This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio.

My guest today holds many titles.

A former lawyer, CEO of the nonprofit organization HARK, founder and CEO of the Connecticut Paid Leave Authority, and the current commissioner for the Department of Social Services in Hartford, Connecticut.

Andrea Barton Reeves has been recognized by the NAACP as one of the quote one hundred most influential Blacks in the state of Connecticut.

She was also named one of the one hundred Women of Color for her groundbreaking leadership during the pandemic.

Barton Reeves is a lawyer, business owner, entrepreneur, and now a government official.

But above all, Barton Reeves is an advocate for others.

I've worked in government since twenty twenty.

I came in eleven days before the pandemic.

And before that it was all like NGO, would you say?

Or I came out of college and worked at a large insurance company.

I went to law school, I practiced law for ten years.

I ran a not for profit for people with intellectual disabilities, and then I came to the state in twenty twenty.

What I wanted to start with, is the work you did as an ad litem council.

You did a lot of work in terms of representing children in the divorce custody nexus.

Correct, Yes, I did.

What was it that drew you to that?

What drew me to that was my own personal experience.

I'm a childhood divorce.

Ah.

It was extremely contentious, and throughout all of that, I felt that my voice and the voices of my two younger brothers just weren't heard at all.

And so when I had an opportunity to do that kind of work to help others children's, other children's voices be heard when their parents were separating or divorcing, or just dismantling of the family as the children, I just felt very called to be a voice for them, which is why I chose to become a guardian at lightem in a attorney for the minor child, which is why I went to law school, which is specifically to do that work.

I'm assuming from what I read that that took place.

You lived in New Jersey when you were much younger, Correct?

I did.

I grew up in New Jersey.

And how old were you when your parents divorced?

I was just sixteen, so you.

Were a grown child.

You were not a little kid, you were grown.

No, but a sixteen year old girl is very impressionable at that stage in their lives.

It's a turning point when your family dismantled at that stage.

Yeah, well I had a divorce.

My first marriage ended in divorce.

My daughter was five years old at the time, and it was blisteringly contentious and unnecessarily so.

And the reason I mentioned to that to you is because you know, they didn't have a progressive or overly competent ad lightem program in New Jersey back then, they did not have that.

No, they didn't know, they didn't.

Children just had to suffer through whatever happened in the courts, and you would find yourself, you know, it's really stuck in the middle of your parents' discontent with one another, and there's a lot of separation and abandonment and acrimony, an enormous amount of actrimony which children don't really have the emotional intelligence to make any sense of.

Their lives are just about pleasing their parents and wanting safety and security, and there's really not a lot to be had in relationships that fall apart in that way and where parents can't seem to bring themselves back together.

So a lot of my work with children really was to be their voice and then and to really be a voice of reason to the parents, to say, I understand why you are not together anymore.

You've made that decision, but to really think about the long term impact of what it means to have children in the middle of all of that controversy, because they live with it forever.

They just do.

It forms the way they form relationship, It forms the way they see the world.

It just does.

And I think to minimize that is a difficult thing to do from the perspective of children.

And I had a lot of parents that really got it when I explained that to them, and could at least figure out a way to make it work for the kids, even if not for one another.

I wrote a book about my divorce and it was a screed against the California family law system, which was horrible.

It was just unspeakably bad in terms of the rights of the father, whereas there's are other states that are much more balanced.

The divorce litigation, financial and custody was for a man that was a gardener for a job those divorces were over in twenty minutes in the courtroom I sat in.

Mine took a year and a half.

When they know you got the dough, they pump it from you.

Every there very versed in that.

And we did not have an ADLTEM council that I recall, but a very close person in my life did and I went to court with him, and I was stunned by the fact that the ADLTEM council in and this one session flipped the whole case on its ear by taking the girls aside and understanding from them that their mother was drinking while she was driving.

And the moment the child reported that to the ATLTEM, she walked in and just lobbed a grenade into the whole thing.

And this person, the guy that I knew, he got full custody of his kids, and the mother lost all her custody of her kids.

So the power of that position did you have.

I don't want to say what's the worst you saw, but what's the most common thing you saw?

As an adel item counsel.

