President Joe Biden on Tuesday called the deadly supermarket shooting in Buffalo, N.Y. an act of terror and excoriated the white supremacist ideology that inspired the alleged gunman, but he stopped short of announcing a political agenda in the massacre’s aftermath.

“What happened here is simple and straightforward: terrorism,” Biden said during a visit to Buffalo. “Terrorism. Domestic terrorism. Violence inflicted in the service of hate, and a vicious thirst for power that defines one group of people being inherently inferior to any other group.”

In an emotional speech before the victims’ families, local officials, and community leaders, Biden assumed a familiar role of grief counselor and empathizer-in-chief; his first wife and daughter were killed in a car accident in 1972, and his son Beau died of cancer in 2015. “The day’s going to come where the loved one will bring a smile as you remember him or her, a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye,” the President told the families gathered at the Delavan-Grider Community Center on Buffalo’s East Side.

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The setting was minutes away from the Jefferson Avenue Tops where the suspected assailant, Payton Gendron, killed 10 people on Saturday. Gendron, 18, allegedly drove more than 200 miles from Conklin, N.Y. to carry out the attack in a predominantly Black neighborhood. Officials said he scoped out the grocery store a day earlier, with the deliberate intent of killing as many Black people as possible. He said as much in a 180-page manifesto he posted on the internet hours before the carnage, espousing what is known as “replacement theory”—the belief that a cabal of elites is systematically replacing white people with ethnic minorities.

The President took aim not only at Gendron’s warped worldview, but also alluded to right-wing media personalities and politicians who have amplified versions of “replacement theory.” Biden didn’t call anyone out by name, but suggested prominent figures bore moral responsibility for the movement they were helping to grow. “I call on all Americans to reject the lie, and I condemn those who spread the lie for power, political gain, and for profit,” he said.

Read More: How the ‘Great Replacement Theory’ Has Fueled Racist Violence

“White supremacy is a poison,” Biden said. “It’s been allowed to fester and grow before our eyes. No more.”

Biden didn’t use the occasion to push for any policy prescriptions, whether by calling for more restrictions on guns or a crackdown on social media platforms that become havens for hate speech. He told reporters before boarding Air Force One on Tuesday that he has “to convince Congress to go back to what I passed years ago,” referring to an assault weapons ban he helped pass as a Delaware Senator in the 1990s that expired in 2004. “It is going to be very difficult, but I am not going to give up.” In an evenly split Senate, Democrats almost certainly don’t have the votes to pass such a measure.

Several people who attended Biden’s speech appreciated his focus on the community’s grief instead of on Washington gridlock. “I don’t think he wanted to politicize the visit,” Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown told TIME shortly after Biden’s speech. “He met with 10 families of loved ones who were taken from them by a racist, domestic terroristic attack on this community. I think he wanted to show his concern and his empathy and his compassion for the families.”

The family members of victims agreed. “It was a heartfelt, beautiful speech, man,” said Wayne Jones, whose mother Celestine Chaney was killed in Saturday’s attack. “He hit it right on the nose.”

Chaney’s grandson, Phillip Bell, also said he valued the President’s remarks. “You can tell it was genuine, and it was really touching to know that he took time out of his busy schedule,” Bell told TIME in the bleachers, minutes after Biden left the auditorium. “There’s a lot of people hurting now.”

Both Jones and Bell met with Biden backstage with the rest of their extended family before his address. There, they say, Biden was more forthcoming about his policy goals; Jones says the President told them he would push for an assault weapons ban.

For now, though, any looming policy fight isn’t at the forefront of Jones’s mind. He’s still waiting for authorities to release his mother’s body, and he’s planning her funeral in the coming days. “I just wish I had her back,” Johnson said. “All of this is nice and fine, but I’d rather have my mom.”

As parents across the country frantically search for baby formula amid a nationwide shortage, many have heard that the source of the problem is in Sturgis, Mich. That’s where Abbott, the multinational healthcare giant that sells formula under the Similac, Alimentum, and EleCare brands and controls 40% of the U.S. infant formula market, shut down its largest baby food plant in February after a type of bacteria linked to the hospitalization and death of several babies was found in the plant. (Abbott maintains there is not conclusive evidence its formulas harmed children.)

But the reason one plant shutting down has had such an outsized impact on the nation’s baby food supply can be traced to Washington, specifically decisions made in the 1980s in Congressional hallways and beleaguered bureaucratic agencies.
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Like most issues in Washington, the baby food shortage is a multifaceted one, but it comes down to a simple mismatch between supply and demand. Millions of families use baby formula, and too few brands supply it, leading to catastrophic shortages when just one of the major brands has a lapse in production.

