Who We Are
Progressive USA promotes progressive values through public education, organizing and advocacy. We’re standing up for health care reform, environmental protection, civil and human rights, and women’s equality, and against gun violence. We advocate for common-sense policy solutions, hold our nation’s elected officials accountable for their actions, and take on the flawed policies and hypocrisy of the radical right.
Progressive USA uses both traditional and new outreach methods to educate and activate concerned Americans. To address our nation’s problems and implement solutions, we engage in media outreach, digital campaigns, issue research and grassroots organizing. Our work is centered around our belief that we all do better, when we all do better.
Our Priority Issues
Civil Rights
We support civil rights for all Americans, enshrined in the Constitution and guaranteed by legislation. For example, it’s imperative that we restore and strengthen the Voting Rights Act. This historic 1965 law, weakened in 2013, seeks to guarantee the right of every citizen, regardless of race, an equal opportunity to participate in our democracy. Furthermore, Congress should pass the Equality Act. This proposed civil rights legislation provides comprehensive non-discrimination protections for LGBTQ people nationwide.
Health Care
Affordable, quality health care is fundamental to our quality of life and economic well-being. In America, everyone should have health insurance and access to health care. There are many ideas for programs and mechanisms to achieve that, all of them good, and we support them. We oppose efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), to eliminate protections for people with pre-existing conditions, and to lift the ban on lifetime and annual benefit caps. We support needed reforms to address surprise medical billing and to eliminate loopholes allowing pharmaceutical companies to block access to lower cost generic drugs.
Women's Rights
We support equal pay for equal work, reproductive freedom, and re-authorizing the Violence Against Women Act, a landmark women’s rights law currently stalled in the U.S. Senate. Additionally, we support passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Equality in pay, economic opportunities and education can be more fully guaranteed if the ERA is enshrined in our Constitution.
Gun Violence
We support lifesaving reforms that close loopholes so criminals and people with mental health problems that render them a risk to others, or themselves, cannot acquire guns. Every gun purchase should require a background check, including arms sold at gun shows. Additionally, we need stronger trafficking laws to help curb our nation’s gun violence epidemic.
Peace
We support robust engagement with the world community, through the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and other international agencies and NGOs. We support existing and expanded arms reduction treaties. Our nation should help secure a safer world through diplomacy and a rebalancing of budget priorities. It is unsustainable and wrong to spend a proposed $1.2 trillion maintaining and expanding our nuclear arsenal when 20 percent of U.S. children live in poverty and our nation’s physical infrastructure, public health programs, and educational systems are in dire need of investment.
Environment
Clean air, clean water, biodiversity, open space and preserving wilderness, rainforests and wildlife are all urgent priorities. Carbon pollution and climate change are global emergencies. Environmental protection legislation should be expanded, not rolled back. Fossil fuels should be kept in the ground and carbon should be taxed. In addition, polluters should pay to clean up the pollution they cause. Our public lands should be preserved, not auctioned off to timber, oil and mining companies. We support a new energy economy, based on conservation, efficiency and renewable energy, as the path to a sustainable and cleaner planet for future generations in perpetuity.
Human Rights
We support using our nation’s global influence to end torture and the exploitation of women and children through forced marriage, sex trafficking and child labor. We must take action to expand and enforce treaties against arms trafficking, antipersonnel landmines, and cluster munitions. Emerging threats to human rights, such as autonomous weapons, must be addressed to avoid future atrocities.
Calling For Progress
Winning campaigns to solve America’s problems ultimately depends on our ability to organize people: to bring people together to call for change in one voice. While digital is a powerful tool in the organizing toolbox, an email is no match for a personal phone call from a constituent. Nor does a web signup form deliver the same motivational power as an organizer calling a member or volunteer.
Through our Calling For Progress program, we combine the old-fashioned power of the telephone with up-to-date calling technology to reach hundreds of thousands of people each year, building the membership of our organizations and amplifying their voices in the halls of power.
Progressive USA launched Calling For Progress in November 2019 to back progressive non-profit organizations whose goals we support. In 2019, Progressive USA’s program donated $81,000 in grants to 2 organizations, People for the American Way and Giffords: Courage to Fight Gun Violence. So far in 2020, our Calling for Progress grant program has made 2 additional grants totaling an additional $80,000 to 2 organizations, NARAL Pro-Choice America (GA) and ACLU (GA).
