Latest news with #Burris
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
When the baby is in the NICU, who's caring for the mom? A new model is changing that
When a newborn lands in the NICU, all eyes turn to the tiniest patient in the room. But what happens to the person still recovering from labor and delivery—especially if they're battling physical complications or mental health challenges while sitting beside an incubator? Dr. Heather Burris, a neonatologist and senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI), noticed a disturbing pattern. 'In my job, I encounter parents choosing to stay with their babies in the NICU instead of seeking their own health care,' she said. Even when a mother has a potentially serious condition like postpartum hypertension or a surgical site infection, 'they must leave their baby's bedside and go to the closest emergency room, requiring separation from their baby to get care.' It's a gap in postpartum care that's hiding in plain sight. Related: 5 reasons why NICU parents might be more susceptible to depression and anxiety My daughter was born six weeks early and spent 10 days in the NICU. Even though her condition was stable, that stretch of time remains one of the most harrowing experiences of my life. There is nothing that can prepare you for seeing your tiny baby hooked up to machines helping them breathe—a vivid reminder of how fragile new life can be. In the days that followed her birth, I was battling more than exhaustion. I experienced symptoms of postpartum PTSD, but no one seemed to notice—not my loved ones, and not my medical team. I kept showing up at her bedside, putting on a brave face, even as I felt myself unraveling inside. Looking back, I wish one of the nurses or doctors had asked how I was doing, not just how she was. It might have saved me months of silent suffering. Related: When my youngest daughter was in the NICU, I felt like I was failing both of my kids A new randomized controlled trial, published in American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology Maternal-Fetal Medicine on May 5, 2025, is reimagining how care is delivered to these parents—by embedding it right where they are. The Postpartum Care in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (PeliCaN) model brings doulas and nurse-midwives directly into the NICU, helping mothers access the care they urgently need without leaving their baby's side. 'Several of our control participants never had their blood pressure checked after they left the hospital after giving birth, even though they had telehealth visits,' Burris noted. In contrast, the 20 parents who received the PeliCaN intervention got care a median of 20 days earlier than the control group. They were also far less likely to miss vital components of postpartum care, like blood pressure checks. The doulas—deployed within the first week postpartum—offered both emotional and physical support. 'Doulas interact with mothers at least once in person, and follow up via phone, text, and video chat,' Burris explained. 'They help mothers overcome barriers to postpartum care.' That support made a meaningful difference. While nearly all study participants eventually received some form of postpartum care, Burris emphasized, '30% of controls were missing a core component of postpartum care, most often blood pressure measurements in the setting of telehealth visits.' Related: 5 ways I became a better labor & delivery nurse by being a NICU mama And in some cases, the intervention may have been life-saving. 'We found severe hypertension even in mothers who hadn't had hypertension before. Other mothers shared suicidal ideation requiring immediate intervention. I truly believe that doulas can be lifesaving.' What's next for maternal care innovationScaling this model will take time, training, and policy support—but Burris and her team are hopeful. Integrating maternal care into NICUs isn't just about convenience; it's about survival, dignity, and supporting mothers as whole people, not just caregivers. 'Her baby was in the NICU—but no one was checking on her.' That may soon change. Sources: LDI Blog Post: 'Parents of Hospitalized Infants Often Neglect Their Own Health Care' American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology Maternal-Fetal Medicine, May 2025 Publication Direct quotes from Dr. Heather Burris via LDI interview, June 4, 2025
San Francisco Chronicle
25-05-2025
- San Francisco Chronicle
The Bay Area's police nemesis is not quite ready to quit
Shagoofa Khan seethed as she walked into John Burris' law firm two years ago. Days before, she'd learned that a police officer who'd arrested her during a protest had traded degrading, misogynistic texts about her with dozens of other Antioch officers. She wasn't the only one. In group chats, officers sent messages ridiculing the city's Black and Brown residents as 'water buffalos' and 'gorillas,' and casually joking about trying to knock suspects unconscious and lying on arrest paperwork. When Khan read the texts — detailed in an investigation by the Contra Costa County District Attorney's Office — she was so appalled she dropped her phone. 'It was shocking to see it,' she said. 'It was disgusting.' Khan, who dreamed of working in public service, worried that the scandal would endanger her future. She responded by taking the case to a Bay Area lawyer whose name had for years been synonymous with lawsuits against police departments: John Burris. Burris was already clashing with Antioch over a fatal police shooting he viewed as unjustified. Within two weeks, he'd sued the city's police force in federal court, accusing officers of unlawful arrests, discrimination and malicious prosecution. At the time, Burris was approaching 80, and hoping to wrap up a landmark civil rights lawsuit he had filed against Oakland police well over 20 years before to bookend a storied career. Instead, he seized on the Antioch case, launching into yet another protracted battle to reform a police department accused of fostering gross misconduct. 