Since the outset of cryptocurrency, its proponents have proselytized its revolutionary potential. It will be the end of fiat currency as we know it. Bitcoin will replace gold as a hedge against inflation. Wall Street is a walking fossil, unaware of how outdated it has already become in the age of crypto innovation. Yet, they have also argued, crucially, cryptocurrency is nowhere near any of these things, instead being more of a curiosity than anything else. Much like the way in which Republican culture warriors live in a self-contradictory world where liberals are simultaneously weak, sensitive snowflakes and evil, violent bullies, cryptocurrency exists in a paradoxical world. Cryptocurrency proponents would have you believe that the technology represents both an existential challenge to the financial status quo, and is also a fragile upstart in need of special regulatory concessions to facilitate its advancement.

This contradiction is obvious when one compares public-facing statements made by cryptocurrency firms to the arguments they make in court. In 2024, the Securities and Exchange Commission attempted to rein in crypto giant Coinbase’s sale of tokens that were functioning as unregistered securities–indeed, tokens which the firm’s own CEO would describe as being part of “the next version of the stock market, and the internet.” Nevertheless, the company’s lawyers argued in court that the tokens did not represent a genuine security, but were instead a collectible item much more akin to a digital beanie baby than an established financial product.

While it is theoretically possible for fiat currency and traditional investments to be replaced by a beanie baby-based economy, the possibility seems rather outlandish. When faced with the threat of regulation, the industry defends itself by describing its activities as little more than a technological curiosity, while also decrying the “innovation” that will be killed by such regulation.

This defense is seen even in clearcut cases of basic corporate malfeasance. In 2025, the CEO of crypto firm Unicorn was charged with fraud for selling investments in crypto assets that were supposedly backed by “​​billions of dollars of real estate and equity interests in pre-IPO companies.” In reality, the investments were backed by assets “never worth more than a small fraction of that amount.” But this deception was no reason for him to admit guilt. Instead he had made a pre-emptive defense of his firm, appealing to the need to innovate and claiming the SEC was risking American financial hegemony by cracking down on violations of securities law. Experienced in the world of crypto, he knew that an actual defense of the allegations would be an uphill fight. It is far simpler to argue against the existence of the system at all, and feign persecution for daring to innovate. To him, this issue was not about fraud, rather “it’s about the broader question of whether America will remain a global leader in technological innovation.”

The appeal to global competition–particularly in regards to China–is a near-ubiquitous claim from cryptocurrency executives faced with the threat of law enforcement. Thankfully for the United States, the cryptocurrency industry stands alone amongst major corporations for not only being preoccupied with maximizing shareholder value, but also embracing the non-fiduciary duty of preparing the nation for a global competition with the People’s Republic of China. What could be motivating this selfless defense of the nation? Surely nothing more than patriotism.

This concern about US dominance over the digital beanie baby industry is so ingrained in the industry that the Trump administration has even held meetings with the Wall Street Blockchain Alliance on the nation’s progress in “steering crypto innovation toward greater stability and global leadership.” Tragically, the cryptocurrency industry’s benevolent global concern has not extended as far as holding their executives and firms to account for the technology’s money laundering uses. And nor is the Trump Administration taking the actual very real uses of crypto currency (money laundering, crime facilitating, etc…) seriously.

Trump pardoned the former CEO of Binance, Changpeng Zhao in October for his violation of US anti money laundering laws. Explaining the president’s pardon, press secretary Karoline Leavitt stated that Zhao’s prosecution “severely damaged the United States’ reputation as a global leader in technology and innovation” (Zhao’s firm conveniently holds 87% of the supply of the Trump-family USD1 cryptocoin) Earlier this week a Binance employee found that the company’s platform may have been used to move up to $1.7 billion to sanctioned entities in Iran.

Similarly, the industry which promises to revolutionize finance as we currently know it claims that even a whisper of regulatory oversight threatens to topple the fragile businesses that have staked their future on the benefits of blockchain technology. It makes little sense how such a fundamentally revolutionary technology might be permanently hindered by scant oversight at the hands of federal regulators, but this argument is not meant to make sense.

Binance’s run-ins with anti money laundering measures are not the only times in which it has been forced to defend itself with technobabble. In 2023, the firm was charged with operating as an unlicensed securities exchange, broker dealer, and clearing agency and with improper oversight over the platform. The company defended itself by claiming the SEC’s charges “would also stifle innovation and punish our company and industry rather than working to allow American businesses to thrive.” The company also called for the creation of a new, crypto-friendly regulatory regime “that enables businesses like ours to grow, create jobs, and provide American consumers safe access to digital assets.” Unfortunately for Binance, the SEC had eye-popping messages testifying to the fact that Binance employees knew about the company’s wrongdoing, including the company’s Chief Compliance Officer messaging a colleague “[w]e are operating as a fking unlicensed securities exchange in the USA bro.” This may seem to undermine the idea that Binance was operating such an innovative firm that it could not be bound by existing securities law, but the truth is, that doesn’t really matter.

The technobabble defense is not limited to legal proceedings. In fact, it seems as though courts are significantly better at sniffing out the weakness in these arguments, and good judges are not concerned with “protecting American technological dominance” or whatever excuse tech firms are able to conjure. Rather, the technobabble defense is most often aimed at the lawmakers entrusted with the creation of our laws.

SEC chair Gary Gensler’s attempts to reign in an industry he said had “made a calculated economic decision to take the risk of enforcement as the cost of doing business” were met with outrage. A crypto industry association alleged he was “anti-innovation” and bemoaned the fact that the industry was forced to defend against the SEC’s charges that companies were breaking long-established securities law. Instead of being concerned with the rule of law, Gensler should have been worried about the hundreds of millions of dollars crypto firms had spent on lawyers, something that “should serve as a stand in for the considerable opportunity cost of delayed innovation” according to the group.

Even members of Congress adopted this tone, accusing the SEC of stifling innovation. When Gensler requested information from crypto firms like the now-disgraced FTX, crypto’s congressional defenders like Republicans Tom Emmer and Byron Donalds and Democrats Josh Gottheimer, Jake Auchincloss, and Richie Torres all leapt into action, sending a letter demanding Gensler back off, asking if the SEC had conducted “cost-benefit analysis” on its attempts to enforce securities law, and demanding that his investigations “do not stifle innovation.” (note that “cost benefit analysis” is supposed to apply to the writing of new regulations, not the enforcement of laws already written into, well, law)

Clearly the Biden administration’s approach to cryptocurrency did little to threaten the industry’s long-term survival. Even with the collapse of FTX in the fall of 2022 and the failure of multiple cryptocurrency-connected banks in early 2023, the industry grew by nearly three fold from the date of Biden’s inauguration to the date he left office. But that does not mean the industry has stopped crying out.

Even with the Trump administration’s open embrace of cryptocurrency as a tool for open bribery, the industry routinely scare-mongers about the threat its enemies pose to innovation. And with the elusive promise of innovation, ushered in by whatever technobabbly jargon is top-of-mind, crypto firms have been able to subvert the law and construct a parallel track of justice for themselves. While much of the innovation is little more than a mirage based on regulatory evasion, who is to deny the space saving innovations in political corruption. Can you imagine how much larger the new East Wing would have to be in order to accommodate Trump’s bribes were they to take the form of physical beanie babies rather than digital tokens?

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Image credit: "Binary code" by Christiaan Colen is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Welcome back to Hackwatch! This week you’re getting a bonus installment in lieu of our regular newsletter on top of the next installment of our Technobabble Defense series on Friday! But we had an opening for this week’s newsletter and I had something I’ve been mulling over that I thought would be fun to write up, so here we are.

A couple of weeks ago, I had an essay in The New Republic wading back into the abundance cinematic universe that laid out the nexus between the abundance ecosystem and the AI industry. If you want a full breakdown, you can read it here. But suffice it to say that there is quite a lot of overlap between abundance world and tech tycoons’ spheres of personal influence. Among some of the more notable ties: the author of Trump’s AI Action Plan was a featured speaker at the Abundance 2025 conference; Inclusive Abundance described AI buildout as one of the five core pillars of abundance work; and the Abundance Institute pushed for federal preemption to block state-level regulation of AI products.

[Ed. Note: If you want some music to listen to while you read, I’d suggest “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears, “Everything Old is New Again” by Barenaked Ladies, “Souls in the Machine” by The Goo Goo Dolls, “The Wrong Direction” by Passenger, “Power of Gold” by Dan Fogelberg, or “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution” by Tracy Chapman.]

Unsurprisingly, the piece was not especially popular among the acolytes of abundance. I was a little surprised to have provoked a response from Jerusalem Demsas over at The Argument, though. What struck me about what Demsas wrote is that while it was (fittingly for its pugilistic publication) quite argumentative, I don’t actually think it was in tension with my point.

This, in particular, is the relevant section:

“In a piece published earlier this week in The New Republic, anti-abundance writer Dylan Gyauch-Lewis argued that “The Abundance Gang Has a Big AI Problem.” The piece itself meanders through a series of criticisms but its core argument is that abundance liberals — including this magazine — are too cozy with the AI industry.

There are many counter-arguments I could devote this column to: From the fact that, unlike housing in America’s most supply-constrained cities, developers are actually not having much trouble building data centers and simply do not need a YIMBY-like movement to help them, to the fact that the legislation that core abundance groups are working on have nothing to do with data centers.

But I think much of this confusion stems from a more fundamental disbelief that anyone could sincerely be motivated by a concern about the boring regulations that prevent the development of housing, transit, and clean energy. So let’s just start there.”

