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The right-wing’s revolving door attacks on President Biden are intensifying, with a particular focus on the new President’s ties to Big Tech. Biden must beware the potency of these attacks and address them head-on.

Baradaran seems committed to challenging the status quo of our financial system that sidelines poor and marginalized communities. The OCC has long been part of a banking system that reinforces racial injustice rather than addresses it — and that remained largely true even after Dodd-Frank was passed and implemented by Obama’s regulatory team. Voices like Baradaran’s are valuable in reconsidering financial regulation and helping raise the bar for who is and who is not an adequately zealous regulator.

At the Revolving Door Project, we have frequently emphasized the importance of strengthening the civil service to ensure government works for public service and doesn’t cater to the interest of powerful people and corporations. We warned about how too much reliance on political appointments in the executive branch reduces accountability, citing academic research that political appointees perform worse than career managers. Especially in the Trump era, we have seen numerous examples of political appointees using the government for personal gain. Biden’s selection of William Burns, a career diplomat, as his CIA director should therefore be widely praised by progressives as a step towards restoring the civil service and depoliticizing the American intelligence community.

Fresh off defending Donald Trump’s historic corruption, conservatives have begun attacking President-elect Biden for his nominees’ ties to Big Tech, Wall Street, and corporate lobbying. While these attacks are transparently hypocritical, they are not without factual substance and could prove to be a major political liability for Democrats unless they commit to adopting much-needed ethics reforms.

As President-elect Joe Biden fills out his Cabinet, progressives have pushed hard on most major positions, save one: Commerce Secretary. Reporting on this role frames the seat as the liaison to the business community, who can “rebuild relationships” with massive corporations like BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and Mastercard. (Were relationships ever frayed to begin with?) This framing makes the Commerce Secretary seem like a glorified middle-man between C-Suites and the White House, overlooking the actual functions of their Department, including the Patent and Trademark Office, the Census Bureau, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and crucial components of US trade policy.