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National Archives: Bradford P. Wilson Confirmed by U.S. Senate as 12th Archivist of the U.S.
WASHINGTON, Aug. 22 -- The National Archives and Records Administration issued the following news release on Aug. 21, 2026:
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Bradford P. Wilson Confirmed by U.S. Senate as 12th Archivist of the United States
The United States Senate voted on August 7, 2026, to confirm Bradford P. Wilson as Archivist of the United States. Wilson was nominated by President Donald J.Trump on March 2, 2026, and received strong bipartisan support following his testimony before the Senate Homeland and Government Affairs Committee.
"I am deeply honored to lead the National Archives and Records Administration, ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Aug. 22 -- The National Archives and Records Administration issued the following news release on Aug. 21, 2026: * * * Bradford P. Wilson Confirmed by U.S. Senate as 12th Archivist of the United States The United States Senate voted on August 7, 2026, to confirm Bradford P. Wilson as Archivist of the United States. Wilson was nominated by President Donald J.Trump on March 2, 2026, and received strong bipartisan support following his testimony before the Senate Homeland and Government Affairs Committee. "I am deeply honored to lead the National Archives and Records Administration,and with the support and trust of President Trump and the United States Senate," said Archivist of the United States Bradford Wilson. "I look forward to working with the professional staff at the National Archives to ensure the preservation of and access to our nation's most important records."
Dr. Wilson previously served as the James Wilson Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Civic Thought in the Center for Constitutional Studies at Utah Valley University. In 2024, he retired from his long-time position as Executive Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, Lecturer in Politics, and Fellow of Forbes College at Princeton University. Before joining Princeton University, Wilson spent eight years as Acting President and then Executive Director of the National Association of Scholars. He has served as a presidential appointee on the Board of Trustees of the James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation and was a Senior Research Fellow in the Witherspoon Institute, President of the Association for the Study of Free Institutions, and Fulbright Senior Scholar in Russia. From 1984 to 1987, he served as Research Associate to two Chief Justices of the United States, Warren E. Burger and William H. Rehnquist.
Wilson received his BA from North Carolina State University, his MA from Northern Illinois University, and his PhD in Politics from The Catholic University of America.
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Original text here: https://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/nr26-4
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Bradford P. Wilson Confirmed by U.S. Senate as 12th Archivist of the United States
The United States Senate voted on August 7, 2026, to confirm Bradford P. Wilson as Archivist of the United States. Wilson was nominated by President Donald J.Trump on March 2, 2026, and received strong bipartisan support following his testimony before the Senate Homeland and Government Affairs Committee.
"I am deeply honored to lead the National Archives and Records Administration, ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Aug. 22 -- The National Archives and Records Administration issued the following news release on Aug. 21, 2026: * * * Bradford P. Wilson Confirmed by U.S. Senate as 12th Archivist of the United States The United States Senate voted on August 7, 2026, to confirm Bradford P. Wilson as Archivist of the United States. Wilson was nominated by President Donald J.Trump on March 2, 2026, and received strong bipartisan support following his testimony before the Senate Homeland and Government Affairs Committee. "I am deeply honored to lead the National Archives and Records Administration,and with the support and trust of President Trump and the United States Senate," said Archivist of the United States Bradford Wilson. "I look forward to working with the professional staff at the National Archives to ensure the preservation of and access to our nation's most important records."
Dr. Wilson previously served as the James Wilson Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Civic Thought in the Center for Constitutional Studies at Utah Valley University. In 2024, he retired from his long-time position as Executive Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, Lecturer in Politics, and Fellow of Forbes College at Princeton University. Before joining Princeton University, Wilson spent eight years as Acting President and then Executive Director of the National Association of Scholars. He has served as a presidential appointee on the Board of Trustees of the James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation and was a Senior Research Fellow in the Witherspoon Institute, President of the Association for the Study of Free Institutions, and Fulbright Senior Scholar in Russia. From 1984 to 1987, he served as Research Associate to two Chief Justices of the United States, Warren E. Burger and William H. Rehnquist.
Wilson received his BA from North Carolina State University, his MA from Northern Illinois University, and his PhD in Politics from The Catholic University of America.
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Original text here: https://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/nr26-4
Postal Service Honors Sarah Orne Jewett
WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 -- The U.S. Postal Service posted the following news release:
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Postal Service Honors Sarah Orne Jewett
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SOUTH BERWICK, ME -The U.S. Postal Service honored Sarah Orne Jewett with a stamp today at the Sarah Orne Jewett Literary House in the town she would call home her entire life. The stamp features an original portrait of the author with the Maine coast as background and a ray of sunshine, evoking a scene from her best-known work, "The Country of the Pointed Firs."
"Sarah Orne Jewett is the premier historical icon of South Berwick, and her writings captured 19th-century ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 -- The U.S. Postal Service posted the following news release: * * * Postal Service Honors Sarah Orne Jewett * SOUTH BERWICK, ME -The U.S. Postal Service honored Sarah Orne Jewett with a stamp today at the Sarah Orne Jewett Literary House in the town she would call home her entire life. The stamp features an original portrait of the author with the Maine coast as background and a ray of sunshine, evoking a scene from her best-known work, "The Country of the Pointed Firs." "Sarah Orne Jewett is the premier historical icon of South Berwick, and her writings captured 19th-centuryNew England life. I have personally read her moving work and it is an honor to have her stamp unveiled in our community today," said South Berwick Postmaster Matthew Kirksey. "This stamp proudly ensures her timeless literary legacy continues to resonate across the nation and right here at home."
The stamp is the 35th in the Literary Arts series and honors Jewett (1849-1909) as a foundational figure in American literary regionalism.
Through her fiction and essays, Jewett provided intimate portrayals of her characters and of the New England landscape and culture that shaped them. She sought to highlight the positive spirit of the region, an enduring model of harmony between individualism and communal values.
Jewett began publishing before age 20 and was firmly established as a writer by 1880. Although a 1902 accident ended her writing career, she continued to mentor younger writers, notably Willa Cather. She published hundreds of short stories, poetry, essays and some 18 novels in her lifetime. Her strong female characters have led to a renewed interest in her work.
Sarah Orne Jewett is a nondenominated, 3-ounce rate stamp. The words "THREE OUNCE" indicate its usage value. It is available in panes of 20 at Post Offices and usps.com.
Like a Forever stamp, it will always be valid for the rate printed on it.
Ethel Kessler, an art director for USPS, designed the stamp with art by Mark Summers.
Postal Products
Customers may purchase stamps and other philatelic products through The Postal Store at usps.com/shopstamps, by calling 844-737-7826, by mail through USA Philatelic, or at Post Office locations nationwide. For officially licensed stamp products, shop the USPS Officially Licensed Collection on Amazon. Additional information on stamps, first-day-of-issue ceremonies and stamp-inspired products can be found at stampsforever.com.
The United States Postal Service is an independent federal establishment, mandated to be self-financing and to serve every American community through the affordable, reliable and secure delivery of mail and packages to more than 170 million addresses six and often seven days a week. Overseen by a bipartisan Board of Governors, the Postal Service is currently pursuing a transformation plan aimed at restoring long-term financial sustainability, improving service, and maintaining the organization as one of America's most valued and trusted brands.
The Postal Service generally receives no tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations.
For USPS media resources, including broadcast-quality video and audio and photo stills, visit the USPS Newsroom. Follow us on X, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Threads, and LinkedIn. Subscribe to the USPS YouTube Channel. For more information about the Postal Service, visit usps.com and facts.usps.com.
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Original text here: https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2026/0821-postal-service-honors-sarah-orne-jewett.htm
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Postal Service Honors Sarah Orne Jewett
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SOUTH BERWICK, ME -The U.S. Postal Service honored Sarah Orne Jewett with a stamp today at the Sarah Orne Jewett Literary House in the town she would call home her entire life. The stamp features an original portrait of the author with the Maine coast as background and a ray of sunshine, evoking a scene from her best-known work, "The Country of the Pointed Firs."
"Sarah Orne Jewett is the premier historical icon of South Berwick, and her writings captured 19th-century ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 -- The U.S. Postal Service posted the following news release: * * * Postal Service Honors Sarah Orne Jewett * SOUTH BERWICK, ME -The U.S. Postal Service honored Sarah Orne Jewett with a stamp today at the Sarah Orne Jewett Literary House in the town she would call home her entire life. The stamp features an original portrait of the author with the Maine coast as background and a ray of sunshine, evoking a scene from her best-known work, "The Country of the Pointed Firs." "Sarah Orne Jewett is the premier historical icon of South Berwick, and her writings captured 19th-centuryNew England life. I have personally read her moving work and it is an honor to have her stamp unveiled in our community today," said South Berwick Postmaster Matthew Kirksey. "This stamp proudly ensures her timeless literary legacy continues to resonate across the nation and right here at home."
The stamp is the 35th in the Literary Arts series and honors Jewett (1849-1909) as a foundational figure in American literary regionalism.
Through her fiction and essays, Jewett provided intimate portrayals of her characters and of the New England landscape and culture that shaped them. She sought to highlight the positive spirit of the region, an enduring model of harmony between individualism and communal values.
Jewett began publishing before age 20 and was firmly established as a writer by 1880. Although a 1902 accident ended her writing career, she continued to mentor younger writers, notably Willa Cather. She published hundreds of short stories, poetry, essays and some 18 novels in her lifetime. Her strong female characters have led to a renewed interest in her work.
Sarah Orne Jewett is a nondenominated, 3-ounce rate stamp. The words "THREE OUNCE" indicate its usage value. It is available in panes of 20 at Post Offices and usps.com.
Like a Forever stamp, it will always be valid for the rate printed on it.
Ethel Kessler, an art director for USPS, designed the stamp with art by Mark Summers.
Postal Products
Customers may purchase stamps and other philatelic products through The Postal Store at usps.com/shopstamps, by calling 844-737-7826, by mail through USA Philatelic, or at Post Office locations nationwide. For officially licensed stamp products, shop the USPS Officially Licensed Collection on Amazon. Additional information on stamps, first-day-of-issue ceremonies and stamp-inspired products can be found at stampsforever.com.
The United States Postal Service is an independent federal establishment, mandated to be self-financing and to serve every American community through the affordable, reliable and secure delivery of mail and packages to more than 170 million addresses six and often seven days a week. Overseen by a bipartisan Board of Governors, the Postal Service is currently pursuing a transformation plan aimed at restoring long-term financial sustainability, improving service, and maintaining the organization as one of America's most valued and trusted brands.
