Search Results for

Neil MacBride spent eight years leveraging his government experience to defend Big Oil, Big Pharma, and Wall Street giants. Why does Biden want him back?

Last month, ProPublica published a jaw-dropping look into the IRS data of well-known billionaires, revealing their meager effective tax rates in detail. The disclosures were met with shock and anger. After all, how could Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Michael Bloomberg, and George Soros go years without paying federal income taxes? And how could this possibly be legal? The article, the first in a series from ProPublica, renewed public cries that billionaires should, in fact, pay their fair share.

President Biden has hired several Big Oil consultants and insiders to staff the executive branch amid growing calls for federal climate action.

Interagency cooperation is essential to ensuring the Biden administration adequately manages the risks associated with the growth of cryptocurrency, including illicit finance, tax evasion, investor and customer protection, shadow banking, and financial stability.

New financial disclosure filings reveal that Elizabeth Rosenberg, Biden’s pick for Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorist Financing, was a consultant for ExxonMobil and a Big Oil-aligned corporate law firm.

It seems safe to assume that most people stopped paying attention to confirmation votes sometime around late spring (if not well before). And even those few who are still tuned in would be forgiven for missing the confirmation vote that directly preceded last week’s Senate showdown over the For the People Act. Despite its low-profile, however, that position — to lead the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) — may be among the most critical to the success of the Biden administration’s agenda.

In light of the recent Supreme Court decision that substantially weakens the Patent Trial and Appeal Board and re-strengthens the USPTO Director’s power over patent decisions, selecting a public-oriented nominee is more important than ever.

Over the Juneteenth weekend, two different men in two different venues told the story of elite Washington in the early Biden era.

Over 10 percent of Biden’s presidential term has passed. Yet, despite notable accomplishments on COVD-19 relief, the Biden administration is still far from having maximized its potential impact, particularly when it comes to executive branch power. Nowhere is that more evident than at independent federal agencies, where Biden’s agenda has barely even begun to take root. With 10 percent of his term gone, Democrats have secured a majority on just three new independent agency boards.

On the occasion of President Biden’s meeting with top financial regulators to discuss the health of the financial system, including climate-related risk, Revolving Door Project Executive Director Jeff Hauser issued the following statement:

Lina Khan alone cannot bring in a new age of American trust-busting. Biden still has yet to name his assistant attorney general for antitrust halfway through his first year in office.

Asset management giant BlackRock most recently made the news for buying up huge tracts of U.S. housing stock to become, essentially, a massive corporate landlord at the expense of all the rest of us. (Seems like they are learning a thing or two from private equity firm Blackstone, to which they formerly belonged, which is infamous for its predatory and downright evil infiltration of the housing market.)

Just as a president shouldn’t only be judged on whether or not they started a war, Fed chairs shouldn’t only be judged on whether they raised or lowered interest rates. That’s their most salient power, but they have other, more complex ways of affecting our lives. Financial regulation is one of the most important of these, and it’s one on which current Fed chairman Jerome Powell has failed badly.

Anyone who’s ever filed a Freedom of Information Act request can tell you that the federal bureaucracy is shockingly opaque despite. This has real consequences for the public’s understanding of what their government actually does every day. Almost all public records requests require watchdogs to specifically identify documents and personnel they are interested in, often without knowing if those documents even exist or if those personnel even still work for the government. This poses a conundrum, however: how can watchdogs know what or whose records to request if they don’t even know who works in a department?