The kids needed to be protected from what.

Kids needed to be protected from the enormous amount of acrimony that occurred as a result of the conflict between their parents.

That's really what they needed to be protected from, and they needed their own voice to be heard in all of those circumstances and in some of the children.

With some of the children that I represented, the parents definitely wanted the children to take sides, but children are not emotionally mature enough to take sides.

The only side that they have is the side of being wanting to be loved by both of their parents.

That's the only side that they can take.

They're really not there to be the arbiters of the conflict between their parents, and that's often the position that they find themselves as, which is why a guardian at lightened and an attorney for the minor child is so incredibly important.

And you do have an enormous amount of power in those circumstances, and to the example that you raise, it's most important to use that extremely responsibly because when you do walk into the courtroom and you hand in your report because you've been to the home eight times, sometimes I would go eight ten times to see children in different circumstances, different times of the days.

Sometimes I'd go to their school, I talk to their parents separately, I've represented children whose parents were incarcerated, and I would go up to the prisons in Connecticut and visit their parents there and really try to figure out what was going on and what was really in the best instance of children.

And that means that you have to set aside your own ideas of what you should think should happen, and you should do what you think is you should make a recommendation to the court that would help the children thrive.

And that might not necessarily what you would do in your own personal circumstance, but it's about the kids that you're representing.

I went to a therapist once who was actually one of the lights of this whole experience, a very wonderful woman who said to me, you know, your daughter was a hostage and she can't do anything to defy the other party, and she just hopes you understand that she's doing what she must do.

She's been kept as a hostage because we didn't.

Every battle I made to augment my custody was not successful.

And a man, a friend of mine, who'd said to me, stick with the boilerplate orders of the court that you have and live with it for a year.

Don't keep coming back.

You have a month or two of positive interaction with the child, and you want fifty to fifty right away.

Don't do that, he said, sit and let everything heal.

Try to let it heal.

If it doesn't heal after a year, then you know what you're dealing with.

And she said, when you're there's my daughter at this point like seven, And she said, when your daughter's twenty five, she'll come around to you and she'll understand.

Thinking, Oh, okay, I just hanging there eighteen years, Okay, yeah, there you go.

Yeah years, hang in there.

Yeah, you stopped doing that?

Did you know?

I would imagine for many people who work in something that's involved so much pain and suffering like that, did you get sick of it?

Eventually?

The reason I stopped is because the last child that I represented had her mother murdered by her father.

And I remember getting a call from the court that Sunday that said there's a two year old that needs your representation.

Can you go and see them?

And courts don't usually call on Sunday, so I knew it was bad, and I went down.

I met my client and her family and they were just taking the accused away at that point the police are still outside.

The mom was still inside, and the police.

There's a lot of police activity.

So I went with the child to another home of another family member and had an opportunity to just and watch her be loved and surrounded when protected.

By two years old.

She was two.

She was too And I came home and said to my husband, I've been doing this a long time, but I don't think I can do this anymore.

What does your husband do?

He's a lawyer, like I mean, okay, he's a contracts lawyer.

He does not have the stomach for the things that I would do.

I am a very different calling all my life.

I do, and I recognize that, and he's been extremely supportive of that.

Whatever happened to that two year old Guildiana, where did she end up going with her?

She ended up going with her maternal grandparents, who eventually got custody of her and then tried to work through some kind of relationship with the dad's family.

But you can imagine that was probably very difficult, and I lost track of her after that.

You transition, but you did all this work, and in these other organizations, you're with some pretty big ticket law firms there at ninety seven through two thousand and four.

How old were you when you entered law school?

Thirty?

So you would decide this is a decision you made, and you were already cruising down the highway career wise, you decided to get off the highway to go to law school.

Yeah, but I will tell you I knew I wanted to be a lawyer when I was seven.

I had already made that decision.

I know, my parents had no idea how I knew, but I was precocious and a reader, and I just knew that that's what I wanted to do.

So I probably waited longer than I would have normally, but at that point in time, that was the right time for me to go.

So I did leave my career at Chubb, which is where I was working, and went to law school full time.

When you graduated, did you know what you wanted to do?

I did.