To start, I think it is a little odd that Demsas felt the need to get defensive about my calling out her publication, mostly because the only time I mentioned them, it was to say that they had published some good writing about the boondoggle-side of AI: “fledgling abundance magazine The Argument (itself frequently techno-optimist and replete with Silicon Valley funding from Arnold, Collison, Open Philanthropy, and Emergent Ventures) has published several good articles that scrutinize the more boondogglish side of Silicon Valley’s latest obsession.”

There are basically two parts of the point I make right there: 1) That The Argument leans strongly pro-techno optimist and was seeded by Silicon Valley grants; and 2) that despite those facts, they have done a good job at times of cutting through the hype when it comes to writing about AI, especially around the implications for our critical thinking ability. Is Demsas too close to the AI industry? Probably for my taste, but that’s orthogonal to the point at hand, which is that it is possible even for elements of the abundance crowd that are cozy with Big Tech to keep from lapsing into Silicon Valley sycophancy.

As for the framing of my piece, perhaps my meandering is why Demsas didn’t catch that I already addressed both of the counterarguments she offered. First, there is an obvious surge in data center NIMBYism, often described as such. That’s why tens of billions of dollars in data center construction have been blocked or delayed. Second, what counts as a “core” abundance group is somewhat subjective, but I would think that Inclusive Abundance, which literally framed AI as more important to abundance policy than transit in their own report, and the Federation for American Innovation, whose alum Michael Kratsios is running the White House Office of Science and Technology and whose Senior Fellow Dean Ball literally wrote the Trumpian book on AI buildout, would qualify. Oh and here’s FAI’s infrastructure director testifying to Congress about why data centers need to not be subjected to environmental review. But again, for more examples, see my piece in The New Republic.

The final explicit rebuttal that I would offer is that I have no issue at all believing that many people sincerely are devoted to YIMBYism. I do have some difficulty believing that Silicon Valley is uniquely beneficent (other industries are not pouring remotely as much money into funding abundance organizations) and that so many billionaires and tech companies are motivated primarily by their desire to lower the rents paid by working class Americans. There were two literal trade groups representing Big Tech companies that sponsored Abundance 2025: Chamber of Progress (members include a16z, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, OpenAI, Midjourney) and New American Industrial Alliance (members include Palantir, Anduril, a16z, Meta, and California Forever, the project for a billionaire-led techno-libertarian “charter city” between Sacramento and San Francisco). So do I believe that some people are all about housing? Absolutely. But is it plausible that everyone in the abundance ecosystem has no other motivations? No, they literally say they do. Like all the time.

More to the point, I had no role in inviting the author of Trump’s AI plan to be a featured speaker at their conference, or in Inclusive Abundance identifying AI as a priority, or in getting Ezra Klein to go on a bunch of podcasts to talk about how the book was about being pro-tech, or Klein and Thompson presenting abundance as the road to an AI-powered utopia in the intro to their book Abundance, etc. Like I’ve said before, I wish the abundance movement that existed was the one envisioned when you listen to Paul Williams or Ned Resnikoff where it is about residential zoning. But if Demsas wants it to be that, I think I’m less of a barrier than the people inside their tent who keep hawking AI.

I try to be precise when I’m critiquing abundance (or anything else, for that matter). The reason my criticism has not been about housing is that I broadly agree with them on a lot of the housing policy. I had no problem with residential YIMBYism, but the abundance rebrand transformed the movement into a political vehicle meant to deregulate large-scale development processes well beyond housing. Again, don’t take it from me: the Niskanen Center wrote a manifesto about how to create an abundance faction was part of a power struggle against progressive influence in the Democratic Party.

To her credit, Demsas did notice this issue, and implored “Don’t make abundance the moderate omnicause.” But abundance is an omnicause. The book Abundance is not limited to housing. From the first use of “abundance agenda” as a political rallying cry, it has included an array of policy areas (including, incidentally, medicine, which I think is actually one of the best candidates for an abundance approach because of the restrictive IP rights that create monopoly and stifle innovation, but that gets comparatively less attention, including in the book’s discussion of pharmaceuticals). It’s entirely possible that the version of abundance that Demsas wants to champion is all about housing affordability—I think she deserves props for taking Marc Andreessen to task over his hypocrisy here—but the real question is whether abundance as a movement is going to insist upon the importance of prioritizing solving the housing crisis, or whether it allows itself to be hijacked in the interest of Silicon Valley bigwigs like Andreessen. Right now, the housing purists are losing control of the coalition. (And notably opposition to exclusionary zoning way predates the modern “YIMBY” movement, see this article or read about this famous New Jersey Supreme Court case.)

There’s a very easy solution to the problem of abundance being deployed as a trojan horse for Silicon Valley capital investments: denounce it. Stop handing the conferences over to speakers from Nvidia and the Trump administration. Talk about why community input meetings and NIMBYism towards data centers is qualitatively different from blocking residential housing density. But right now, communities are making good use of the types of mechanisms abundance is attacking and showing exactly why they can be essential when the “building” in question is not for humans, but (the best “this is not all a bubble” case?) is being built to take jobs away from people.

Admittedly, arguing with me is a much lower lift.

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Want more? Check out some of the pieces that we published or contributed research or thoughts to in the last week:

Centrists: Better Things Aren’t Possible

Trump’s Fed Regulators Rewrite the History of the Silicon Valley Bank Collapse

Gas Prices Really Are Trump’s Fault, Just Not for the Reason People Think

The Spy-Tech Insider Running Homeland Security’s Biometric Dragnet

Data Centers in My Backyard with Dylan Gyauch-Lewis

Image credit: "New Amazon data center" by xcorex is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Top Biden advisor Bruce Reed recognized this trend, telling Politico’s Nancy Scola that “The industry got away with a lot of stuff because ‘It’s complicated to understand.’” The belief is, as Scola writes, that Silicon Valley “has long found success in Washington by cloaking its endeavors in technical jargon.”

For most of this series, we’ll be looking at specific applications of the technobabble defense in specific industries: how fintech firms are able to use jargon to justify creating massive shadow banking operations, how landlords argue that price fixing via algorithm doesn’t really count as price fixing, how cryptocurrencies are able to portray flagrant disobedience of securities law as “innovation.”

To kick us off, though, I want to talk about one of the most critical, common, and under-recognized examples of technobabble: the very concept of a “technology industry” itself.

When we hear about the tech industry or “Big Tech,” we have a general idea of what it is we mean, that web of computer-based business models centered around Silicon Valley. It’s a very convenient shorthand, one that virtually everyone, myself very much included, is guilty of using. And it is nice to be able to invoke phrases like “tech titans,” which succinctly communicate the centers of gravity for a powerful network that influences so much of our modern lives. But it also serves Silicon Valley’s interests; if their industry is “technology,” it grants credence to their techno-optimist trappings. It helps everyone keep a straight face when figures like Marc Andreessen present themselves as the latest step of our march of progress.

It bears asking: if there is a technology industry, what precisely is non-technological industry? Our general understanding of industry is deeply interwoven with technology; I would argue that all contemporary industry is a technology industry. Not to get too semantic, but I might even posit that the relationship to technology and technological progress is what distinguishes an industrial mode of commerce from other types of economic activity.

We also need to reckon with the implications that Silicon Valley represents a grouping of businesses that form a coherent “industry.” That assumption is dubious, to say the least. Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Uber are companies that are as varied as Disney, Costco, Boeing, and Yellow Cab. Notice that both of those lists are sets of a communications platform, a retail giant, an advanced manufacturing company, and a driving service. And yet we reflexively read the first list as a reasonable clumping, while the second feels scattershot.

Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Uber all deliver dramatically different products in dramatically different markets, but still are all commonly understood as tech firms. Where the real commonalities lie is in the broad strokes of their business models. All were fueled by Silicon Valley venture capital to rapidly scale-up and absorb losses to undercut competitors via that “blitzscaling” approach, all of them collect massive amounts of data on their userbase, and all have attempted to stave off oversight through appeals to how complicated and technical their products are. They have all, in other words, invoked the technobabble defense.

The popular conception of a “technology industry” does not actually line up with the markets they operate in. There are two main sets of industry classification: the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) from the Securities and Exchange Commission for breaking out what markets publicly traded firms operate in and the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), created by the Office of Management and Budget alongside Canadian and Mexican peer institutions, which supplanted SIC as the standard classification metric among federal agencies that collect economic data. If you look each of their industry classifications up, Meta is a web search or database retrieval portal, Amazon is miscellaneous retail, Apple is wireless communications equipment manufacturing, and Uber is a driving support service.

Both classifications are obviously imperfect, but it bears mentioning that neither matches the popular discourse about a defined “technology industry.” If you’re interested, here’s a quick and dirty table that gets the point across:

None of this is to say that every use of the phrase “tech industry” or “big tech” is nefarious, only that it reinforces a public branding that is beneficial to invocations of the technobabble defense. For this reason, we won’t use either term in this series, we’ll instead discuss “Silicon Valley” or “Silicon Valley Venture Capital-backed,” which are clunkier but don’t fall for the industry’s own self-mythologizing. And yes, we are aware that not every firm broadly counted as being among the “tech firm” set is physically headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area. All, however, have been backed by the area’s venture capital funds.

But the important takeaway here is that Silicon Valley does not, actually, have a monopoly on technology or innovation so much as they have an aggressive marketing strategy to drape themselves in rhetorical appeals to themselves as inheritors of the legacy of progress. When we get down to brass tacks, we don’t need to accept their favored conception.

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Image credit: "Binary code" by Christiaan Colen is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Last year, my colleague Henry Burke and I wrote for The American Prospect about how Silicon Valley has turned lawbreaking into a supposedly “innovative” business strategy. By refusing to adhere to the rules of the road, Silicon Valley pioneered new businesses that undercut existing players in the market, and it worked phenomenally—for the venture capitalists. By betting on slow government response coupled with regulators too scared to actually crack down on lawbreaking, Silicon Valley hacked capitalism, and as of November 2024 – the White House.