The Postal Service generally receives no tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations.
For USPS media resources, including broadcast-quality video and audio and photo stills, visit the USPS Newsroom. Follow us on X, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Threads, and LinkedIn. Subscribe to the USPS YouTube Channel. For more information about the Postal Service, visit usps.com and facts.usps.com.
***
Original text here: https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2026/0821-postal-service-honors-sarah-orne-jewett.htm
Inter-American Development Bank: Keeping Heads Above Water - Evidence From a Labor Retention Scheme in Response to Floods in Brazil
WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 (TNSLrpt) -- The Inter-American Development Bank issued the following white paper on July 2026, entitled "Keeping Heads Above Water: Evidence from a Labor Retention Scheme in Response to Floods in Brazil."
Here are excerpts:
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Abstract
We study the labor market effects of a major flood disaster in Brazil and whether a temporary labor-retention scheme--Programa Emergencial de Apoio Financeiro (PEAF)--mitigated these effects by providing wage subsidies while requiring firms to retain covered workers. Drawing on administrative data, we use a matched event-study design that ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 (TNSLrpt) -- The Inter-American Development Bank issued the following white paper on July 2026, entitled "Keeping Heads Above Water: Evidence from a Labor Retention Scheme in Response to Floods in Brazil." Here are excerpts: * * * Abstract We study the labor market effects of a major flood disaster in Brazil and whether a temporary labor-retention scheme--Programa Emergencial de Apoio Financeiro (PEAF)--mitigated these effects by providing wage subsidies while requiring firms to retain covered workers. Drawing on administrative data, we use a matched event-study design thatcompares workers in flood-affected establishments with and without PEAF coverage to matched workers in non-affected establishments. Direct flood exposure reduced formal employment among unprotected workers by about 2 percentage points and increased job switching, indicating rapid reallocation to other formal employers. PEAF increased employment by 2.4 percentage points relative to the counterfactual of flood exposure without program protection. It also reduced reliance on unemployment insurance, consistent with its effect on employment retention. Earnings effects are more nuanced: PEAF mitigated unconditional earnings losses through employment preservation, but earnings among retained workers declined, consistent with downward compensation adjustment within continuing jobs. Effects are concentrated in very small establishments and in sectors more exposed to disruption. The results show that labor-retention schemes can preserve employment after climate disasters, but that need not imply full income protection, a difference that is central to the design of policies aimed at mitigating the economic consequences of climate shocks.
Introduction
The world is currently witnessing intensified climate change and global warming, driven by continued increases in carbon emissions. Emissions between 2010 and 2019 accounted for more than 40% of total emissions accumulated since 1850 (IPCC, 2023). Rising temperatures disrupt the atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere, increasing the frequency and severity of extreme weather events (Rodell & Li, 2023). Consistent with this trend, 2023 to 2025 were the three most disaster-intensive years on record (CRED & USAID, 2025; Delforge et al., 2026). Climate disasters generate severe economic impacts, particularly in developing countries, reducing GDP levels and growth and acting as negative labor market shocks (Ferreira, 2024). Employment and income losses are typical consequences of destructive extreme weather events, and evidence from Latin America shows that informality, income, and sector of employment shape workers' vulnerability to disasters (Otero-Cort'es & Bohorquez-Penuela, 2020; Wagner, 2025; Xie, 2024).
As extreme weather events become more frequent and severe, understanding the resilience of labor markets to sudden disruptions has become an increasingly urgent research question. Central to this debate are the magnitude and persistence of employment and income losses caused by climate shocks, and whether policy interventions can mitigate these losses, particularly among economically vulnerable workers. One possible response is the use of labor-retention schemes (LRSs)--such as furloughs, short-time work arrangements, and wage subsidies--which aim to preserve employment relationships during temporary covariate shocks. These policies expanded substantially during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in Western Europe (Giupponi, Landais, & Lapeyre, 2022). Yet credible evidence on their effectiveness after climate disasters remains limited.
This paper addresses this gap by studying a major flood disaster in Brazil followed by the adoption of a labor-retention policy. Starting in late April 2024, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil's southernmost state, experienced floods of unprecedented intensity, the largest disaster in the state's recorded history. Extreme rainfall caused widespread destruction of homes, businesses, and industrial facilities and forced approximately 600,000 people into displacement or temporary shelters (Tebaldi, 2025). Immediate economic losses were estimated at USD 17.3 billion (IDB, 2024). In response, the federal government launched the Emergency Program for Financial Assistance (Programa Emergencial de Apoio Financeiro, or PEAF), a two-month program requiring employers to retain covered workers for four months--two months during which a wage subsidy was paid and the subsequent two months.
We investigate both the labor market consequences of direct flood exposure and the extent to which PEAF mitigated these impacts by preserving employment relationships and workers' earnings. To do so, we combine Brazil's matched employer-employee dataset with geospatial flood maps, PEAF administrative records, and social-protection registries. These data allow us to construct a monthly panel tracking workers through December 2024. We implement a matched event-study design that partitions workers into three groups: workers in non-affected establishments, workers in flood-affected establishments not covered by PEAF, and workers in flood-affected establishments covered by PEAF. We use coarsened exact matching to balance these groups on a rich set of baseline worker and establishment covariates. This design allows us to estimate the effect of direct flood exposure among unprotected workers and the extent to which PEAF mitigated that effect within a unified empirical framework. The internal validity of our research design is supported by flat pre-trends in the event-study specifications across all outcomes we examine, both for affected untreated workers and for PEAF-treated workers relative to their matched non-affected controls. The results are also robust to specifications that absorb time-varying shocks associated with the baseline covariate profiles used in the matching procedure and robust to the exclusion of comparison workers who may have been indirectly affected by the floods through local spillovers or general-equilibrium effects.
We find that direct flood exposure generated persistent employment losses among unprotected workers. By the end of 2024, formal employment had fallen by about 2.2 percentage points among workers not covered by PEAF. This net employment loss masks a larger disruption to workers' baseline employment relationships. Job switching increased by about 2 percentage points by the end of the period, implying that separations from baseline employers increased by roughly 4 percentage points. Thus, a substantial share of the disruption to original worker-firm matches was absorbed by rapid reallocation to other formal employers. PEAF largely offset the remaining employment loss. Workers in PEAF-covered establishments experienced no average decline in formal employment, and the estimated program effect is 2.4 percentage points relative to the counterfactual of being flood exposed without program protection. This pattern is consistent with the design of the program, which conditioned transfers on the preservation of covered employment relationships.
The earnings results are more nuanced. Among unprotected workers, direct flood exposure reduced unconditional earnings by 2.1% on average. This decline appears to be driven primarily by the net loss of formal employment documented above. Conditional on positive earnings, the effect is much smaller, at 0.8%, indicating that workers who remained formally employed or who rapidly reallocated to another formal job experienced only modest earnings losses on average. PEAF only partially mitigated the earnings losses by preserving employment. Relative to the counterfactual of being flood exposed without program protection, it increased unconditional earnings by about 1.1%. However, the program did not fully protect pay among workers who remained employed. Conditional on positive earnings, PEAF-treated workers experienced larger declines, with earnings falling by 1.3% on average and by around 3% in some post-flood months. This pattern suggests that covered establishments maintained formal job links while adjusting compensation downward among retained workers, likely through variable components of pay.
The floods also increased workers' reliance on the social-protection system, although the effects on noncontributory benefits are modest. Among unprotected affected workers, registration in CadUnico, Brazil's national registry for low-income households, increased ' by 0.2 percentage points, while transfers from Bolsa Fam'ilia, the country's flagship conditional cash transfer program, increased by R$1.12. Both effects correspond to about 4% of the respective baseline control means. Similar effects for PEAF-treated workers imply that PEAF did not meaningfully affect this margin, which likely reflects the broader postdisaster mobilization to register affected households in social programs. The effects on unemployment insurance are larger and more directly connected to the employment losses. Unprotected affected workers became 1.1 percentage points more likely to receive unemployment insurance and received R$19.43 more in monthly benefits, both roughly 28% of the post-flood control mean. PEAF moved these outcomes in the opposite direction: Relative to unprotected affected workers, the program reduced unemployment insurance receipt by 1.9 percentage points and benefits by R$34.17.
A back-of-the-envelope calculation helps benchmark these magnitudes against the scale of the intervention. PEAF paid two minimum-wage transfers, totaling R$2,824 per covered worker. Our estimates imply that the program reduced unemployment-insurance payments by about R$34 per worker-month. In addition, using the estimated 1.1% effect on unconditional earnings and average monthly earnings in the control group, PEAF preserved roughly R$32 in labor earnings per worker-month. Cumulated over the April- December window, these directly measured short-run gains amount to about R$600 per covered worker, well below the transfer cost. This comparison is necessarily partial, as it excludes potentially important benefits from preserving worker-firm matches, avoiding search and training costs, and preserving the tax base. It also reflects only the short-run horizon observed in this version of the paper.
Finally, we show that average effects mask substantial heterogeneity across establishments. Employment losses are especially large among workers attached to very small establishments: In establishments with four or fewer employees, flood exposure without PEAF reduced employment by 6.7 percentage points. PEAF was also most protective in this group, implying a program effect of about 8 percentage points relative to unprotected affected workers. We also find meaningful heterogeneity across sectors, with larger untreated employment losses in construction, manufacturing, and commerce than in services, and PEAF mitigated losses across these sectors. By contrast, heterogeneity across worker characteristics is less systematic. While some differences appear across wage and education groups, they do not map cleanly into a single worker-level vulnerability gradient. Overall, the incidence of employment losses and the protective effects of PEAF appear to be shaped primarily by the characteristics of affected establishments, especially firm size and sector.
Taken together, the results point to a more nuanced view of postdisaster labor market adjustment. Even among unprotected workers, the employment losses caused by the floods were partly offset by rapid reallocation to other formal employers. This adjustment was not enough to prevent a persistent decline in employment, but it indicates that local labor markets absorbed part of the shock through worker mobility. PEAF further reduced these short-run employment losses, with the strongest effects in the firms and sectors in which untreated workers were most exposed. At the same time, preserving employment relationships did not fully insure workers against earnings losses. PEAF mitigated unconditional earnings losses by keeping workers formally employed, but earnings among retained workers still declined. This suggests an important policy lesson: Labor-retention schemes can be effective at preventing separations after climate disasters, but their design must also consider whether firms can adjust compensation along dimensions not directly covered by retention requirements. Our evidence is short run; a longer horizon will be important to assess whether unprotected workers continue to recover through reallocation and whether preserved matches translate into more persistent gains.
