Contra Matt Yglesias, Biden appointees with extensive ties to big business did real damage to his agenda; Harris should not make the same mistake.
This newsletter was originally published on our Substack. Read and subscribe here.
Matt Yglesias on August 4 argued in his weekly Bloomberg opinion column that if she wins in November, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris should cultivate a business-friendly executive branch. His argument relies on two dubious claims: 1) the risible notion that not many corporate revolvers made it into the Biden administration and 2) that Harris should be less scrupulous about the professional backgrounds of potential nominees because the private sector is a vast pool of talent which would be foolish to overlook. Yglesias repeated this argument in an August 12 blog post titled “Bring back the revolving door!” In that piece, he went so far as to say that “Joe Biden’s administration, unlike Barack Obama’s or Bill Clinton’s, hasn’t included any businesspeople in the cabinet.”
That’s demonstrably false, and looking beyond the Cabinet, it’s not very hard to find examples of Biden appointees with extensive ties to big business who did real damage to the president’s agenda of “growing the economy from the middle out and bottom up—not the top down.” Evidence of increased wage growth in the bottom half of the labor market and increased investment in the domestic manufacturing of green technologies show that the White House’s plan, sometimes called Bidenomics, has been at least partially successful. How much more successful would Biden’s downwardly redistributive program have been, one wonders, had certain appointees not been in leadership positions at key agencies?
To take just two examples, the Justice Department’s refusal to crack down adequately on white-collar crime and the Commerce Department’s failure to consistently support the aims of Bidenomics undermined the administration’s goal of shifting economic power from corporations to workers. Unsurprisingly, many of the people sitting at or near the top of those agencies are brazen corporate revolvers—precisely the kind of appointees that Yglesias is now urging Harris to prioritize. It’s essential that Harris not follow Biden in nominating people with long histories of putting corporate interests above the public good.
Fresh “reporting” from Axios suggests that Harris may be considering some problematic figures. Names include Eric Holder, Obama’s Attorney General who was rewarded with a BigLaw gig after declining to prosecute Wall Street fraudsters in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, for White House chief of staff; current Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo (more on her later) or investment banker Blair Effron for Treasury Secretary; financial titan Ray McGuire or Big Tech executive Charles Phillips to be Raimondo’s replacement at Commerce; Tom Nides of Blackstone for U.S. trade representative; Uber chief legal officer Tony West (Harris’ brother-in-law and campaign adviser) for White House Counsel or DOJ, where he was an official before; and Tom Donilon of BlackRock or infamous neoliberal shill Rahm Emanuel for national security adviser.
There’s very strong reason to be skeptical of Axios’ anonymously sourced reporting. The outlet’s Cabinet predictions were wrong in 2016 (according to what we’ve heard, admittedly based on our own off-the-record sources) and 2020 (the Revolving Door Project is proud of the role we played in preventing Biden from nominating some of the worst actors, such as Larry Summers, but our success rate for securing progressive personnel is far from 100%). Emanuel, for instance, seems unlikely to get a Harris administration job given his complete dismissal of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, when Walz was first campaigning for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2006. (Walz flipped a red district despite the defeatism of Emanuel, who was chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee at the time.)
Still, it bears repeating that Harris must not “go back,” as she has been saying, to the time when hacks like Emanuel called the Democratic Party’s shots. That era, which was defined by ignoring the mounting struggles of working-class households, led to the rise of Donald Trump and the entrenchment of right-wing authoritarianism in the Republican Party. Now is the time for Harris to build on the successes of her and Biden’s pivot to a post-neoliberal economy in which corporate monopolies are restrained and working families supported.
The following DOJ and Commerce officials should serve as a cautionary tale about the dangers of tapping corporate revolvers to do a public servant’s job. This list is illustrative but by no means exhaustive. Click each link to find out more about that person.
Justice Department
Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco
Acting Associate Attorney General Benjamin Mizer
Acting Assistant Attorney General Brian Boynton
Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian Netter
Commerce Department
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo
Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information Alan Davidson
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Services Christopher Hoff
There’s a Lesson Here That Harris Should Heed
The failure of the officials above to protect the U.S. public from the depredations of powerful corporations and wealthy elites, long accustomed to acting with impunity, exemplifies why the revolving door is so politically toxic. It’s worth revisiting this polling conducted before the 2020 election, which found that voters across partisan lines would be more likely to support Biden if he excluded corporate lobbyists and executives from his administration in favor of individuals committed to advancing the interests of working families. Yglesias has opined that “taking popularist advice is better than ignoring popularist advice.” If he really thought that politicians should do what is popular, he would realize the importance of closing the revolving door.
Nobody expects that people fresh off defending white-collar criminals or otherwise advancing the interests of big business will suddenly become anti-corporate populists when they join (or rejoin) the federal government. The bottom line is that Yglesias doesn’t have a problem with such dynamics because he prefers a “moderate” White House stacked with corporate lapdogs as opposed to a progressive one full of economic reformers. He admitted as much in his August 12 piece: “I usually agree with both Uber and Airbnb in political and regulatory controversies, so I have zero problem” with executives or attorneys from such predatory gig economy firms running the executive branch.
(We’re curious whether Yglesias wants to defend the record of the Justice Department outside of antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter, a former BigLaw partner who has burned all bridges to big business with the zeal of a committed convert. Skim our archives for our take on Garland, Monaco, Mizer, and others.)
In his August 4 column, Yglesias stated that “of course, nobody wants a revolving-door administration staffed by officials regulating industries they used to work in,” but every other sentence he wrote belies that claim (and his follow-up blog makes a mockery of it!). As my colleague Andrea Beaty observed earlier this year, “It’s hard to convince Americans that you’re on their side against corporate power when parts of your administration, frankly, aren’t.” Let’s hope Harris and her team take that wisdom to heart as they think through potential staffing decisions.
Follow the Revolving Door Project’s work on whatever platform works for you! You can find us on that website formerly known as Twitter, Bluesky, Instagram, and Facebook.
Want more? Check out some of the pieces that we have published or contributed research or thoughts to in the last week:
What We Talk About When We Talk About the Revolving Door
Please Mr. President, Can We Have Just A Bit of Corruption
The WSJ Shows Its Hatred of Workers
When In Doubt, Pretend Everything Fits Your Preexisting Conclusions
Lessons from Trump’s Record on Health Care
Harris Presidential Campaign Finds Legal World Booster in Paul Weiss Firm