A senior staffer on Sen. Jon Ossoff’s 2026 reelection campaign received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for research examining how information about historical housing discrimination affects public support for reparations, according to grant materials reviewed by Breitbart News.
Bryant Moy, who serves as Ossoff’s data and analytics director, is also an associate professor at New York University and a principal investigator at the school’s Urban Politics Lab. The Gates Foundation grant summary describes his project this way: “Racially restrictive housing covenants – used by white homeowners to prevent migration of people of color into their neighborhoods – contributed to contemporary patterns of residential segregation, social stratification, and inequality. Yet, policy proposals to correct these historical wrongs have not gained broad support. Political scientist Bryant Moy will investigate whether awareness of racially restrictive housing covenants bolsters support for reparations. He will conduct a nationally representative survey experiment for his study.”
On his personal website, Moy describes a related, still-unpublished paper titled “Can Knowledge of Racially Restrictive Covenants Increase Support for Redress?” which is listed as under review. He writes there that “public support for reparations among white Americans remains divided” and that his study “examines whether informational and visual interventions that present the structural roots of racial inequality can increase support for reparative policies.”
His Urban Politics Lab biography says his broader research “uses large-scale datasets, survey and field experiments, and modern methods of causal inference to understand how local institutions produce—or undermine—equity and democratic responsiveness in multiracial communities.”
Ossoff’s own past comments on reparations
The revelation follows a Fox News report in August that resurfaced a 2019 interview in which Ossoff addressed the topic directly. “There is a debt unpaid. I think it is a very, very difficult question: how to pay it,” Ossoff said at the time. When the host responded that the real question was how, not whether, reparations should be paid, Ossoff did not dispute the framing. He also said in the interview, “Forty acres and a mule was never paid out.”
Despite those remarks, Ossoff has not signed on as a cosponsor of legislation from Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) that would create a commission to study and develop reparations proposals. That bill, reintroduced on January 9, 2025, currently has 20 cosponsors, all Democrats except independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who caucuses with them. Cosponsors include Sens. Mazie Hirono (HI), Adam Schiff (CA), Chris Van Hollen (MD), Elizabeth Warren (MA) and Sheldon Whitehouse (RI).
The Fox News report also noted that reparations have become a platform priority for groups including the Movement for Black Lives and the Democratic Socialists of America.
A tightening Senate race
Ossoff is facing Republican Rep. Mike Collins in the November election. Recent polling has shown Ossoff maintaining a lead that has narrowed somewhat in recent weeks. Outgoing Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp has endorsed Collins, saying in a statement, “Jon Ossoff’s far-left agenda doesn’t represent Georgia values, and the future of our state and country demands a different direction.”
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