I wanted to be a guardian atlightem and represent children.

I did.

It's not what I ended up doing directly out of law school, but it ended up being the bulk of my career.

Now, you went to New York Law did they have Obviously, in any law school, they have specialty programs for the ad LTEM work.

They didn't they didn't know, they did not, but it was the kind of school and still is.

They gave you a lot of practical experience, so I was able to get summer internships and jobs during the school year.

It really taught me how to be a good lawyer, because that's what you really need.

You need compassion, need really sharp legal skills, and you just really need to understand that being a lawyer is not just about the law, it's about the whole person as a client.

And that's what they taught me there, and that's what I learned at the law firms where I worked, and that's what allowed me to do the work that I did for so long and hopefully.

Well then you start your own law firm.

It did.

Yeah, why did you want to do what needs weren't met in another law firm.

Yes, the need was an eighteen month old who needed his mom, that was in need.

That was flexible schedule.

A flexible schedule.

My husband and I are adoptive parents, and we had this beautiful he was eight months at the time, the eight month old boy that needed a home and through a lot of different circumstances, we are his parents.

We still are to this day, probably much to his sugar in, but we still are.

Well.

I'm sure he's very proud of you.

I think he is.

He really needed me to be home with him.

So I started my own law practice so I could do that, right.

And so when you leave or not leave your practice, but were you still practicing privately.

I'm assuming there's an overlaper when you were the program director at Lawyers for Children in America.

Yes, I did both.

You're doing both.

I did both.

I had my private practice and I taught other lawyers how to represent children whose families were involved in the child protections.

So when you told your husband you want to have a second child, he spit out his coffee in the kitchen area said, no way, are we doing?

No room for any siblings?

I yes, Yeah, there was a lot.

I would say.

We tried, We thought about adoption again.

We thought about trying again, but at the time just left us and he was ten and figured well, we'll just raise him the best.

You had a big career by then, you were working all yeah.

Describe what is HARK.

That used to be an acronym that stood for the Hartford area Association for Retarded Citizens, and we don't use that name anymore.

It's not an acronym.

It is an organization that at Bauptestiz is probably seventy years old, that supports people with intellectual disabilities in their families.

And how long are you there?

One year?

Was there for ten years or ten years?

What kind of work did you do there?

I went in as their general counsel and they're a head of HR and I left as the CEO.

And what work did they do?

Specifically?

They supported about two hundred families and people that have intellectual disability anything for being on the autism inspectrum to severe intellectual disability in group homes, in day programs and summer camps, and working in the community through something called supported employment.

So if you know someone who has an intellectual disability, it's very likely that they're not working.

They're probably still living at home with their parents, and they're not living a full life.

And this program is designed to make sure that people with disabilities, particularly intellectual disabilities formally known as mental retortation, we do not use that term anymore.

We're able to live full and complete lives.

Now, when you're there, what is the there's two hundred families that are under your umbrella.

There, that's right.

That seems like a So this is like a what would you describe as an MNGO or you have to raise the money privately, correct or you get grants?

Well both, right.

So it was funded primarily by the state of Connecticut through a lot of contracts to provide services to these families.

There was a lot of fundraising.

It is your typical not for profit, always sort of struggling but making it work and really very mission focused and mission driven.

And I loved it.

I loved it.

My family member of mine a woman, a young woman, she had two daughters, and when she was pregnant for her third child, they found that it was Down's syndrome, and they went ahead and had the baby, and then right after the baby was born, the husband left.

They took off.

Very common.

Is that very common?

It is?

Yes, it's common that.

There are people that just can't deal with it.

That's right.

It puts enormous strain on families because you were always caring for that child for the rest of their lives.

Wow.

Yeah, I'm assuming that this might be one of the areas that's the most underserved in our society.

Is that correct, that's right, working with intellectual disabilities.

Yes, so your friend's daughter, I always say this probably encounters a lot of discrimination because of her disability, her intellectual disability, And people make a lot of assumptions about people that have intellectual disability.

Many of them are just not good, that the person is really limited in their capabilities, and in many cases that is just simply not true.

They've just not ever had a chance to prove how capable they really can be.