The remainder of this article is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews the literature on the labor market effects of natural disasters and the role of labor-retention schemes. Section 3 provides institutional background on the 2024 Rio Grande do Sul floods and the PEAF program. Section 4 describes the data and empirical strategy. Section 5 presents the main results, discusses robustness checks, and reports heterogeneity analyses. Section 6 concludes.
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View full text here: https://publications.iadb.org/en/keeping-heads-above-water-evidence-labor-retention-scheme-response-floods-brazil
[Category: IADB]
Here are excerpts:
* * *
Abstract
We study the labor market effects of a major flood disaster in Brazil and whether a temporary labor-retention scheme--Programa Emergencial de Apoio Financeiro (PEAF)--mitigated these effects by providing wage subsidies while requiring firms to retain covered workers. Drawing on administrative data, we use a matched event-study design that ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 (TNSLrpt) -- The Inter-American Development Bank issued the following white paper on July 2026, entitled "Keeping Heads Above Water: Evidence from a Labor Retention Scheme in Response to Floods in Brazil." Here are excerpts: * * * Abstract We study the labor market effects of a major flood disaster in Brazil and whether a temporary labor-retention scheme--Programa Emergencial de Apoio Financeiro (PEAF)--mitigated these effects by providing wage subsidies while requiring firms to retain covered workers. Drawing on administrative data, we use a matched event-study design thatcompares workers in flood-affected establishments with and without PEAF coverage to matched workers in non-affected establishments. Direct flood exposure reduced formal employment among unprotected workers by about 2 percentage points and increased job switching, indicating rapid reallocation to other formal employers. PEAF increased employment by 2.4 percentage points relative to the counterfactual of flood exposure without program protection. It also reduced reliance on unemployment insurance, consistent with its effect on employment retention. Earnings effects are more nuanced: PEAF mitigated unconditional earnings losses through employment preservation, but earnings among retained workers declined, consistent with downward compensation adjustment within continuing jobs. Effects are concentrated in very small establishments and in sectors more exposed to disruption. The results show that labor-retention schemes can preserve employment after climate disasters, but that need not imply full income protection, a difference that is central to the design of policies aimed at mitigating the economic consequences of climate shocks.
Introduction
The world is currently witnessing intensified climate change and global warming, driven by continued increases in carbon emissions. Emissions between 2010 and 2019 accounted for more than 40% of total emissions accumulated since 1850 (IPCC, 2023). Rising temperatures disrupt the atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere, increasing the frequency and severity of extreme weather events (Rodell & Li, 2023). Consistent with this trend, 2023 to 2025 were the three most disaster-intensive years on record (CRED & USAID, 2025; Delforge et al., 2026). Climate disasters generate severe economic impacts, particularly in developing countries, reducing GDP levels and growth and acting as negative labor market shocks (Ferreira, 2024). Employment and income losses are typical consequences of destructive extreme weather events, and evidence from Latin America shows that informality, income, and sector of employment shape workers' vulnerability to disasters (Otero-Cort'es & Bohorquez-Penuela, 2020; Wagner, 2025; Xie, 2024).
As extreme weather events become more frequent and severe, understanding the resilience of labor markets to sudden disruptions has become an increasingly urgent research question. Central to this debate are the magnitude and persistence of employment and income losses caused by climate shocks, and whether policy interventions can mitigate these losses, particularly among economically vulnerable workers. One possible response is the use of labor-retention schemes (LRSs)--such as furloughs, short-time work arrangements, and wage subsidies--which aim to preserve employment relationships during temporary covariate shocks. These policies expanded substantially during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in Western Europe (Giupponi, Landais, & Lapeyre, 2022). Yet credible evidence on their effectiveness after climate disasters remains limited.
This paper addresses this gap by studying a major flood disaster in Brazil followed by the adoption of a labor-retention policy. Starting in late April 2024, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil's southernmost state, experienced floods of unprecedented intensity, the largest disaster in the state's recorded history. Extreme rainfall caused widespread destruction of homes, businesses, and industrial facilities and forced approximately 600,000 people into displacement or temporary shelters (Tebaldi, 2025). Immediate economic losses were estimated at USD 17.3 billion (IDB, 2024). In response, the federal government launched the Emergency Program for Financial Assistance (Programa Emergencial de Apoio Financeiro, or PEAF), a two-month program requiring employers to retain covered workers for four months--two months during which a wage subsidy was paid and the subsequent two months.
We investigate both the labor market consequences of direct flood exposure and the extent to which PEAF mitigated these impacts by preserving employment relationships and workers' earnings. To do so, we combine Brazil's matched employer-employee dataset with geospatial flood maps, PEAF administrative records, and social-protection registries. These data allow us to construct a monthly panel tracking workers through December 2024. We implement a matched event-study design that partitions workers into three groups: workers in non-affected establishments, workers in flood-affected establishments not covered by PEAF, and workers in flood-affected establishments covered by PEAF. We use coarsened exact matching to balance these groups on a rich set of baseline worker and establishment covariates. This design allows us to estimate the effect of direct flood exposure among unprotected workers and the extent to which PEAF mitigated that effect within a unified empirical framework. The internal validity of our research design is supported by flat pre-trends in the event-study specifications across all outcomes we examine, both for affected untreated workers and for PEAF-treated workers relative to their matched non-affected controls. The results are also robust to specifications that absorb time-varying shocks associated with the baseline covariate profiles used in the matching procedure and robust to the exclusion of comparison workers who may have been indirectly affected by the floods through local spillovers or general-equilibrium effects.
We find that direct flood exposure generated persistent employment losses among unprotected workers. By the end of 2024, formal employment had fallen by about 2.2 percentage points among workers not covered by PEAF. This net employment loss masks a larger disruption to workers' baseline employment relationships. Job switching increased by about 2 percentage points by the end of the period, implying that separations from baseline employers increased by roughly 4 percentage points. Thus, a substantial share of the disruption to original worker-firm matches was absorbed by rapid reallocation to other formal employers. PEAF largely offset the remaining employment loss. Workers in PEAF-covered establishments experienced no average decline in formal employment, and the estimated program effect is 2.4 percentage points relative to the counterfactual of being flood exposed without program protection. This pattern is consistent with the design of the program, which conditioned transfers on the preservation of covered employment relationships.
The earnings results are more nuanced. Among unprotected workers, direct flood exposure reduced unconditional earnings by 2.1% on average. This decline appears to be driven primarily by the net loss of formal employment documented above. Conditional on positive earnings, the effect is much smaller, at 0.8%, indicating that workers who remained formally employed or who rapidly reallocated to another formal job experienced only modest earnings losses on average. PEAF only partially mitigated the earnings losses by preserving employment. Relative to the counterfactual of being flood exposed without program protection, it increased unconditional earnings by about 1.1%. However, the program did not fully protect pay among workers who remained employed. Conditional on positive earnings, PEAF-treated workers experienced larger declines, with earnings falling by 1.3% on average and by around 3% in some post-flood months. This pattern suggests that covered establishments maintained formal job links while adjusting compensation downward among retained workers, likely through variable components of pay.
The floods also increased workers' reliance on the social-protection system, although the effects on noncontributory benefits are modest. Among unprotected affected workers, registration in CadUnico, Brazil's national registry for low-income households, increased ' by 0.2 percentage points, while transfers from Bolsa Fam'ilia, the country's flagship conditional cash transfer program, increased by R$1.12. Both effects correspond to about 4% of the respective baseline control means. Similar effects for PEAF-treated workers imply that PEAF did not meaningfully affect this margin, which likely reflects the broader postdisaster mobilization to register affected households in social programs. The effects on unemployment insurance are larger and more directly connected to the employment losses. Unprotected affected workers became 1.1 percentage points more likely to receive unemployment insurance and received R$19.43 more in monthly benefits, both roughly 28% of the post-flood control mean. PEAF moved these outcomes in the opposite direction: Relative to unprotected affected workers, the program reduced unemployment insurance receipt by 1.9 percentage points and benefits by R$34.17.
A back-of-the-envelope calculation helps benchmark these magnitudes against the scale of the intervention. PEAF paid two minimum-wage transfers, totaling R$2,824 per covered worker. Our estimates imply that the program reduced unemployment-insurance payments by about R$34 per worker-month. In addition, using the estimated 1.1% effect on unconditional earnings and average monthly earnings in the control group, PEAF preserved roughly R$32 in labor earnings per worker-month. Cumulated over the April- December window, these directly measured short-run gains amount to about R$600 per covered worker, well below the transfer cost. This comparison is necessarily partial, as it excludes potentially important benefits from preserving worker-firm matches, avoiding search and training costs, and preserving the tax base. It also reflects only the short-run horizon observed in this version of the paper.
Finally, we show that average effects mask substantial heterogeneity across establishments. Employment losses are especially large among workers attached to very small establishments: In establishments with four or fewer employees, flood exposure without PEAF reduced employment by 6.7 percentage points. PEAF was also most protective in this group, implying a program effect of about 8 percentage points relative to unprotected affected workers. We also find meaningful heterogeneity across sectors, with larger untreated employment losses in construction, manufacturing, and commerce than in services, and PEAF mitigated losses across these sectors. By contrast, heterogeneity across worker characteristics is less systematic. While some differences appear across wage and education groups, they do not map cleanly into a single worker-level vulnerability gradient. Overall, the incidence of employment losses and the protective effects of PEAF appear to be shaped primarily by the characteristics of affected establishments, especially firm size and sector.
Taken together, the results point to a more nuanced view of postdisaster labor market adjustment. Even among unprotected workers, the employment losses caused by the floods were partly offset by rapid reallocation to other formal employers. This adjustment was not enough to prevent a persistent decline in employment, but it indicates that local labor markets absorbed part of the shock through worker mobility. PEAF further reduced these short-run employment losses, with the strongest effects in the firms and sectors in which untreated workers were most exposed. At the same time, preserving employment relationships did not fully insure workers against earnings losses. PEAF mitigated unconditional earnings losses by keeping workers formally employed, but earnings among retained workers still declined. This suggests an important policy lesson: Labor-retention schemes can be effective at preventing separations after climate disasters, but their design must also consider whether firms can adjust compensation along dimensions not directly covered by retention requirements. Our evidence is short run; a longer horizon will be important to assess whether unprotected workers continue to recover through reallocation and whether preserved matches translate into more persistent gains.