By six months of age, roughly three-quarters of babies born in the U.S. are given at least some formula, according to 2020 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But lower-income moms are more likely than higher-earning ones to use formula over breastfeeding and start their babies on it earlier in life, due, in part, to the absence of national paid parental leave policies and less flexibility for mothers in service-industry jobs to breastfeed.

Read more: 5 Parents on the Stress of Feeding Their Babies Amid Formula Shortage

Many of those mothers end up taking part in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infant, and Children, also known as WIC, which is run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Through state agencies, WIC gives families earning at or below 185% the federal poverty line vouchers and electronic cards to purchase baby formula on the government’s dime. In 1989, Congress, hoping to keep WIC’s costs down, passed legislation requiring states to use competitive bidding to select one manufacturer of infant formula to be covered by WIC.

Roughly half to two-thirds of formula purchased in the U.S. is bought through WIC, according to government estimates. With so many low-income parents relying on formula, the move by Congress led to the bid winners in each state dominating the formula market there. That spurred the kind of intense consolidation in the U.S. formula industry that has not been seen in many other parts of the world.

Since the single-contract rule was established more than 30 years ago, only three companies–Abbott, Gerber, and Mead Johnson—have received those WIC contracts. Their control over the market has disincentivized the creation of new brands, which is why the recent loss of Abbott’s products from store shelves has left many parents with few alternatives.

As of May 8, 43% of the top-selling infant formula products were out of stock across the country, according to software platform Datasembly, with the range of standard shortages falling between 2% and 8%.

“The extremely high levels of concentration in the infant formula market creates a serious risk to infant health if there is any disruption to a major manufacturer’s supply,” Senators Cory Booker of New Jersey, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, and five other Democratic Senators wrote to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack last week, calling for an “immediate antitrust review.”

“This is yet another example of how alarming levels of consolidation hurts American families and can no longer be ignored,” they added.

‘Infant formula is the most regulated food that exists’

In Michigan, mother Elyssa Schmier is among those flummoxed by the empty baby formula shelves at her local grocery stores. She had hoped to exclusively breastfeed her son, who is eight months old, but her body wasn’t producing enough milk—even when she woke up every three hours to pump. Her doctor advised her to supplement with formula, which now makes up approximately 60% of her son’s bottles when she can find it in stores.

Schmier, a vice president with MomsRising, which advocates for issues facing mothers and families, expressed frustration with seeing people use the moment to guilt moms for using formula when exclusively breastfeeding a child isn’t feasible for many, especially after they have begun tapering. “The best way to feed a child,” she says, “is to feed a child.”

In Washington, many of the proposed solutions to Schmier’s dilemma are focused on the immediate crisis.

The Biden Administration has urged states to temporarily loosen regulations around what brands and sizes of formula parents are able to purchase with WIC. A White House official told reporters on Monday that the Administration was also working with the four largest formula brands to identify hurdles to increasing supply domestically; the Administration also announced it would expedite the application and approval process for the importation of non-domestic formulas.

That process normally moves at a snail’s pace due to strict safety regulations governing baby formula. “Infant formula is the most regulated food that exists, by far,” says Dr. Steven A. Abrams, a professor at the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin and the chairman of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Committee on Nutrition. “The reason being that if you leave a component out, the baby can have severe brain damage and die.”

But international brands are also disincentivized from exporting their baby formula to the U.S. by tariffs as high as 17.5%. Rep. Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, is working on a bill that would temporarily waive such tariffs on baby formula products.

Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a Virginia Democrat, agrees that there needs to be some form of tariff reduction. “The fastest way to get more formula onto the shelves, at least in the short term, is going to be tariff relief,” she told TIME Monday.

Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle, including Sen. Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, and Spanberger, have also urged the Biden Administration to consider invoking the Defense Production Act, a law originally passed amid the Korean War that gives presidents broad powers to control domestic industries during emergency situations. Both Biden and former President Donald Trump invoked the DPA to speed up production of supplies needed to combat the pandemic. “There is ample precedent for using the DPA to address a crisis in peacetime,” Rubio said in a statement last week.

But after the current crisis is over, and grocery stores are back to being fully stocked with formula, the underlying consolidation issue will remain, as well as the potential for similar shortages in the future. Addressing that problem would require a major overhaul of WIC, the kind that some experts who follow the issue are skeptical will happen any time soon.

“There’s still not an awareness that one of the government’s key roles is to structure markets, so that you don’t have fragile supply chains,” says Matt Stoller, the director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, an antitrust advocacy group, and the author of Goliath: The Hundred Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.

Spanberger says there also needs to be more transparency about possible shortages. She and a Republican colleague have drafted a bill that would require baby food manufacturers to inform the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) if they anticipate shortages moving forward, like manufacturers of other products do already. “There are certain requirements on various different types of industries that if they are anticipating supply chain disruptions or shortages, that they are to make that known to FDA,” she says, while acknowledging that the proposal wouldn’t solve the current shortages. “This legislation, unfortunately, won’t help us in the here and now,” she says.

