Executive Branch

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.

Over the Juneteenth weekend, two different men in two different venues told the story of elite Washington in the early Biden era.

On the occasion of President Biden’s meeting with top financial regulators to discuss the health of the financial system, including climate-related risk, Revolving Door Project Executive Director Jeff Hauser issued the following statement:

Lina Khan alone cannot bring in a new age of American trust-busting. Biden still has yet to name his assistant attorney general for antitrust halfway through his first year in office.

On several key matters, Garland’s DOJ has concealed the full extent of Trump’s wrongdoing; kept thousands of immigrants from obtaining greencards, while flooding the immigration system with Trump-selected judges; expanded the scope of police power; ensured oil and gas profits for decades to come; and explicitly protected one of Trump’s most hated Cabinet secretaries from accountability.

Let’s be clear: there is absolutely no compelling reason Garland has to maintain the racist, misogynistic, planet-destroying, and corporatist legal stances of the Trump administration.

It’s hard to imagine a lawyer more conflicted on so much of the Treasury’s issue portfolio, and for such egregious reasons. A quick glance at MacBride’s own page on Davis Polk’s website is all it takes to see he cannot be trusted to act in the public’s interest.

The Revolving Door Project will be tracking these disclosures and flagging important revelations revealed by the OGE to ensure high level political appointees are not financially beholden to special interests they may regulate in government.

Representatives of corporate interests often twist the spirit and the intent behind calls for ethics in government. Under the guise of keeping lobbyists out of an administration, big business rails against even the suggestion that working people get a voice in government. They do this by falsely conflating public interest lobbyists and corporate lobbyists.

The fact that most of the names Ars Technica reported are under consideration are deeply corporate-aligned is simply infuriating. To take just one example, here is a brief summary of Jannie Lau’s work on behalf of InterDigital.

President Biden has signed an executive order guaranteeing a minimum wage of $15/hr for federal contractors, but there’s a lot more that he can do to immediately improve their lives.

When there actually are odious, greedy bad guys stuffed away in a back-room scheming, it’s pretty good politics to bust it up and take credit for doing so. Just such a racket is happening right now in an obscure corner of the executive branch, and all it would take to end it is some muscle from the President and one of his most-praised appointees.

The Fed is more than monetary policy, and we need to think of the Fed chair’s whole role. Since democratic control of the Fed is exercised primarily through presidential appointments, we must consider Powell’s record holistically. It’s not a good one.

Trump-appointed FBI director Chris Wray cannot be trusted to handle the continued surge in white supremacist violence and terror.