’ll be able to afford rising rent prices, inflation-impacted groceries, and hefty student loan payments each month.”

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The first six weeks of the new federal administration have sparked widespread uncertainty, to say the least. The communities served by The Legal Aid Society and similar organizations fear what lies ahead, and rely on us for support.

Amid this unease, public defenders and civil legal service providers have been working tirelessly to provide not only legal representation but also education and resources to help vulnerable people—largely from low-income neighborhoods of color—navigate an ever-changing landscape.

These legal services, which keep people housed, reunite families, and help protect the rights of New Yorkers, are now more critical than ever. 

In addition to being woefully underpaid and under-resourced, the attorneys who provide these vital services are facing another debilitating crisis: crippling student loan debt and a stagnated loan assistance program that has failed to keep up with inflation and New York City’s skyrocketing cost of living. 

Despite recent data showing that the average law student graduates with a whopping $130,000 in student loan debt, under the current program, public interest attorneys in New York can only receive up to $20,400 in total loan assistance—or $3,400 annually—over a six-year period.  

To make matters worse, recent threats to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education could further jeopardize federal loan assistance for these attorneys. 

In the face of this looming crisis—which has the potential to impact attrition rates at legal service organizations for years to come—it is incumbent upon our leaders in Albany to take immediate action to ensure that public interest attorneys across the state receive increased student loan assistance that aligns with the current economic reality. 

Fortunately, a legislative solution already exists: a bill to strengthen the New York District Attorney and Indigent Legal Services Attorney Loan Forgiveness (DALF) program enjoys strong support from district attorneys, public defenders, unions, and members of the State Legislature. 

The legislation, sponsored by State Sen. Jessica Ramos and Assemblymember Jo Anne Simon, would increase student loan aid for public interest lawyers to $8,000 annually, for up to eight years, or total award eligibility of up to $64,000 in total. 

Current loan assistance amounts place public interest attorneys far behind other vital workers, such as registered nurses on teaching faculties and social workers, who also perform essential work but, on average, carry less debt than public interest lawyers. 

This modest funding increase, which amounts to mere pennies compared to the state’s proposed $252 billion budget, will help nonprofit public interest organizations retain the lawyers whose critical work benefits millions of New Yorkers. 

Attorneys serving the public interest are saddled not only with the constant stress of a demanding and under-appreciated profession, but also with the anxiety of whether they’ll be able to afford rising rent prices, inflation-impacted groceries, and hefty student loan payments each month. 

This constant stress forces an impossible choice: remain in the public sector, making a tangible and valuable difference in the lives of vulnerable individuals, or leave for a higher-paying job. 

Attorneys who choose to leave contribute to high attrition rates at both legal service organizations and district attorney’s offices, resulting in increased workloads for the remaining attorneys and additional court backlogs that negatively impact the people we serve.   

And while the resulting case delays and staffing shortages ultimately harm low-income and marginalized New Yorkers the most, a 2024 study by the American Bar Association Young Lawyers Division found that high student debt severely affects the emotional well-being of young lawyers as well.  

For those with more than $200,000 in student debt, 76 percent reported that the burden made them feel stressed or anxious, and 52 percent reported that it made them feel depressed or hopeless. This environment is not conducive to the kind of dedicated, zealous representation New Yorkers need and deserve.  

It doesn’t have to be this way. While Gov. Kathy Hochul left funding for this program out of her Fiscal Year 2026 Executive Budget, there is still time to right this wrong and increase funding for DALF this session. 

During Hochul’s January State of the State address, she emphasized the importance of increasing affordability, as well as getting and keeping more New Yorkers safely and stably housed.  

The individuals on the front lines—the ones actually delivering on the services that will make these goals possible—are public interest attorneys.  

In 2025—with so much on the line for low-income New Yorkers—Gov. Hochul and the New York State Legislature must prioritize funding for the DALF legislation and ensure its inclusion in the budget.  

Twyla Carter is the attorney-in-chief and chief executive officer at The Legal Aid Society. Lisa Ohta is president of the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys (UAW Local 2325) 

The post Opinion: Crippling Student Loan Debt Threatens the Work of New York’s Public Service Lawyers appeared first on City Limits.

By JACK BROOK, Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets of New Orleans to celebrate Mardi Gras with parades and partying, leaving behind an avalanche of waste.

At dawn Wednesday, a motley waste management crew embarked on the unenviable mission of cleaning up tens of thousands of pounds of detritus spread across the city’s historic French Quarter.

Waste from Mardi Gras awaiting collection in the French Quarter of New Orleans, on Ash Wednesday, March 5, 2025. (AP Photo/Jack Brook)

Riding through a sea of waste

Leander Nunez, 54, steered a massive truck onto Bourbon Street just after 5 a.m., spraying water onto the piles of waste so they could be more easily swept up. He’s a supervisor for IV Waste, the company contracted by the city to help clean up many of its most popular streets over the 58-day Carnival season.

Beaded necklaces, tossed from balconies and floats, crunched beneath wheels as the truck passed daiquiri bars, strip clubs and fried chicken joints.