We think this approach has come to define much of our current political moment. Wealthy tech oligarchs, empowered by decades of government inaction, have come to see the government as something they can ignore. And, not content to rest on their expensive laurels, the oligarchs are also buying off politicians to keep things this way. This corruption fundamentally erodes trust in government, but it also undermines our democracy and markets. If a regulation is outdated or actually hinders innovation it should be removed by the elected officials empowered to do so by the democratic process, not by wealthy tech investors who undermine it until it becomes functionally unenforceable. The rule of law does not have an algorithm exception.

Reid Hoffman—a prominent tech investor, founder of LinkedIn, and billionaire political donor— termed the breaking the law first approach to regulation “blitzscaling.” We have another name: “the technobabble defense.” Using technical jargon to obscure what the business actually does is the core part of this business plan, and we think it should be highlighted as such. “Blitzscaling” is yet another euphemism in Silicon Valley’s fake-innovation lexicon, and like most euphemisms, the term obscures what it actually is. Science fiction shows infamously feature “technobabble” as a plot device to create a plausible-seeming explanation for how something is happening, which is how you wind up with scenes featuring ultra-technical nonsense like, “the hyper-warp plasma manifold is out of alignment, pass me that quantum recoupler so I can fix it.” Silicon Valley venture capitalists have brought this practice out of the writer’s room and into political economy.

For an example of technobable, look no further than Uber, the now-ubiquitous ride hailing app. Taxi regulation existed before Uber, but Uber’s entire “disruption” was predicated on pretending that its app-based gig system made it a technology company, not a car service. Of course, Uber doesn’t make money by selling or licensing its software. It makes its money through taking a cut from the service provided by its drivers. Even the company’s defenders recognize that this is regulatory arbitrage. They just conveniently ignore that the difference in regulation is because Uber just flagrantly violated existing law.

Long before Uber, though, Microsoft pioneered the technobabble defense when it argued that actually, it’s not an antitrust violation when you do it on a computer. Obviously, they didn’t literally say it like that. Their position was that preloading the Internet Explorer browser onto Windows computers was not a violation of antitrust prohibitions on “bundling” using market share in one market to disadvantage competitors in a separate but related market. The Department of Justice alleged that packaging Internet Explorer with Windows parlayed Microsoft’s monopoly in operating systems into an anticompetitive advantage in web browsing, attempting to take the legs out from under rivals like Netscape.

Defending his company, Bill Gates explicitly appealed to innovation and the rapidly changing nature of the technology industry, saying “Can any Microsoft endure future competition without innovation? The answer is no. We’ve got to keep changing.” This appeal to fluidity fundamentally misunderstands the challenge to Microsoft’s conduct. The issue was not that Microsoft was innovating new features within its operating system, it was that it was packaging complimentary goods with a product they exercised monopoly power over, creating barriers to entry for competitors in that industry. The idea that a company’s need to innovate in order to continue into the future somehow negates existing law’s application in the here and now is foundational to the technobabble defense.

Across a range of industries, companies have taken to invoking this defense to justify why their conduct is not subject to government oversight. RealPage argued that coordinating prices across rental properties was not a form of cartelization or price manipulation, because they were using an algorithm. Sports betting apps launched in violation of state gambling restrictions by claiming that their apps were actually mobile strategy games, not betting sites. The entire premise of cryptocurrency is that speculative assets don’t count as securities if you throw them on a blockchain. Hell, now we even have companies claiming that betting on the outcome of sports games isn’t gambling — it’s investing in swaps.

Silicon Valley-backed firms have been permitted to play cute with the rule of law for nearly two decades, but they’ve become even more brazen in the first year of Trump 2.0, emboldened by the cartoonishly open pay-to-play regulation across the economy and the president’s embrace of technobabble’s greatest ever user: crypto. Crypto has become central to Trump, his fortune, and his administration in a way that grants legitimacy to the technobabble defense. Now that the sharks sense blood in the water, they don’t want to remain confined to a handful of industries. Much of our economy is now overseen by corporate executives eagerly hunting for end-runs around public accountability.

To highlight this issue, we’re going to be producing a short newsletter series tracing technobabble through different industries highlighting the way corporations have been able to wield the excuses of “innovation,” “algorithms,” and other jargony drivel as an end run around consumer protection laws, securities regulations and more.

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Unfortunately, we still won’t be able to go back to running these Hackwatch columns at regular intervals, but hopefully you won’t have to go without our keen, cutting, quippy coverage of the commentariat for months on end again! Anywho, let’s talk about the middle-of-the-road political sensation that’s sweeping the nation: abundance.

Today is the start of the flagship Abundance 2025 conference, the second annual gathering devoted to building a political faction centered on permitting reform, reducing barriers to building, and greenwashing Joe Manchin’s legacy!

[Ed. note: If you want a musical accompaniment while you read, I’d recommend “The Wrong Direction” by Passenger, “Crossroads” by Tracy Chapman, “I Won’t Back Down” by Tom Petty, “Waking Up The Giants” by Grizfolk, or “Only a Pawn in their Game” by Bob Dylan]

For those of you joining us blessed enough to not follow politics closely or tuning in from under a rock, the abundance movement is a cross-partisan initiative that ostensibly emphasizes identifying and clearing bottlenecks in the building process to clear the path for material abundance. Towards this end, abundists frequently advocate for relaxing regulatory requirements, though many of its Democratic-aligned champions bristle at accusations of being “deregulatory.”

We’ve been critiquing this approach for years now, since before it had crystallized into the “abundance agenda.” In the last few months we’ve written a lot about the movement’s ideas and policies and why we think it’s a losing political paradigm. In particular, last week my colleagues Hannah, Kenny, and Henry wrote a report jointly with our friends at the Open Markets Institute tackling a number of the biggest problems with the abundance narrative. And this morning, Henry has followed that up with another new report on the people and groups comprising the abundance ecosystem.

Check out Henry’s report The Abundance Ecosystem here!

The trouble with talking about the abundance movement is that it’s quite hard to pin down what exactly it is. There’s Paul Williams who basically says that abundance is just an amalgamation of local YIMBY movements, which leads to the counterintuitive position (made at roughly the 1 hour 52 minute mark) that people like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson aren’t really part of the movement, despite being the most prominent public representatives of the faction’s brand. Amusingly, when I was searching for where Williams said that, Google’s AI told me “No, Paul Williams is not in the abundance movement, but Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are two of its most prominent proponents.” (For what it’s worth, I truly wish that we lived in a world where we had an abundance movement that matches what people like Williams and Ned Resnikoff mean, rather than a bundling of YIMBYism with clearing a path for AI data centers—which is explicitly cited as an objective by the Inclusive Abundance Initiative—and abetting fossil fuel expansion. Oh well.)

A degree of this ambiguity is deliberate, as the movement’s main organizing arm Inclusive Abundance acknowledged that:

“Thus far, the ecosystem has intentionally taken a big-tent approach by maintaining a broad appeal. That said, as momentum moves towards policy action, some in the ecosystem have called for more clearly defining policy priorities, which has the potential to surface policy disagreements among the organizations in the space.”

That abundance is a big tent doesn’t quite do the canopy’s capaciousness justice. The movement includes groups like Greater Greater Washington, which explicitly centers “racial, economic, and environmental justice,” which seems directly opposed to the thesis of “everything bagel liberalism.” But it also includes groups like Stand Together, a philanthropic organization funded by Charles Koch (and run by the head of the Charles Koch Foundation) which funds the Alliance Defending Freedom, an anti-LGBTQ hate group that, among other things, has sought to keep laws criminalizing sodomy on the books and in 2015 argued to the European Court of Human Rights that transgender people should face mandatory sterilization. You’ve got Americans for Prosperity, the primary Koch political arm that has waged an intense campaign to block climate action, alongside the Federation of American Scientists.

There becomes a point where expansiveness begets incoherence. As a political faction, I think abundance is past that point. Our dear friend Matt has also said this explicitly:

When people talk about “abundance,” they mean a lot of different things. For nearly a century before Derek Thompson coined the term “abundance agenda,” the word was used to describe a political economic paradigm that emphasized equitable distribution over increasing growth and production, pretty much diametrically in opposition to the modern abundance movement. I wrote about the abundance faction of 1935 that toyed with founding a party to FDR’s left for The New Republic. It’s a good word that socialists and social justice folks had been using for a long time (and probably would like to have it back). There’s even a forthcoming communist degrowth treatise called Radical Abundance.

But in the very contemporary, last few months sense, people broadly mean some subset of three things when they say “abundance.” There’s the book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, there’s abundance as an umbrella policy category encompassing how to invigorate the physical economy, and there’s the political abundance faction.

There are a ton of book reviews, ranging from near infatuation to even-handed to negative fusilades. I maintain that my colleague Hannah’s early review for The American Prospect is criminally underrated in that department. It usefully contrasts the book with Marc Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works, which makes an extremely similar case but with some more nuance and historical context. If you want a quick guide to criticism of Klein and Thompson’s book, we have a compilation on this page.

Sometimes Abundance is called an airport book, and other times it’s “a once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to renew a politics of plenty.” I honestly expected it to be better; I liked Klein’s previous book Why We’re Polarized a lot more and I often enjoy Thompson’s articles.