'You go out and you beat these people up, call people all kinds of names? Well, somebody has to do something about it,' he said. 'I guess it's my time to do it. I don't view it as work. It's a crusade.' Burris has spent 40 years suing the police, cultivating a reputation as an unapologetic civil rights lawyer, equal parts brash, charming and erudite. His lawsuits have reshaped the Oakland Police Department, with one of them prompting the federal court oversight that has now stretched more than two decades, and have forced other departments to rethink how they search suspects, handle protesters and discipline officers. Even Burris' fiercest courtroom opponents, such as police union attorney Harry Stern, acknowledge his impact. 'He and I are on different sides of a divide that runs deep in the U.S. And sometimes the important things he has to say are hard for me to hear,' Stern said. 'Overall, he's advanced the cause of police accountability.' Now Burris — whose clients have included Rodney King and the families of Oscar Grant and Mario Woods — finds himself on shifting ground. In Oakland and across the country, the fervent calls for police reform that exploded after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 have bled away as politicians have seized on concerns about crime and public safety. President Donald Trump, who has encouraged police officers to be rougher with criminal suspects, has upended the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, suspending investigations of police abuse at several major departments around the country. But Burris carries on. At the initial hearing in the Antioch lawsuit, Khan waited outside the courtroom, anxious. Then Burris emerged, gathering her and the other plaintiffs together. She recalled a sense of relief washing over her as the attorney told the group, 'We will be holding the police officers accountable.' 'Could that happen to me?' Burris didn't always aspire to a career in law. He grew up in a working-class family in Vallejo, picking prunes and pears in orchards outside of Suisun City in the summer to pay for the school clothes his family couldn't afford. His father worked at the Mare Island shipyards, and his mother was a psychiatric nursing assistant at Napa State Hospital. From an early age, he was aware of discrimination and inequality, fueled in part by the stories of racism that his uncles suffered working as stevedores at the shipyards, or the race riots that took place at his high school. And then, in 1955, he listened in shock in his grandmother's home as his parents told him about the lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi. 'We were all scared to death,' he recalled. 'Could that happen to me?' He soon realized that he was on a different path than white children. As a child and later in college, he studied and read voraciously. Though he came from a deeply religious family, learning about America's racist past made him an atheist. How could a loving God allow slavery and lynchings, he reasoned. 'From the very beginning, he was always trying to intellectualize why the world was in the state it was in,' said Courtney Burris, Burris' daughter, a prosecutor in Alameda County. During a high school job fair, he recalled, he was told he'd never be a lawyer or doctor — but he was good with numbers, so he should consider accounting. But after just a few years as an accountant, Burris discovered he hated the job. Then in the late '60s, Burris felt like the world was 'on fire.' He enrolled at UC Berkeley and studied law. When he spent a summer interning at a corporate law office in Chicago, he ended up spending weekends interviewing victims of police brutality for a blue-ribbon panel that then-Rep. Ralph Metcalfe commissioned to investigate police abuses. After graduating from law school, he returned to the Windy City, working first at a corporate law office and later as a prosecutor in Chicago, before moving back to the Bay Area and the Alameda County District Attorney's Office. In one early case, he recalled talking to a police officer who, while preparing to testify, asked him, 'What do you want to happen?' 'That really fueled me toward this notion, you can't trust the police,' he said. As one of the only Black prosecutors in the office, Burris saw racism by police and prosecutors alike that 'was much more flagrant, that was much more prevalent, much more excused' than it is today, Courtney Burris said. That experience, she said, made her father want to balance the scales. By the late '70s, Burris had opened a private criminal defense practice in Alameda County. In 1979, Oakland police shot and killed Melvin Black, a 15-year-old who'd been shooting cars with a pellet gun. In an effort to pacify Black's family and outraged community members, then-Mayor Lionel Wilson tapped Burris to conduct an independent investigation into the shooting. Burris didn't know it, but the assignment would change the trajectory of his life. Burris spent five months interviewing witnesses, officers and experts, producing a 200-page report concluding that the shooting was the result of faulty judgment and poor tactics. Black's family hoped that might change things, recalled Marilyn Baker, Black's older sister. The officers who shot her brother were never charged. But after the report's publication, Oakland created a citizen's review board in a bid to provide more oversight of the department. Five years later, Black's family sued, winning a $693,000 judgment against the city. 