And that's what HARC did is really help people live their fullest lives.

When you left there after quite a while, you were the CEO, and I'll help you.

Didn't get this one wrong?

The Connecticut Paid Family and Medical Leave Insurance Authority correct.

Yes, yes, what did you do there?

I started it.

It was a law that was passed that said people should be able to get paid when they take family and medical leave.

And that was it.

It was the board of directors and a piece of paper, and my job was to make it into a full fledged state agency.

And now it is probably have served more than one hundred and fifty thousand people, probably is, I think the last number I saw it had one point two billion dollars in assets and benefits.

It's made out to people, so people won't have to do things like leave their kids in the NICICQEU to go back to work because they need a paycheck and they can't afford to take time and be with their family.

That was the whole point.

That really was the whole.

Yeah, that Ted talk you did was very powerful, well done.

That was really good.

I learned a lot from that.

Thank you.

But then, of course you arrive where you are now in twenty twenty three.

I believe you're appointed commission of the department.

So is this a position you wanted?

No, you didn't.

I didn't seek it.

Let me just put it that way.

And I was just talking to my husband about this, and I remember getting the call from the governor's chief of staff saying would you like this job?

And I had to stop for a moment and say, are you sure the Medicaid Agency and they said, yeah, we want you.

And so within a matter of days, that was the decision that I made that I would come and do this work.

It's critical.

So I'm assuming because I see at one point here in my notes that there's a number that people are worried you may lose.

That's in the three hundred to four hundred million dollar mark for the state.

Correct, That is the estimate all of the things together.

Yeah, this comes from the FEDS, that's right.

Has the federal funding of these programs, whether it was preceded you or not, has the federal funding for these programs been anemic all along?

And was it bad and now it's just going to get worse or was a period where you were well funded?

Yeah?

No, I don't think there was ever a period we were well funded.

I don't think any medicaid director or anybody who has my job across the country will tell you that it's always a struggle to try to meet the needs of all the people and to try to do that adequately because states have limited budgets.

Those the budgets that you get from the federal government is really based on a lot of formulas.

Some most of its population and need and income based, So it's really a hard thing to do.

And then when you're starting to look at the kinds of changes that HR one brings, it puts even more financial pressure on states that already have financial pressures in their medicaid programs.

And their staff programs.

So it's a harder thing to do.

And the third of our state here in Connecticut, they're on Medicaid a third a third.

The total population in Connecticut is what it's three million less than Brooklyn, that's right.

So when you're up there, what's the tax situation up there?

It's not that you have no tax, but you have a rather low state income tax.

Correct, we have, you know, I would say a pretty adequate and robust state income tax, right, I don't remember the rate is adequate.

But we have pockets of enormous wealth here and lots of pockets of poverty.

So, you know, the wealth has kind of concentrated closer to New York City in the water, you know, Stanford right day, in the places where people get to the city and make their living, and then closer to where I am in the middle of the state, that's a very different circumstance.

We have some pretty significant pockets of urban and rural poverty that we struggle with.

Commissioner for the Department of Social Services in Connecticut, Andrea Barton Williams.

If you enjoy conversations about politics and current events, check out my episode with Becca Heller founder of the International Refugee Assistance Project.

Heller organized a network of lawyers working pro bono at airports across the United States during the first Trump Administration's Muslim Man The.

Thing that was amazing about Airport Weekend is that, like, we organize the lawyers, but nobody organized the protesters.

Totally spontaneous.

Thousands of America went out and freezing shitty January weather to just be like, this is not cool.

The Executive Order was rescinded before the lawsuit.

The lawsuit we won said that they can't hold people.

But the one that we won right away wasn't about sort of the legality of the order on its face.

It was the public pressure that got the administration to rescind the executive Order and the so called chaos at the airports, which I will forever be proud of.

To hear more of my conversation with Becca Heller, go to Here's Thething dot org.

After the break, Barton Reeves discusses the changes she anticipates in Connecticut and nationwide with President Trump's new policies and how this will affect health insurance in her state.

I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here is the thing.

Andrea Barton Reeves built a legal career in both private practice and nonprofit organizations.

Her appointment as Commissioner for the Department of Social Services marks her first foray into government work.

