Americans were more divided than ever in 2021, but everyone in the country still agreed on one thing: The Democratic Party has a messaging problem.

“We’ve got a national branding problem that is probably deeper than a lot of people suspect,” Democratic pollster Brian Stryker, who is currently working with the centrist think tank Third Way to understand why Democrats lost the recent governors’ race in Virginia told The New York Times. “I’m not going to argue it’s working right now, but I need it to work when it matters,” Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY), chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee told The Washington Post in November of the Democrats’ efforts to sell their legislative victories. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) seemingly agrees, telling attendees at a recent fundraising dinner that “Democrats are terrible at messaging. It’s just a fact.”

Climate change poses a serious threat to everything the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is meant to protect and oversee. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CTFC)’s “Managing Climate Risk in the U.S. The Financial System ”report makes this abundantly clear. The report concludes that climate change may “exacerbate existing, non-climate related vulnerabilities in the financial system, with potentially serious consequences for market stability”. Furthermore, the physical and transitional risks of climate change will likely lead to systemic and sub-systemic financial shocks. These shocks would cause “unprecedented disruption in the proper functioning of financial markets and institutions” and further marginalize communities underserved by the financial system. To fulfill its mandate, of maintaining fair, orderly, and efficient markets, protecting investors, and facilitating capital formation, the SEC must proactively ensure there is enough personnel to monitor and enforce regulations that will keep markets stable and adaptable. 

Today, the Revolving Door Project released its SEC Climate Capacity Report examining the detrimental impact of capacity shortfalls on the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)’s climate work. This report is the second installment of its Climate Finance Capacity Project. The Climate Finance Capacity Project explores the power and responsibility that each of the Financial Stability Oversight Council’s member agencies has to address the climate crisis and consider how resource limitations threaten to limit their impact. 

To truly bring an end to the Covid-19 pandemic which has ravaged the globe, the Biden administration must embrace a strategy of vaccine equity.