Piles of Mardi Gras detritus accumulated from Mardi Gras celebrations lies in the French Quarter in New Orleans, on Ash Wednesday, March 5, 2025. (AP Photo/Jack Brook)

Waves of trash that included cans, wrappers and neon green plastic cups for “hand grenade” drinks rippled out from the front of the truck as if before the bow of an ocean liner.

With the sun rising, people stumbled out of bars and saluted the trash collectors. A drunken couple shrieked and leaped onto sidewalks to escape from the cascade of waste as Nunez muttered about Bourbon Street’s “typical foolishness.”

From the perspective of the grizzled veteran Nunez, the cleanup was a lighter lift than in previous years, likely due to the chilling effect of a Jan. 1 truck attack on Bourbon Street and storms that cut short Tuesday’s parades.

“Only thing I can judge it by down here is by the trash,” Nunez said. “There was people down here for Mardi Gras, but I don’t think the trash is the way it used to be.”

Leander Nunez, 54, navigates a truck down Bourbon Street in New Orleans on Ash Wednesday, March 5, 2025, as part of post-Mardi Gras clean up efforts beginning before dawn. (AP Photo/Jack Brook)

IV Waste has the logistics down to a science to get the French Quarter fully cleaned up by around 10 a.m. each day, said owner and president Sidney Torres.

After wetting down the trash, teams wielding pressure washers spray garbage off the sidewalks. Tractors bearing bristles and nicknamed “toothbrushes” scrub the asphalt, targeting beads. Bulldozers plow into the piles and dump them into trucks capable of bearing 40,000 pounds of waste at a time. Small teams on foot armed with brooms sweep anything left over into dust bins.

A trash collecting machine operated by IV Waste, the company tasked with cleaning up with the French Quarter in New Orleans, Wednesday, March 5, 2025, gathers detritus the day after Fat Tuesday. (AP Photo/Jack Brook)

Then comes the final touch: a citrus spray Torres calls “lemon fresh.”

“It’s not just fragrance like putting perfume on a pig. It has enzymes in it that kill the bacteria,” Torres said. “You can have a clean street, but if you smell the puke and the stale beer and liquor that’s washed out onto the streets, it’s a foul odor and people remember that.”

A water truck spraying lemon fragrance washes down Bourbon Street in New Orleans, the day after Mardi Gras, Wednesday, March 5, 2025. (AP Photo/Jack Brook)

Sustainability efforts on the rise

Over the past three years, a collection of organizations has stepped up efforts to improve the sustainability of Mardi Gras and cut down on the more than 2 million tons of waste generated during the heart of the city’s Carnival season.

“It’s almost an unfathomable number and feels like an uphill battle,” said Franziska Trautmann, cofounder of the glass recycling company Glass Half Full. “But the team is noticing a difference.”

Detritus from Mardi Gras Day in New Orleans, lies scattered in the French Quarter on Ash Wednesday, March 5, 2025. (AP Photo/Jack Brook)

Partnering with the city and other groups, Glass Half Full collected more than 33,000 pounds of glass from nearly two dozen bars as part of a “Bar Wars” contest and at recycling stations along parade routes, Trautmann said.

Anna Nguyen, a spokesperson for the city’s Office of Resilience & Sustainability, said the city is working with community groups to engage and incentivize recycling, with groups offering rewards for anyone who turns in bags of beads, cans or bottles and an artist building a mosaic from them.

A pile of trash awaiting clean up in the French Quarter in New Orleans, Wednesday, March 5, 2025, the day after Mardi Gras. (AP Photo/Jack Brook)

This year, the city had earmarked $50,000 to support Mardi Gras recycling for the first time and has increased that budget by fivefold for next year’s season, Nguyen said. Convention planners and groups looking for cities to host events are increasingly prioritizing sustainability, she added.

But it’s also part of a cultural shift toward greater sustainability among social clubs and parade-goers during Mardi Gras, according to Kevin Ferguson, vice president of external affairs for New Orleans & Company, a nonprofit dedicated to boosting the city’s tourism: “What we’re building is more of a movement than an individual project.”

A positive sign, he says, is that “throws” — the trinkets that float riders toss to spectators — are evolving to feature more items that people want and are likely to keep.

“That’s just not happening with beads anymore. No one’s picking that up off the ground,” Ferguson said. “I think you’re seeing riders are buying less of that and more of other things.”

Associated Press reporter Stephen Smith contributed to this report.

By LAURAN NEERGAARD

WASHINGTON (AP) — A health economist who once famously clashed with officials at the National Institutes of Health and now is the nominee to lead the agency faced questions from senators from both parties Wednesday about drastic funding cuts and research priorities.

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Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University professor, was an outspoken critic of the government’s COVID-19 shutdowns and vaccine policies. Now he’s poised to become director of the NIH, long called the government’s crown jewel, as it faces mass firings and drastic funding cutbacks.

“I love the NIH but post-pandemic, America’s biomedical sciences are at a crossroads,” Bhattacharya told senators.

He laid out priorities including a bigger focus on chronic diseases, including diabetes and obesity. But he also said the agency needs to be more open to scientific dissent, saying influential NIH leaders early in the pandemic shut down his own criticisms about responses to COVID-19.