The remainder of this article is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews the literature on the labor market effects of natural disasters and the role of labor-retention schemes. Section 3 provides institutional background on the 2024 Rio Grande do Sul floods and the PEAF program. Section 4 describes the data and empirical strategy. Section 5 presents the main results, discusses robustness checks, and reports heterogeneity analyses. Section 6 concludes.
* * *
View full text here: https://publications.iadb.org/en/keeping-heads-above-water-evidence-labor-retention-scheme-response-floods-brazil
[Category: IADB]
Inter-American Development Bank: Beyond Violations - Measuring Compliance in Drinking Water Regulation
WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 (TNSLrpt) -- The Inter-American Development Bank issued the following white paper on Aug. 2026, entitled "Beyond Violations: Measuring Compliance in Drinking Water Regulation."
Here are excerpts:
* * *
Abstract
Ensuring safe drinking water depends not only on infrastructure but on effective regulatory compliance. This paper studies compliance with drinking water quality regulations through a three-layer framework that distinguishes among whether providers report monitoring data at all, whether those that do report collect the required number of samples, and whether the samples ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 (TNSLrpt) -- The Inter-American Development Bank issued the following white paper on Aug. 2026, entitled "Beyond Violations: Measuring Compliance in Drinking Water Regulation." Here are excerpts: * * * Abstract Ensuring safe drinking water depends not only on infrastructure but on effective regulatory compliance. This paper studies compliance with drinking water quality regulations through a three-layer framework that distinguishes among whether providers report monitoring data at all, whether those that do report collect the required number of samples, and whether the samplescollected reveal violations of regulatory quality thresholds. Because each layer is a necessary condition for the next, failures in reporting and sampling can prevent official statistics from accurately reflecting underlying water quality risks. Using comprehensive administrative data from Brazil covering more than 5,500 municipalities between 2010 and 2022, we show that failures at each compliance layer are widespread, non-random, and systematically correlated with municipal characteristics. Non-reporting and under-sampling are concentrated in poorer and lower-capacity municipalities, while over-sampling is prevalent among larger providers. Over samplers report fewer violations than municipalities that comply exactly with the prescribed sample count, a pattern that admits several interpretations and that the administrative record alone cannot adjudicate. The reported violation share is therefore jointly determined with sampling behavior, and this joint determination is systematically related to the municipal characteristics that also predict contamination risk. Treating reported violations as the sole measure of regulatory performance yields a misleading picture of drinking water safety and obscures the importance of monitoring compliance with reporting and sampling requirements alongside quality thresholds.
Introduction
Safe drinking water is a fundamental determinant of public health, yet ensuring its quality remains an unresolved challenge in both developing and developed countries. Contaminated water is associated with a range of severe health outcomes, including gastrointestinal disease, low birth weight, child mortality, and multiple forms of cancer (Pr~uss-Ust~un et al., 2019; WHO, 2022; Kremer et al., 2023). In Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), unsafe water and inadequate sanitation account for a disproportionate share of child deaths (Wolf et al., 2023), and the expansion of piped water has been shown to reduce infant mortality (Gamper-Rabindran et al., 2010). Yet infrastructure alone is not enough: the health gains from piped water depend critically on whether the water delivered through those pipes meets quality standards set by the corresponding national regulation (Hutton and Chase, 2016). Whether that regulatory system actually works, that is, whether providers report information, whether they sample at the required frequency, and whether official records accurately reflect the drinking water quality that reaches households, is therefore a first-order public health concern.
Most countries have established formal drinking water quality regulations that set maximum permissible levels for microbiological and chemical contaminants and mandate regular testing and public reporting by water providers (WHO, 2022). In LAC, nearly all countries have such rules in place, yet monitoring and enforcement remain persistently weak (Larocque, 2018; Couleau et al., 2025). The underlying reason is that most regulatory systems rely on self-monitoring: providers are themselves responsible for collecting, testing, and submitting the data used to assess their own compliance. This creates a classic principal-agent problem. Regulators must rely on entities that bear the direct costs of compliance and hold private information about their own water quality. The problem is particularly acute when the regulated entity controls not only what is reported, but also how much is tested and when, giving agents facing regulatory penalties both the incentive and the discretion to manipulate the information used to evaluate them. Understanding compliance with water quality regulation, therefore, requires looking beyond the official violation record.
We organize compliance into three sequentially conditional layers: whether providers report any data at all; whether those that do report collect the required number of samples; and whether the samples collected reveal violations of quality standards. Each layer is a necessary condition for the next, and failures at any stage can prevent official statistics from reflecting the true extent of water quality problems. If the characteristics of non-reporters differ systematically from those who report, official violation rates will be biased downward, with the bias likely largest precisely where water quality risks are greatest. Beyond non-reporting, deviations in sampling volume introduce a further source of distortion. Under-sampling may reflect limited provider capacity, but it also reduces the probability of detecting contamination, meaning violations go unrecorded, not because the water is safe but because the testing is insufficient. Over-sampling, by contrast, may reflect genuine quality consciousness among better-resourced providers, but can also serve to dilute the share of positive results, thereby keeping reported violation rates below regulatory thresholds even when underlying contamination is present. Both mechanisms bias official violation statistics in ways that are difficult to detect without observing all three compliance layers simultaneously.
To study these compliance dynamics empirically, we turn to Brazil. Brazil's regulatory framework (Portaria GM/MS No. 888/2021) makes all three compliance layers simultaneously observable in a single administrative system covering more than 5,500 municipalities over 13 years.1Brazil is particularly well suited for this analysis: its advanced information systems and binding regulatory framework make it one of the few developing countries where reporting and sampling behavior can be observed separately and consistently across a large number of providers over a long time period. At the same time, there is substantial heterogeneity in provider capacity, income, and institutional quality across municipalities, which allows us to observe the full range of compliance behaviors within a single regulatory environment and to trace how those behaviors relate to population health outcomes. We use a balanced panel of 5,565 municipalities observed annually from 2010 to 2022.
We rely on the National Sanitation Information System (SNIS, in Portuguese), managed by the Ministry of Cities, as our source of data for water quality and sampling adequacy. Brazil also maintains a parallel water quality database, Water Quality Surveillance System (SISAGUA, in Portuguese), operated by the Ministry of Health. While SISAGUA records individual sample results and is used for surveillance purposes, it does not include information on the number of samples each provider was required to collect under the regulation. Because assessing sampling adequacy requires comparing observed sample counts to the regulatory minimum, SNIS is the appropriate data source for the second compliance layer.
Our empirical analysis focuses on total coliform compliance. While the regulation prohibits E. coli in all samples without exception, the compliance threshold subject to empirical variation, the 5% rule, applies exclusively to total coliforms, which constitute the binding and measurable regulatory standard governing distribution network performance. Total coliforms are also the most widely and consistently tested microbiological indicator across Brazilian municipalities, making them the most tractable outcome for large-scale empirical analysis.
Evidence from both high- and low-income countries suggests that failures at each compliance layer are widespread and non-random. At the reporting layer, non-reporting is a serious problem even in countries with robust oversight infrastructure: in the United States, between 26 and 38 percent of detected health-based violations are never formally reported to the relevant authority, and the providers most likely to go silent are those serving rural, low-income, and otherwise disadvantaged communities (Allaire et al., 2018; Mueller and Gasteyer, 2021). At the sampling layer, both under-sampling and over-sampling are common and non-random. Under-sampling is more prevalent among smaller and financially constrained providers, consistent with limited capacity rather than deliberate evasion (Crocker and Bartram, 2014). Over-sampling is concentrated among larger, better-resourced systems. Bennear et al. (2009) shows that in U.S. water utilities, over-sampling was concentrated in months when early contamination had already been detected, pointing to deliberate threshold management rather than a precautionary response.
Analogous strategic responses to monitoring requirements have been documented in air quality regulation, where local agencies strategically shut down monitors before high-pollution events (Mu et al., 2021), and in surface water monitoring in China, where contamination distributions are bunched just below regulatory thresholds (Zhao et al., 2021). At the violation layer, even among providers that report and sample adequately, official violation rates will be biased downward if selection into the preceding layers is correlated with underlying water quality (Gray and Shimshack, 2011; Shimshack, 2014), meaning the communities facing the greatest risks are precisely those least visible in the official record. Existing evidence on these mechanisms, however, comes predominantly from the United States; whether similar patterns obtain in middle-income country settings, where provider heterogeneity and institutional capacity constraints are more severe, remains an open question.
This paper makes two contributions. First, we introduce a three-layer compliance framework that explicitly distinguishes reporting, sampling adequacy, and threshold reported violations as sequentially conditional behaviors. Prior work has focused almost exclusively on the third layer (Gray and Shimshack, 2011; Shimshack, 2014), treating official violation rates as the relevant outcome. We show that this restriction is consequential: the selection processes governing who clears the first two layers are non-random and systematically related to the underlying water quality risk. Second, we provide the first large-scale evidence on all three compliance layers in a middle-income country. The United States evidence, while valuable, operates in a setting with comparatively strong institutional capacity; our findings document that compliance failures are sharper and more unequally distributed when provider heterogeneity is more pronounced.
Our findings are consistent with systematic downward bias in official compliance statistics. At the reporting layer, between 5 and 17 percent of municipalities submit no water quality data in a given year; non-reporters are concentrated in poorer, smaller, and less-developed municipalities, precisely those facing the highest risk of poor water quality. At the sampling layer, over-sampling is the dominant behavior among reporters, accounting for approximately 45 percent of reporting municipalities, while under-sampling has declined but remains prevalent, particularly in lower-income and more rural areas; exact compliance with the prescribed sample count is the least common outcome. At the violation layer, under-samplers exhibit persistently higher coliform violation rates than exact-samplers or over-samplers, consistent with degraded water quality constrained by limited testing. Over-samplers report fewer violations than exact-samplers, a result that admits several interpretations, including genuinely better water quality, dilution of positive results through excess testing, and the mechanical effect of the mandatory resampling protocol triggered by any positive coliform detection. The administrative record alone cannot separate these mechanisms. What the evidence does establish is that official violation statistics, which capture only the third compliance layer, conditional on passing the first two, reflect not just underlying water quality but also the sampling decisions that precede measurement, and that these decisions are themselves systematically related to the municipal characteristics that predict contamination risk. The communities least visible in the official record, and least adequately represented within it, are those facing the greatest underlying risk.
The remainder of the paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 presents the three-layer compliance framework and describes Brazil's regulatory environment. Section 3 describes the data. Section 4 presents the empirical analysis of each compliance layer. Section 5 concludes.
