There is this race going on right now in Washington D.C. The finish line is Friday at noon—inauguration day. The desperate runners are all the people who work for Barack Obama. They’re rushing to do everything they can to cement the legacy of this president before the next one takes office.

The way they are doing this: Rules. Congress may pass the laws, but the president and the agency heads he appoints write the rules. And it is the rules that dictate how laws play out in our daily lives—how strong a regulation will be, and even who gets funding.

Since the election, the Obama Administration has banned offshore drilling in parts of Alaska; put measures in place to protect funding for Planned Parenthood; and made new rules about coal pollution.

These rules aren’t brand new ideas, though. It can take years, decades even, to craft all the fine print that goes into a rule. It can take just as long to undo it.

On today’s show, the last minute rules President Obama has been locking in place. We follow the long process it takes to make rules, the scramble to finish them, and the Republican plan to undo them as fast as possible.

Music: “Blues Swagger” and “Renegades.” Find us: Twitter/ Facebook.

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Every child wants to grow up to be independent — to leave their parents’ home, find work, build a life of their own.

But that seemingly simple step into adulthood can be a monumental challenge for children with developmental disabilities like autism spectrum disorder, cerebral palsy, or any of a range of other such disabilities that affect about one in six American children, according to the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Most of them remain dependent on their parents and families for support well into adulthood, or they end up living in a home under the care of professional caregivers. Only a fraction of adults with developmental disabilities end up finding steady employment.

But some people are finding work and a path to self-reliance by working in the food industry. Parts of this industry are particularly well-suited to many people with developmental disabilities, like Victoria Reedy of Schenectady, N.Y.

Reedy is 23 years old and lives with her parents and two sisters. When I met her in her parents’ home, she was dressed casually in a sweatshirt and wore sparkly nail polish. She’s of average height now – about five feet five inches – but growing up, she says, she was a very small child.

“I was 6 years old, and the same size as my little sister who’s four years younger than me,” says Vicky.

She has a condition called panhypopituitarism, which is a problem in her pituitary gland that causes it to not produce enough hormones, including growth hormone.

Vicky’s condition affected the development of her brain as well. She struggled with a range of learning problems while growing up, and school felt extremely hard. “I struggled at just about everything but art,” she says. “I had a really hard time reading, [a] hard time writing, and learning things in general.”

Her speech was affected, too. And she shied away from social interactions. As she grew up, she depended on her parents and a close friend for everything outside her home, from getting around to handling money.

But today, Vicky is a very different person. She’s more confident and independent. She even takes the bus everywhere, all by herself. “I take the bus just about everywhere I have to go, unless I’m traveling with Mom or Dad or any of my friends,” she says.

That’s because a year and a half ago, Vicky got a job at a bakery in downtown Schenectady.

Puzzles Bakery & Cafe in downtown Schenectady is bright and spacious. The winter sun filters through the glass door and windows and fills the front of the café. On the day I visit, it’s packed with customers sitting down for lunch at the small white tables lined on either side.

Vicky is a senior café attendant here. She stands behind the counter, matching orders coming out of the kitchen, making sure the right order goes to the right tables.

Vicky also handles customers herself sometimes. She trains interns, organizes food and clean tables when necessary. Some of her favorite tasks, though, involve working behind the scenes, in the kitchen. She loves doing dishes, slicing meat and cheese on an electric food slicer. It’s mechanical, somewhat repetitive work that takes time, but Vicky says she finds it satisfying.

In the time that she has worked here, Vicky has even made new friends among her colleagues. Her colleagues say she has grown tremendously at the job. She’s now one of the few employees who have a key to the store, so she can open and close the café when necessary.

Sara Mae Pratt, 26, is Vicky’s boss and the owner of the cafe. She says she’s very proud of Vicky. “She’s come such a long way.”

As have many of her other employees, who have some sort of a developmental disability. Pratt opened Puzzles Bakery & Cafe in April 2015 with the goal to employ people with special needs, who otherwise struggle to find jobs. “There [are] not a lot of opportunities, certainly not in the way of employment,” Pratt says. Once they graduate from the school system, they often “kind of fall off a cliff,” she says.

And statistics back up her point. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the percentage of working-age people with disabilities who are employed is about one-third of the percentage of people without any disability. And some 50 percent of people who are employed struggle to complete their tasks due to their disabilities, according to the BLS. Many face compensation gaps and discrimination at their workplace, according to the Arc of the U.S.A, an advocacy group for the developmentally disabled.

