Editor's note: The Brookings Brief will take a short hiatus and return on Tuesday, January 18. Ahead of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we invite you to read our latest research and commentary on the historic and present racial inequalities in American public policy.
President Biden announced his roster to fill key vacancies on the Federal Reserve's 7-seat Board of Governors, and if confirmed, these nominees will increase the gender and racial diversity of the board. However, with the hyperpartisan state of the Senate, rough waters lie ahead for the president's nominees, write Sarah Binder and Mark Spindel.
Frustrations are mounting—from lawmakers, activists, and the president himself—on the lack of progress around voting rights. On the latest episode of The Current, Rashawn Ray discusses President Biden's speech in Atlanta, the Senate filibuster, and what may happen if Democrats do not pass legislation before the midterm elections.
Climate change seems like an insurmountable problem, but there are reasons to be optimistic about concrete action in the new year. Wolfgang Fengler explains how countries are quantifying the drivers of climate change and how economies—even major ones like the United States, Germany, and the U.K.—are finally starting to reduce their footprints.
The pandemic has exacerbated online privacy threats. Online traffic is surging during the COVID-19 crisis, leading to growing concerns about people's data privacy. Niam Yaraghi and Samantha Lai share findings from recent research on the ways websites share user information with third-party sites.
The FTC and Log4j vulnerabilities. In December 2021, a severe security vulnerability in Log4j, a widely used Java logging utility, was publicly disclosed. The flaw puts hundreds of millions of devices at risk, including servers for enterprise software, cloud hosting, and web applications. The Stanford Internet Observatory's Riana Pfefferkorn discusses the FTC's response to the crisis and what might come next.
States' best chance for advancing broadband affordability. Congress has allocated tens of billions of dollars for universal broadband access and affordability. To capitalize on the current momentum, Blair Levin calls on states across America to take action now—and outlines the upsides of doing so.
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