It is, though, frequently wrong and/or incomplete. It discusses housing without mentioning the collapse of a housing bubble in the Great Recession. It laments that we can’t build another transcontinental railroad without discussing any of the historical tragedy around that construction, which I wrote about here. And the book takes issue with a Los Angeles air filter regulation that is actually extraordinarily reasonable and not cost-intensive, which I wrote about here. It also leans heavily on a questionable understanding of the New Left, including an unusual reading of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and arguing that Ralph Nader’s litigation to compel the government to actually enforce the law is actually the ur-example of making the government less able to act decisively. My paradigm, alas, remains unshifted.

The part of abundance that’s most compelling (in my humble opinion) is its role as an umbrella category for an array of supply-side policies. (And no, I do not consider climate denialist “all of the above” energy policies within that category; we already have an abundance of pollution.) There’s a lot of good work being done on housing policy by a variety of YIMBY groups. There are a number of organizations like the Volcker Alliance and Partnership for Public Service that do great work to develop a corps of dedicated civil servants, and there are a number of very good policy shops that I’m a big fan of, including the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. At the same time, you also have conservative culture warrior organizations like the Manhattan Institute and the Cato Institute and a literal landlord lobbying group in the National Multifamily Housing Council who pitch their policy preferences as abundance agenda items.

And then there’s abundance as a political program. My biggest problem with abundance is that it is specifically envisioned as means to disempower progressives, organized labor, and environmentalists. To be clear, that’s not me drawing spurious conclusions. Here’s some statements that say it quite explicitly:

• Niskanen: “On the left, conflicts exist wherever progressives pursue their goals through NIMBY-like mechanisms, such as with historic preservation, public employee unions, and organized interests claiming the mantle of environmental justice.”

• Derek Thompson, on the Lex Fridman podcast: “On the Democratic side, there is a fight and it’s happening right now and our book is trying to win a certain intra-left coalitional fight about defining the future of liberalism in the Democratic Party. So, I’m not of the left. I’m certainly not of the far left. I have center left politics and maybe even a center left personality style if we can even call it that, but I do not begrudge the left for fighting because there’s a fight to be had.”

• Jonathan Chait: “[P]rogressives are not wrong to see the abundance agenda as a broader attack on their movement. Their theory of American politics depends on empowering the very groups the abundance agenda identifies as the architects of failure and barriers to progress.”

• Josh Barro: “Sometimes the conflict between abundance and the labor movement gets downplayed. If you look up “unions” in the index to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, it takes you to their discussion on pages 126-7 of how the use of union labor did not prevent Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro from using regulatory relief to speed the reconstruction of a destroyed interstate underpass. It does not take you to their discussion on page 104 of how local construction trade unions in San Francisco have sought to block the use of cost-saving modular construction in affordable housing projects.”

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As I’ve written, it isn’t universal, but there is a major undercurrent of anti-labor sentiment in the abundance movement. As my colleagues and their OMI co-authors discuss at some length in their report on the abundance policy agenda, environmentalists are perhaps an even greater scapegoat.

It’s worth noting that this faction is seeking to disempower organized labor and environmentalists arm-in-arm with:

• Charles Koch’s personal political machine, Americans for Prosperity

• Multiple organizations with contributors to Project 2025 like the American Enterprise Institute, the Reason Foundation, the Foundation for American Innovation, and the Mercatus Center

• Oren Cass, a speaker at Abundance 2025 who was also a contributor to Project 2025 and who just yesterday wrote in The New York Times about how the Trump administration’s destructive first 8 months set the stage for an economy that, as the article’s image claims emblazoned on a hard hat, “Make[s] America Build Again”

• The Future of Life Institute, which once sent a letter of intent for a $100,000 grant to a Swedish Neo-Nazi publication

As Henry details in the report released this morning, all of those groups are either included in Inclusive Abundance’s “Abundance Landscape” or are participating at today’s abundance conference.

At a time when the most fundamental question confronting the Democratic Party, and everyone in the center-left coalition more broadly, is how to stand up to Trumpism, it seems like a particularly bad moment to decide that the Kochs make better allies than the AFL-CIO. And abundance very much is the pitch from establishment Democrats right now.

The champions of abundance liberalism are also hell-bent on bringing tech moguls, many of whom have become openly fascistic (e.g. Musk, Marc Andreesen), back into the fold even while advocating to discard entire constituencies including labor, environmentalists, and racial justice advocates, along with immigrants and queer people. At WelcomeFest, a centrist confab that was very abundance-pilled, there were talks about why Democrats needed to stop talking about Kilmar Abrego Garcia and why it was a bad idea to contest Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

As Substacker and labor organizer JoeWrote explained, this myopia is downstream of the top-down vision of politics that has become a defining feature of Democrats, and is part of why the party is so distrusted even by its base. As Joe wrote:

“While most parties try to build support by turning their constituents’ wishes into policy, the Democrats take the opposite approach. The political objective is determined by wealthy party and media insiders, who then try to convince their constituents that the elite-decreed platform is in their best interest. This was best illustrated in the concluding chapter of Abundance, which outlined a top-down political theory: the policies are decided by the donor class, and the job of Democrat-aligned media and politicians is to sell those policies to American voters.”

And:

“As Abundance articulated, the Democratic establishment believes think tanks and donors should determine the party's direction, not voters. Those forces are ideologically committed to Israel, neoliberalism, and the existing social order, so they see their primary goal as stopping anti-Zionists, socialists, and progressives from having a seat at the table.”

This frame, I think, helps to explicate why centrist liberals would proactively seek to weaken organized labor with the help of well-monied benefactors from the oil, crypto, and tech industries. As a factional movement, abundance is being wielded to preserve the type of top-down anti-democratic politics that has led us to this juncture.

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Want more? Check out some of the pieces that we have published or contributed research or thoughts to in the last week:

Who is Behind the Growing Abundance Movement?

Trump's Homicidal Hurricane Policy

In Trump’s D.C., the Swamp Runneth Over

Battle Over Independence Arrives at Fed's `Doorstep'

Detailed Report Exposes Serious Threat of the Neoliberal, Trump-Lite 'Abundance' Agenda

Goon School Begins Bright and Early

The “Mini-Trump” Attacking Lisa Cook Had Paperwork Problems of His Own

Polymarket Authorized for U.S. Return Just Days After Donald Trump Jr. Joins as Adviser

Clarification: A previous version of this Hackwatch said that the Future of Life Institute "granted $100,000 to Swedish Neo-Nazis," based on reporting that a grant in that amount had been approved. FLI has denied that funds were disbursed and has disputed the reporting that the grant was approved, though they have acknowledged sending a letter of intent to the pro-Nazi publication Nya Dagbladet. The wording has been updated to clarify the stage in the grant process reached.

Unfortunately, we’ll have another hiatus after this piece as well; I’ll be having surgery today to remove a portion of my lung and the tumor it’s housing. Don’t get cancer, but if you do, this is the kind to have—it’s a slow-growing tumor called a carcinoid that usually doesn’t metastasize and can often be cured by surgery alone. I’m very lucky as people with tumors go. I’ll probably come out on the other side at the cost of just half a lung.

But while I’m waiting for that, I’ve been following the discourse around Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance, and the movement it comes out of. (Even though I’m grateful that I probably only need a single surgery to handle a large tumor, I could really go for one of Ezra and Derek’s star pills from page 2.)

[Ed. Note: If you want some music to listen to while reading (or in general), I’d recommend “Souls in the Machine” by The Goo Goo Dolls, “All at Once” by The Fray, “The Devil” by The Wandering Hearts, “Relatively Easy” by Jason Isbell, “This Land” by Gary Clark Jr., “Blame it on Me” by George Ezra, and “Our Bright Future” by Tracy Chapman.]

In the interest of full transparency, I have been cynical about the abundance agenda for a while. I have been following it for the last two years, seeing its metamorphosis from a single essay to a well-funded and organized political movement, and in November of 2024 I wrote what I believe was among the first widely read pieces critical of the movement. Despite Ezra Klein and others calling it a hit piece, I think the actual criticism was relatively tepid. My main objective was to highlight how money from crypto, Big Tech, and the oil industry was involved in the movement, and raise the question of why and what powerful industry players think they stand to gain from an “abundance agenda.”

It also garnered a lot of takes, including quite a bit of criticism centered on my calling the movement “rebranded neoliberalism.” I explained what I mean by the term here at the time. I’ve also posted another blog this morning defining neoliberalism on the RDP site, which you can see here. This passage captures the thrust of how I think about the term:

“In short, neoliberalism is an economic perspective where markets are the benchmark. It includes privatization of state services, but also specific ways of thinking of government “like a business:” pursuing efficiency and evaluating success in market terms through cost-benefit analysis. It involves a subordination of ideals of public good under this framework. Obviously, programs were always evaluated for costs and benefits; what the neoliberal turn changed was how things are evaluated. Harms that cannot be readily converted into monetary costs are frequently secondary under our modern neoliberal analyses.”

And, while I think Klein and Thompson are among the least neoliberal in the abundance movement, their version of efficiency still buys into this exact sort of framing. Whether they themselves are neoliberals is academic; neoliberalism, at least as I’m using it, is neither bad nor good. It can be used to justify privatizing public libraries and union-busting (bad) or to oppose reckless protectionism and isolationism (good). I’m mostly including this part to clarify that and try to move beyond the focus on vocabulary.

Efficiency’s Effect

For the rest of this column, I want to focus on this way of thinking and why the pursuit of cost-efficiency and easier building inherently includes large tradeoffs that I have not seen considered nearly seriously enough.

Let’s begin with an example from Abundance. On page 74, the authors lament that while we once built things like the transcontinental railroad, we now struggle to take on projects of that scale.

However, Klein and Thompson don’t deal with the fact that Central Pacific, who built most of the western side of the railroad through California, Nevada, and Utah, exploited Chinese immigrants who were paid half of what white workers were. Many of those workers died or suffered serious injury. Not to mention that it was incentivized by the federal government giving away huge tracts of land to the railroads, including through areas that had only recently seen Native American genocide.