'The mayor just wanted it to go away,' Burris said of the case, while sitting in his office just off the Nimitz Freeway near the Oakland airport, beneath dozens of framed articles about his past legal victories. 'It let me know, fundamentally, that police did not care about necessarily getting to the truth of the matter, but having the public believe that what they did was the correct thing to do at the time.' For Burris, though, the case was foundational to the civil rights litigation he would pursue over the rest of his career, said Dr. Ramona Tascoe, who was married to Burris for 17 years. 'It was a case in which he was able to prepare a report, analyze circumstances and propose solutions to a system that was failing the community for quite some time,' she said. 'It was really the launchpad.' At the time, as a fledgling defense attorney, Burris crisscrossed the Bay Area, representing accused clients in courts from Monterey to Placer County. The work was draining, he recalled, and marked by constant fights with prosecutors and judges who looked through his clients like they didn't exist. 'The most despised person in the judicial system is a Black man with a criminal record,' he said. 'I hated it. I felt like I couldn't make a difference.' 'High-horse' cases Burris didn't find the fight he was looking for until 1985, when he began to focus on police brutality. Civil rights work felt like a relief, the chance to finally practice law the way he wanted to, harnessing the outrage he felt witnessing injustice. 'John has never doubted himself,' Tascoe said. 'I don't say that to be facetious. He walks in authority of what he knows he's capable of.' It didn't matter if some of his clients had criminal backgrounds, and many, he acknowledged, were not model citizens. But their backgrounds didn't excuse police overreach or street justice. Burris looked for what he called the 'high-horse' cases against police: traffic stops motivated by racial bias, meritless beatings and unnecessary shootings. He relished getting an officer on the stand and laying into him. 'Those are the high-horse cases,' he said. 'You get on your high horse, ride to town, and f–– them up.' In those early years of his practice, Burris said, many people didn't take him seriously, viewing his adversarial stance toward the police with disbelief, even anger. These people didn't recognize the patterns that Burris was describing. 'You have middle-class people that have never had a bad day with cops,' said Jim Chanin, a civil rights attorney who worked with Burris on the Oakland case that led to court oversight. 'It's hard for some people to believe that some police can do some of the things they do.' But lawsuit after lawsuit sent a message, Burris said: 'Ultimately you gotta come to grips that Burris is serious.' Over the next 15 years, Burris built his reputation and a lucrative practice handling such cases, perhaps most famously assisting in Rodney King's lawsuit against the Los Angeles Police Department after four police officers severely beat him with batons in 1991. Tascoe recalled that she saw video of the violence on a morning newscast and called out to Burris, who emerged from the shower in a towel, asking why she was yelling. 'This is your case!' she said. In a key moment in King's civil trial against the city of Los Angeles, Burris sparred with lawyers representing the officers who beat King over whether the video of the encounter — which sparked the riots and made the beating international news — had captured them yelling slurs at their victim. An audio expert for the police, flown in from Germany, testified on behalf of the police that there was no racial slur. 'This was ludicrous,' Burris recalled. Armed with his own expert, Burris pushed back. The argument proved central to King's civil rights case, which concluded with a $3.8 million jury award. Burris went on to build the latticework of a superstar lawyer, hosting a weekly show, 'Legally Speaking,' on a Bay Area radio station, and writing a book, 'Blue vs. Black,' in which he laid out a vision of how to overhaul the culture of police forces and improve relations between cops and minority communities. While he preferred police misconduct cases, he took on high-profile criminal defendants, representing rapper Tupac Shakur, actor Delroy Lindo and baseball star Barry Bonds, after the Giants' left fielder was charged with perjury in 2007 amid the MLB's steroid scandal. It was all a deliberate strategy, Burris acknowledged. Being at the forefront of big cases brought more visibility to his work and helped draw in the clients he wanted. And he developed his persona: a vocal skeptic of police and a media-savvy litigator, at home both in the Oakland flatlands and on TV, where he preferred sharp blue suits. Ultimately, many of the strongest plaintiffs knew of him and came to him. And when they did, he would emerge with them on camera, letting the relatives of victims, or the victims themselves, tell their story — leveraging public fury in pursuit of payouts and reforms. 'I wanted to be front and center, to make people uncomfortable. I relished it,' he said. 'In the cases I'm involved in, they never have their side of the story told. The police immediately give a story that projects my client in the most negative light. Unless there's a trial, they would never be heard. I want them to be heard immediately.' Over the years, Burris' wins in civil court showed other lawyers how to hold police departments accountable, said Adante Pointer, a civil rights attorney and Burris protégé. 