Climate and Environment

Joe Biden has been president for nearly seven months, and he still has not appointed an Administrator for the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA).

Hochstein is not even a skeptic of the fossil fuel industry, much less an environmentalist. His life’s work has been planting American flags on global fossil fuel reserves, facilitating the drilling and pumping of their contents, and inflicting pain on anyone who gets in the way.

Today, a coalition of 23 environmental, labor, and good government organizations called on President Biden to remove Thomas Workman from his role as the independent member with insurance expertise on the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), the interagency panel which identifies and addresses systemic risks to the financial system. 

President Biden has repeatedly declared himself “the most pro-union President you’ve ever seen.” But a pro-labor President should also support the workers for whom he’s the boss — namely, the federal civil service.

A Republican majority on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission impedes action on fossil fuels.

Workman came with exactly zero experience as an insurance regulator, but plenty of experience from the opposite side of the courtroom: for 17 years, he’d been the President and CEO of the life insurance industry’s main lobbying group in the state of New York, the Life Insurance Council of New York (LICONY).

June 30th marked the last official day of Republican Neil Chatterjee’s term as a commissioner on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Despite FERC’s obscurity, it is a critically important independent agency of the federal government that regulates the interstate transmission of oil, gas, and electricity, and reviews proposals to build gas terminals and pipelines. As of July 1st, a new commissioner nominated by President Biden and confirmed by the Senate could have stepped in, giving the five-seat board a Democratic majority. Biden has thus far failed to begin that process, so Chatterjee will remain serving an expired term until Biden appoints and the Senate confirms someone new.

Graham’s history fighting for the public against the predations of and systemic risks posed by Wall Street, and now the fossil fuel industry, speaks for itself.

The Biden Administration has a historic opportunity to reverse the executive branch’s long-standing war on whistleblowers, and end the all-too-common (and sadly bipartisan) practice of villainizing whistleblowers and leakers to avoid accountability for government wrongdoing revealed by these actors.

“As a private corporate attorney, MacBride defended fossil fuel companies, Wall Street giants, Big Tech monopolies, and a myriad of other corporate industries,” the groups wrote. “His past work fighting vigorously and successfully on behalf of corporations against the public interest disqualifies him from a role in the administration.”

Survivors of sexual assault were hurt to learn that the Department of Justice chose to continue to defend Donald Trump in E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit against the former president. Unfortunately, this is but one example of many in which Merrick Garland’s Justice Department has maintained flawed legal positions of the Trump administration which contravene not only the administration’s goals, but basic norms of American democracy. While the Attorney General may be motivated by an attempt to maintain the appearance of impartiality at the DOJ, the institutional goal must be to achieve just outcomes; deference to the Trump DOJ under the guise of impartiality is not only unwarranted, it is unjust. The flawed legal positions the Department has been adopting or maintaining in case after case contravene this goal. These positions have already had disastrous repercussions.

There is no delicate way to put it: Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) has been a striking failure so far. More than 10 percent of the way through this presidential term, Attorney General Merrick Garland has failed to remove Trump holdovers; is treating Trump as a completely typical president and refusing to prosecute his many crimes; is not reversing dangerous Trump-era legal positions; and is freely allowing corporate capture of his department.

Garland’s disappointing tenure is detrimental to progressive plans for many issues — criminal justice, police violence, labor rights, immigration, antitrust, and white collar crime prosecution, among others — but his potential to wreak havoc on necessary climate action is most staggering considering the existential stakes.

Neil MacBride spent eight years leveraging his government experience to defend Big Oil, Big Pharma, and Wall Street giants. Why does Biden want him back?

President Biden has hired several Big Oil consultants and insiders to staff the executive branch amid growing calls for federal climate action.

New financial disclosure filings reveal that Elizabeth Rosenberg, Biden’s pick for Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorist Financing, was a consultant for ExxonMobil and a Big Oil-aligned corporate law firm.