I was curious about her experience thus far if she found her colleagues in the Connecticut State House as well intentioned and motivated as the nonprofit world.

In the job that I have now, My committees of cognizances you described in that way are the Human Services Committee, the Children's Committee, aging, and they're all led by really incredible people who do I think, very difficult work under very difficult circumstances.

We're a blue state, so in some instances it's easier to do the work here.

But we have a lot of people that are aging quickly.

We have a lot of kids that are need you know, we have a five percent unensured health rate in this state.

There's a lot of things that need to get done here, so you need to have people that really candmitted to getting that to happen.

We have more bipartisanship here in Connecticut than I hear that happens in other states, so we don't really have sort of what I would call sort of a Tammany Hall situation going on here at all.

No, but it's still political.

It still takes a lot of talking and walking around in the hallways and building relationships to get things to work.

That's anywhere you go.

But I think I'm lucky to be here.

So Trump comes in the first round, you are not in that job in the first round, and then Trump's in the second round.

What are you seeing?

What's the situation now?

You've expect the Trump budget and the Trump policies to result in what for your program and.

Your state, and it's a nationwide I would say we expect that a number of people will go without health insurance because the rules for getting health insurance have changed dramatically under this bill for a particular population, which is known in the as expansion population.

So those are people that we were able to to add to the Medicaid roles because of changes to the federal rules that allowed us to add about in our state, about three hundred and fifty thousand more people who normally wouldn't be qualified for Medicaid because of their income.

We were able to add them.

They are now specifically targeted under the passage of HR one, so they now have work requirements that they have to meet that they're very strict and rather draconian and the description of the way that some people would think about it.

And if you don't meet those requirements, then you are dropped away the way that it's defined and designed now.

And when you fall off of those roles, you're then not able to go on to what's known as commonly known as Obamacare, because if you can't qualify for the Medicaid, then you're automatically disqualified for the Obamacare, which means then you go without any coverage whatsoever for a pretty significant period of time, and then the only thing available to you after that would be emergency medical coverage, which is costly.

It's very expensive, and people usually go there as a last resort.

So we're kind of we're kind of hurting ourselves by not having these other more comprehensive programs, because when you push people into a corner, their ultimate choice is a very expensive one.

It really is, and it becomes expensive because people will wait till the last minute and when they're very, very sick, so they're going to end up getting the most expensive medical interventions.

So it's kind of counterintuitive to trying to save money because eventually you have to pay for health care in some way, shape or form.

There's no way to get around doing that.

It does, so this means that we'll have those that group of people really at risk.

Then the other side of it is a snap which most people know is food stamps.

Food stamps, but it's a supplemental nutrition assistance program that has it's always had work requirements, but it's moved up from age fifty four to sixty four.

So now we're going to have people, you know, fifty five up to sixty four.

They're going to have to find some kind of job in order for them to be able to keep their food benefit.

I don't know how that's going to happen.

So they have to find a job at fifty five.

You have to find a job at fifty five that meets these new work requirements.

And if you don't in this economy, that's right, and we won't be able to provide you with food anymore.

And food insecurity around people who are fifty five and older is an epidemic that people don't talk about.

It really is.

And so now I'm thinking, I don't know how this is going to happen.

And this is the same kind of thinking that my colleagues have across the country, which is we are just very afraid and almost you know, in a state of panic and devastation around what's going to happen to people.

Our goal here, and I think it's it's the goal around the country is to have a few people as possible adversely impacted by what's happening.

So we're doing a lot of planning, a lot of you know, thoughtful work around how we can get people to comply with the law.

Because it is the law, there's not really much we can do about that.

And it only passed by four votes.

You know, there's four votes that have just changed the trajectory of the way people get access to healthcare and access to food.

And when you think about that, it's mind boggling and devastating when you think about it in the larger context of what democracy is supposed to.

But it reminds me also of the housing thing I heard about in New York, where they're saying, well, you know, homeless advocates and so forth that I worked with off and on over the year's Coalition for the homeless and so forth.

They were saying, how, you know, just give them the cash for the rent to keep them in the building.