'He casts a long shadow over police misconduct litigation,' Pointer said, 'and laid the legal framework on which we're still continuing to build.' Unfinished business The case that came to define Burris was not Rodney King but the Riders. In the summer of 2000, a newly sworn Oakland police officer resigned while accusing officers he was shadowing in West Oakland of beating and framing suspects and lying on police reports. The victims flocked to Burris and Chanin. The lawsuit they filed resulted in a settlement of nearly $11 million, then the largest in Oakland history. More crucially, city officials agreed in 2003 to make dozens of reforms to the police department, changes that would be overseen by an independent monitor who, in turn, reported to a federal judge. The agreement has since cost the city more than $20 million. Burris and Chanin continue work on the case, representing the plaintiffs by ensuring the department follows the agreement. In the first 13 years, Burris billed Oakland more than $200,000, but he said he later stopped billing for his work. 'I didn't feel it was necessary,' he said. 'It was not enough money for me to be worrying about.' But the responsibility of the case, Burris said, forced him to sit down and talk to police as partners rather than adversaries. 'I developed respect for a lot of them and policing,' he said. 'I certainly understood more about their positions.' It also gave Burris the chance to put into practice many of the suggestions he'd made in his book, years before. The sweeping agreement targeted nearly every aspect of how the department trained, tracked and punished officers, requiring detailed accounting of traffic stops, more stringent internal affairs reports, better technology, closer supervision from superiors and a 24-hour, toll-free hotline for civilian complaints. 'How do you improve the department itself?' Burris said. 'You want to make the case bigger than the four corners of the lawsuit.' Burris later used a similar playbook to attack Oakland's strip-searching of Black motorists— which he likened to a 'minstrel act' — as well as the city's crowd-control tactics and use of dogs on suspects. Yet more than 20 years later, the Oakland Police Department remains under court control, the reforms mostly done but still incomplete, in what has become one of the longest oversight programs of a police department in U.S. history. Some of Burris' critics said over the years that the settlement came to hobble the department while draining the city's budget, arguing the requirements were so strict that they were essentially impossible to meet. They claimed that the Riders case was riddled with conflicts of interest — and that Burris, Chanin and particularly the court-ordered monitor didn't want the settlement to end, because they could bill for their work. 'It's become an impediment to reform, because people see it as a sham,' said Sean Whent, Oakland's police chief from 2013 to 2016. Chanin pushed back, saying, 'John and I would not let this go on if there was no reason to let it go on.' The critics, he said, 'need to look in the mirror rather than start blaming everybody else.' Burris believes the Oakland force has made great strides under this pressure, and some officers agree. LeRonne Armstrong, who was chief from 2021 until his controversial firing in 2023, is an unlikely admirer of Burris' work. The Riders case 'has truly changed' the department, he said. Noting that payouts for police misconduct have plummeted in recent years, Armstrong said, 'The culture is completely different than it was.' Change on the horizon One Wednesday in April, Burris walked into federal court in San Francisco. After more than a year of legal wrangling, Antioch had agreed to negotiate. By then, many of the officers charged with crimes had been convicted, and the U.S. Department of Justice had closed its investigation into the department, requiring it to hire consultants to help implement a raft of changes. Then last week, the Justice Department said it would step back from police reform, while dropping accountability agreements with Minneapolis and Louisville. To Burris, the Trump administration's approach means federal intervention is likely out of the picture in many of his cases, at least for the foreseeable future. In Antioch, that's forced Burris and his attorneys to change tack. If they can't rely on the Justice Department, they'll have to find someone else to oversee the ultimate settlement with the city. Maybe a federal judge, perhaps California's attorney general. Since Reconstruction, Burris notes, the fight for civil rights has ebbed and flowed. Foes of racism had to fight against political structures that actively opposed them, vilified them, oppressed them. In the South, Black lawyers had to fight for their rights in cities where the Klan killed their neighbors. And the fight went on. 'On balance, you still have to fight through,' Burris said, 'because the people before me, they fought. There's always been warriors. … And that will always be the case.' For days, Burris' clients from Antioch filed into a courtroom on the 17th floor of the federal building. As U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria looked on, they described how the police had damaged their lives. By the end of the hearings, Burris and Antioch had agreed to a tentative settlement to resolve the claims of Khan — the activist officers had denigrated in their texts — and many of the other plaintiffs in the case. Burris said he could not provide further details because the settlement was not official and the terms remained confidential. This month, Burris turned 80. He knows he can't keep working forever, but he's not quite ready to quit. 'If something new comes and I see an egregious wrong, I'm inclined to go do it,' he said. 'I don't have to have a last case. I'm not looking for Moby Dick or anything. Whatever comes, comes.' Three days after the Antioch settlement negotiations, Burris' phone rang. Police in Pocatello, Idaho, had shot and killed an autistic 17-year-old boy through a fence as he'd been playing with a knife in his parents' yard. The family wanted Burris' help.
