Revolving Door

In another notable swing through the revolving door between government and BigLaw, two top Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement officials recently joined Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP as partners. They join former SEC general counsel Robert Stebbins and former CFTC commissioner Christopher Giancarlo as government alumni at the firm. 

The Department of Commerce is currently conducting digital trade talks with nations from the Indo-Pacific and Europe, with negotiations led by its secretary, Gina Raimondo. Through her role as lead negotiator in President Biden’s newly established Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) and one-year-old U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council (TTC), Raimondo is poised to influence global trade policies.

We are firmly on track toward an unlivable world. And a man whose entire career is marked by hubris and greed, who touts the false benefits of methane gas and makes millions from fossil fuel firms and their allies, is being raised as a candidate for White House National Climate Advisor. To put our position plainly, “No.” 

The news today that Anita Dunn will return to the White House as a senior advisor makes clear that her involvement with this administration was never credibly temporary.

Dan Tangherlini and Trump alum Derek Kan are unlikely to oust DeJoy if confirmed to the Postal Board.

In his gig as a global health consultant at a powerful D.C. business strategy firm that has financial ties to one of the two major COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers, Jha has kept his client roster under wraps despite publicly promising to release a client list.

Nearly halfway through President Biden’s second year in office, with midterms on the horizon and senior staff either burning out or eager to sell out, “Transition 2.0” — the rapid departure of said senior staff with an influx of new personnel — is growing closer. One position we’re keeping a close eye on is Biden’s next Chief of Staff. Currently filled by Ron Klain, this is Biden’s de facto power broker. He helps the president make decisions and acts as a gatekeeper for the many, MANY forces, good and bad, who’d like to influence the president.

Elon Musk is not just purchasing Twitter because, by all appearances, he is a very sad man who is desperate for other very sad men to think he is cool.

Over a decade after the financial crisis, few would still dispute that the revolving door between financial regulators and the financial industry helped pave the way for economic disaster. In the years preceding the crash, regulators who came from the country’s largest banks and planned to promptly return to them, removed regulatory restraints and turned a blind eye to the predictably dangerous effects (see, e.g. Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan). In the next administration, different regulators drawn from the same well let the fraudsters off the hook and left the working people who had fallen victim to them out to dry.  

“Michael Barr was too close to fintech and cryptocurrency schemers to be the Comptroller of the Currency, and he is still too close to them to be Vice Chair for Supervision.”

Fortunately, Biden has the means to stop at least one aspect of crypto’s campaign in its tracks. Through an executive order, he can cut off crypto’s access to the revolving door by barring the officials who are involved in developing regulations for the digital assets industry from working for it for at least four years. By rights, it should be a bare-minimum anti-corruption standard.

Over the span of two decades, the health care companies that Zients controlled, invested in, and helped oversee were forced to pay tens of millions of dollars to settle allegations of Medicare and Medicaid fraud. They have also been accused of surprise-billing practices and even medical malpractice.

The Revolving Door Project released a new “Industry Agenda” report today breaking down the systemic flaws and increasing relevance of the carbon offset industry as the favored greenwashing strategy for big industries and high-polluting nations. The report highlights the policies and executive branch agencies of interest to players in both voluntary and compliance carbon markets in the United States.

As officers with extraordinary latitude and immense authority within their districts, U.S. Attorneys have the ability to implement ambitious reforms to the federal legal landscape in a direct and immediate fashion. U.S. Attorneys also have incredible freedom to reorient the undercurrent priorities of the federal legal system and to center historically under prosecuted, but systemic nonetheless, crimes such as corporate and white collar malfeasance. Because of the incredible potential of the position, it is critical that these offices are prioritized in Biden’s staffing of the federal bureaucracy. However, as we have examined previously, the Biden administration has proven remarkably slow in its nominations process for U.S. Attorneys positions, seemingly in part due to an unwillingness to decisively abandon deference to a racist Senate decorum procedure known as blue slips.

Biden is still married to reviving a long-lost vision of bipartisanship. Never mind that the same Republicans he’s desperate to welcome into the fold literally did not applaud the ideal of bipartisanship he is pushing.