Our Blog

Conventional economists have been bristling about sellers’ inflation being presented as an alternative to the more staid explanation of a wage-price spiral (we’ll come back to that), but in recent months there have been extremely aggressive (and often condescending, self-important, and factually incorrect) attacks on the idea and its proponents. Despite this, sellers’ inflation really is not that far from a lot of long standing economic theory, and the idea is grounded in key assumptions about firm behavior that are deeply held across most economic models.

Measuring the impact of regulations and enforcement actions can be difficult, particularly as the benefits of such actions can take years to accrue. On the other hand, it’s often possible to observe the consequences of lax or nonexistent enforcement playing out in real time.  

This past spring gave us a slow rate of nominations from the White House and a similarly glacial pace of confirmations from a Senate that has been plagued with an utterly dysfunctional confirmations system.

Rep Jim Jordan and company had already been eyeing Khan for an investigation because she had the audacity to enforce a consent decree that Twitter violated under Elon Musk’s leadership. Then, they eagerly seized on last month’s (conveniently timed) reporting from Bloomberg which published a previously unseen memo from an FTC ethics official and accused Chair Khan of ignoring the official’s recommendation. With that backdrop, the Republicans seemed poised to strike while the iron was hot, a culmination of their years-long project to undermine Khan’s leadership and reputation. The result was … much different. Thanks to some sleuthing on our part and the bipartisan support for taking on tech monopolies, yesterday’s hearing was less a damning inquisition and more a victory lap for Khan’s rejuvenation of the FTC.

It turns out that radical ideology IS allowed at the FTC.

Several states have attempted to implement automatic voter registration based on Medicare enrollment—but the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is still stalling.

If we were to agree to the industry’s demand that policy experts should be precluded from regulating issues they have spent significant amounts of time developing expertise in, we would be setting a precedent that severely undermines any kind of public-minded enforcement. In fact, banning experts such as Gensler would leave the public with a pool of potential regulators who are either already corporate-aligned or unqualified to adequately opine on pressing issues.

Extreme weather is the story of this summer so far, the hottest in 120,000 years. But you wouldn’t know it from following Beltway politics.

In advance of the House Judiciary Committee holding a hearing on Thursday, July 13, 2023, at 10:00 a.m. ET on “Oversight of the Federal Trade Commission,” Revolving Door Project has sent a letter to FTC Chair Lina Khan calling on her to take on the FTC’s considerable internal revolving door challenges.

Mick Mulvaney and Eric Blankenstein want to permanently cripple their former agency.

Yet despite these promises, email correspondence obtained through FOIA requests by Demand Progress show that senior officials across USTR, including Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Sarah Bianchi, actively seek input from executives at Big Tech firms such as Amazon and Google. Giving Big Tech a privileged ability to mold American trade policy undermines Biden’s commitment to a new era of trade deals.

The crackpot former Trump lawyer, who is facing disbarment for trying to overturn the 2020 election, wants to help Big Business rip you off.

Revolving Door Project’s Fatou Ndiaye published a piece in Democracy Journal outlining the staggering gap between how the appropriations process for federal agencies is supposed to work versus how it currently works. Understanding the difference can help Americans refine strategies to get our voices heard in Congress and shine light on overlooked contributors to chronic underfunding across the federal government. Such an examination is especially relevant as Congress appears poised for a series of fiscal nightmares this fall.