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The rampant federal fraud that DOGE is largely ignoring
International criminal groups are stealing as much as a trillion dollars a year from U.S. government programs but DOGE has done little to address the problem, according to a new report by a private anti-fraud firm. 'It's the government's dirty little secret—this has been an ongoing effort by nation states and other criminal organizations for years,' said Jordan Burris, vice president of Socure, an identities management firm, a former White House official. 'We've been able to confirm that these coordinated attacks are pilfering government programs and doing so at a velocity that is relentless.' Socure's new report found that U.S. government programs are being attacked by international criminal groups in China, Russia, Egypt, Poland and several other nations—and that international fraudsters were responsible for up to 12% of all applications for government services and loans. The core problem is a failure to properly identify recipients. 'For far too long, fraud has been seen as the cost of doing business in government. But this is a fallacy,' says the new report, which NBC News obtained in advance of its publication. 'As Washington prioritizes efficiency, one of the most significant opportunities to reduce government waste, fraud, and abuse remains under-addressed: strengthening our digital identity verification systems.' A Trump Administration official speaking on behalf of DOGE told NBC News that DOGE is trying to implement new technology and private sector solutions to stop improper payments. But he said those efforts have been met with criticism, such as a plan to modernize computer code in the Social Security Administration. 'Doge is taking common sense approaches that have been done in the private sector and we get criticized for cutting people's benefits,' the official said. 'We are making basic changes to try to prevent fraud, we've made tremendous progress and we are well on our way to uprooting fraud in our government once and for all.' NBC News reported in 2022 that hundreds of billions of dollars were stolen from pandemic relief programs by foreign criminal groups using false identities. They included expanded unemployment relief and the employer loans and grants associated with the Paycheck Protection Program. But anti-fraud experts say the same thing has been happening for years to regular government programs, from Federal Emergency Management Agency hurricane relief to Medicare. A report by the Government Accountability Office last year pegged annual losses to fraud at between $233 billion and $521 billion annually. Burris and other experts say the true number if likely far higher. "You can only measure what you can see when it comes to identity fraud,' said Burris, who previously worked in the White House as the chief of staff in the Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer from 2017 to 2021. 'Frankly, the government does not have the right visibility. And so if you were to ask me, I would say that number--you can double and/or triple it.' Another fraud expert, Linda Miller, told CBS's 60 Minutes she believes the losses reach between $550 and $750 billion a year. Burris and other experts credit Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency for bringing attention to the issue of fraud in federal programs. But they say Musk has misunderstood the real vulnerabilities—focusing on foreign aid spending with which he disagrees and making baseless allegations of government employees with unexplained wealth. Experts say the vast majority of fraud in federal programs involves so-called improper payments — money paid in benefits to people or entities who pose as an eligible recipient using a stolen or fake identity. It's a problem that banks and private companies such as Amazon and Walmart have largely solved. Experts say it persists in government not because of corrupt bureaucrats but due to incompetence and inertia, experts say. 'Criminals are using the stolen identities of Americans to pilfer federal and state government programs at a record pace,' according to the new report from Socure,. 'New AI enabled technologies allow bad actors to use increasingly sophisticated fraud tactics to siphon billions away from programs.' 'Researchers from Socure have tracked fraud rings originating in China, Russia, and around the world,' the report adds. 'And these criminals are getting more sophisticated, deploying techniques such as the creation of synthetic identities, faster and in greater volume than ever before.' DOGE has highlighted examples of improper payments by the federal government, but there has so far been no effort to bring in new technology that might stop them, according to Burris and another anti-fraud expert. 'The problem is that no one has actually acted on it, and with the politicization of fraud, I still see no signs of them actually taking any concrete action to change course,' Burris said. The Socure report highlighted examples of suspected fraud rings defrauding government programs, without naming the specific programs. The criminals—two international and one domestic--used stolen identities to apply for government benefits, fabricated business names and internet domains, disguised their IP addresses through VPN providers, and submitted suspicious or mismatched phone numbers and emails, the report says. In most cases, Burris said, federal agencies are not using the kinds of techniques employed by private companies to detect such fraud. 'Today, in many agencies, if someone calls into a call center and says that I'm locked out of my account, many of them will allow them to get access to their account by saying `hey, we'll let you change your name and your password on here,'' Burris said. 'They'll probably ask them something to the effect of, 'hey, can you tell me your name? Can you tell me social security number? Can you perhaps answer this question about a car that you probably had once upon a time?' The person on the other end of the phone will do so,' based on easily obtainable stolen information. Banks and other private companies, by contrast, use artificial intelligence and analytical tools to check for anomalous behavior. Examples include someone claiming to be calling from Connecticut who is actually in China or asking to add a bank account that has never been associated with the presumed beneficiary. 'DOGE claims that this is something that's front and center for them,' Burris said. 'I look forward to seeing what they actually do to try to curb some of these issues.' This article was originally published on
NBC News
