January 11, 2023
Revolving Door Project Condemns TVA Decision To Expand Fossil Fuels, Urges EPA and White House To Be More Aggressive
In response to news that Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) CEO Jeff Lyash issued a final decision to construct a new fossil gas plant and pipeline to replace an aging coal plant, Revolving Door Project Climate Research Director Dorothy Slater released the following statement:
January 11, 2023 | Revolving Door Project Newsletter
Newsletter 2022 ElectionClimate and EnvironmentExecutive BranchGovernanceGovernment CapacityIndependent Agencies
Government Spending and its Discontents
We spent October highlighting the perpetual underfunding of most federal departments and agencies, and urging Congress and the Biden administration to use December’s omnibus bill to finally provide them with the money and resources they need. Sadly, while appropriations did increase for FY2023, budgets consistently fell short of what agencies requested. The most jarring example may be the Department of Housing and Development (HUD), whose budget is a whopping $16 billion shy of the requested $77.8 billion. Biden recently announced his goal to cut homelessness by 25 percent in the next two years, but it’s hard to see how even this meager goal will be achieved without a fully funded HUD.
December 22, 2022
RELEASE: TVA Board Might Have Easily Blocked Fossil Energy Expansion, Had Senate Confirmed Them Sooner. The EPA Still Can.
In response to reports that the U.S. Senate confirmed six nominees to the Board of the Tennessee Valley Authority by voice vote Wednesday, Revolving Door Project Climate Research Director Dorothy Slater released the following statement:
December 20, 2022
To Win 2024, Democrats Must Heed Voters' Calls For Housing Justice
Low income communities of color made countless sacrifices to keep the United States’s economy going during the pandemic, all while supporting their families and enduring sky-high rents.
November 23, 2022 | The New Republic
Timi Iwayemi Dylan Gyauch-Lewis
Op-Ed Congressional OversightCryptocurrencyFinancial RegulationIndependent Agencies
Don’t Fall for FTX’s Final Con
The FTX disaster should be all the impetus needed to kill off any new crypto industry–approved legislation. Instead, we need Congress to provide material support for financial regulators in the form of increased appropriations to guard against the next collapse. Much of the crypto industry is already subject to laws—the very ones that the SEC seeks to enforce and that the crypto industry broadly (not just Sam Bankman-Fried) seeks to evade by reducing the SEC’s jurisdiction ex post facto. Both the CFTC and SEC urgently need funds to fulfill their mandates. Crypto stretches these needs even further, but the need has existed for years. For decades, financial crimes have too often gone unpunished. This wasn’t for a lack of rules, but a lack of will, funds, and people willing to enforce them. Crypto doesn’t need special treatment, it needs to face the music.
November 04, 2022
Hackwatch BankingCongressional OversightConsumer ProtectionExecutive BranchFinancial RegulationIndependent Agencies
Corporate Scammers Aren't Independent Voices
White collar crooks are behind the campaign to kill the CFPB, but don’t expect the mainstream media to tell you that.
October 31, 2022 | The American Prospect
How Governing Can Motivate Politics
An alternate vision for how Democrats could bring the fight to the midterms by taking action in Congress and the White House
October 28, 2022
Hack Watch: Debunking the Big Budget Bogeyman
It seems pretty incontestable that a big part of the media’s job is “informing the public of things they need to know.” Accordingly, the media’s coverage of how the government spends money is a spectacular example of how it fails. Congress has enabled a vacuum of sensible, accessible information about the appropriations bills it’s supposed to pass each year to fund government activity, and the media has not stepped in to fill the void.
October 24, 2022 | The American Prospect
The Unlikely Origins of the Chamber-Chopra War
Big business could soon get their chance to kill the CFPB for good, thanks in part to former Obama aide William Daley.
October 17, 2022
Independent Agency Update Summer 2022
Personnel is policy, which means that the people who make up our federal institutions matter. Which means that the partisan Republican assault on the staffing up of the federal agencies that regulate so much of the public’s everyday life also matters greatly. Unfortunately, as we have highlighted for months and will continue to highlight for as long as it persists, the federal government is being gutted from the inside out by a blockade of overdue qualified leadership.
October 14, 2022
Omnibus Awareness Month in Review
If Congress regularly met its own deadlines, then October—the first month of the fiscal year—would also be the first month when federal agencies could implement their new and improved budgets. Unfortunately, the modern Congress regularly fails to pass an omnibus spending package for the next fiscal year, which bundles several appropriations bills for different parts of the federal government into one whole-of-government budget, by the end of the previous fiscal year. This autumn is no different.
October 12, 2022
Tenant Organizers Call On Biden To Tackle Rent Inflation
The grassroots Homes Guarantee campaign has an executive branch playbook to protect tenants, but will the Biden administration acquiesce?
October 05, 2022 | Revolving Door Project Newsletter
Another Eleventh-Hour Stopgap Spending Bill
October means a lot of things in the political world: the end of a fiscal year and the beginning of a new one; SCOTUS returning from a long recess; and, every two years, the final stretch before a general election. If the congressional appropriations process worked as designed, October would also be the month when federal agencies began implementing their new budgets for the next fiscal year. If only things could work so smoothly.
September 30, 2022
Politico Rolls Out The Red Carpet For Ripple And Securities Fraud
Boosters of Ponzi products should not be granted the freedom to tout their products without ample pushback and skepticism. Because, as is all too common in Washington, when this media cover is combined with other forms of political pressure including lobbying and campaign donations, industry interests take precedence over the public’s. Politico knows where to find skeptical voices; they had Healthy Markets President and CEO Ty Gellasch on the panel that followed Alderoty’s remarks, albeit alongside three other preachers of crypto’s so-called greatness.
September 23, 2022 | Revolving Door Project Substack
Hack Watch: So About Those Rate Hikes...
Few of the pundits who sprang to Jerome Powell’s defense last year have acknowledged that their analysis was exactly wrong.