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A leading voice in this push is Sam Bankman-Fried, 30-year-old CEO of crypto trading exchange FTX. Christened by some as a crypto prince and others as Washington’s aspiring kingmaker, Bankman-Fried has in the past year developed an extensive crypto policy agenda that entails revolving-door hiring of former CFTC officials, formation of super PACs, and congressional campaign donations.

Crypto’s ongoing blitz of advertisements that package speculation and fear of missing out (FOMO) in glittering terms is a danger to consumers all over the world. Below is a list of resources that will help the public see beyond the marketing hype and garner a true understanding of crypto assets and the industry at large. 

Over a decade after the financial crisis, few would still dispute that the revolving door between financial regulators and the financial industry helped pave the way for economic disaster. In the years preceding the crash, regulators who came from the country’s largest banks and planned to promptly return to them, removed regulatory restraints and turned a blind eye to the predictably dangerous effects (see, e.g. Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan). In the next administration, different regulators drawn from the same well let the fraudsters off the hook and left the working people who had fallen victim to them out to dry.  

Fortunately, Biden has the means to stop at least one aspect of crypto’s campaign in its tracks. Through an executive order, he can cut off crypto’s access to the revolving door by barring the officials who are involved in developing regulations for the digital assets industry from working for it for at least four years. By rights, it should be a bare-minimum anti-corruption standard.

While it is unlikely that an economy as large as Russia’s can be rerouted through present crypto infrastructure, there remains opportunity for targeted individuals and entities to leverage the industry’s weak compliance mechanisms to move some of their assets. The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) and Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN), in conjunction with the White House’s National Security Council, need to ensure this does not happen. 

To truly bring an end to the Covid-19 pandemic which has ravaged the globe, the Biden administration must embrace a strategy of vaccine equity.

The Covid-19 threat will not simply go away—especially when addressed with half measures. The administration must use its authority under the Defense Production Act much more wisely and aggressively.

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.”

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.

In 2019, Gallup found that the pharmaceutical industry was “the most poorly regarded industry in Americans’ eyes,” and rightfully so. Pharmaceutical companies often set drug prices exorbitantly high, including life-saving drugs which patients literally cannot go without, such as insulin. This includes older drugs that are cheaper to produce — such as epinephrine (emergency medication used to treat severe allergic reactions and asthma attacks). These firms achieve this by stifling competition at the consumer’s expense, jealously protecting their money-makers from the generics which the pharmaceutical system is supposed to develop after a patent expires.

Numerous positions are vacant, threatening progress in a host of areas.

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.