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When United States Trade Representative Katherine Tai announced this past May that the U.S. would support the TRIPS waiver on COVID-19 vaccines at the World Trade Organization (WTO), we at the Revolving Door Project celebrated the administration’s decision as “a transformative, hopeful event.” The waiver proposal calls on the WTO’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Council to suspend intellectual-property protections on COVID-19 therapeutics, diagnostics, and vaccines to ensure materials necessary for combating the pandemic are “available promptly, in sufficient quantities and at affordable price to meet global demand.”

“Over four months after announcing its support for the COVID-19 TRIPS Waiver, the Biden administration’s once promising step towards achieving vaccine equity is proving to be little more than an empty promise. Officials across the administration are cowering in the face of Big Pharma’s insatiable appetite for profit rather than pursuing one of many paths to rapidly ensure equitable access to vaccines worldwide.”

President Biden announced Wednesday that he’s nominated Massachusetts State Representative Maria Robinson to be the Assistant Secretary in the Office of Electricity at the Department of Energy. 

In his time on D.C.’s Public Service Commission and before that as a corporate lawyer, Phillips consistently sided with utilities over the public interest.

Professor Omarova has spent over a decade fighting for the belief that the public should set rules for banks, rather than banks setting rules for the public.

Kaplan and Rosengren’s scandals aren’t the only ethics questions surrounding the Fed leadership’s conduct which merit greater scrutiny.

Since the start of the year, we have warned that failure to promptly fill vacant and expired seats on independent agency boards would undermine the Biden administration’s agenda across many issue areas. Now, as executive branch policymaking kicks into high gear across this administration, we are seeing examples of this warning becoming a reality. 

For those less familiar with the Carlyle Group, the private equity firm where Powell was a partner and senior lawyer from 1997 – 2005, here’s a quick overview of their history with capitalizing on political connections and the revolving door.

It really shouldn’t surprise anyone that a former Carlyle Group executive — a firm whose whole profit strategy is based on exploiting insider connections in the federal government — hasn’t prioritized ethics and oversight in running the nation’s largest stockpile of potentially market-moving information.

Economic consulting firms hire former officials to undermine antitrust efforts. Here’s how to stop that.

The Commerce Secretary is a dedicated corporate crony. Making her Treasury Secretary would be a catastrophic mistake.

Even when these pundits have the facts right, their actual argumentation is still pretty weak.

The letter calls on the university to implement fair disclosure requirements for its faculty and condemn the unethical practices of former Pritzker Dean Dr. Daniel Rodriguez.

Phillips has done the bidding of utilities giants during his time on the D.C. Public Service Commission, and spent years working for corporate BigLaw firms which represent oil and gas interests.

Apparently, Harris just doesn’t get why regulators have to be so skeptical of the industry all the time—which makes sense, coming from a fintech executive who’s advocated for the industry on both sides of the revolving door.