The BLS also finds that those who are unemployed report many obstacles to finding employment, including the absence of sufficient and appropriate training.

Pratt knew a lot of this from her personal experience. Her 23-year-old sister, Emily, has autism. As her sister approached adulthood, she says, she and her parents worried what her sister would do once she graduated high school and no longer had any support from the state education system. “I certainly struggled with what my sister will be doing for the rest of her life. She has a very long life ahead of her.”

Her sister is too disabled to work – she recently moved out of their parents’ home and into a group home, where she could have round-the-clock help. But Pratt wanted to help those who could work, to find a sense of self-reliance and purpose in their lives.

Before deciding to open a café, she did a lot of research and found that working with food is a particularly good fit for many people with developmental disabilities. For one, “food is very forgiving,” she says. “If you mess up, [it’s] not a big deal. You can throw it away, try it again.”

And it’s no surprise that Vicky enjoys simple, repetitive tasks like doing dishes and slicing and arranging food, she says. “It can be quite therapeutic to kind of do the same thing day in and day out, and it’s something many people with developmental disabilities can actually excel at.”

There is another factor about this work that helps people like Vicky overcome their struggles with social interactions. “They actually get to take part in the creation of this food and bring it to the customer and see that smile on their face,” says Pratt. “They’re seeing this day in and day out. That’s the really wonderful thing about food, it really connects people.”

Similar bakeries and restaurants exist elsewhere in the country. Some, like Jack’s Bar & Grill in Arvada, Colo., employ people with special needs. Others, like Sunflower Bakery in Gaithersburg, Maryland, also train and then place such individuals at other businesses in the food service industry.

Today, more than 50 percent of Pratt’s employees have a developmental disability, she says. That includes 23-year-old Madaline Hannon, who has autism. She has limited vocabulary and according to her parents, she has always been painfully shy.

Now, though, Hannon works four days a week at Puzzles. She only works three hours a day and spends a lot of it serving customers, mostly during the lunch rush.

Dressed in a loose T-shirt, jeans and a baseball hat, Maddy stands behind the counter, keeping an eye on every plate of food that comes out of the kitchen through a little window on the wall behind the café’s counter. She matches the food on the plate with the orders flashing on a little screen above the window, then she calls out the order loudly to find the right customer. “Order for Mary Ann!” she says, holding a plate with a sandwich in her hands. When the customer raises her hand, Maddy walks over the plate of food to her, then wishes her a good day. She rarely makes eye contact, but she interacts with every customer as she serves them their plate of food.

And she tells me she enjoys the work. She’s been working here for about a year and a half, and she says she now has big dreams for her future.

“I wanna work at Disney World, in a bakery,” she says. “They have more gourmet stuff.”

Maddy still lives with her parents and unlike Vicky, she still depends on them to bring her to work and take her home at the end of her shift. So, I ask her if she’d be willing to leave her parents’ home and move out of Schenectady to pursue her dream. “Definitely, yes,” she says with a smile.

Her mother, Kathleen Hannon says, this job has transformed her daughter.

“[The] Maddy that walked in here the first day probably didn’t say hello to people who’d come in,” she says. “Today, she’s out there. I know she will talk to the customers. And we’ve seen a big difference at home. She’s happy!”

The job has given Maddy a sense of belonging, she says. “It’s her job. It’s her friends. It’s her responsibilities. And that’s important. We all want that. We all want to fit in. We all want to belong. We all want friends. And I think that’s helped a lot.”

She says her daughter recognizes that she’ll always need extra support, but the job has made her realize how much she can do on her own.

“She’s wandering further and further away from us,” says Kathy Hannon. “She’s looking for more independence.”

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Steve Flatow’s daughter, twenty-year-old Alisa Flatow, was studying abroad in Israel. One day she was on a bus in the Gaza Strip, and a suicide bomber blew the bus up. Alisa died in the attack.

The bomber was part of a group called Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which the U.S. State Department believed was funded by Iran. Flatow decided to sue Iran for monetary damages. But under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, U.S. citizens couldn’t sue countries.

That didn’t stop Flatow. He called up Steve Perles, an international reparations lawyer. The two knocked on hundreds of doors on Capitol Hill, pitching the idea that if Flatow won his suit, and won it big, maybe they could make it too expensive for Iran to sponsor terror groups.

It worked. And in 1996, President Bill Clinton changed the law to say that an Americans could sue certain countries in terrorism cases.

So they sued.