That process was also insanely corrupt, with the Union Pacific Railroad, who built the eastern side of the railroad from the Missouri River to Utah, engaging in massive fraud in what became the Credit Mobilier scandal.

One of the messier parts of the #discourse around the book has been a weird back and forth of abundists and critics all trying to claim the legacy of FDR. Matt Yglesias, for instance, argued that FDR was largely able to build because the procedural roadblocks that hamper building had largely not been set up yet. But the Roosevelt administration was still expanding building at an enormous scale while it had perhaps the strongest policy of favoring unionized contractors that we’ve ever had.

I actually do think Yglesias is correct on the topline. But, I think where he and his allies stray is ignoring that some of the most costly restrictions we’ve put in place are things like “it’s not okay to bulldoze poor communities,” “we can’t just abuse our workers,” “let’s make sure we aren’t racist,” and “no poisoning people.” Regulations may be a barrier to building at the speed of, say, China, but many of those regulations are the cost of kind governance. It is challenging to quantify all the lives saved by disasters that didn’t happen because of tighter regulations, but there is no shortage of horror stories about the human and ecological consequences of projects built without adequate guardrails, at home and abroad, in the past and the present.

Our current regulatory system is far from adequate; even with regulations and initiatives to address environmental damage, disparate racial impact and more, we still allow the Tennessee Valley Authority to dump carcinogenic waste in a black community, for instance. The past that Klein and Thompson mourn, where we could build more freely, was upheld by pillars of genocide, monumental theft, and wanton disregard for frontline communities. I don’t expect either of them to condone this type of conduct, but to ever truly understand why we have those irksome regulations, these past atrocities and their ongoing reverberations need to be addressed.

Klein and Thompson’s book gestures towards workplace safety regulations as an example of inefficiency. How much of an increase in worker injury should be tolerated in the name of speedier construction? They take aim at a patchwork of environmental laws aimed at, among other things, preventing widespread species extinctions. How much are they willing to join their libertarian pro-abundance counterparts in targeting laws like the Endangered Species Act and their state-level iterations to expedite building, even if that extinguishes entire species? Are Klein and Thompson actually comfortable with the consequences if their agenda were widely implemented at scale? I’d like to see someone ask them directly.

(Honestly, we’re just hoping that they debate any sharp-elbowed critic without a vested interest in reciprocally friendly coverage in The New York Times, Atlantic, or Ringer podcast network).

We still allow brutal working conditions in the United States, especially regarding heat exposure. The rail workers likely to vanguard any new transcontinental railroad are still only barely able to seek medical attention when sick and are subject to grueling work schedules. Freight rail companies are still fighting unions over having two people operate their engines, as opposed to one. And fellow abundist Matt Yglesias has previously pointed to this push to require a minimum crew of two as an example of unions rent-seeking to preserve member jobs at the expense of higher transportation costs.

What that view misses, though, is any interrogation of who the second person would be. It isn’t simply a redundancy. Absent that rule, all engines are only required to have one person on board to pilot the train. The second person would be an engineer. Train crashes are rare, but when they happen they are disastrous. Just think back to East Palestine, Ohio. A crew of two with an engineer means a better chance of realizing when something goes wrong because one of them won’t be focused on driving. And when something does go wrong, addressing it safely is much more doable with two people. Think about how hard it must be to try and get your train to a depot while simultaneously driving, trying to fix or manage whatever mechanical problem arises, and trying to communicate that something’s gone wrong.

Similarly, community involvement is meant to allow those impacted by new infrastructure to protect themselves. It can absolutely slow the building process and add additional costs. But the unspoken tradeoff is that we are more likely to—intentionally or unintentionally—harm and exploit people without it. What happens without these processes can be seen in projects that skirt them; in Memphis, Elon Musk’s xAI data center went ahead and expanded on-site fossil fuel turbines without a permit, and the community is now being exposed to dangerous air pollution and carcinogenic chemicals like formaldehyde.

When you want to build a pipeline through a populated area, you have a choice: go around and/or take additional safety measures, or go ahead as planned. Many of these regulations do not simply add costs, they shift the costs. The intent is to internalize costs so that frontline communities have less to bear. Safety regulations shift the cost of accidents from workers (death, injuries, etc.) to their employers (more precaution, risk mitigation).

Workplace safety requirements also make a certain level of safety a societal guarantee and thus outside the marketplace of negotiation. That transformation increases the leverage of both witting but vulnerable and unwitting workers while ensuring that no one needs engineering and biochemical specialties in order to assess the tradeoffs of taking jobs that might be riskier than they appear from afar.

There are some instances where you can eliminate regulatory burden where the risk of such tradeoffs are minimal. Upzoning, for instance. As progressives, we’ve always opposed restrictive zoning, as much of it was deliberately constructed to facilitate white flight (see: redlining). But to get back to building at the scale of the transcontinental railroad, we have to consider the externalities presented by new bargains.

Efficiency is not costless. But it is unclear to me how abundists would balance building against the wellbeing of affected people when they conflict. There is a way to do it, but not without recognizing and owning that this is a live and urgent question, and perhaps not without necessarily narrowing “abundance” from a cardinal principle to one of a set of priorities, something some of its champions are actively opposed to.

If “abundance” is meant as an overriding principle, then that means reckoning with who will bear the costs of building that are being re-externalized.

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Here’s a summary of who’s already been drafted and who we expect to be signed soon.

First Round Selections:

Kyrsten Sinema

Once viewed as a top prospect by the private equity industry, Sinema’s draft prospects seemed to decline as a result of her trouble following the party line in the Senate. After using her position within the party to protect a tax loophole crucial to the private equity industry, Sinema requested a trade from the Democratic Caucus. While this may have endeared her to the industry, it did not help her political prospects long term. With Ruben Gallego promising to run on the Democratic ticket against her last year, Sinema decided to step aside and enjoy using her campaign funds on lavish trips to Europe and California Wine country instead.

Despite this, Sinema’s value was still high enough to be picked up by Coinbase’s Global Advisory Council. Crypto interest was unsurprising given the help she provided the industry while in office. Sinema is not the first high-profile elected official to join the crypto company’s team, she’ll be joining the council alongside Trump Campaign Manager Chris LaCivita and veteran crypto shills like former Congressman Tim Ryan, former Congresswoman Stephanie Murphy, former Senator Pat Toomey, and former Mayor of Los Angeles and CA Governor candidate, Antonio Villaraigosa. With no salary cap in the lobbying (or, in this case, unregistered influence-peddling) game, expect the already stacked roster of cryptocurrency cheerleaders to grow even further. Do not be surprised if Sinema is also able to expand her reach, taking a second position with private equity or another influential business lobby that she has long courted.

Debbie Stabenow

Despite being 74 years old, outgoing Senate Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow was hired by the lobbying firm Liberty Partners Group. While technically not working as a lobbyist for the firm (her position is listed as senior policy advisor), Stabenow will be helping the firm support its clients’ goals.

Currently, Liberty Partners’ client roster is primarily composed of healthcare groups, but their website lists Google as a client as well. Given that Stabenow’s committee roles were not healthcare-focused, and her committee’s preeminent role in the regulation of commodities (making her one of DC’s most influential voices on cryptocurrency regulation), we expect Liberty Partners’ client list to expand rapidly, picking up cryptocurrency firms looking to push weaker regulations through the Senate.

High-Value Picks:

Patrick McHenry

The bow tie-wearing former Chair of the House Committee on Financial Services, McHenry (R-NC) has yet to be picked up by any firm, but he’s clearly one of the best prospects of the 2025 class. With a 20-year career in the House of Representatives, McHenry has the robust experience every lobbying firm is looking for. He’s a plug-and-play rookie for any industry looking for immediate regulatory evasion. While lobbying for Wall Street seems like a logical solution for the Chair of the Financial Services Chair, it has been cryptocurrency that has been throwing money left and right over the past year. It’s clear that 2025 is the year they want to make waves, and adding McHenry to their roster could be an easy way to add depth.

Garret Graves

Rumored to be in consideration to be Donald Trump’s FEMA Administrator or his Secretary of Transportation, Louisiana Congressman Garret Graves seemingly is still a free agent. The 52-year-old Congressman chose not to seek reelection after courts mandated Louisiana re-draw congressional district boundaries to fix the racial gerrymandering. A former congressional staffer who worked for the Energy and Commerce Committee, Graves is known as a detail-oriented policy wonk who was very effective during his ten years in Congress. Having spent time on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and the Committee on Natural Resources, he would be an effective lobbyist if he decided to put some of his political ambitions on hold to pursue a payout. While ambitious and relatively young, Graves has come into conflict with his own party (particularly in his home state), possibly making a federal lobbying gig even more enticing.

Graves has already celebrated Trump’s Deputy Secretary of the Interior pick and during his time in Congress, he was a vocal proponent of expediting the permitting process, especially for fossil fuel projects. Given his Louisiana ties, working for the fossil fuel industry would be logical, but he could be a smart choice for the AI industry or the Abundance Agenda looking to make inroads in the MAGA-led Department of Interior and House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.

Cathy McMorris Rodgers

Rodgers doesn’t have the same clear path to a financial lobbying gig that McHenry does, but as the former Chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee (one of the most powerful roles in Congress) and as the Vice Chair of Donald Trump’s 2016 transition team, McMorris Rodgers is perfectly suited to lobby on any number of issues. Despite an apparent loss of favor with Trump at some point in 2016 (leading to her not receiving an expected appointment to Secretary of the Interior), Rodgers continued to be a Trump loyalist throughout her time in the House. Given the myriad of issues she’s well-situated to lobby on, she’d be a likely pick for one of the lobbying firms that are on the rise with Trump back in power. Do not be surprised if she’s hired by the likes of Ballard Partners or Mercury Public Affairs.

