Revolving Door Project | Elite Corruption, From Silicon Valley to the Supreme Court

A round-up of recent work from the Revolving Door Project team.

Fittingly ominous skies over the UFC Freedom 250 press conference on June 12, 2026. Official White House photo by Molly Riley.

Welcome back to Watchdog Weekly. We’ve been busy so far this hurricane season, tracking the literal and metaphorical storms gathering on the horizon as elite immunity spreads its shadow over the American landscape. Here are some of the projects we’ve been working on lately:

Marking the beginning of hurricane season with a new report on how the Trump administration has undermined hurricane readiness at every stage, from storm prediction and preparedness to disaster response and recovery

Releasing a collaborative report with Public Citizen on how Trump has taken over America’s 250th anniversary celebrations to funnel over $100 million in federal grants and contracts to his political allies

Reporting for The American Prospect on the nine-figure sum that Silicon Valley elites are pouring into the abundance movement to uphold elite political interests, according to a fundraising pitch and manifesto obtained from within the Abundance Network

Urging the Senate Judiciary Committee to investigate Supreme Court Justice Alito’s failure to recuse from the upcoming climate liability case Suncor v. Boulder despite his oil and gas conflicts of interest, which drew pushback from the Justice

Forecasting the consequences for students of the Trump administration’s recent move to displace one of the Education Department’s core responsibilities—protecting the civil rights of students—to the politicized and corrupted Justice Department

Let’s get into it.

This Hurricane Season, We May Be In Deep Water

On June 1, the official first day of hurricane season, our Kenny Stancil published a report outlining how the Trump administration continues to undermine hurricane preparedness.

Last year, we were lucky to not have a single hurricane make landfall in the continental U.S. for the first time in a decade. If we are not so lucky again this year, we will feel the pain of Trump’s outrageously irresponsible disaster recovery policies, which include:

Cutting over 5,000 FEMA workers since January 2025, or about 20 percent of the already-belaguered agency’s previous workforce, including many veteran employees

Creating a leadership vacuum by failing to fill key positions for over sixteen months, while empowering pro-Trump loyalists who have obstructed routine agency activities

Blocking the flow of billions of dollars in federal funding that state and local governments need to prepare for and respond to disasters, affecting communities around the country

Obstructing efforts to avoid disaster by gutting investments in upgrading physical and social infrastructure that would help increase communities’ resilience to extreme weather

Deliberately neglecting outreach to vulnerable communities, deepening inequities in disaster response

For a fuller look at how disaster relief is itself becoming a slow-motion disaster, read the report here.

Trump’s Red, White, and Blue “Vanity Cringefest”

Earlier this June, our Toni Aguilar Rosenthal and Alan Zibel of Public Citizen released their MAGA 250! report, outlining how Trump has taken control of and politicized the nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations. Flummoxed at how you can mess up straight-forward patriotism? Well, Trump is one step ahead of you, as he set up Freedom 250, a fundraising arm run out of the White House that has since siphoned off most of the federal funding for the nonpartisan America 250 commission that was supposed to be in charge.

Around 80 percent of the $126 million in federal contracts awarded for the 250th anniversary celebrations have flowed into a network of Trump officials and allies, including entities connected to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Trump’s former campaign manager Chris LaCivita, and former presidential campaign finance director Meredith O’Rourke.

Freedom 250 has also assembled its own raft of corporate sponsors, including Chevron, ExxonMobil, January AI, Lockheed Martin, Palantir, Oracle, UnitedHealth Group, United Airlines, and others. Toni and Alan write that these corporate contributions “raise a slate of ethics and transparency concerns about whether Trump and his allies are soliciting donations in exchange for access to the administration, including the President.”

For an exploration of the federal interests and political connections of each of the corporate donors to the vehicle of Trump’s hostile takeover of the 4th of July, check out the full report.