Today on the show, how Steve Flatow’s quest for justice put him up against both Iran and his own government—and how he shook up assumptions about international diplomacy.

Music: “Curious Process” and “Chimera.” Find us: Twitter/ Facebook.

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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau released a survey today that it says shows widespread tactics used by debt collectors to threaten consumers. The watchdog agency, which is considering strengthening regulations of the industry and its conduct, says more than a quarter of the consumers it surveyed felt threatened by the debt collectors.

“It is the most common issue that people complain about,” bureau director Richard Cordray told NPR. “Debt collection is a market with real, persistent and disturbing problems.”

The moves come at a time when the future of the independent agency is itself in question. The incoming Donald Trump administration and other Republicans have vowed to undercut the agency. And last fall, a federal appeals court ruled the agency’s structure is unconstitutional, but said it could remedy the problem by allowing the president to fire its director at will, or by allowing it to maintain its independence, but running it as a commission.

There are nearly 70 million Americans who have been contacted by debt collectors, who are often hired by banks and other creditors to pursue repayment. The CFPB’s survey found that because the creditors often sell their debts to one of 6,000 debt collection companies, the consumer data is often false; consumers are contacted about the wrong amount of debt, or about the debt of a family member. So far, the bureau has amassed 129,000 debt-collection complaints in its database.

More than half (53 percent) of consumers reported being contacted with incorrect information or the wrong amount of debt. A large minority (36 percent) of respondents in the bureau’s survey said they were contacted at inconvenient times, and 40 percent said they were often repeatedly contacted by the same collector, in spite of requests to cease contact — actions which the CFPB says are in possible violation of laws preventing the harassment and abuse of consumers.

The bureau is considering rules governing debt collectors’ conduct, including how they contact consumers, and how they verify their records.

Cordray says the laws were created decades ago, and need to be updated to reflect the modern marketplace. He says old, uncollected debts are traded online for tiny fractions of the amount owed. “For all we know, criminals are buying this and misusing that information for identity theft and other purposes,” he says.

The distinction between the original creditor and the debt-collection industry is an important one, says the American Bankers Association. The trade group says the CFPB’s survey shows the consumer experience depends on who is doing the collecting — the creditor, or a third-party debt collector.

“The report acknowledges that consumers reported more favorable experiences with creditors,” said Jeff Sigmund, a spokesman for the ABA.

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Note: Today’s show originally ran in October 2014.

Sam Brownback cut taxes dramatically in Kansas. As a Republican governor of a Republican state, he was going to enact the dream. Taxes on small businesses went down to zero. Personal income taxes went down. The tax rate on the highest income bracket went down about 25 percent. Brownback promised prosperous times for the state once government got out of the way.

One goal of the tax cuts was to get more money to flow back into the pockets of hard-working, job-creating Kansans. The other was to trim back government spending. It was part of the Republican dream.

After these tax cuts, Kansas had $600 million less revenue than before. So, to balance the budget, the government tapped into the highway budget. Towns and cities trimmed back, too.

Marquette, Kansas saw its only school close in 2014. Now, the 65 kids who once attended Marquette Elementary travel 10 to 20 miles out of town every day to go to class.

Sam Brownback has said that he’s sticking to his tax plan. But the state legislature has recently introduced a bill to roll back some of his tax cuts.

Today on the show, what happens when a state really puts tax cuts to the test.

Music: “Swamp Fever” and “(You Give Me) Nothing In Between“. Find us: Twitter/ Facebook.

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After years of planning, negotiations and speculation, filmmaker George Lucas has chosen Los Angeles to be the home for his museum honoring visual storytelling. It will display his personal collection of fine and popular art, including Norman Rockwell paintings, Mad Magazine covers, photography, children’s art, as well as Hollywood props and visual effects from his famous movie franchise Star Wars.

Lucas and his wife Mellody Hobson are footing the bill — $1 billion for an endowment, a futuristic-looking museum building and park land. Lucas has spent years planning his Museum of Narrative Art, which will include cinema and digital art. The museum’s website states, “Our collection features the original, artist-made creations, from sketches to storyboards to sets and costumes from movies.” There are plans for lectures and movie screenings, as well as workshops and school programs.