15-05-2025
- Business
- NBC News
The rampant federal fraud that DOGE has done little to stop
International criminal groups are stealing as much as a trillion dollars a year from U.S. government programs but DOGE has done little to address the problem, according to a new report by a private anti-fraud firm. 'It's the government's dirty little secret—this has been an ongoing effort by nation states and other criminal organizations for years,' said Jordan Burris, vice president of Socure, an identities management firm, a former White House official. 'We've been able to confirm that these coordinated attacks are pilfering government programs and doing so at a velocity that is relentless.' Socure's new report found that U.S. government programs are being attacked by international criminal groups in China, Russia, Egypt, Poland and several other nations—and that international fraudsters were responsible for up to 12% of all applications for government services and loans. The core problem is a failure to properly identify recipients. 'For far too long, fraud has been seen as the cost of doing business in government. But this is a fallacy,' says the new report, which NBC News obtained in advance of its publication. 'As Washington prioritizes efficiency, one of the most significant opportunities to reduce government waste, fraud, and abuse remains under-addressed: strengthening our digital identity verification systems.' A Trump Administration official speaking on behalf of DOGE told NBC News that DOGE is trying to implement new technology and private sector solutions to stop improper payments. But he said those efforts have been met with criticism, such as a plan to modernize computer code in the Social Security Administration. 'Doge is taking common sense approaches that have been done in the private sector and we get criticized for cutting people's benefits,' the official said. 'We are making basic changes to try to prevent fraud, we've made tremendous progress and we are well on our way to uprooting fraud in our government once and for all.' Hundreds of billions stolen NBC News reported in 2022 that hundreds of billions of dollars were stolen from pandemic relief programs by foreign criminal groups using false identities. They included expanded unemployment relief and the employer loans and grants associated with the Paycheck Protection Program. But anti-fraud experts say the same thing has been happening for years to regular government programs, from Federal Emergency Management Agency hurricane relief to Medicare. A report by the Government Accountability Office last year pegged annual losses to fraud at between $233 billion and $521 billion annually. Burris and other experts say the true number if likely far higher. "You can only measure what you can see when it comes to identity fraud,' said Burris, who previously worked in the White House as the chief of staff in the Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer from 2017 to 2021. 'Frankly, the government does not have the right visibility. And so if you were to ask me, I would say that number--you can double and/or triple it.' Another fraud expert, Linda Miller, told CBS's 60 Minutes she believes the losses reach between $550 and $750 billion a year. DOGE's work so far Burris and other experts credit Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency for bringing attention to the issue of fraud in federal programs. But they say Musk has misunderstood the real vulnerabilities—focusing on foreign aid spending with which he disagrees and making baseless allegations of government employees with unexplained wealth. Experts say the vast majority of fraud in federal programs involves so-called improper payments — money paid in benefits to people or entities who pose as an eligible recipient using a stolen or fake identity. It's a problem that banks and private companies such as Amazon and Walmart have largely solved. Experts say it persists in government not because of corrupt bureaucrats but due to incompetence and inertia, experts say. 'Criminals are using the stolen identities of Americans to pilfer federal and state government programs at a record pace,' according to the new report from Socure,. 'New AI enabled technologies allow bad actors to use increasingly sophisticated fraud tactics to siphon billions away from programs.' 'Researchers from Socure have tracked fraud rings originating in China, Russia, and around the world,' the report adds. 'And these criminals are getting more sophisticated, deploying techniques such as the creation of synthetic identities, faster and in greater volume than ever before.' DOGE has highlighted examples of improper payments by the federal government, but there has so far been no effort to bring in new technology that might stop them, according to Burris and another anti-fraud expert. 'The problem is that no one has actually acted on it, and with the politicization of fraud, I still see no signs of them actually taking any concrete action to change course,' Burris said. The Socure report highlighted examples of suspected fraud rings defrauding government programs, without naming the specific programs. The criminals—two international and one domestic--used stolen identities to apply for government benefits, fabricated business names and internet domains, disguised their IP addresses through VPN providers, and submitted suspicious or mismatched phone numbers and emails, the report says. Failure to act In most cases, Burris said, federal agencies are not using the kinds of techniques employed by private companies to detect such fraud. 'Today, in many agencies, if someone calls into a call center and says that I'm locked out of my account, many of them will allow them to get access to their account by saying `hey, we'll let you change your name and your password on here,'' Burris said. 'They'll probably ask them something to the effect of, 'hey, can you tell me your name? Can you tell me social security number? Can you perhaps answer this question about a car that you probably had once upon a time?' The person on the other end of the phone will do so,' based on easily obtainable stolen information. Banks and other private companies, by contrast, use artificial intelligence and analytical tools to check for anomalous behavior. Examples include someone claiming to be calling from Connecticut who is actually in China or asking to add a bank account that has never been associated with the presumed beneficiary. 'DOGE claims that this is something that's front and center for them,' Burris said. 'I look forward to seeing what they actually do to try to curb some of these issues.'
