Our Blog

July 07, 2023 | The American Prospect
Secretary Yellen, Where Are the Crypto Tax Regulations?
Despite this, Janet Yellen’s Treasury Department has yet to formalize the regulations that would usher in this new reporting regime. The initial expectation was to have Treasury provide the new guidance by the end of 2022, allowing reporting changes to begin with transactions completed in 2023. However, despite approval of the proposed regulations by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in February (the usual stumbling block in this sort of proceeding), the department has yet to publish the regulations.

July 05, 2023
Calling for a Corporate Crackdown, Not Lukewarm Apologism
With smog from fossil-fueled wildfires hanging in the Chicago air, Biden shared an underwhelming vision of corporate accountability as part of his “Bidenomics” platform.

July 05, 2023 | The American Prospect
Lina Khan Haters Took A Premature Victory Lap
It turns out that the ethics official who recommended that Khan recuse herself from a case involving Meta is an owner of Meta stock. This ethics judgment was music to the ears of the media organizations, Republicans, and antitrust hacks who have been attacking Lina Khan throughout her leadership. Beyond being wrong and selective in singling out FTC officials for ethics concerns, the problem with Pankey’s opinion is deeply ironic. Pankey herself has a legitimate conflict of interest in relation to Meta.

June 30, 2023
RDP Asks FTC IG To Investigate Ethics Officer Who Pushed Khan To Recuse While Owning Meta Stock
The ethics officer who recommended Lina Khan recuse herself from the Meta/Within case owns between $15k and $50k in Meta stock.
June 30, 2023
Hack Watch: The Dangerous Cult Of The Entrepreneurial “Innovator”
It shouldn’t take a catastrophe for reporters to critically engage with entrepreneurial notions of so-called innovation.

June 30, 2023 | Common Dreams
Right-Wing Activists, Not Asian Americans, Killed Affirmative Action
Conservative legal strategists leveraged the Asian American community into their fight against affirmative action. The media continues to let them hide and evade blame.

June 29, 2023
RDP Calls On Microsoft/Activision Judge Who Disclosed Son's Employment At Microsoft To Recuse
The Revolving Door Project sent a letter to Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley, who is presiding over the FTC’s challenge of the Microsoft/Activision merger, after Judge Corley disclosed that her son is an employee of Microsoft but did not recuse. This relationship may violate the Code of Conduct for US Judges.

June 28, 2023 | Revolving Door Project Newsletter
Eighteen Months To Avoid Another X-Date
Earlier this month, Politico reported that after Biden secured his debt ceiling deal—a deal whose poison pills we’ll still be unpacking for some time to come—he went quiet on exploring options to permanently get rid of the debt ceiling.
This goes against what the president promised agitated members of his own party who urged him to take any manner of executive branch routes to resolve the crisis without capitulating to Republican demands: that it was his “hope and intention” to “find a rationale to take it to the courts to see whether or not the 14th Amendment is, in fact, something that would be able to stop it.” And it sets us up for another protracted, exhausting, damaging tête-à-tête at the edge of a fiscal cliff in just eighteen months.

June 23, 2023 | Revolving Door Project Newsletter
Treat Alito Like The Hack He Is
Let’s take a step back and consider what it means for a Supreme Court Justice to respond to questions for a news article by publishing an angry opinion piece in a (very) different publication than the one which contacted him, and apparently without informing the journalists ahead of time.

June 23, 2023 | The American Prospect
The Obscure NIH Official Blocking Lower Drug Prices
Mark Rohrbaugh, a mid-level staffer at the National Institutes of Health, has consistently blocked the use of march-in rights to seize patents on high-cost drugs.

June 21, 2023
In Case Of Emergency Spin Revolving Door
Despite venture capitalists, investment pundits, and other crypto firms alike all acknowledging that the jig is up, regulatory revolvers remain undeterred in their willingness to lend their reputations, expertise, credibility, and relationships to keep the crypto con alive.

June 16, 2023
Republican CFPB Opponents Are Crooked Corporate Shills
Every word from their mouths is paid for by Big Business. But the mainstream media won’t follow the money.

June 15, 2023
RELEASE: GOP Corporate Shills Say The Quiet Part Loud At CFPB Hearing
Republicans inadvertently expose their own corruption while attacking an upstanding public servant.

June 15, 2023 | The American Prospect
Pandemic Fraud Is Really, Truly, Not A Big Deal
By focusing on the (inflated) total defrauded, reporters are using big-sounding numbers without any context to try to scare the public.

June 14, 2023
Christine Varney Made A Career Out Of An Agency She Now Deems Unconstitutional
Implicit in the worldview of these revolvers is the idea that corporations should be free to operate and acquire competitors with near impunity, therefore antitrust enforcement should be as narrowly tailored as possible. This is obviously problematic — we need regulators that believe in the government’s ability to take on corporations with outsized market influence — but Cravath, Swaine & Moore’s Christine Varney recently took things many steps further in her representation of the biotech company Illumina in its case against the FTC. Varney doesn’t just attack specific enforcement actions as unwarranted, but calls into question the constitutionality of the FTC’s authority to issue enforcement actions in the first place.