Silicon Valley is All In On Abundance

Our Dylan Gyauch-Lewis recently wrote for The American Prospect about leaked documents from abundance movement actors revealing not only the massive amount of money that tech elites are pouring into abundance politics, but the nakedly pro-elite sentiment driving that investment.

According to these documents, which originate with Zack Rosen, founder of California YIMBY and the Abundance Network, the abundance movement has roughly $260 million annually to spread its deregulatory gospel. Contributions from just three billionaires account for that nine-figure sum: $120 million annually from oil industry tied ex-hedge fund manager and current Meta board member John Arnold, $40 million from Facebook/Meta co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, and $100 million from Steve Ballmer, the L.A. Clippers owner and former Microsoft executive.

With billionaire friends like these, who needs popular support? Indeed, Rosen asserts in one of the leaked documents that “small dollar internet fundraising makes politics dumber,” describing grassroots political participation as “amateurs yanking the handles of ActBlue slot machines” compared to the “old gatekeepers” who were “card-counting” “political professionals.” Continuing this casino allegory, Rosen makes clear that he wants the abundance faction to be the House.

Check out the full piece on the Prospect’s site, where Dylan outlines how the abundance movement pitches itself to tech elites as a way to restore their political power in an era of escalating skepticism of Silicon Valley’s broken promises.

Justice Alito Doesn’t Understand What All The “Ethics” Fuss Is About

In May, we spearheaded a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee with 29 other organizations drawing attention to Justice Alito’s failure to recuse from the major climate accountability case Suncor v. Boulder, which the court will hear in the coming term. The letter was covered exclusively in E&E News, and then picked up by The Guardian, The New Republic, and NBC News.

The letter urges an investigation of Alito’s failure to recuse given his conflicts in this case, including longstanding oil and gas holdings and his relationship to billionaire Paul Singer, who owns over 52 million shares worth over $2.3 billion in Suncor. Alito and Singer’s relationship previously drew scrutiny when ProPublica reported that Singer had gifted undisclosed private jet travel to Alito to facilitate his attendance at a luxury hunting trip in Alaska.

Alito previously recused from Suncor v. Boulder in 2023 when the oil company petitioners brought their case to the Supreme Court, seeking to evade accountability for decades of corporate misconduct; now he claims that recusal was a mistake, and intends to sit on the case. Under statutory law, justices are required to recuse when their impartiality might reasonably be questioned.

“The oil company petitioners in these cases have been explicit in court filings that they view the cases as linked; there is no reason for Justice Alito to view them otherwise,” I told NBC News. Given Alito’s direct financial stake in oil companies involved in some of the parallel cases, a blanket recusal is the only ethical option. Barring that, the growing chorus demanding structural reforms to fix what the Roberts Court has broken in America will get even louder.

The Trump Administration Wants Discrimination in Education

Late last year, our Chris Lewis outlined for The American Prospect how the Trump administration is putting into motion the reactionary white supremacist playbook for dismantling civil rights enforcement in education outlined in Project 2025. This June, we saw that plan move into its next stage.

In the first year of the Trump administration, Education Secretary Linda McMahon gutted half of the office’s staff, shuttered several regional offices across the country, dismissed over 3,400 discrimination complaints, and began to target schools with pro-diversity principles for allegedly violating civil rights law. In 2025, the office only resolved 112 cases, 1 percent of its caseload, and not a single case involved racial harassment, sexual harassment, or sexual violence.

Now, the effort to gut civil rights protections for students is entering its next phase. By relocating the Office for Civil Rights from the Education Department into the Justice Department, the administration may be able to realize Project 2025’s goal of transforming the office into a weapon to wield against inclusive education. So not only will students experiencing discrimination no longer have a reliable ally in the Office for Civil Rights, but the office’s activities will likely worsen inequities.

“OCR is a small cog in the Trump-McMahon machine to ensure that schools can be effectively resegregated,” Chris wrote. “OCR would still exist, but hampering its enforcement capacity will allow parents the choice to put their children in nearly all-white schools that have the power to reject poorer minority students.”

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