Just give them the rent money so that they can stay, because once they get kicked out of it, that's when the problems really really multiply, and that's when things made you, you know, give them the money to have health insurance because you're only going to end up paying more potentially.

Give them the money for the rent because you're only going to end up pay more potentially.

And I think that, I mean, I love that idea that we're going to find housing for people, whether it's in the city itself or not.

So that what you're describing is called the housing first model, which is that you get people housed first, and it's that foundation that allows people to get access to other benefits.

And we know that the housing first model works.

We have statistical proof that shows that it works.

Happened though with the last the most recent executive order that President Trump just issued around housing.

It meant that people who are now currently on house could sort of be rounded up and institutionalized, which is the antithesis of the housing first model.

It's because homelessness is not criminal homelessness really is a societal issue that we need to embrace, and so I think sticking with this idea of funding the housing first model is how we get to do the right thing for people so that they're not out on the street, that we can get them to access healthcare.

They can then have stability and be able to work.

And there are solutions for this if we're willing to do it as a country, and I think there just needs to be more of a political will to make that happen.

But that most recent I would say edict through this executive order doesn't send us in that direction at all.

Now, you are a spectacularly and powerfully educated woman and accomplished woman, and I'm wondering if the work you do is affected by you being a woman and you being a black woman, Like, do you see we're in a social services system that there are certain groups that are more disadvantage than others.

And here you are with a law degree from New York Law and everything, and you're there to try to help these people.

Are you affected by that fact at all?

Does that play into your consciousness about it?

It absolutely does.

Yes, I am extremely fortunate to be where I am right and I know that.

But my parents came from nothing.

They were immigrants that came from Guyana with absolutely nothing and came here to have my brothers and I and to create a life for us, and unfortunately they were able to do that.

So I've walked this journey and I understand it.

And you know, even though you know my dad ended up being a doctor and my mother ended up being a psychiatric nurse, we were raised while they were getting those educations, so we didn't have anything.

We didn't grow up the way that doctors childrens grow up.

We had a lot of poverty, a lot of struggle, So we understand that.

And then when my parents divorced, it was just my mom and my brothers and I and she didn't really have any money.

She got paid what nurses get paid, which wasn't very much.

So we had snap, we had food stamps, we had government cheese, we had all of those things.

We had the lights turned off, we had the water turned off.

I've lived this journey.

I've lived it.

But she passed away last September.

But she was a person of extraordinary strength that never made any excuses, and she would just say we go on those are her words, it's tough.

We go on and I learned from her to be the person that I am, and she taught us that we have an obligation to do more and do better.

And she did not make all the sacrifices that she made for me to feel like I'm privileged and don't have an obligation to do for others.

This is in my blood, this is what I do.

I am absolutely built to be an advocate.

And it's amazing how people like yourself, who are mentored by a mother like that or a parents like that, you see their success rate, and then you see the success rate is less for those who don't have that.

They don't have a parent who can teach them where they can go, what they can do, how they can spread their wings and fly.

I mean, I've got I'm sixty seven years old, i have a two year old baby.

I got seven kids.

And the number one thing is when they reach these transitional ages.

When you see a child move from two to three, three to four, and then they get to be like seven, they cross the line of maybe six is my recollection now with my one child, and they start to be much more curious about the world.

How do you teach your kids to face things.

That's the challenge for me every day.

You know, gradually there's a lot of joy I see that you have with your family, and that's a beautiful thing and a gift.

We have, as I mentioned, our one son, and we've poured everything that we have into him.

But the one thing that we've taught him is that he lives in an enormous amount of privilege because his dad and I made a lot of sacrifices to make that happen.

Because my husband is also the same way, grew up in Newark, New Jersey, food stamps, not a lot of money, working class family.

We understand that we have a lot of privilege, and we have taught our son that it's about character, it's about the kind of person that you are.

It's using your privilege and your access to do good and make a better life for other people.

We do not indulge him, and we never have, and we've said to him, you owe others because you have had so much, and you've had a lot more than we ever had.

So we've done that through example and through overt teaching, through raising him in religious communities, sending him to mission trips, and making sure that he sees us volunteer and show up in the community.

And that's the example you want to be.