* * *
View full text here: https://publications.iadb.org/en/beyond-violations-measuring-compliance-drinking-water-regulation
[Category: IADB]
Here are excerpts:
* * *
Abstract
Ensuring safe drinking water depends not only on infrastructure but on effective regulatory compliance. This paper studies compliance with drinking water quality regulations through a three-layer framework that distinguishes among whether providers report monitoring data at all, whether those that do report collect the required number of samples, and whether the samples ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 (TNSLrpt) -- The Inter-American Development Bank issued the following white paper on Aug. 2026, entitled "Beyond Violations: Measuring Compliance in Drinking Water Regulation." Here are excerpts: * * * Abstract Ensuring safe drinking water depends not only on infrastructure but on effective regulatory compliance. This paper studies compliance with drinking water quality regulations through a three-layer framework that distinguishes among whether providers report monitoring data at all, whether those that do report collect the required number of samples, and whether the samplescollected reveal violations of regulatory quality thresholds. Because each layer is a necessary condition for the next, failures in reporting and sampling can prevent official statistics from accurately reflecting underlying water quality risks. Using comprehensive administrative data from Brazil covering more than 5,500 municipalities between 2010 and 2022, we show that failures at each compliance layer are widespread, non-random, and systematically correlated with municipal characteristics. Non-reporting and under-sampling are concentrated in poorer and lower-capacity municipalities, while over-sampling is prevalent among larger providers. Over samplers report fewer violations than municipalities that comply exactly with the prescribed sample count, a pattern that admits several interpretations and that the administrative record alone cannot adjudicate. The reported violation share is therefore jointly determined with sampling behavior, and this joint determination is systematically related to the municipal characteristics that also predict contamination risk. Treating reported violations as the sole measure of regulatory performance yields a misleading picture of drinking water safety and obscures the importance of monitoring compliance with reporting and sampling requirements alongside quality thresholds.
Introduction
Safe drinking water is a fundamental determinant of public health, yet ensuring its quality remains an unresolved challenge in both developing and developed countries. Contaminated water is associated with a range of severe health outcomes, including gastrointestinal disease, low birth weight, child mortality, and multiple forms of cancer (Pr~uss-Ust~un et al., 2019; WHO, 2022; Kremer et al., 2023). In Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), unsafe water and inadequate sanitation account for a disproportionate share of child deaths (Wolf et al., 2023), and the expansion of piped water has been shown to reduce infant mortality (Gamper-Rabindran et al., 2010). Yet infrastructure alone is not enough: the health gains from piped water depend critically on whether the water delivered through those pipes meets quality standards set by the corresponding national regulation (Hutton and Chase, 2016). Whether that regulatory system actually works, that is, whether providers report information, whether they sample at the required frequency, and whether official records accurately reflect the drinking water quality that reaches households, is therefore a first-order public health concern.
Most countries have established formal drinking water quality regulations that set maximum permissible levels for microbiological and chemical contaminants and mandate regular testing and public reporting by water providers (WHO, 2022). In LAC, nearly all countries have such rules in place, yet monitoring and enforcement remain persistently weak (Larocque, 2018; Couleau et al., 2025). The underlying reason is that most regulatory systems rely on self-monitoring: providers are themselves responsible for collecting, testing, and submitting the data used to assess their own compliance. This creates a classic principal-agent problem. Regulators must rely on entities that bear the direct costs of compliance and hold private information about their own water quality. The problem is particularly acute when the regulated entity controls not only what is reported, but also how much is tested and when, giving agents facing regulatory penalties both the incentive and the discretion to manipulate the information used to evaluate them. Understanding compliance with water quality regulation, therefore, requires looking beyond the official violation record.
We organize compliance into three sequentially conditional layers: whether providers report any data at all; whether those that do report collect the required number of samples; and whether the samples collected reveal violations of quality standards. Each layer is a necessary condition for the next, and failures at any stage can prevent official statistics from reflecting the true extent of water quality problems. If the characteristics of non-reporters differ systematically from those who report, official violation rates will be biased downward, with the bias likely largest precisely where water quality risks are greatest. Beyond non-reporting, deviations in sampling volume introduce a further source of distortion. Under-sampling may reflect limited provider capacity, but it also reduces the probability of detecting contamination, meaning violations go unrecorded, not because the water is safe but because the testing is insufficient. Over-sampling, by contrast, may reflect genuine quality consciousness among better-resourced providers, but can also serve to dilute the share of positive results, thereby keeping reported violation rates below regulatory thresholds even when underlying contamination is present. Both mechanisms bias official violation statistics in ways that are difficult to detect without observing all three compliance layers simultaneously.
To study these compliance dynamics empirically, we turn to Brazil. Brazil's regulatory framework (Portaria GM/MS No. 888/2021) makes all three compliance layers simultaneously observable in a single administrative system covering more than 5,500 municipalities over 13 years.1Brazil is particularly well suited for this analysis: its advanced information systems and binding regulatory framework make it one of the few developing countries where reporting and sampling behavior can be observed separately and consistently across a large number of providers over a long time period. At the same time, there is substantial heterogeneity in provider capacity, income, and institutional quality across municipalities, which allows us to observe the full range of compliance behaviors within a single regulatory environment and to trace how those behaviors relate to population health outcomes. We use a balanced panel of 5,565 municipalities observed annually from 2010 to 2022.
We rely on the National Sanitation Information System (SNIS, in Portuguese), managed by the Ministry of Cities, as our source of data for water quality and sampling adequacy. Brazil also maintains a parallel water quality database, Water Quality Surveillance System (SISAGUA, in Portuguese), operated by the Ministry of Health. While SISAGUA records individual sample results and is used for surveillance purposes, it does not include information on the number of samples each provider was required to collect under the regulation. Because assessing sampling adequacy requires comparing observed sample counts to the regulatory minimum, SNIS is the appropriate data source for the second compliance layer.
Our empirical analysis focuses on total coliform compliance. While the regulation prohibits E. coli in all samples without exception, the compliance threshold subject to empirical variation, the 5% rule, applies exclusively to total coliforms, which constitute the binding and measurable regulatory standard governing distribution network performance. Total coliforms are also the most widely and consistently tested microbiological indicator across Brazilian municipalities, making them the most tractable outcome for large-scale empirical analysis.
Evidence from both high- and low-income countries suggests that failures at each compliance layer are widespread and non-random. At the reporting layer, non-reporting is a serious problem even in countries with robust oversight infrastructure: in the United States, between 26 and 38 percent of detected health-based violations are never formally reported to the relevant authority, and the providers most likely to go silent are those serving rural, low-income, and otherwise disadvantaged communities (Allaire et al., 2018; Mueller and Gasteyer, 2021). At the sampling layer, both under-sampling and over-sampling are common and non-random. Under-sampling is more prevalent among smaller and financially constrained providers, consistent with limited capacity rather than deliberate evasion (Crocker and Bartram, 2014). Over-sampling is concentrated among larger, better-resourced systems. Bennear et al. (2009) shows that in U.S. water utilities, over-sampling was concentrated in months when early contamination had already been detected, pointing to deliberate threshold management rather than a precautionary response.
Analogous strategic responses to monitoring requirements have been documented in air quality regulation, where local agencies strategically shut down monitors before high-pollution events (Mu et al., 2021), and in surface water monitoring in China, where contamination distributions are bunched just below regulatory thresholds (Zhao et al., 2021). At the violation layer, even among providers that report and sample adequately, official violation rates will be biased downward if selection into the preceding layers is correlated with underlying water quality (Gray and Shimshack, 2011; Shimshack, 2014), meaning the communities facing the greatest risks are precisely those least visible in the official record. Existing evidence on these mechanisms, however, comes predominantly from the United States; whether similar patterns obtain in middle-income country settings, where provider heterogeneity and institutional capacity constraints are more severe, remains an open question.
This paper makes two contributions. First, we introduce a three-layer compliance framework that explicitly distinguishes reporting, sampling adequacy, and threshold reported violations as sequentially conditional behaviors. Prior work has focused almost exclusively on the third layer (Gray and Shimshack, 2011; Shimshack, 2014), treating official violation rates as the relevant outcome. We show that this restriction is consequential: the selection processes governing who clears the first two layers are non-random and systematically related to the underlying water quality risk. Second, we provide the first large-scale evidence on all three compliance layers in a middle-income country. The United States evidence, while valuable, operates in a setting with comparatively strong institutional capacity; our findings document that compliance failures are sharper and more unequally distributed when provider heterogeneity is more pronounced.
Our findings are consistent with systematic downward bias in official compliance statistics. At the reporting layer, between 5 and 17 percent of municipalities submit no water quality data in a given year; non-reporters are concentrated in poorer, smaller, and less-developed municipalities, precisely those facing the highest risk of poor water quality. At the sampling layer, over-sampling is the dominant behavior among reporters, accounting for approximately 45 percent of reporting municipalities, while under-sampling has declined but remains prevalent, particularly in lower-income and more rural areas; exact compliance with the prescribed sample count is the least common outcome. At the violation layer, under-samplers exhibit persistently higher coliform violation rates than exact-samplers or over-samplers, consistent with degraded water quality constrained by limited testing. Over-samplers report fewer violations than exact-samplers, a result that admits several interpretations, including genuinely better water quality, dilution of positive results through excess testing, and the mechanical effect of the mandatory resampling protocol triggered by any positive coliform detection. The administrative record alone cannot separate these mechanisms. What the evidence does establish is that official violation statistics, which capture only the third compliance layer, conditional on passing the first two, reflect not just underlying water quality but also the sampling decisions that precede measurement, and that these decisions are themselves systematically related to the municipal characteristics that predict contamination risk. The communities least visible in the official record, and least adequately represented within it, are those facing the greatest underlying risk.
The remainder of the paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 presents the three-layer compliance framework and describes Brazil's regulatory environment. Section 3 describes the data. Section 4 presents the empirical analysis of each compliance layer. Section 5 concludes.
* * *
View full text here: https://publications.iadb.org/en/beyond-violations-measuring-compliance-drinking-water-regulation
[Category: IADB]
Inter-American Development Bank: Agricultural Development Through Evidence - Lessons From a Decade of IDB Impact Evaluations in Latin America and the Caribbean (2014-2025)
WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 (TNSLrpt) -- The Inter-American Development Bank issued the following white paper on July 2026, entitled "Agricultural Development through Evidence: Lessons from a Decade of IDB Impact Evaluations in Latin America and the Caribbean (2014-2025)."