New York Times
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Kentucky Derby 2025 fashion trends from Timothée Chalamet to ‘Wicked.' Designers weigh in
Churchill Downs has trademarked the Kentucky Derby as 'the most exciting two minutes in sports.' But, in the words of Louisville-born milliner Mary Julia Kaiser, 'It's not just a two-minute moment for Louisville. It's a citywide season.' School is canceled the Friday before race day, restaurants are slammed, hotel prices skyrocket and a thriving hat-making industry is churning out beautiful, painstaking work. For those in attendance, the Kentucky Derby is much more than just a race. Advertisement 'People plan their outfits for the Derby much like a wedding,' says Jenny Pfanenstiel of Formé Millinery. 'It is not just another day at an ordinary event; it's the Kentucky Derby!' 'The Derby is a different kind of spectator sport,' says Today Show style correspondent Zanna Roberts Rassi, who is the returning guest editor of the Kentucky Derby Style Guide. 'It's an explosion and a celebration of self-expression, an optical feast.' That optical feast is prepared by many local and international artisans who come together to create each year's Derby fashion. We reached out to them to learn about the culture surrounding this unique sport — and, of course, to get the inside scoop on this year's biggest fashion trends. The Kentucky Derby sustains a small but thriving community of craftspeople. 'There are micro-economies that live on this event,' says Gigi Burris, who runs her millinery atelier in New York City. Last year, she made the hat worn by social media A-lister Alix Earle. Burris could be described as a blueblood of the millinery world, educated at Parsons School of Design in both New York and Paris, working with top brands and fashion designers and providing headwear for celebrities like Rihanna, Lady Gaga and Madonna. But in a call with her, Burris intentionally shifts focus from the craft to the craftspeople. 'Millinery is a dying trade, and there are fewer and fewer resources for us as an industry to develop talent,' Burris says. The ancient tradition of master craftsmen passing on their knowledge to younger apprentices is drying up, she says. 'We could lose those intergenerational skills.' Jessica Schickli, owner of Louisville-based Hat Haven, is one designer who benefits from such a tradition. Her hat-making is a skill passed down from her mother like a living heirloom. She has witnessed the Kentucky Derby evolve from a local event into the international spectacle it is today. Schickli keeps bringing our conversation back to the local roots of the Derby, the history that she weaves into her hats. Advertisement 'I have hats with jockey silk remnants in them,' she says. She tells me not to miss a trip to Wagner's Pharmacy when I'm in town. Tony Wilson-Browder is a local milliner from Tony Leon Designs whose roots in 'hats and horses' go even further back in his lineage. His grandfather, Robert C. Caldwell II, was a horse trainer recognized in the 'Chronicle of African Americans in the Horse Industry Oral History Project.' Wilson-Browder remembers growing up in Georgetown, Kentucky, going to work on the horse farms with his grandfather and falling in love with horses. He loved the hats his mother wore to their Pentecostal church. 'In my curiosity, being the Aquarius that I am, I would take her hats apart and put them back together a different way,' Wilson-Browder says. 'She loved it, and I fell in love with millinery.' Now he runs his hat-making business with his husband of eight years. Patricia Standard has taken apprenticeship into her own hands and neighborhood. Educated at the Academy of Art University and known by her professors as 'Miss Textile' thanks to her singular designs, Standard approaches millinery with a community leader's eye for the potential around her. She opened her shop, Crown by Standard, on Raggard Road in Louisville and welcomes young people from the neighborhood who are interested in learning from her. 'Even though they may not want to be milliners or textile designers,' Standard says, 'all of these things can open doors for them.' Louisville-born Mary Julia Kaiser, a nurse practitioner and mother of six, recalls Derby week from her kindergarten days, when they would make papier-mâché horses and race them around the classroom. She says hat-making 'kind of fell into my lap' one year when she went to a Derby event and was underwhelmed by the hat she had ordered on Amazon. So she 'dressed it up.' It grew from there when her sister encouraged her to open an Etsy shop in 2017. Advertisement In 2024, TODAY's Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager wore Kaiser's bouquet-inspired hats. Now, she's one of the Derby's featured milliners with her company, Derbyologie. 'It's been a joyride,' Kaiser says. 'One pinch-me moment after the next.' Diana Heron is another local who has seen her handiwork on celebrities. Owner of Derby Dianas, Heron's business grew through word of mouth until she landed in the path of celebrity stylist Ryan Christopher, and designed a hat for Olympic and world champion track and field athlete Sanya Richards-Ross. A post shared by Sanya Richards-Ross (@sanyarichiross) 'These events [like the Derby] support the local economy in the sense that a really niche craft industry hangs on this,' Burris says. 'It's more than just fashion, it's about the people.' While, as Burris says, these craftspeople rely on the business of the 'first Saturday in May,' the Kentucky Derby's success, conversely, hangs on these local artisans. It's a partnership woven together as naturally and sturdily as the woven wire and sinamay that form a Derby hat. Last year's trends were influenced by the release of Beyoncé's 'Cowboy Carter' album and the 'Barbie' movie. So, we asked the experts: What can we expect this year? The first trend on every designer's lips: 'Pastels.' 