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April 07, 2025
Federal Understaffing Spotlight: Department of Interior
Department of Interior understaffing has been threatening environmental protection efforts and the health of marginalized communities.
April 02, 2025 | Revolving Door Project Newsletter
Polluters Get A Presidential Exemption From The Law
Are you a highly polluting industrial facility? Maybe a coal-fired power plant, or a coke oven, or a chemical manufacturer, or a commercial sterilizer? Do your neighbors complain about the eye-watering, throat-choking clouds that billow from your stacks? Are you tired of being the bad guy just because your operations emit arsenic, ethylene oxide, mercury, and lead into the air and water, which can cause cancer, brain defects, and other illnesses? Well, President Trump has got your back.
March 28, 2025
Silencing Silent Spring
In Abundance and in press, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have made it clear they want to close the book on Rachel Carson’s seminal work.
March 26, 2025 | The American Prospect
An Abundance of Credulity
In the months before the re-election of Donald Trump precipitated our rapid descent into authoritarianism, two books were being written about the idea that progressivism went astray in the 1960s and 1970s. In Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson describe a drift into a “politics of scarcity,” and in Why Nothing Works, Marc Dunkelman calls it a “cultural aversion to power.” Both books ask a pertinent question: Why doesn’t the government do big, bold things, quickly, to address the pressing issues of our time? We have an abundance of viewpoints and veto points, they argue, but a shortage of affordable housing and transmission lines. Something’s got to give. The unstated question, of course, is who must give.
March 25, 2025
Ezra Klein Said What?
Abundance co-author’s word salad about environmental review left us scratching our heads.
March 19, 2025 | The American Prospect
Op-Ed Climate and EnvironmentCongressional OversightDOGEEconomic PolicyElon MuskExecutive BranchGovernanceGovernment CapacityHousingTrump 2.0
DOGE Is Going to Kill a Lot of Americans
The Democratic Party could spell this out clearly and consistently for voters.
March 12, 2025
Federal Understaffing Spotlight: Environmental Protection Agency
During the Biden administration, EPA workers reported a staffing crisis at the agency. The Trump administration now wants to drastically decrease its work force. This blog overviews the impacts of an understaffed EPA on the health and wellbeing of our environment and communities.
March 07, 2025
Trump’s Attacks on Weather and Climate Science Put Us All In Danger
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is the backbone of climate and weather research and information in the United States. Its annual budget is under $7 billion, and the value of the weather information that it shares with the public is estimated to be over $100 billion annually. That means the American taxpayer gets a more than fourteen-fold return on investment. (Now that’s government efficiency, contrary to the claims of DOGE and its sympathizers about eliminating government bloat.)
March 06, 2025 | The American Prospect
The Clean Air Act is Under Attack
In 1943, Los Angeles residents awoke to a city so thoroughly pervaded by eye-stinging smog that they thought the city had been the victim of a World War II-related chemical attack. It hadn’t. Rather, a boom in car infrastructure coupled with new and existing industrial pollution caused sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide, and other particulate matter to dominate the air in the city. At times it was nearly impossible to see more than a few blocks, or to breathe outside of one’s home.
March 05, 2025 | The Sling
Should The Government Subsidize Artificial Intelligence?
It turns out that you can develop cutting edge AI with orders of magnitude less money and energy than we’ve been told.
March 03, 2025
FAQ On Crypto's Impact and Influence
As the crypto industry continues to jockey for prominence in the second Trump administration this FAQ explains crypto’s impacts and influence.
February 28, 2025
Why We’re Skeptical About The “Energy Abundance” Agenda
Over the past few years, a cohort of neoliberal pundits from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson to Matt Yglesias and Eric Levitz have increasingly problematized the modern regulatory state, framing the government’s many environmental and labor standards as an impediment to “abundance.” Multiple books advancing this argument are slated to be published in the first months of 2025, from Marc Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works to Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
February 28, 2025 | Watchdog Weekly
Newsletter Climate and EnvironmentConsumer ProtectionCorruption CalendarEthics in GovernmentJudiciaryTechTrump 2.0
Corruption Calendar Week Six: A dying CFPB, Musk’s business boom, conflicts of interest, and blatant favoritism.
This week, the Trump administration is moving fast to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), abandoning several active enforcement cases against financiers ripping off consumers. The SEC paused its case against Trump ally Justin Sun and handed the crypto industry another victory. Elon Musk continues to have field day after field day, slashing agencies he doesn’t like and watching his businesses balloon in value since the election. Several Trump appointees (like CFTC Chair Nominee Brian Quintenz and acting administrator of the PHMSA Ben Kochman) have major conflicts of interests which will likely skew agency action towards the interests of corporations at the expense of the public. We also witnessed an instance of blatant bias in how legal actions are handled, with leniency toward Republicans.
February 26, 2025 | No Corporate Cabinet
No Corporate Cabinet: Doug Burgum
Oil Man Tapped for “Energy Czar”
February 25, 2025
Like Doug Burgum, Matt Yglesias Erroneously Opposes Environmental Review
“Abundance agenda” apostle Matt Yglesias’ affinity for Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s deregulatory plans makes clear that this agenda is, at its heart, a neoliberal-approved version of Trumpian plunder.