Under the Radar Prospects:

Sean Patrick Maloney

A veteran of the Coinbase Global Advisory Board that Sinema just joined, Maloney stepped down to accept a post as Ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. This was, of course, after some pressure from The Revolving Door Project and Senator Elizabeth Warren. Warren got Maloney to commit to not accepting any job or compensation with a cryptocurrency or digital asset firm for four years after leaving office, so he’ll be forced to look elsewhere for playing time. Despite that, he’s still a party insider with connections to peddle. With his apparent resignation from the ambassadorship, he’s more than likely already seeking out a position somewhere.

Rostin Behnam

Commodities Future Trading Commissioner Rostin Behnam relinquished his post at the CFTC on February 7th despite his term not expiring until next year. The former CFTC Chair was known to be friendlier to the digital assets and cryptocurrency industries than any other Democratic regulators, especially Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, so his post-government career seems likely to include work on their behalf. He could also take a more traditional role working for a big bank or commodity trading group. Given his previous experience as a top aide to Senator Stabenow, he could be valuable for his experience in both the executive and legislative branches, allowing a prospective firm to score a multi-threat influence peddler.

Waiver Wire Pickups:

The Children Of Powerful Trump Administration Officials

Any lobbying firm looking for a budget-friendly way to pad out their roster needs look no further than the children of key public servants. Within days of her mother being tapped as Trump’s White House Chief of Staff, Katie Wiles was promoted by her employer, lobbying firm Continental Strategy, to be director of lobbying and consulting for their Jacksonville and Washington DC offices. Her prior experience? Less than two years working as “Communications Chief” to the mayor of Jacksonville. Oh, and nebulous “connections” to people in DC so crucial that a sitting Congressman, Rep. Byron Donalds, celebrated her promotion.

Thankfully, Katie Wiles is not alone. Her sister, Caroline Wiles, is also headed to DC as Vice President of Federal Affairs for Florida-based lobbying firm Rubin Turnbull & Associates. After the last Trump administration resulted in Caroline being forced out of the White House for failure to pass a background check, it’s great to see that all Caroline needed to land on her feet was a parent landing one of the most powerful positions in government. The lesson to prospective lobbying firms? Why wait for powerful people to leave government service when you purchase their influence immediately through their children?

Hi folks! We don’t usually do on-the-fly updates, but there are several new developments in the IRS/Direct File story that we wanted to make sure readers were made aware of promptly. Toward that end, enjoy a bonus mini-Hackwatch column this week.

It seems hard to believe, but it’s mostly good news.

To start, not only is the Direct File portal still open, but it’s now also available in Spanish! You can access the Spanish-language portal with this link.

The backlash that the administration received on Monday and Tuesday actually led to a defensive response from the Trump press office headlining an email blast, sent late on Tuesday February 4, titled “FAKE NEWS: Hoax Machine Keeps Running.” Here is the exact language from the White House:

“HOAX: “Until today you could file your taxes FOR FREE. Trump just took that from you,” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) claimed.

FACT: That’s an easily debunked lie — the official IRS Direct File website remains online and is accepting tax returns. It’s such an egregious lie, even the Associated Press admits “the free filing program is still available.”

This response should be encouraging; it may well have been Musk’s plan to take the Direct File portal down (although there’s really no way of knowing what he meant by “that group has been deleted”), but now the White House has directly affirmed its continued existence. The fact that an unconditional rebuttal came so quickly may indicate that, for now, they don’t have an appetite for this fight. And that indicates that they see the support for Direct File as significant enough to steer clear (again: for now). As this case study demonstrates, boosting and demonstrating popularity for tangible government goods and services remains one of the best tactics available to combat the hollowing of the civil government.

NLRB board member Gwynne Wilcox also officially filed her suit seeking to enjoin Trump’s firing of her. Democrats at the NLRB continue to lead by example in fighting to keep the federal government intact (if affirmed, Wilcox’s firing would leave the board without a quorum, functionally paralyzing the only agency set up to protect individuals’ workplace rights).

And finally, this op-ed from a former Justice Department attorney about the positive impact of activism on slowing the gears of the worst decision-making within the first Trump Administration is well worth a read. As we have written, the original #Resistance was a good thing, and it’s bad that people are pretending otherwise.

The above photo by Tim Evanson is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Hi folks, welcome back to Hackwatch! It’s been a minute. As I’m sure is the case for many, we’ve been busy keeping track of the new administration’s policy hurricane. Towards that end, my colleagues launched a new weekly newsletter, the “Corruption Calendar,” which you should absolutely check out here (and subscribe to our Substack to get it delivered straight to your inbox).

Also, if you haven’t seen it, my colleague Henry put together a list of media watchdogs we’re grateful for last Thanksgiving. Now is a great time to revisit that, as legacy media flounders in its responsibility to hold the powerful to account. But that’s enough programmatic talk.

One glaring commonality between the first and second Trump terms is the obvious effort to hollow out whole chunks of the federal government by executive fiat. Perhaps the greatest example of the first take was eviscerating the Environmental Protection Agency—a move that the Biden administration was far too slow to reverse. This time, there has been rapid erosion of numerous agencies, including the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Internal Revenue Service.

I wrote about FEMA in a blog last week and there’s plenty being said about the FAA in the wake of the first fatal plane passenger plane crash in the United States in well over a decade. So for right now, let’s talk internal revenue shop.

(Ed. note: If you want some music to listen to this week, I’d suggest “Linger” by The Cranberries or “Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat” by James Taylor.)

On January 21, Danny Werfel, Biden’s IRS commissioner, announced that he was resigning, despite his term running until November 2027. This came after Donald Trump had already announced Billy Long as his pick to take over the agency. The commissioner is meant to be somewhat insulated from presidential politics (hence 5 year terms, making it inevitably overlap with two presidential terms), but the president does have the power to fire them at will, making Werfel’s departure feel less like an abdication of duty than, say, Michael Barr. (For what it’s worth, even champions of the revolving door and milquetoast centrism are with us on this front.)

Even so, every high ranking Democratic appointee who left without being fired has eschewed the public interest they took an oath to defend. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Rohit Chopra was also expected to be fired on the first day of the Trump administration. But he kept doing his job for another two work weeks, continuing to enact important policy, slowing the takeover of Trumpian administration priorities, and creating a cost to remove him.

While Chopra is the most prominent example, other dedicated civil servants continued to crew their posts until removed, including National Labor Relations Board General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, who held out for a week, and her deputy, Jessica Rutter, who valiantly took over as acting counsel for another work week. And NLRB board member Gwynne Wilcox (the first Black Woman to serve on the board) promised legal action in opposition to her firing rather than meekly accepting the outcome (unlike the GC, board members can only be removed for cause; Wilcox argues that Trump did not demonstrate an appropriate pretense).

Particularly given Long as his replacement, Werfel should have stayed and buttressed the institution he led until removed from office. Billy Long has publicly opposed the very existence of the IRS (he cosponsored the euphemistic “Fair Tax Act”). To steal a quip from Trevor Noah (about Scott Pruitt’s appointment as EPA administrator 8 years ago), that’s a bit like appointing an Amish NASA head.

All of this is worsened by an impending Republican effort to permanently rescind $20 billion in modernization funds from the IRS.

While Democrats have been caught embarrassingly, disastrously flat-footed to the administration’s “flood the zone” strategy, its major strength is also a huge vulnerability; doing so much all at once leads to a propensity to miss crucial details. That’s probably why it took so long to give Chopra the boot. And Chopra’s removal was a bigger prize than Werfel’s would have been—there’s at least another couple of weeks left until the fight over IRS resources reenters the spotlight.

One of the biggest wins of the Biden IRS was the rollout of the Direct File tool, an entirely free public option to file simple tax returns directly to the federal government. I wrote about using it last year; it's a good tool. But the program is in Republicans’ crosshairs, and given Long’s prima facie hostility to tax collection (and inevitable opposition from the likes of Intuit), he probably won’t work too hard to defend it.

However, on Monday January 27 Direct File opened for residents in 25 states with tens of millions of people eligible to use it. I’ve been told by an ally who’s worked a lot on defending the program that the tool could save filers over $10 billion in costs this tax season. That’s probably why TurboTax has ramped up their advertising, particularly promising free filing for anyone who didn’t use their service last year.

Visual from Economic Security Project.

The morass that we’re expected to wade through in order to file our taxes in this country is inane. I plan on using Direct File again this year. If you can, you should give it a try too. The best way to protect these kinds of wins for good, accessible government is to make them popular. Last year the tool wasn’t perfect, but it sure beat getting pitched the premium upgrade from TurboTax about a billion times while I’m just trying to import a W2.

More importantly, it did the job well enough that states from ruby red Idaho to plum purple Pennsylvania to the dazzlingly Democratic Massachusetts all joined the tool since last year. There’s a real path to popularity.

On Monday, Elon Musk created mass confusion when he claimed that 18F, a government division that helped to create the Direct File tool, was “deleted.” 18F is dedicated to helping other parts of the government with software development and, currently, their website remains up. However, given the context of the comment, the remark launched widespread confusion about whether Direct File was in jeopardy. This is an evolving story, but here are the key points as they currently stand:

1. It is unclear if 18F has been shuttered at all. Talk of “deleting” parts of the government is relatively new and comes mostly from Musk-adjacent tech staff with little understanding of how the government works. How this kind of deletion could unfold is an open question, but for now it seems like bluster.

2. 18F helped develop Direct File, but is not responsible for administering it. That is internal to the IRS.