Here are excerpts:
* * *
Abstract:
This study reviews a decade of rigorously evaluated IDB-supported agricultural interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean. The evidence base encompasses five major intervention categories: input and technology transfers, rural infrastructure, land regularization and administration, extension ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 (TNSLrpt) -- The Inter-American Development Bank issued the following white paper on July 2026, entitled "Agricultural Development through Evidence: Lessons from a Decade of IDB Impact Evaluations in Latin America and the Caribbean (2014-2025)." Here are excerpts: * * * Abstract: This study reviews a decade of rigorously evaluated IDB-supported agricultural interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean. The evidence base encompasses five major intervention categories: input and technology transfers, rural infrastructure, land regularization and administration, extensionservices and capacity-building, and animal and plant health. Five key findings emerge. First, productivity impacts are inherently dynamic and often require medium- and long-term data to fully capture the transformation of productive systems. Second, agricultural programs can generate substantial welfare gains, including improvements in food security, resilience, and inclusion, even in the absence of immediate increases in productivity or income. Third, heterogeneous impacts across gender and other population groups are highly relevant but remain insufficiently explored. Fourth, the measurement of spillover effects provides valuable insights into the broader development effectiveness of agricultural interventions beyond direct beneficiaries. Finally, combining survey data with remote sensing offers a powerful complementary approach that expands the scope of impact measurement and helps overcome many of the limitations of traditional field-based data collection. The study concludes with practical recommendations to strengthen the design, implementation, and evaluation of future agricultural development programs.
Introduction
Over the last 15 years, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has significantly expanded its portfolio of impact evaluations to assess and improve the development effectiveness of its interventions. This commitment has produced a robust body of evidence across multiple sectors, with the agricultural sector experiencing a particularly significant increase in empirical analyses. This study synthesizes the knowledge generated between 2014 and 2025, offering an overview of the main findings from this recent evidence. The goal is to provide policymakers with actionable insights for designing interventions that boost agricultural productivity and income while simultaneously strengthening food security, rural welfare, and climate resilience.
To promote evidence-based interventions, the IDB complements its operational portfolio with robust knowledge generation efforts. These efforts have evolved over time, particularly following the introduction of an updated institutional framework for development effectiveness in the late 2000s, which strengthened the systematic use of rigorous empirical evidence throughout the project cycle.
This study presents a narrative review of quantitative evaluations of IDB agricultural projects. Several of the evaluations reviewed have been published as IDB knowledge products and were therefore subject to the Bank's rigorous internal peer review process, which often begins at the program design stage. Others have been published in peer-reviewed academic journals and therefore, reviewed through external scholarly processes.
Given the heterogeneity of the evidence base and the narrative nature of this review, this study does not intend to draw universal conclusions regarding the absolute effectiveness of specific intervention types. Rather, it identifies cross-cutting themes within the IDB's agricultural portfolio, highlighting systemic lessons from the application of evidence-based policy. The focus remains on understanding how evaluation insights can inform context-specific program design across the sector.
The analysis draws on 25 impact evaluations of IDB-supported agricultural projects implemented between 2010 and 2024. These evaluations rely on counterfactual methods--experimental or quasiexperimental--to compare treatment and control groups and identify the causal impacts of agricultural interventions. Although the evaluated projects do not constitute a statistically representative sample of the Bank's agricultural portfolio, they encompass the principal intervention areas in which the IDB invests, including sustainable agricultural development, technology adoption, agricultural health and food safety, infrastructure, research and innovation, irrigation, agribusiness, and land administration. These investment areas also constitute the core of the Bank's current agricultural portfolio, which comprises approximately US$1.81 billion in active lending. Moreover, because the evaluations cover agricultural operations implemented between 2010 and 2024 across the Bank's principal lines of intervention, the evidence synthesized in this review provides a robust and policy-relevant basis for informing the design, implementation, and evaluation of ongoing and future agricultural operations.
In sum, several key lessons emerge from the evidence of these 25 impact evaluations:
1. Productivity impacts are dynamic, and effects may emerge over different time horizons; consequently, medium- and long-term evaluations are critical for accurate measurement.
2. Welfare impacts can be achieved through agricultural programs even in the absence of immediate or expected changes in productivity or income.
3. Impact heterogeneity by gender can result from strategic program design, though evidence remains scarce despite clear links to household food security.
4. Accounting for spillover effects in program and evaluation design provides critical insights into the broader reach of development effectiveness.
5. Integrating remote sensing with survey data offers a powerful complementary strategy for overcoming the traditional challenges and costs of field data collection.
The remainder of this study is structured as follows. Section 2 summarizes the analytical framework, including an overview of the IDB's role in implementing and evaluating agricultural interventions. Section 3 presents a literature review describing key characteristics of each of the 25 studies considered in this study. Section 4 highlights and describes the lessons learned from ten years of IDB impact evaluations. Finally, Section 5 summarizes actionable guidance for policymakers and development practitioners seeking to advance food security and sustainable growth in the region.
This study aims to create a bridge between operational experience and academic evidence by reviewing a decade of rigorously evaluated IDB-supported agricultural interventions.
* * *
View full text here: https://publications.iadb.org/en/agricultural-development-through-evidence-lessons-decade-idb-impact-evaluations-latin-america-and
[Category: IADB]
Here are excerpts:
* * *
Abstract:
This study reviews a decade of rigorously evaluated IDB-supported agricultural interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean. The evidence base encompasses five major intervention categories: input and technology transfers, rural infrastructure, land regularization and administration, extension ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 (TNSLrpt) -- The Inter-American Development Bank issued the following white paper on July 2026, entitled "Agricultural Development through Evidence: Lessons from a Decade of IDB Impact Evaluations in Latin America and the Caribbean (2014-2025)." Here are excerpts: * * * Abstract: This study reviews a decade of rigorously evaluated IDB-supported agricultural interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean. The evidence base encompasses five major intervention categories: input and technology transfers, rural infrastructure, land regularization and administration, extensionservices and capacity-building, and animal and plant health. Five key findings emerge. First, productivity impacts are inherently dynamic and often require medium- and long-term data to fully capture the transformation of productive systems. Second, agricultural programs can generate substantial welfare gains, including improvements in food security, resilience, and inclusion, even in the absence of immediate increases in productivity or income. Third, heterogeneous impacts across gender and other population groups are highly relevant but remain insufficiently explored. Fourth, the measurement of spillover effects provides valuable insights into the broader development effectiveness of agricultural interventions beyond direct beneficiaries. Finally, combining survey data with remote sensing offers a powerful complementary approach that expands the scope of impact measurement and helps overcome many of the limitations of traditional field-based data collection. The study concludes with practical recommendations to strengthen the design, implementation, and evaluation of future agricultural development programs.
Introduction
Over the last 15 years, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has significantly expanded its portfolio of impact evaluations to assess and improve the development effectiveness of its interventions. This commitment has produced a robust body of evidence across multiple sectors, with the agricultural sector experiencing a particularly significant increase in empirical analyses. This study synthesizes the knowledge generated between 2014 and 2025, offering an overview of the main findings from this recent evidence. The goal is to provide policymakers with actionable insights for designing interventions that boost agricultural productivity and income while simultaneously strengthening food security, rural welfare, and climate resilience.
To promote evidence-based interventions, the IDB complements its operational portfolio with robust knowledge generation efforts. These efforts have evolved over time, particularly following the introduction of an updated institutional framework for development effectiveness in the late 2000s, which strengthened the systematic use of rigorous empirical evidence throughout the project cycle.
This study presents a narrative review of quantitative evaluations of IDB agricultural projects. Several of the evaluations reviewed have been published as IDB knowledge products and were therefore subject to the Bank's rigorous internal peer review process, which often begins at the program design stage. Others have been published in peer-reviewed academic journals and therefore, reviewed through external scholarly processes.
Given the heterogeneity of the evidence base and the narrative nature of this review, this study does not intend to draw universal conclusions regarding the absolute effectiveness of specific intervention types. Rather, it identifies cross-cutting themes within the IDB's agricultural portfolio, highlighting systemic lessons from the application of evidence-based policy. The focus remains on understanding how evaluation insights can inform context-specific program design across the sector.
The analysis draws on 25 impact evaluations of IDB-supported agricultural projects implemented between 2010 and 2024. These evaluations rely on counterfactual methods--experimental or quasiexperimental--to compare treatment and control groups and identify the causal impacts of agricultural interventions. Although the evaluated projects do not constitute a statistically representative sample of the Bank's agricultural portfolio, they encompass the principal intervention areas in which the IDB invests, including sustainable agricultural development, technology adoption, agricultural health and food safety, infrastructure, research and innovation, irrigation, agribusiness, and land administration. These investment areas also constitute the core of the Bank's current agricultural portfolio, which comprises approximately US$1.81 billion in active lending. Moreover, because the evaluations cover agricultural operations implemented between 2010 and 2024 across the Bank's principal lines of intervention, the evidence synthesized in this review provides a robust and policy-relevant basis for informing the design, implementation, and evaluation of ongoing and future agricultural operations.
In sum, several key lessons emerge from the evidence of these 25 impact evaluations:
1. Productivity impacts are dynamic, and effects may emerge over different time horizons; consequently, medium- and long-term evaluations are critical for accurate measurement.
2. Welfare impacts can be achieved through agricultural programs even in the absence of immediate or expected changes in productivity or income.
3. Impact heterogeneity by gender can result from strategic program design, though evidence remains scarce despite clear links to household food security.
4. Accounting for spillover effects in program and evaluation design provides critical insights into the broader reach of development effectiveness.
5. Integrating remote sensing with survey data offers a powerful complementary strategy for overcoming the traditional challenges and costs of field data collection.
The remainder of this study is structured as follows. Section 2 summarizes the analytical framework, including an overview of the IDB's role in implementing and evaluating agricultural interventions. Section 3 presents a literature review describing key characteristics of each of the 25 studies considered in this study. Section 4 highlights and describes the lessons learned from ten years of IDB impact evaluations. Finally, Section 5 summarizes actionable guidance for policymakers and development practitioners seeking to advance food security and sustainable growth in the region.
This study aims to create a bridge between operational experience and academic evidence by reviewing a decade of rigorously evaluated IDB-supported agricultural interventions.
* * *
View full text here: https://publications.iadb.org/en/agricultural-development-through-evidence-lessons-decade-idb-impact-evaluations-latin-america-and
[Category: IADB]
Innovation Leaders to Gather at GET Forum 2026 to Strengthen Latin America and the Caribbean's Entrepreneurial and Investment Ecosystems
WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 -- The Inter-American Development Bank issued the following news release on Aug. 20, 2026:
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Innovation Leaders to Gather at GET Forum 2026 to Strengthen Latin America and the Caribbean's Entrepreneurial and Investment Ecosystems
The IDB Group's flagship event to take place on October 5-7 in Ecuador.
