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January 13, 2022 | Democracy Journal
What Biden’s Message Should Be
Americans were more divided than ever in 2021, but everyone in the country still agreed on one thing: The Democratic Party has a messaging problem.
“We’ve got a national branding problem that is probably deeper than a lot of people suspect,” Democratic pollster Brian Stryker, who is currently working with the centrist think tank Third Way to understand why Democrats lost the recent governors’ race in Virginia told The New York Times. “I’m not going to argue it’s working right now, but I need it to work when it matters,” Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY), chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee told The Washington Post in November of the Democrats’ efforts to sell their legislative victories. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) seemingly agrees, telling attendees at a recent fundraising dinner that “Democrats are terrible at messaging. It’s just a fact.”

January 06, 2022 | The American Prospect
Merrick Garland Is Undermining The Biden Antitrust Strategy
In theory, nothing prevents Biden from hiring whomever Kanter personally trusts to help execute their shared agenda. So what’s causing the chaos?

January 04, 2022 | The New Republic
One Unexpected Way for Biden to Help the Climate and Rural America at the Same Time
The president has the power to reform the wayward Tennessee Valley Authority. It’s a bigger deal than you think.

December 22, 2021 | Common Dreams
Free At-Home Tests Are a Start, But Biden Must Move Faster and Go Bigger to End Pandemic
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.

December 21, 2021 | The Hill
Is The Media Laundering Open Lawlessness At The FDIC?
McWilliams and Chopra both make compelling characters, but only one is quite clearly violating the law, and attempting to seize absolute power over a crucial agency with no repercussions.

December 17, 2021
Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice Is Perpetuating Climate Destruction
When the government’s lawyers defend fossil fuel interests, people and the planet pay the price.

December 13, 2021 | The American Prospect
The Trump Officials Still Running Biden’s Justice Department
We are rapidly approaching the one-year anniversary of January 6, and Attorney General Merrick Garland has yet to give any sign that his Justice Department is independently investigating former President Trump and his fellow instigators. This is, by far, Garland’s most high-profile failure when it comes to accountability for the prior administration, one that more observers have begun to notice. But it is not the only one.

December 08, 2021 | Talking Points Memo
The Bureau Of Prisons Needs New Leadership, Now
Progressives, prison workers and prisoners are in agreement: the Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Michael Carvajal, should be fired. The Bureau of Prisons is in a crisis several layers deep, and new leadership will be key to its reformation.

November 20, 2021 | The American Prospect
Gensler Punts In Fight Over Auditing Watchdog
Gensler appears to have backed down from a full fight with Republicans on the SEC and in Congress. This is likely because Gensler needs to pick his battles, of which there are many. But in times as dire as these, choosing to let certain grifts carry on as normal is an ominous call.

November 18, 2021 | The American Prospect
How Biden Can Protect Students From Predatory For-Profit Colleges
The Biden administration inherited a morass of understaffed and undermined federal agencies, weakened by the Trump administration. It makes sense that building back the government’s capacity would be an uphill battle for the Biden administration, with so many years of policymaking undermined by his predecessor. What doesn’t make sense is the jarring number of cases in which the administration is going out of its way, at considerable cost, to uphold Trump-era policies that go against Biden’s stated agenda and the public interest.

November 05, 2021 | The American Prospect
A Missing Link in the Fight Against the Climate Crisis
With his legislative climate agenda hanging in the balance, President Biden turned to executive action this week in his attempt to “assert American leadership” at COP26 in Glasgow. On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced sweeping new rules to curb methane emissions. Those standards, which the agency estimates would eliminate a greater volume of emissions between 2023 and 2035 than those emitted from all U.S. passenger cars and commercial planes in 2019, were rightly applauded. For now, however, these are just estimates. Ensuring that they turn into real-life emissions reductions that meet or exceed expectations will require that agencies have the capacity to promptly write strong new rules and, then, enforce them.

October 29, 2021 | The American Prospect
Will Biden’s FDA Be Led by a Pharma Guy?
Dr. Robert Califf appears to be the clearest front-runner for the (somehow) still open position of commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. After floating his name in the press a few weeks ago, President Biden recently met with Califf in private. Such meetings tend to be the final step before a nominee is announced.
There’s just one problem: Califf is a longtime political consultant to Big Pharma and, more recently, to Big Tech. In fact, he’s so tied to those industries that he once earned the ire of a certain crucial senator from West Virginia.

October 20, 2021 | The American Prospect
Who’s Really Running Justice?
It was never a secret that Attorney General Merrick Garland was among the key Biden administration figures opposing Jonathan Kanter’s nomination as assistant attorney general for antitrust. Ultimately, however, Garland did not get his way; the appointment went to Kanter rather than to one of the many Big Tech–allied BigLaw partners whom Garland favored. In view of Kanter’s career as a plaintiff’s lawyer, his nomination was rightly celebrated as a decisive victory by antitrust reformers and BigLaw opponents alike. But it was just one battle in a broader war for renewed anti-monopoly enforcement and a DOJ eager to build back better in every policy area.

October 15, 2021 | Talking Points Memo
The Jan. 6 Committee Has The Right Idea: Now Congress Should Subpoena Zuckerberg
Facebook continues to lie to the public with abandon. That is one of the main takeaways from the Facebook whistleblower’s testimony last week. Even now, having been called out, Facebook is frantically working to obscure and underplay its own dishonesty.

October 12, 2021 | The American Prospect
The Little-Known Power Brokers At The Federal Reserve
The cloistered, out-of-touch nature of Fed leadership derives mostly from its obscure senior staff members. And if one asks who sets the direction for them, one finds a fascinatingly top-heavy organizational structure.