You need to be a global citizen, and you need to be a responsible citizen with the gifts that you've been given.

So Trump comes in the second time, and I'm not someone who I've lost my appetite for the Trump bashing thing, but it is stark.

It is heartbreaking for me to see a society that has all this money and is willing to give all these tax breaks to people and to put us further in debt when we're Bavie was a crisis level of debt federally as it is, and to cut all this money to just give people hand up to be a part of this society we have.

We don't want to give them a ceiling and say well you have to have this much, but they have to have a floor.

They have to have food, education, medicine, housing and beyond.

And I'm thinking, are you are people in your office?

Are they scared?

They are extraordinarily concerned.

I think when we first started, we were frightened about how dracone these changes would be and how fundamentally different the programs that we administer would become as a result of of whatever we thought the final bill.

There were many iterations of this bill and we had a lot of sleepless nights following it, back and forth from the House to the Senate, that different visions in the House, different versions in the Senate, and what we ended up with, we think was pretty close to what we anticipated we would end up with.

So we had anticipated some of the changes, but some of them we did not, because you just didn't know what was going to happen at the end.

This is what's happening right now.

This is not new, and I think this is what people really need to understand.

This has happened to us as a nation for decades.

There's always been this fundamental misapprehension about why poor people are poor, and that is because there's an understanding that they are lesser than others that are not that being poor is in many ways perceived to be by other's a self inflicted wound that if you were to just work harder and if you were more industrious, that somehow you wouldn't find yourself in these circumstances, and then somehow you would have the same access to resources as everyone else.

Does, Well, we know that that thinking is very deeply flawed because we have so many foundations of discrimination in this nation, whether it's against women, people of color, people who are poor, people who are immigrants, that there really was no way there for anyone to be on an equal playing field with others, for us not to be where we are, even during the New Deal, right with the Roosevelt administration that came about because of the destitution that people were experiencing, because it was happening during the Depression.

But even in his own thinking, if you were to read some of the works that in some of the work around Roosevelt and his thinking at the time, even he was reluctant to be as expansive in the New Deal as he was because he believed that people really needed to bring themselves up by their bootstraps.

But that assumes that there's an equal footing that everyone can take hold of and look forward, and in this nation that has never been the case.

It's never been true.

You asked me earlier about being a black person and being a woman, Well, you know, that intersection of identity was one that just didn't I would have had no rights even two hundred years ago right that I would not I couldn't vote, and I wasn't even a whole person, but I was even considered a full human being in the foundational documents of this nation.

So under those circumstances, there is no way for me to have equal footing with others, for me to not be poor, to not have access to the same kinds of things that people have.

But if you want to talk your self into believing that that's the narrative, then it gives you the license to make the kinds of decisions that are that were being made.

But back in the Reagan administration, this is how decisions were made to cut food programs, to cut back on foodstamps, to create block brands for heating assistance.

It was the same kind of thinking.

Poor people are poor because of what they do and what they haven't done.

This is just a new iteration of that same kind of thinking that we're more cognizant of because it's just so much more dramatic and it's cut.

But it's not a new way of thinking for this country at all.

Andrea Barton reeves, if you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow.

Here's the thing on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts when we come back.

Barton Reeves on whether she would consider running for public office in Connecticut.

I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to hear the thing.

Andrea Barton Reeves's career has taken an unpredictable path from ad litem law to CEO of HARK, which provides support to the intellectually and developmentally disabled, to creating Connecticut's paid Family and Medical Lead program, with her focus always on advocating for others.

I was curious whether or not she would consider running for office.

One day.

Oh my goodness, have you been talking to my friends?

Maybe I have.

You'll never know.

I would never know.

No, I have not considered that.

I think I would stay in state service.

I would love to be able to continue to do the work that I'm doing, or something else that helps people who are disadvantage, for low income disabled.

This is what I think I was born to do.

I think it's why I'm here, and I feel like I do this work exceptionally well because it is in my DNA.

It is what I was destined to do.

Now, talk about this other Masters of Arts and Religion program.

What is a Master of Arts in Religion program?

And you're going where to Yale?

I am going to Yale?

What is it?