-
Leaders from the global entrepreneurial ecosystem will gather in Quito, Ecuador, from October 5-7 for GET Forum 2026, the Inter-American Development Bank Group's (IDB Group) flagship event on innovation and early-stage investment for development. The forum aims to turn ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 -- The Inter-American Development Bank issued the following news release on Aug. 20, 2026: * * * Innovation Leaders to Gather at GET Forum 2026 to Strengthen Latin America and the Caribbean's Entrepreneurial and Investment Ecosystems The IDB Group's flagship event to take place on October 5-7 in Ecuador. - Leaders from the global entrepreneurial ecosystem will gather in Quito, Ecuador, from October 5-7 for GET Forum 2026, the Inter-American Development Bank Group's (IDB Group) flagship event on innovation and early-stage investment for development. The forum aims to turnthe region's entrepreneurial drive into businesses, investment and development impact at scale.
More than 100 international speakers and 800 participants are expected to attend the high-level conference in Quito, along with over 2,000 attendees to the Innovation Village on the opening day. Confirmed speakers include Jeff Hoffman, Chairman of the Global Entrepreneurship Network (GEN) and tech entrepreneur; venture capital leaders Rebeca Hwang and Nicolas Berman; Casey Weston, LinkedIn's Global Head of Labor and Economic Policy; Sariha Moya, Minister of Economic and Productive Development of Ecuador, and Maria Luisa Hayem, Minister of Economy of El Salvador.
"Entrepreneurial talent exists in every country. What determines whether that talent transforms an economy is the strength of the ecosystem around it," said Graham Macmillan, CEO of IDB Lab, the innovation and venture arm of the IDB Group. "Entrepreneurs need investors. Investors need market intelligence. Governments need evidence. Universities need industry partners. Innovation becomes development impact only when those connections exist -- and GET Forum is designed to build them."
"Ecuador is committed to making entrepreneurship, innovation and investment engines of long-term economic growth," said Minister Sariha Moya. "Hosting GET Forum gives us the opportunity to connect our entrepreneurs and businesses with global investors, technology leaders and partners, while positioning Ecuador as an active contributor to the region's innovation economy."
Despite high levels of entrepreneurial activity across the region, many promising innovations still struggle to reach scale. GET Forum serves as a convening platform bringing together founders, investors, policymakers, corporations, universities, development partners and ecosystem builders - to catalyze collaboration among them. For countries seeking new sources of productivity, competitiveness and quality employment, building those connections has become an economic imperative.
Co-organized by the IDB Group, the Global Entrepreneurship Network (GEN), the Alliance for Entrepreneurship and Innovation of Ecuador (AEI), and the government of Ecuador, this year's GET Forum will focus on three priorities:
* Expanding economic opportunity through technology skills
* Scaling venture capital investment
* Shaping policies that enable stronger entrepreneurial and investment ecosystems
Artificial intelligence and digital transformation will cut across the agenda, with discussions examining how emerging technologies are reshaping businesses, labor markets and economic opportunity.
"The countries that will lead tomorrow's economy will be those that build stronger innovation ecosystems today," said Jonathan Ortmans, Founder and President of the GEN. "Connecting talent with capital, knowledge and global networks is not optional -- it is a prerequisite for sustained competitiveness."
Paulina Burbano de Lara, President of the Board of the AEI, said, "Ecuador brings together an exceptional combination of strengths: unique natural wealth, a diverse society with a deep entrepreneurial spirit, and a private sector ecosystem that believes in the country and connects talent, investment, and collaboration. GET Forum will provide an opportunity to showcase how the combination of these strengths enables us to respond to major global trends, transform ideas into impactful solutions, and position Ecuador as a global leader in innovation and entrepreneurship with worldwide reach."
As part of the GET Platform, IDB Lab's broader effort to strengthen entrepreneurial innovation ecosystems across the region, the forum goes beyond an annual gathering. It is a long-term mechanism for turning entrepreneurial innovation into development impact at scale.
Registration is now open at www.GETForumLAC.org.
See the full agenda and speakers here (https://bidlab.org/en/products/knowledge-and-connections/get-forum-2026#bidlab-widget-2186).
* * *
About the IDB Group
The Inter-American Development Bank Group (IDB Group) is the leading source of financing and knowledge for improving lives in Latin America and the Caribbean. It comprises the IDB, which works with the region's public sector and enables the private sector; IDB Invest, which directly supports private companies and projects; and IDB Lab, which spurs entrepreneurial innovation.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.iadb.org/en/news/innovation-leaders-gather-get-forum-2026-strengthen-latin-america-and-caribbeans-entrepreneurial-and
* * *
Innovation Leaders to Gather at GET Forum 2026 to Strengthen Latin America and the Caribbean's Entrepreneurial and Investment Ecosystems
The IDB Group's flagship event to take place on October 5-7 in Ecuador.
-
Leaders from the global entrepreneurial ecosystem will gather in Quito, Ecuador, from October 5-7 for GET Forum 2026, the Inter-American Development Bank Group's (IDB Group) flagship event on innovation and early-stage investment for development. The forum aims to turn ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 -- The Inter-American Development Bank issued the following news release on Aug. 20, 2026: * * * Innovation Leaders to Gather at GET Forum 2026 to Strengthen Latin America and the Caribbean's Entrepreneurial and Investment Ecosystems The IDB Group's flagship event to take place on October 5-7 in Ecuador. - Leaders from the global entrepreneurial ecosystem will gather in Quito, Ecuador, from October 5-7 for GET Forum 2026, the Inter-American Development Bank Group's (IDB Group) flagship event on innovation and early-stage investment for development. The forum aims to turnthe region's entrepreneurial drive into businesses, investment and development impact at scale.
More than 100 international speakers and 800 participants are expected to attend the high-level conference in Quito, along with over 2,000 attendees to the Innovation Village on the opening day. Confirmed speakers include Jeff Hoffman, Chairman of the Global Entrepreneurship Network (GEN) and tech entrepreneur; venture capital leaders Rebeca Hwang and Nicolas Berman; Casey Weston, LinkedIn's Global Head of Labor and Economic Policy; Sariha Moya, Minister of Economic and Productive Development of Ecuador, and Maria Luisa Hayem, Minister of Economy of El Salvador.
"Entrepreneurial talent exists in every country. What determines whether that talent transforms an economy is the strength of the ecosystem around it," said Graham Macmillan, CEO of IDB Lab, the innovation and venture arm of the IDB Group. "Entrepreneurs need investors. Investors need market intelligence. Governments need evidence. Universities need industry partners. Innovation becomes development impact only when those connections exist -- and GET Forum is designed to build them."
"Ecuador is committed to making entrepreneurship, innovation and investment engines of long-term economic growth," said Minister Sariha Moya. "Hosting GET Forum gives us the opportunity to connect our entrepreneurs and businesses with global investors, technology leaders and partners, while positioning Ecuador as an active contributor to the region's innovation economy."
Despite high levels of entrepreneurial activity across the region, many promising innovations still struggle to reach scale. GET Forum serves as a convening platform bringing together founders, investors, policymakers, corporations, universities, development partners and ecosystem builders - to catalyze collaboration among them. For countries seeking new sources of productivity, competitiveness and quality employment, building those connections has become an economic imperative.
Co-organized by the IDB Group, the Global Entrepreneurship Network (GEN), the Alliance for Entrepreneurship and Innovation of Ecuador (AEI), and the government of Ecuador, this year's GET Forum will focus on three priorities:
* Expanding economic opportunity through technology skills
* Scaling venture capital investment
* Shaping policies that enable stronger entrepreneurial and investment ecosystems
Artificial intelligence and digital transformation will cut across the agenda, with discussions examining how emerging technologies are reshaping businesses, labor markets and economic opportunity.
"The countries that will lead tomorrow's economy will be those that build stronger innovation ecosystems today," said Jonathan Ortmans, Founder and President of the GEN. "Connecting talent with capital, knowledge and global networks is not optional -- it is a prerequisite for sustained competitiveness."
Paulina Burbano de Lara, President of the Board of the AEI, said, "Ecuador brings together an exceptional combination of strengths: unique natural wealth, a diverse society with a deep entrepreneurial spirit, and a private sector ecosystem that believes in the country and connects talent, investment, and collaboration. GET Forum will provide an opportunity to showcase how the combination of these strengths enables us to respond to major global trends, transform ideas into impactful solutions, and position Ecuador as a global leader in innovation and entrepreneurship with worldwide reach."
As part of the GET Platform, IDB Lab's broader effort to strengthen entrepreneurial innovation ecosystems across the region, the forum goes beyond an annual gathering. It is a long-term mechanism for turning entrepreneurial innovation into development impact at scale.
Registration is now open at www.GETForumLAC.org.
See the full agenda and speakers here (https://bidlab.org/en/products/knowledge-and-connections/get-forum-2026#bidlab-widget-2186).
* * *
About the IDB Group
The Inter-American Development Bank Group (IDB Group) is the leading source of financing and knowledge for improving lives in Latin America and the Caribbean. It comprises the IDB, which works with the region's public sector and enables the private sector; IDB Invest, which directly supports private companies and projects; and IDB Lab, which spurs entrepreneurial innovation.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.iadb.org/en/news/innovation-leaders-gather-get-forum-2026-strengthen-latin-america-and-caribbeans-entrepreneurial-and
ICYMI - Fox News: Battle over federal courthouses erupts as GSA warns against giving judiciary more control
WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 -- The General Services Administration issued the following news release:
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ICYMI - Fox News: Battle over federal courthouses erupts as GSA warns against giving judiciary more control
*
GSA says past judicial oversight left one Alabama courthouse facing millions in repairs and serious safety hazards
Article by Bonny Chu
Published on Fox News
EXCLUSIVE: The agency overseeing U.S. courthouses is pushing back against a new bill that would give the judicial branch more property control, arguing that the judiciary has a history of mismanaging its buildings at a cost of ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 -- The General Services Administration issued the following news release: * * * ICYMI - Fox News: Battle over federal courthouses erupts as GSA warns against giving judiciary more control * GSA says past judicial oversight left one Alabama courthouse facing millions in repairs and serious safety hazards Article by Bonny Chu Published on Fox News EXCLUSIVE: The agency overseeing U.S. courthouses is pushing back against a new bill that would give the judicial branch more property control, arguing that the judiciary has a history of mismanaging its buildings at a cost oftens of millions of dollars to American taxpayers.
