Independent Agencies

As the Biden Administration Enters Its Twilight, Let’s Face Facts

The FEMA director has been elevated to a cabinet-level post once before: under President Clinton in 1996. Even that relatively small step could make a huge difference. 

Since our last update on May 23, 2024, we have seen an encouraging amount of new nominees emerging from the White House. Many of these nominations, thankfully, address long standing expirations, vacancies, and partisan gridlocks that have long defined the 40 independent agencies that we track. That said, few confirmations emerged from the Senate this summer, and we continue to advocate for simple, common sense, Senate rule changes to hasten the confirmation process and to aid in the staffing and fuel basic functionality of the federal government.

The fastest way to remove FDIC Chair Martin Gruenberg is to confirm Christy Goldsmith-Romero to lead the agency. Republicans say they want to get rid of Gruenberg, so why aren’t they calling for the immediate confirmation of Goldsmith-Romero?

On Tuesday, Judge Alan D. Albright of the Western District of Texas sided with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and ruled that the structure of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is unconstitutional. Specifically, the Judge ruled against the removal protections enjoyed by administrative law judges and the board’s members. The preliminary injunction will prevent the NLRB from pursuing an unfair labor practice charge against SpaceX, but as Matt Bruenig explains, “The real question is going to be what the Supreme Court does once this case makes it to their docket.”

Billionaires and right-wing judges are attacking the NLRB because it protects workers.

Former President Trump has recently sought to distance himself from Project 2025 and its radical proposals, claiming that he knows “nothing about” it, has “no idea who is behind it,” and has “nothing to do with them.” Project 2025 has tried to create some distance as well, maintaining in a recent tweet that it is “not affiliated with former President Trump.” It’s a classic example of drawing a distinction without a difference.

RDP’s Vishal Shankar joined KALW’s Your Call to discuss the Supreme Court’s overturning of Chevron deference and the right-wing Big Money interests that lobbied for the ruling.

Since our last update on January 9, 2024, the rate of confirmations emerging from the Senate has (finally) picked up. While the majority of these confirmations involve nominees that have been pending for nearly nine months or more, their confirmations have put a sizable dent in the total number of expired seats and vacancies remaining across the independent agencies.

It’s certainly true that liberals can believe things that are actually incorrect, but the centrality of criticizing the left detracts from the core part of the argument.