Proposals for housing the museum at Chrissy Fields in San Francisco’s Presidio were nixed by the trust that manages the park. Then preservationists in Chicago sued to prevent Lucas from building on lakefront property there. Then Lucas and his board of directors were courted by city officials in both San Francisco and Los Angeles. Instead of the Bay Area’s Treasure Island, they chose L.A.’s Exposition Park, near Lucas’ alma mater, the University of Southern California

“South Los Angeles’s Promise Zone best positions the museum to have the greatest impact on the broader community, fulfilling our goal of inspiring, engaging and educating a broad and diverse visitorship,” reads a statement from the board of directors for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. “Exposition Park is a magnet for the region and accessible from all parts of the city. As a museum uniquely focused on narrative art, we look forward to becoming part of a dynamic museum community, surrounded by more than 100 elementary and high schools, one of the country’s leading universities as well as three other world-class museums.”

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who lobbied heavily for the museum, said, “Millions of Angelenos and visitors will enjoy an extraordinary collection anchored in storytelling — an art that carries so much meaning in the history and legacy of Los Angeles. L.A. is gaining a new jewel.”

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Donald Trump has named his son-in-law to a top White House job. Jared Kushner will serve as a senior adviser to the president, and the transition team says he will work with incoming Chief of staff Reince Priebus and chief strategist Stephen Bannon “to execute President-elect Trump’s agenda.”

The announcement also says Kushner will not receive a salary while serving in the Trump administration, which could help alleviate legal problems stemming from federal anti-nepotism law.

Kushner, a 36-year-old real estate developer and publisher of the New York Observer, has been married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka since 2009. When it was reported last week that they would be moving to Washington, D.C., it fed into speculation that one or both would serve as advisers in the Trump administration.

“Jared has been a tremendous asset and trusted advisor throughout the campaign and transition and I am proud to have him in a key leadership role in my administration,” Trump said in a statement, nothing Kushner’s success in business and politics, with his role in the inner circle of the president-elect’s 2016 campaign.

In the statement, Kushner said, “It is an honor to serve our country. I am energized by the shared passion of the President-elect and the American people and I am humbled by the opportunity to join this very talented team.”

Bringing family members into the White House may prove difficult, though. That’s because of a 1967 anti-nepotism law, inspired by another famous family, as NPR’s Jim Zarroli recently reported:

“The anti-nepotism law was passed by Congress in response to President John F. Kennedy’s decision to appoint his brother Robert as attorney general, says Darrell West, vice president and director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution.

” ‘It was very controversial at the time. Lyndon Johnson in particular did not like that, and when he became president he helped shepherd this anti-nepotism law through the U.S. Congress,’ West says.”

But it’s not entirely clear what that law means. Here is what the statute lays out, as NPR’s Ailsa Chang reported in November:

“A public official may not appoint, employ, promote, advance, or advocate for appointment, employment, promotion, or advancement, in or to a civilian position in the agency in which he is serving or over which he exercises jurisdiction or control any individual who is a relative of the public official.”

The question now is what exactly “agency” means, Chang reported. This question has come up before — in a 1993 case pertaining to President Bill Clinton, who appointed wife Hillary to head up a health care reform task force. In that case (which was not in fact about nepotism at all), the judge mentioned in his decision that the statute didn’t seem to apply to White House staff. But that still isn’t settled law, Chang also reported.

“There’s plenty of disagreement in the legal community about whether that bit from Judge Silberman’s opinion is legally binding because it wasn’t part of the reasoning for the central holding in the case.”

But the fact that Kushner will not draw a salary could be key. Government ethics lawyer Ken Gross pointed out to NPR last November that the statute requires violators give up compensation, which he described as an ineffective way to enforce the law.

“So it sounds like you could have someone in an unpaid position, and then they’ve already suffered the penalty for violating the provision, and presumably, they would go on their merry way as an unpaid member,” said Gross at the time.

Even leaving aside the appointment’s legality, it could also raise plenty of ethical questions. In a recent piece, the New York Times laid out the many possibilities for conflicts of interest to arise with Kushner in the White House. For example, the Times reports that Kushner “played a pivotal role in persuading” Trump to appoint Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn — whose bank lent money to the Kushner Cos. — as director of the National Economic Council.

Kushner’s legal counsel, Jamie Gorelick — who served as deputy attorney general during Bill Clinton’s administration — told NPR’s Jackie Northam on Monday that Kushner plans to divest from his real estate holdings in anticipation of serving in public office. “He is going to restructure his business, so that he will no longer have any active involvement in Kushner Co. entities, which are real estate entities mostly in New York. He will divest a substantial number of his assets, and for any of those that remain he will abide by all the appropriate recusal requirements of the ethical guidelines,” Gorelick said.

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