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December 03, 2021
Active Revolving Door Between Government and Contracting Industry Could Threaten Reform
Officially speaking, the federal government employs just shy of 3.6 million people (2.2 in the civilian workforce and 1.4 in the military). In reality, however, the number of people whose paychecks originate with the federal government (through grants or service contracts) is much larger — around 12 million according to recent estimates. This workforce, and the contracts that sustain it, rarely get much attention in public discourse. Yet, the federal government’s power to set standards and direct funds through contracting is not an insignificant one. President Biden has begun to tap into those powers with directives to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour for federal contractors and institute a vaccine mandate for those same workers. These are strong first steps but they only scratch the surface of what is possible and what is needed to address the many problems that plague federal contracting. Fully harnessing that power, however, will likely require confronting a deep-seated problem: an active revolving door between the offices charged with granting and monitoring federal contracts and the companies that receive them.

December 02, 2021
Climate Finance Capacity Project: Commodity Futures Trading Commission
The Biden Administration was elected to office with an urgent mandate to change our current trajectory towards catastrophic climate change. Climate-focused financial regulation, or the regulation of markets to accurately account for climate risk and the social and material costs of climate-damaging activities, must be a part of this coordinated federal response in order to meaningfully address climate concerns at the governmental level. An agency that is particularly key to this goal is the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The CFTC is one of the smallest federal financial regulatory bodies and yet it is responsible for regulating one of the country’s largest markets, derivatives. While it was originally founded to regulate futures trading in commodities, the passage of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in 2010 expanded the CFTC’s mandate to include swaps markets and broadened the agency’s role in regulating other derivatives, in part due to their extreme volatility and outsized role in the 2008 financial crisis.

November 30, 2021
Fossil Fuel Loyalist Mitch Landrieu Is Biden's Pick To Manage $1.2 Trillion Infrastructure Bill
President Biden signed the elusive bipartisan infrastructure bill into law on November 15th. It’s just the first part of a planned two-part infrastructure push, the other being the Democrat-only Build Back Better Act which Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have slashed to pieces. Yet Biden keeps calling the bipartisan bill he signed a climate bill.

November 17, 2021
Revolver Spotlight: Charles Yi
Yi is the latest BigLaw revolver and corporate ally to join the Biden Administration.

November 16, 2021
Powell Held No Meetings With Labor, But Plenty With Wall Street, Through Biden Term
Powell did not meet with any non-governmental individuals who are not members of or aligned with the financial industry. This stands in stark contrast to Powell’s predecessor, Janet Yellen, who is now the Secretary of the Treasury.

November 10, 2021
A Fossil Fuel-Aligned Investment Executive Is Biden's Final Nominee to Manage Federal Retirement Funds
Harvard President Larry Bacow announced mid-afternoon on September 9th that the Ivy League university — whose 53.2 billion endowment exceeds the GDP of over 100 countries — would officially end its investments in fossil fuels. That announcement set off a domino reaction of divestment announcements from Dartmouth, the California State University system, Boston University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Toronto, the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Netherlands’ largest pension fund, and hundreds of other groups. They appear to see the writing on the wall that fossil fuel investments, beyond being morally egregious, are also no longer profitable.

November 09, 2021
Brad Crabtree And The Dangerous Love Story Of Oil Production And Carbon Capture
The process of enhanced oil recovery that Crabtree champions is dangerous. Aside from the considerable economic and scientific barriers to scale, discussed below, the model of the CCT Crabtree supports rests on an unethical premise: that decarbonization should be profitable for Big Oil.

November 08, 2021
Quarles' Resignation Alone Won't Change The Fed's Regulatory Status Quo
There is no assurance whatsoever that Quarles’ successor will have anything close to Quarles’ own power, should Biden refuse to nominate a new Federal Reserve Chair.

November 04, 2021
When Republican Votes Advance Biden's Nominations
Rahm Emanuel’s nomination is not the first time a Biden pick advanced despite Democratic opposition.

October 26, 2021
Yellen Is Empowering Powell and Selling Out the Climate
It is very possible that President Biden will show up empty-handed to COP26 in Glasgow next week. And that isn’t just because of the apocalyptic vanity of two Senators from Arizona and West Virginia. Many executive-led policies that are just a matter of political will have not been done, and some of those which have are pure paper tigers. Biden’s administration failed last week to take advantage of a lesser known, but extremely meaningful climate action opportunity. The Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) released its long-awaited report on climate-related financial risk, which the President personally ordered months ago. And it was a complete flop.

October 18, 2021
Congress Can't Leave Policing The Fed...To The Fed
It’s highly probable that Powell guessed in advance that October would be a rough month for stocks, and made a multi-million dollar choice to get out.

October 15, 2021
Appointing Google Health's D.C. Strategist Would Bring Risk To FDA's Credibility
Califf coordinates lobbying for major corporations — in his case, for Big Tech giants eager to get into the medical sector (and get into patients’ medical data.)

October 12, 2021
Is Brainard Responsible For The Fed's Oversight Failures? In A Word, No.
The deeper problem with this argument gets at one of the most fascinating, least discussed dynamics of the Fed: the fact that it is an extraordinarily top-heavy institution, perhaps more than any part of the federal executive branch.

October 07, 2021
Is the Federal Reserve’s Inspector General Really Independent?
The Revolving Door Project makes a point of watching independent agencies, those oft-overlooked entities, closely. As a result, we’ve had reason to give a great deal of thought to the purpose and meaning of “independence” in the agency context. As “independence” is invoked as a shield in other settings, that thinking may prove instructive.

October 06, 2021
Chevron Firm Which Hounded Donziger Has Allies In The Biden Administration
Alumni of Gibson Dunn, the law firm that helped Chevron go after Steven Donziger, have influential executive branch jobs under Biden.