3. Newly-minted Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent committed to retaining Direct File, at least through the 2025 tax season.

4. The tool has already launched for the 2025 tax season and remains available.

5. A completed return done through the Direct File tool is a valid tax return and legally must be processed.

If you can, file your taxes with Direct File. Tell all of your friends, rave about it every chance you get, and make it obvious that you don’t want to go back to being left at Intuit’s mercy. (For what it’s worth, I would also recommend filing early; despite this scare being mostly nonsense, confusing shenanigans are part of that flood-the-zone strategy and will only increase as we get closer to Republican efforts to further eviscerate the IRS.)

If there’s one take away from this, it should be that even when things seem hopeless, even when loss seems predetermined, our actions still matter for changing the momentum of policy change. Think about how much has happened in the past two weeks. Every little roadblock that adds hours or days to the teardown of the civil service matters tangibly. How much harm did Chopra staying for 2 weeks prevent? Think about how quickly things are moving. That time matters. Delay actions are worthwhile; they might be the best tactic available, especially with Democratic electeds capitulating.

If you’re a Democratic appointed official, that means staying in your job. For the rest of us, that means building support for important programs like Direct File. Because while the process is horrendous and laws being broken clearly merit resistance, the best way to get people to understand the stakes of what is happening in the government is to elevate how people are being harmed day in and day out by rich people destroying tangible public goods and services.

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In her New Year’s Eve column, Rampell speculated on some of the ways in which widespread usage of GLP-1 receptor agonists—a class of drug which includes increasingly popular weight loss medications like Zepbound (manufactured by Eli Lilly), Ozempic, and Wegovy (both manufactured by Novo Nordisk)—could impact the economy.

Setting aside the fact that glowing write-ups of corporations have become a running theme in Rampell’s column, the real hackery is how Rampell’s enthusiasm towards corporate solutions contrasts her hostility to policy that curbs corporate power.

For all her optimism about this technology, Rampell acknowledges in the very beginning of her piece that “even experts don’t entirely understand how it works, its full range of uses and what its unintended consequences could be.”

Yet the picture she paints of how these drugs will “disrupt the economy” is rather positive: households could save more by spending less on groceries and labor markets stand to benefit from an ostensibly healthier population. (It’s worth noting that the evidence Rampell used to support the latter claim was an assertion that individuals would have the energy to pick up second jobs because they lost a significant amount of weight. Whether it’s a good idea to view the path to prosperity as people simply working more should raise some eyebrows, but that’s a topic for another day.)

Yet, when Rampell attempted to predict the impacts of a national ban on price gouging for food and groceries—the precedent for which already exists at the state level—the only outcomes she foresaw were “shortages, black markets and hoarding,” as well as potential increases in prices.

That Rampell seems more willing to entertain the possibility of airline passengers “slim[ming] down en masse” enough to cut fuel costs, while simultaneously dismissing the reality of seller’s inflation, speaks volumes about her brand of “data driven journalism.”

We’ve called out a lack of nutrition in Rampell’s reporting before—multiple times—and will continue to do so so long as she continues to deliver a menu of ostensibly overlooked corporate heroes and purportedly meddlesome regulations.

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That’s what Adam Kovacevich did when he started Chamber of Progress in 2021. Now the group, which has been growing in terms of both financial resources and influence, has the perfect opportunity to enact its goals: turning Silicon Valley’s policy preferences into the Democratic platform.

Adam Kovacevich, CEO and Founder of Chamber of Progress.

The tech industry was not happy with the Biden administration. Despite having an almost comical amount of influence (the former CEO of Google literally paid the salaries of over a dozen White House staffers), Silicon Valley felt as if they were not listened to. Joe Biden appointed an FTC Chair who dared to enforce antitrust law, an SEC Chair who boldly regulated digital assets as the securities they are, and the Biden NLRB redoubled efforts to protect worker’s rights. The disastrous June debate that led Joe Biden to eventually withdraw from the race offered Silicon Valley a chance to reverse this concerning trend. With Harris, a Bay Area politician with personal ties to tech firms, the tech world felt there was an opportunity to expand their influence. 

No one made this more clear than Kovacevich and Chamber of Progress who tweeted nearly incessantly about how Harris was friendly to business unlike the Biden regime. 

Almost immediately, there were reports that LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, a major Harris donor, requested that the VP fire FTC Chair Lina Khan upon her election. Billionaire Mark Cuban began pushing the VP towards more cryptocurrency friendly stances. Harris’ debate prep team was even headed up by Karen Dunn, a lawyer actively defending Google from an antitrust lawsuit. But this influence either didn’t work enough, or it didn’t work at all (we believe the latter). Harris lost.

Without a second look at the influence the industry had over the campaign (Uber’s Chief Legal Officer is Harris' brother-in-law and perhaps her most trusted advisor), Silicon Valley pivoted to the great blame debate. This is where Chamber of Progress and its CEO, Kovacevich have truly excelled. With a base reeling from a stinging defeat, Kovacevich’s Democratic-alligned trade group has had the perfect opportunity to pounce upon the supposedly anti-business left of the Democratic Party that stymied his organization’s lobbying efforts. 

In the time since the election, Kovacevich has levied attacks on Biden staff, a false report about “lefty” staff in the Harris campaign, and, of course, the anti-crypto left. Before the election he even preemptively blamed us here at the Revolving Door Project for Biden's unpopularity because we had “torpedoed Biden nominees with business experience.”

Portraying himself as a staunch Democrat angry at the progressives who led the party astray, Kovacevich has worked to present his tech industry agenda as the only pragmatic path forward. With an organization that describes itself as “devoted to a progressive society, economy, workforce, and consumer climate,” a bio flaunting a quote that Kovacevich is apparently “a significant voice in the progressive movement” (a claim that we have been unable to verify), and not-so subtle name in an allusion to its progressive stances, Kovacevich has worked to worm his way into the Democratic Party as the humble progressive who was left behind by the party’s supposed jarring leftward shift. 

Kovacevich praises Rep. Richie Torres’ friendliness towards tech as a model other Democrats should follow. Torres has been amongst the most crypto-friendly Members of Congress, going so far as to threaten the SEC for asking questions of crypto companies like FTX. 

This strategy is not a new or particularly creative one. The approach has been replicated by the Progressive Policy Institute as well as the libertarian-connected Institute for Progress. But that doesn’t mean it’s ineffective. With plenty of Silicon Valley influence in the Trump-led Republican Party, Kovacevich’s role is to be tech’s voice to partisan Democrats. And to those unaware of him or his history, this weak bait and switch might work. That is why we have decided to prepare a quick resource for those interested in big tech’s flack in DC. Kovacevich is the latest addition to our growing list of hacks profiled on our Hackwatch website. 

Interested in how Kovacevich continues to tout his college activism of crossing picket lines to this very day? Or how he used Google’s vast funds to pay right-wing “academics” like Joshua Wright to defend the company from any allegations of antitrust violations? Perhaps you’re more interested in how a staunch Democrat like Kovacevich wrestles with the fact that he donated to Jim Jordan’s campaign? We’re still trying to pin down that contradiction.

Perhaps you just want to read about the vast swathe of Mountainview, Sunnyvale, and Cupertino that fund his salary, or to read about his heartwarming friendship with Senator Tom Cotton. We have all that in one easy to access place. Give it a look over, maybe you’ll be surprised what Democratic politician used to employ this principled man (most likely not). But under no circumstances should you refer to this biography when consuming his work. It’ll completely ruin the illusion that he’s pursuing what he genuinely believes is right. 

Don’t miss our other recent work:

The Department of Government Efficiency Is Inefficient

Elon Musk has absolutely no idea what he’s doing in government. He’s even somehow made his government efficiency program inefficient. 

The Biden Administration Completely Failed to Address Corporate Crime. Can We Blame Voters for Noticing?

The Merrick Garland-led DOJ has been a failure. Under the tepid leadership of a business friendly bunch, white collar crime enforcement is nearing record lows, lower than even many years of the Trump DOJ. That’s a problem.

The Campaign That Could Have Been

What could the Harris campaign have done had they not shied away from an aggressive message on popular issues? 

The Committee For a Responsible Federal Budget Welcomes Musk’s Meme Department of Government Efficiency

The supposedly serious folks at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget are praising Elon Musk’s ridiculous government efficiency commission. It's both embarrassing and revealing. There’s a reason why they too are featured on our list of hacks. 

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(Ed. Note: Like last week’s Hackwatch, this is on the beefier side, just fyi. We’ll be going back to shorter and quippier next week. If you want song accompaniment, I’d recommend “America” by Tracy Chapman, “I See America” by Joy Oladukun, “American Oxygen” by Rihanna, or “Talking Bout a Revolution,” another one by Tracy Chapman. Or, if you want something more upbeat, “Footprints on the Moon” by Emerson Drive. Also, if you have thoughts on including these song recs with Hackwatch, I’d love to hear them.)

Setting the Scene

Since last Friday’s Hackwatch, the election results discourse has only intensified, with a mixture of great, interesting takes and some more akin to bovine excrement. 

In particular, we’re starting to get more information about the inside operations of the Harris campaign. We now know, for instance, that one of Harris’ biggest Super PACs funneled some $8 million to firms owned by the PAC’s leadership. The campaign itself also gave $15 million to celebrities to overshadow the Vice President perform at events. It somehow spent over a billion dollars, despite some staff reportedly not having been paid for past work yet. We’ve also gotten more reporting on the campaign abandoning its progressive economic platform being a move to satisfy corporate executives and the donor class. Oh, and the Republican House majority is official now.

Even the media landscape has shifted in the last week. The Guardian has left X (nee Twitter) in opposition to how Elon Musk has been running it. And, in lighter news, The Onion now owns InfoWars.

