As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of Americans have fallen into poverty. Over ten million are unemployed, and parents are having to choose between paying rent and feeding their children. Among the myriad questions in the wake of the COVID-19 is how should the United States should help people to meet their basic needs during a crisis of this magnitude. Our chapter attempts to provide an answer. In doing so, our chapter makes three contributions. First, it summarizes how Congress and federal agencies responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with various changes to safety net programs. Second, this chapter enters a scholarly conversation that reaches beyond welfare programs. In recent years, legal academics have drawn attention to the sclerotic nature of national lawmaking. Our chapter joins this ongoing conversation by applying those insights to the specific context of the safety net. Specifically, it suggests that, given the challenges associated with Congress acting quickly to alter safety net programs in the midst of national emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress should now focus on legislating mechanisms, such as automatic stabilizers, that would make these programs more responsive. Third, the chapter moves from the conceptual back to the practical, outlining how Congress could enact these automatic stabilizers in the tax code, the Social Security Act, the Food Stamp Act, and the Medicaid Act.

Ecolabeled green buildings can have a diverse array of characteristics. Their superior environmental performance can include things like energy efficiency or water efficiency; using cleaner and lower carbon energy sources; sourcing construction materials with sustainable practices; or site selection for the buildings so as to reuse and rehabilitate brownfields or encourage use of public transportation or bicycles. The multidimensional nature of “greenness” for green building is an essential feature of these ecolabels and the Green Building Movement more broadly. The holistic approach to greener buildings embraces flexibility, diversity, and innovation over strictly prescriptive or one-size-fits-all approaches. In this chapter we unpack the diversity of green buildings using attributes such as the publicness and the private marketing benefits of an organization’s ecolabeling strategy to provide improved understanding of the manner in which firms certify green. Green building strategies are classified as altruist, pragmatist, green club, and greenwash. By providing better understanding of green building strategies, our understanding of sustainability strategies by firms and organizations is enhanced.