While Republicans warmly welcomed Bhattacharya, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who chairs the Senate health committee, pressed him about vaccine skepticism that is fueling a large measles outbreak that already killed a child in Texas.

Cassidy strenuously urged Bhattacharya not to waste NIH dollars reexamining whether there’s a link between standard childhood vaccines and autism. There’s no link — something that’s already been proven in multiple studies involving thousands of children, the senator stressed.

Bhattacharya called the measles death a tragedy and said he “fully supported” children being vaccinated but added that additional research might convince skeptical parents.

“People still think Elvis is alive,” a frustrated Cassidy responded. He told Bhattacharya any attempt to revisit the debunked issue would deprive funds to study autism’s real cause.

Some Senators, including Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, and Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat from Wisconsin, expressed deep frustration that turmoil at the nation’s largest funder of medical research — mass firings and funding cuts and freezes — threatens the development of cures and new treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and host of other disorders. They pushed Bhattacharya about how he’d reverse those losses, including one set of funding cuts — currently paused by a federal judge — that they said is forbidden by a congressional spending law.

Bhattacharya said he’d had no part in those cuts and if confirmed as NIH’s director, he’d look carefully at the concerns to make sure researchers “have the resources they need.” He also said some of the Trump administration’s cuts are a signal of distrust of science.

Until recently, the $48 billion NIH had strong bipartisan support. NIH scientists conduct cutting-edge research at its 27 institutes specializing in diseases including cancer, chronic illnesses such as heart, lung and kidney disease, aging and Alzheimer’s. Most of the agency’s budget is dispersed to universities, hospitals and other research groups through highly competitive grants to conduct everything from basic research to clinical trials.

NIH-funded research has played a part in the development of most treatments approved in the U.S. in recent years.

Bhattacharya gained public attention as one of three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, an October 2020 open letter maintaining that pandemic shutdowns were causing irreparable harm and argued that people at low risk of COVID-19 should live normally while building up immunity through infection.

At the time — before vaccinations had begun – that view was embraced by some in the first Trump administration but was widely denounced by infectious disease experts. Then- NIH director Dr. Francis Collins called it dangerous and “not mainstream science.”

Bhattacharya became a plaintiff in a Supreme Court case, Murthy v. Missouri, arguing he was “unfairly censored” on social media as part of government efforts to combat misinformation. While the case gained national attention, it was ultimately unsuccessful in a 6-3 ruling.

Bhattacharya, who will face a vote of the full Senate at a later date, holds a medical degree but is not a practicing physician. His own research on the economics of health care has been funded by the NIH.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

By MIKE STOBBE

NEW YORK (AP) — The nation’s top public health agency is inviting about 180 employees back to work, about two weeks after laying them off.

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Emails went out Tuesday to some Centers for Disease Control and Prevention probationary employees who got termination notices last month, according to current and former CDC employees.

A message seen by the AP was sent with the subject line, “Read this e-mail immediately.” It said that “after further review and consideration,” a Feb. 15 termination notice has been rescinded and the employee was cleared to return to work on Wednesday. “You should return to duty under your previous work schedule. We apologize for any disruption that this may have caused,” it said.

About 180 people received reinstatement emails, according to two federal health officials who were briefed on the tally but were not authorized to discuss it and spoke on condition of anonymity.

It’s not clear how many of them returned to work Wednesday. And it’s also unclear whether the employees would be spared from further widespread job cuts that are expected soon across government agencies.

The CDC is the latest federal agency trying to coax back workers soon after they were dismissed as part of President Donald Trump’s and billionaire Elon Musk’s cost-cutting purge. Similar reversals have been made among employees responsible for medical device oversight, food safety, bird flu response, nuclear weapons and national parks.

The Atlanta-based CDC is charged with protecting Americans from outbreaks and other public health threats. Before the job cuts, the agency had about 13,000 employees.

FILE – A sign marks the entrance to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, on Oct. 8, 2013. (AP Photo/David Goldman, File)

Last month, Trump administration officials told the CDC that nearly 1,300 of the agency’s probationary employees would be let go. That tally quickly changed, as the number who actually got termination notices turned out to be 700 to 750.

With 180 more people now being told they can return, the actual number of CDC employees terminated so far would seem to stand somewhere around 550. But federal health officials haven’t confirmed any specifics.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last month pledged “ radical transparency ” at the department, but HHS officials have not provided detail about CDC staff changes and did not respond to emailed requests on Tuesday and Wednesday. An agency spokesman, Andrew Nixon, previously told the AP only that CDC had more full-time employees after the job cuts than it did before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Those who received reinstatement emails included outbreak responders in two fellowship programs — a two-year training that prepares recent graduates to enter the public health workforce through field experience and a laboratory program that brings in doctorate-holding professionals.

U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock celebrated the reinstatements, but said it’s not enough.

“Today’s announcement is a welcome relief, but until all fired CDC employees are restored, our country’s public health and national security will continue to be at risk,” Warnock, a Georgia Democrat, said in a statement Wednesday.

Associated Press writer Michelle R. Smith in Providence, Rhode Island, contributed to this report.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.