In the more immediate future, Abbott announced on Monday that it had reached a deal with the FDA to resume operations at its plant in Sturgis as soon as within the next two weeks after the plant addresses safety concerns.

This won’t solve Schmier’s problems overnight, though. Abbott has previously said that once that plant was running again, it would take six to eight weeks for baby formula from there to return to store shelves.

—with reporting by Alana Semuels in New York

The Tops supermarket on Buffalo’s Jefferson Avenue is surrounded by streets lined with dilapidated houses. Around the corner is a small strip with two barbershops, a nail salon, and a heavily guarded M&T Bank. On most days, this part of town sees little foot traffic. But on Monday, it was filled with television news crews and local church groups offering free food to a community that had just experienced a massacre.

The gunman accused of killing 10 people here over the weekend made no secret about his motive. He came to Tops “to take as many Black lives as possible,” as Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said. And the suspect, Payton Gendron, did not arrive there by accident.

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Gendron allegedly posted a racist manifesto online before the massacre. He wrote the N-word on the gun he used in the attack, according to The Buffalo News. And law enforcement officials confirmed that the 18-year-old from Broome County, N.Y.—more than a three-hour drive from the Queen City—had conducted reconnaissance on the Tops location, with the intent of capitalizing on the neighborhood’s concentration of Black people.

In deliberately targeting a grocery store in the heart of Buffalo’s Black community, the accused assailant took advantage of the fact that Buffalo is one of the most racially segregated cities in America. Roughly 85% of the city’s Black residents live in the economically devastated East Side.

This too is no accident. It’s a legacy that dates to World War I, when Buffalo was a major steel city producing much of the machinery American forces were using in Europe. That led to an abundance of jobs in the Western New York city, where Black Americans soon came in search of economic opportunity.

It didn’t take long, however, for racial tension and violence to erupt in the 1910s. The city’s public officials quickly responded by restricting Blacks from living in white neighborhoods. Buffalo’s City Hall and New York state government enacted racist zoning laws, while white property owners began to use restrictive covenants to prevent their homes from later being sold to Black families, according to research by the Partnership for Public Good, a Buffalo think tank.

Restrictive covenants were outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1948, but racist federal policy housing continued. Black people were denied FHA mortgage loans through redlining, which made it harder for them to buy homes at all, let alone in middle-class neighborhoods.

“The history of segregation is the history of institutionalized racism in our governments, in our banks, in the extension of credit and opportunity to white people that was intentionally not made available to Black people,” says Miles Gresham, a policy fellow at the Partnership for Public Good.

The problem got worse in Buffalo after World War II, when the construction of a highway in the 1950s and ’60s split the city in half. The Kensington Expressway, just a few blocks from the Tops store, destroyed a growing Black neighborhood and cut the city into an East and West Side.

“The Kensington Expressway made it easier for white people who had engaged in white flight and moved out into the suburbs to still travel to the economic centers of the area,” Gresham says. It also created a new reality in which everything east of the highway—a portion of Buffalo that was already heavily Black—fell into poverty and economic disrepair. The rest of the town fared much better. Today, more than one-third of the city’s 255,000 residents live below the poverty line. Most of them reside on the East Side.

For this part of Buffalo, the opening of the Jefferson Avenue Tops was a big deal. In 2003, then-Senator Hillary Clinton came for the ribbon cutting. Until Tops arrived, the neighborhood was an infamous food desert, without a grocery store in walking distance. It was an acute problem for the community, particularly since many of its impoverished residents didn’t have access to a car.

Betty Jean Grant, a longtime Buffalo politician who pushed for public funding for the Tops when she was on the Buffalo Common Council, says the area was blighted then. “In the 1990s, to have a white person walking east of the Humboldt Expressway or the 33, would have been like a ghost,” Grant says. “They’d be like somebody from Mars, because people did not walk on the East Side of Buffalo.”

Buffalo as a whole has enjoyed something of a renaissance over the past decade, from the building of Canalside—a redeveloped district that has revived the town’s Lake Erie waterfront—to the expansion of commercial strips and a new medical campus downtown. Yet the working-class Black neighborhoods on East Side have remained neglected, leaving Buffalo one of the poorest large cities in America.

“The fact that there’s only one grocery store on the East Side that serves Black communities is a choice,” says India Walton, an activist and former Democratic candidate for mayor. “This is not something that’s, like, accidental. No one cares about Black people on the East Side of Buffalo.”

It’s why activists like Walton, now a senior adviser for the Working Families Party, are pushing not only for policy action to combat racism and extremist violence but also for the city’s leaders to address the legacy of segregation and inequality that has plagued Buffalo for a century.

“People are tired,” Walton says. “I’m personally ready to burn this sh-t down. You can put that on the record. We’re not taking this anymore.”