'Pastels again? Groundbreaking,' Roberts Rassi says with a laugh, referencing the much-loved Meryl Streep quote from 'The Devil Wears Prada.' But pastels, Roberts Rassi quickly amends, are a classic because they are so versatile. She emphasizes looking for 'cool pastels' like blush pinks, pistachio green and butter yellow. The color palettes popular after pandemic shutdowns were vivid, bright and almost saccharine. But the 'Barbie'-influenced hot pinks are now fading away for softer shades. Advertisement 'Pale pink is the hottest color,' says Pfanenstiel. Move over, 'Barbie'! The pastel trend is, perhaps, largely thanks to another blockbuster movie: 'Wicked.' Ariana Grande's wardrobe in the smash movie musical includes a range of soft pastels, but most iconically, blush pink. 'I think we should definitely be saying thank you to our 'Wicked' sisters,' Roberts Rassi says. 'The fairy tale aesthetic and the method dressing from Cynthia [Erivo] and Ariana [Grande] on the red carpet have had a major impact.' Look for blush pink, bubble hems, whimsical florals, veils and every shade of green on the spectrum, from pistachio to neon. In the spirit of Erivo's aesthetic, I'll have an eye out for unique nail art on the ground at Churchill Downs. Look no further than January's Golden Globes red carpet: Old Hollywood glamour is back. Think: long opera gloves, vintage dresses from the '50s and '60s, ball gowns, dramatic draping and voluminous skirts and hairstyles featuring soft lines, waves and bouffant. Wilson-Browder describes his favorite trend as 'classic, timeless, less is more.' One of his biggest influences is Jackie Onassis. While florals are a constant at the Derby, Roberts Rassi describes this year's floral trend as 'wallpaper floral prints.' 'Imagine a Southern Living bouquet on your head,' says Kaiser. 'People will ask, 'How does that stay on your head?'' And, speaking of old Hollywood style, polka dots are back! The day after the Kentucky Derby, stars will walk the Met Gala red carpet. This year's Met Gala theme is 'Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,' drawing inspiration from Monica L. Miller's 2009 book 'Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity.' Colman Domingo — known for his elite, theatrical, dandified red carpet style — is a co-host along with Lewis Hamilton, A$AP Rocky, Pharrell Williams and Anna Wintour, with LeBron James serving as co-chair. 'Guys should bring the dandy of it all,' Roberts Rassi says. 'Don't be afraid, bring the theater, bring the persona, bring the pocket squares, bring the cane! If this isn't an occasion to do that, then when is?' For those going with a masculine styling who aren't ready for dandyism, monochromatic is the trend of the hour. Traditionally, men mix and match prints for the Derby, combining lots of colors like a blue suit, pink tie and yellow shirt. This year, thanks to celebrities like Timothée Chalamet and his head-to-toe butter-yellow Oscars look, men are going monochrome. Roberts Rassi says the key here is to go all in, with a full monochromatic look: the tie, the shirt, the shoes, all of it. When you think of the Kentucky Derby — and Southern style in general — neutrals do not often come to mind. But this year, designers say, neutrals are in high demand. Burris developed a collection with Woodford Reserve featuring all neutrals, allowing people to wear their hats with a variety of different looks. She says she focused on neutrals like taupes, creams, cocoa and soft beige. 'A neutral is something clients can re-wear,' Burris says. 'I call the style 'Swirled sinamays and branching bouquets,'' says Kaiser. 'Geometric and architectural pieces with swirled fabric manipulation have sold a lot this year.' 'The fascinator trend continues to sweep,' says Kaiser. 'I'd say 90 percent of what I do are fascinators.' A fascinator, she points out, doesn't equal small. They can be quite large and 'have a lot of impact and drama,' but without the hat head. Most of the designers I spoke with point to the British royal family — and Princess of Wales, otherwise known as Kate Middleton — as the driving influence behind the fascinator trend. But this year, another classic hat is rising: the boater. 'We're returning to more classic styles,' Roberts Rassi says. 'The boater style has been very popular this year, with Kate Middleton wearing more boaters and Melania Trump's style for the inauguration.' Heron says she loves to play with fresh designs and bold takes beyond the traditional Derby look. 'For me,' Heron says, 'I learn a lot from the Nigerians. They have excellent milliners, and I love watching hours of YouTube videos showing me all the different things to do, like making leaves or taking a series of feathers and curling them into a flower.' Advertisement In the end, they all advise just going for it. While this year's color palette is softer, the spirit of Derby fashion remains one of self-expression. 'People do get very brave at the derby,' says Roberts Rassi. 'My best advice: You do you.' Standard says, 'For me, personally, I don't follow a trend. I don't even look back at my old designs because I do not repeat anything. I get all my supplies, put them all in front of me, and then let the designs come to me. Some people don't follow; they go with what's in their gut.' 'Truth is, you'll never see someone in a bad mood who's wearing a hat,' says Kaiser.