What are you going there for?

So I'm getting a Master of Arts and Religion and ethics.

So my goal once I leave is to be able to help other leaders who work in the spaces that I work in in advocacy and not for profit and government, to really be able to have more of a stronger intersection between their own personal beliefs.

They don't have to be religious beliefs, they just have to be, you know, their own personal philosophy and the work that they're being called to do, because often you're asked to separate those things.

You're either working in an environment where you sort of set aside your morals and your values, or you're working in environment that you're completely immersed in your morals and your values, and it's really hard to make those things integrated.

You really have an opportunity to do that.

My goal is to really help leaders figure out how to do that, because I feel fortunate that I've been able to figure out how to do that, which is why I get so much joy from the work that I do.

Even under the circumstances and that we're talking about today, I still feel like there's a chance for me to help people live a better life.

I can take the circumstances that have been handed to us through this bill and still try to find a way to make access to healthcare and access to food possible for people by using my imagination and my experience and my education.

And I want other leaders to feel just as hopeful, even when the circumstances are prevented with they're presented with may seem untenable.

So it's not about you either having people in the workspace, regardless of what it is, embrace the moral components of the work they do, or asking them to face the moral components of the work that they do.

It's not about that, is it.

Kindly about that?

Is?

It is not that compelling.

It's about being unafraid to face the moral decisions that you need to make right.

It's really it's taking in the entire circumstance of what it means to make a life changing decision.

That's what I do every day, right for a million people.

When we have a budget of nine billion dollars for our medicaid budget, every single one of those dollars represents a decision about who gets what and when and the quality of the care that they get.

So if I sat back and thought about it, I would say, oh, you know, this is a huge responsibility.

You know who would voluntarily take it.

But if you have a chance to make that kind of change in a person's life, I believe that it's really your moral obligation and your responsibility to embrace it, because who else but you who's thinking about the intersection of what you can do morally and what you can do in a more expansive way for lots of people so they can all be lifted and live a better life.

We very rarely get a chance to do that kind of work in our lives, we really do.

We can do it in small places, we can do it, you know, intermittently, But when you get a chance to do it on a large scale.

I did with paid family and medical eve and I'm doing now.

You have to embrace it.

But many people are afraid to embrace it because they're afraid of all the moral hazards that come with it.

My role now is to say you need to embrace those moral hazards, not be afraid of them, but equip yourself to deal with them so that you can lead exceptionally and really help people to live fully as they're intended to.

And you can do that, and I hope I'm an example of that in some ways, and I'd like to teach other people how to do that.

I want to ask you in the last couple of minutes we have here, which is, what does someone who is immersed in many of life's most difficult problems?

What do you do to escape and unwind?

What do you do and your husband do?

Where do you go?

Well?

We're big moviegoers, but okay, okay, we are.

The Hallmark channel might have something soothing.

Well, they have a little bit more to do that.

We're more sort of Maravel movie You are you are?

Reallys Yes, We're more along those lines because I think you're right for him, it's less of an issue for me.

I do struggle with the moral of the normalization of violence in media in general, not just movies, So I personally struggle with that, and he respects that.

We take a lot of long walks, We spend a lot of good, great quality time together.

We're both voracious readers.

Do you like to get out of town.

You like to go away anywhere I do.

We just got back from Bermuda, which did nice love.

Yeah, we just love these long vacations.

It was beautiful and you get to decompress and unwind, Yes, from your tough, tough, Quotitian chores there.

Yes that I love.

As I say, I believe that I am built for this and all to do this work.

So it's it's a for me.

There's a strange joy that comes to being able to share what I've learned throughout my life to help make things better.

Well, the state of Connecticut is lucky to have you.

They're lucky to have you.

You're a very substantial human being.

Thank you.

It's my pleasure to speak with you.

Appreciate it.

Connecticut Commissioner for the Department of Social Services, Andrea Barton Reeves.

This episode was recorded at c d M Studios in New York City.

Were produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice, and Victoria De Martin.

Our engineer is Frank Imperial.

Our social media manager is Danielle Gingrich.

I'm Alec Baldwin.

Here's the thing, as brought to you by iHeart Radio.