The General Services Administration (GSA), which serves as the real estate manager for most federal courthouse space, said the bill would allow the judiciary to assume real property authority over buildings in up to 10 federal judicial districts from the GSA, including responsibility for repairing and maintaining facilities.
The bill, the Judicial Space and Facilities Management Effectiveness Act, was introduced July 30 by U.S. senators Dick Durbin, D-Ill.; Kevin Cramer, R-N.D.; and John Boozman, R-Ark. Proponents of the bill argue that U.S. courts will be better at maintaining their own judicial facilities.
However, pointing to a 1988 pilot program that placed three courthouses under judiciary oversight, the GSA said two of the three participating courthouses ended their participation after unforeseen repair costs exceeded typical daily maintenance budgets.
Only one courthouse, the Hugo Black Federal Courthouse in Birmingham, Alabama, remained under the judiciary, the agency said.
The building reportedly deteriorated significantly and accumulated $57.7 million in delinquent maintenance costs. An analysis revealed extensive safety hazards, including improper chemical storage, inoperable elevator emergency phones and poorly maintained fire protection systems, among other issues, according to the GSA.
According to a 2024 evaluation report of the Hugo Black building, the courthouse experienced significant systemic deterioration and required nearly $19 million in repairs and maintenance while under judicial oversight. Of those costs, almost 83% were categorized as top-priority repairs that needed to be addressed immediately or within one to two years.
"The facility's unique repair needs reflect poor maintenance practices that have shortened the useful life of expensive, critical systems, including elevators, chiller plants, and boilers," the agency said.
Despite holding autonomy over the courthouse, the judiciary repeatedly turned to the GSA for technical assistance with complex repairs, the agency added. For instance, the judiciary reportedly relied on GSA service contract templates to assist with its own contracting needs.
During a 2013 budget hearing on the U.S. courthouses, Judge Julia S. Gibbons characterized the repair responsibilities as a "significant cost liability to the Judiciary's budget" that "veers dramatically from our core mission to deliver justice," the agency said.
Due to these financial and operational strains, the Judicial Conference reportedly endorsed ending the judiciary's pilot program in September 2005 "as a cost-savings measure," the GSA said.
Separately, the GSA said it successfully completed construction on the new U.S. courthouse in Huntsville, Alabama, in 2024. The project was completed $7 million under budget and features state-of-the-art security, energy efficiency and operations technology.
The GSA also pointed to its maintenance backlog, saying a "broken congressional authorization and appropriations process" has contributed to delays and funding shortfalls. The agency said GSA Administrator Edward Forst has already made unprecedented efforts to address the backlog.
"The fundamental issue at hand is outdated congressional funding and approval rules," Forst said. "I'm leading an unprecedented effort to reimagine federal building management by raising the prospectus threshold and expanding access to the Federal Buildings Fund with support from 22 cabinet members and agency heads. Those changes -not Judiciary management -are what's necessary to remediate and renew America's federal facilities and courthouses."
Forst further claimed the agency is "the most experienced and efficient building manager in the federal government."
"Multiple Government Accountability Office (GAO) studies show that breaking our model apart would not make courthouse projects faster, cheaper or better-built. It would make them more fragmented, more expensive, less accountable and less safe," Forst said.
GAO has separately found that congressional funding constraints have contributed to deferred maintenance in federal buildings and has cautioned that transferring real property authority to the Judiciary would not itself provide additional funding and would require sufficient real property expertise.
"Trials and audits have shown that the Judiciary struggles with basic upkeep and maintenance of their facilities, doesn't effectively utilize its vast space, and is not equipped with the financial resources or expertise to manage their own buildings," GSA added.
Defending the branch's capability, an Administrative Office spokesperson argued that basic facilities' upkeep is inherently tied to their work and that "the courts have a long history of managing complex business operations, such as budgets, finances, and information technology.
"Maintaining a safe, functional environment is essential to the administration of justice," the spokesperson said.
"Starting with the proposed pilot program, the Judiciary has the capacity to make property management decisions that better serve the public and the courts."
About GSA: GSA provides centralized procurement and shared services for the federal government, managing approximately 360 million rentable square feet, overseeing over $126 billion in products and services via federal contracts, and delivering technology services to millions of people across dozens of federal agencies. GSA's mission is to deliver exceptional customer experience and value in real estate, acquisition, and technology. To address nearly $50 billion in delinquent maintenance, GSA is leading a coalition of every cabinet agency and many federal leaders urgently advocating for full Federal Buildings Fund access and raising the prospectus threshold from $3.96 million to $75 million. For more information, visit GSA.gov and follow @USGSA.
Contact
press@gsa.gov
***
Original text here: https://www.gsa.gov/about-gsa/newsroom/news-releases/icymi-fox-news-battle-over-federal-courthouses-erupts-as-gsa-warns-against-08212026
* * *
ICYMI - Fox News: Battle over federal courthouses erupts as GSA warns against giving judiciary more control
*
GSA says past judicial oversight left one Alabama courthouse facing millions in repairs and serious safety hazards
Article by Bonny Chu
Published on Fox News
EXCLUSIVE: The agency overseeing U.S. courthouses is pushing back against a new bill that would give the judicial branch more property control, arguing that the judiciary has a history of mismanaging its buildings at a cost of ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 -- The General Services Administration issued the following news release: * * * ICYMI - Fox News: Battle over federal courthouses erupts as GSA warns against giving judiciary more control * GSA says past judicial oversight left one Alabama courthouse facing millions in repairs and serious safety hazards Article by Bonny Chu Published on Fox News EXCLUSIVE: The agency overseeing U.S. courthouses is pushing back against a new bill that would give the judicial branch more property control, arguing that the judiciary has a history of mismanaging its buildings at a cost oftens of millions of dollars to American taxpayers.
The General Services Administration (GSA), which serves as the real estate manager for most federal courthouse space, said the bill would allow the judiciary to assume real property authority over buildings in up to 10 federal judicial districts from the GSA, including responsibility for repairing and maintaining facilities.
The bill, the Judicial Space and Facilities Management Effectiveness Act, was introduced July 30 by U.S. senators Dick Durbin, D-Ill.; Kevin Cramer, R-N.D.; and John Boozman, R-Ark. Proponents of the bill argue that U.S. courts will be better at maintaining their own judicial facilities.
However, pointing to a 1988 pilot program that placed three courthouses under judiciary oversight, the GSA said two of the three participating courthouses ended their participation after unforeseen repair costs exceeded typical daily maintenance budgets.
Only one courthouse, the Hugo Black Federal Courthouse in Birmingham, Alabama, remained under the judiciary, the agency said.
The building reportedly deteriorated significantly and accumulated $57.7 million in delinquent maintenance costs. An analysis revealed extensive safety hazards, including improper chemical storage, inoperable elevator emergency phones and poorly maintained fire protection systems, among other issues, according to the GSA.
According to a 2024 evaluation report of the Hugo Black building, the courthouse experienced significant systemic deterioration and required nearly $19 million in repairs and maintenance while under judicial oversight. Of those costs, almost 83% were categorized as top-priority repairs that needed to be addressed immediately or within one to two years.
"The facility's unique repair needs reflect poor maintenance practices that have shortened the useful life of expensive, critical systems, including elevators, chiller plants, and boilers," the agency said.
Despite holding autonomy over the courthouse, the judiciary repeatedly turned to the GSA for technical assistance with complex repairs, the agency added. For instance, the judiciary reportedly relied on GSA service contract templates to assist with its own contracting needs.
During a 2013 budget hearing on the U.S. courthouses, Judge Julia S. Gibbons characterized the repair responsibilities as a "significant cost liability to the Judiciary's budget" that "veers dramatically from our core mission to deliver justice," the agency said.
Due to these financial and operational strains, the Judicial Conference reportedly endorsed ending the judiciary's pilot program in September 2005 "as a cost-savings measure," the GSA said.
Separately, the GSA said it successfully completed construction on the new U.S. courthouse in Huntsville, Alabama, in 2024. The project was completed $7 million under budget and features state-of-the-art security, energy efficiency and operations technology.
The GSA also pointed to its maintenance backlog, saying a "broken congressional authorization and appropriations process" has contributed to delays and funding shortfalls. The agency said GSA Administrator Edward Forst has already made unprecedented efforts to address the backlog.
"The fundamental issue at hand is outdated congressional funding and approval rules," Forst said. "I'm leading an unprecedented effort to reimagine federal building management by raising the prospectus threshold and expanding access to the Federal Buildings Fund with support from 22 cabinet members and agency heads. Those changes -not Judiciary management -are what's necessary to remediate and renew America's federal facilities and courthouses."
Forst further claimed the agency is "the most experienced and efficient building manager in the federal government."
"Multiple Government Accountability Office (GAO) studies show that breaking our model apart would not make courthouse projects faster, cheaper or better-built. It would make them more fragmented, more expensive, less accountable and less safe," Forst said.
GAO has separately found that congressional funding constraints have contributed to deferred maintenance in federal buildings and has cautioned that transferring real property authority to the Judiciary would not itself provide additional funding and would require sufficient real property expertise.
"Trials and audits have shown that the Judiciary struggles with basic upkeep and maintenance of their facilities, doesn't effectively utilize its vast space, and is not equipped with the financial resources or expertise to manage their own buildings," GSA added.
Defending the branch's capability, an Administrative Office spokesperson argued that basic facilities' upkeep is inherently tied to their work and that "the courts have a long history of managing complex business operations, such as budgets, finances, and information technology.
"Maintaining a safe, functional environment is essential to the administration of justice," the spokesperson said.
"Starting with the proposed pilot program, the Judiciary has the capacity to make property management decisions that better serve the public and the courts."
About GSA: GSA provides centralized procurement and shared services for the federal government, managing approximately 360 million rentable square feet, overseeing over $126 billion in products and services via federal contracts, and delivering technology services to millions of people across dozens of federal agencies. GSA's mission is to deliver exceptional customer experience and value in real estate, acquisition, and technology. To address nearly $50 billion in delinquent maintenance, GSA is leading a coalition of every cabinet agency and many federal leaders urgently advocating for full Federal Buildings Fund access and raising the prospectus threshold from $3.96 million to $75 million. For more information, visit GSA.gov and follow @USGSA.
Contact
press@gsa.gov
***
Original text here: https://www.gsa.gov/about-gsa/newsroom/news-releases/icymi-fox-news-battle-over-federal-courthouses-erupts-as-gsa-warns-against-08212026