But for the most part, things stand more or less where they did a week ago. The blame game continues apace as Democrats and liberals search for new leadership and direction. The biggest question in the immediate term is who will take over the Democratic National Committee. 

Searching for a Spine: A Brief History of Democratic Cowardice

Two and a half years ago now, I wrote with my colleague Toni about Dick Durbin’s refusal to hold Clarence Thomas accountable after ProPublica’s bombshell reporting on Thomas being lavished by gifts from Harlan Crowe fit into a broader trend of “Democratic fecklessness.” A lot of what we wrote then rings truer than ever now. (For what it’s worth, there are now concerns that Durbin doesn’t have enough fight in him to oppose Trump's judicial nominees.)

In particular, read this passage:

Democrats are scared: scared of losing, scared of rocking the boat, scared of recognizing the gravity of the situation, scared of doing something about it. For the party that claims to be the “mature adults in the room” who sanctify American institutions and laws, Democrats have, in practice, settled for hand-wringing and symbolic admonishments as they clutch the tatters of long-lost norms and congressional cordiality.

Democrats have long waited for a day—one that will not come—where Republicans simply and suddenly discover some semblance of a moral compass. Joe Biden declared on the campaign trail in 2019, “[We] will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends,” after Donald Trump leaves office. We’re still waiting.

We’re not only still waiting, but Donald Trump left office without causing a republican epiphany and is now returning to office with a vengeance. Democrats don’t even seem any better prepared to take on the task of fighting the Trump administration than they were 8 years ago. Long ago we pointed out that Chuck Schumer could solve Senate gridlock on Presidential nominees by reforming Senate rules. If he had, we could be living in a world with all judicial vacancies filled and every independent agency seat Democrats are entitled to staffed until at least 2026. Some could have guaranteed majorities for longer. The Federal Labor Relations Authority—the National Labor Relations Board’s public sector cousin—could have 2 of 3 seats filled by Democrats until 2029. But it hasn’t happened. It isn’t too late to get a number of critical appointments done in the Lame Duck, but limited floor time means that number will be low, handing the incoming Trump administration even more vacancies to fill. 

This isn’t just on Schumer; he had to manage a caucus reliant on Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin. But now we’re in crunch time and he’s still scared and being cowed into letting opportunity pass by. One of the most critical appointments still on the table is the Chair of the NLRB, Lauren McFarren, whose renomination has been languishing in legislative limbo for 6 months after clearing committee. If McFarren is reconfirmed, the NLRB would have a Democratic majority until August 2026. 

The Biden NLRB has done a lot of good. One of the biggest wins came just this week when it ruled that captured audience meetings (where firms force employees to attend anti-union presentations) are illegal and violate workers’ rights to organize. Already, there’s talk about how this will be overturned in the next administration. Imagine how much of a difference two years of a Democratic NLRB board protecting the right to organize without these meetings could make. Schumer has the opportunity to deliver that, but he won’t because he’s scared it would lead Trump to fire the entire board. 

Do it anyway. Maybe Trump will fire the whole board. But the baseline here is a 100% chance of a Trump-majority in the coming months, so any chance that he won’t fire them is worth it. And, if Trump fires them, that still might be better than a Trump-majority. Right now the NLRB has a 3-1 Democratic majority and needs a 3 member quorum. He can’t fire anyone without going below the quorum and in the interim, all of the Biden-majority rulings would stand. 

Democrats have demurred for decades in the face of a conservative movement increasingly unbound from norms and procedures. They’ve allowed their agenda to be derailed by a strict adherence to protocol. They failed to pressure RBG to retire when it was obviously long time past for her to go, then hesitated to pressure Justice Breyer to retire when he was creating an unnecessary risk, and have now probably missed the opportunity to nudge Sotomayor the same way. Trump may already have a chance to replace Thomas and Alito with fresh-faced ideologue justices; imagine if Sotomayor is making the same mistake Ginsburg did not that long ago. 

Democrats have shown a lack of willingness to play hardball, whether that be by allowing the Supreme Court to get away with murder (of ethics), letting the GOP extract disastrous concessions via hostage-taking, taking an unconscionably long time to de-Trumpify the executive branch, or failing to get through the confirmation crisis. And, both during and after the first Trump administration, our pleas for Congress to actually do their job and exercise oversight authority were ignored. A lot of horrible things happened under Trump; not highlighting them at every opportunity allowed those horrors to fade out of Americans’ memory. Elaine Chao’s DOT was a disaster and helped set the stage for rampant inflation. The handling of Hurricane Maria was abominable. The list goes on and on. And now Democrats just got their clock cleaned. Avoiding the fight didn’t keep them from getting pummeled. 

They lost the election. But they don’t have to lose the lame duck. Throw a hail mary; the worst that can happen is getting picked off with the final seconds of the game ticking away.

Did Bidenomics Blow it? (tl;dr- no)

One common subject of finger pointing has been blaming the Biden administration’s economic policy for Harris’ loss. The reason why is obvious: if that narrative sticks it would absolve the campaign, the people who ran it, and the pundits who drove the discourse around it. 

Last week, we talked about the mechanics of whether Bidenomics caused inflation and I’ve explained why the demand-side models of inflation and interest rates don’t align well with what we’ve over the last three years in a few different places. But we don’t even need to get into any of that to see that blaming the administration’s economic policies (re-industrialization, onshoring supply chains, investing in unions, fighting corporate concentration, restricting unfair business practices) doesn’t make very much sense.

For a start, voters didn’t hear a real Democratic economic platform. Which makes sense given that neither the Biden administration nor the Harris campaign ever fully leaned into a messaging strategy, despite our very frequent encouragements. 

In an election, do people make decisions based more on messaging or what’s happened over the preceding presidential campaign? Obviously, that’s a false binary; they both matter. But they don’t matter symmetrically to voters. Voters who consume a lot of news and political content will inevitably know a lot more about what’s been happening and, ergo, make decisions with that in mind. Lower-informed voters, however, will know less about what governing has looked like, meaning messaging is weighted comparatively higher. Harris likely won highly informed voters by a good margin; the people who are more familiar with what Biden’s been doing are also more supportive of those actions. This matches polling that shows that Biden’s economic policies have been very popular but are not well known.

A huge part of this disconnect is a result of the policies Biden chose to push. A bold agenda like his takes time to pass Congress and even more time to start taking effect in people’s communities. This is fine, parties win office in order to implement good policy. But when many of the jobs Biden’s policies will create have yet to arrive, Democrats must pivot to other messaging that makes voters feel as if they care about their current financial situations. (All of this is why media ecosystems matter.) 

Our theory that politics is about grabbing attention by highlighting villains and leaning into conflict accounts for this in a way that just trying to tweak the policy platform to match the median voter theory never can.

And everything I’ve been saying is in line with election results as well. Candidates who leaned into the type of messaging and strategy we advocate generally ran ahead of Harris. Sherrod Brown (US Senate, OH) ran about 7.5 points ahead, Chris Deluzio (US House, PA) ran around 5 points ahead, and Dan Osborn (US Senate, NE) ran 14 points ahead. There are many other examples, and everyone can find some strand of their preferred message in stronger candidates – but we doubt there are overperformers who failed to embrace some populist anti-corporate rhetoric. It’s what the moment demanded, and that’s why the moment was so wrong for a White House run by Jeffrey Zients and Anita Dunn and a campaign run by David Plouffe.

Opinion polling has also continually found all the major planks of Bidenomics to be extremely popular. Trying to blame progressive economics is all about posturing in the left-of-center discourse, not seriously trying to explain anything.

Pundits Punching Down

In a similar vein, ivory tower pundits have been lashing out in their search to prune the party into a shadow of itself. For now, I want to focus on two examples: trans people and campaign staff. 

Trampling Trans People

We talked about the inane trans-bashing last week. Since then two house Democrats, Tom Suozzi (NY-3) and Seth Moulton (MA-6) have slammed the Democratic party for being too supportive of trans kids. Longtime friend of the show Matt Yglesias published a list of “commonsense principles” for Democrats to adopt after the election loss, one of which reads: “Race is a social construct, but biological sex is not. Policy must acknowledge that reality and uphold people’s basic freedom to live as they choose.”

Look, “biological sex is not a social construct” is a dog whistle, plain and simple. No one denies the existence of sex; the idea of transness is literally defined through a distinction between gender and sex. And this is actually an improved version of Yglesias’ first take, which didn’t include any “freedom to live” caveat at all. 

Is this really one of the nine most important principles for Democrats going forward? These principles have been boosted by other high profile pundits, including Noah Smith, Fareed Zakaria, and Jonathon Chait. 

Meanwhile, Republicans are preparing to strip trans people of protections from discrimination in housing, employment, and education. And trans students, already at much higher risk than peers, are flooding helplines. 

Not only would this abandonment be a disgusting abandonment of vulnerable groups, but it is not electorally working. Collin Allred ran ads about how he would never want “boys in girls sports” only to lose by far more than Beto O’Rourke had against the same opponent 6 years before. In fact, this year marked the first time an openly transgender person, Sarah McBride, won a Congressional seat. She outran Harris, and everyone else running statewide in Delaware.

Honest question: Does Yglesias think that there are no moderates in Delaware? McBride is a celebrity candidate – what’s the Yglesias explanation for McBride’s success?

Socking it to Staffers

Earlier this week, two journalists at The Financial Times reported that Harris declined an interview with Joe Rogan because of a feared backlash from progressive staffers. Come on. For a start, if you can’t manage your staff, you are a bad manager. This should be read as an indictment of leadership, not staff. But also, there’s no way that this backlash would be more vocal than what they dealt with over Liz Cheney’s heavy involvement. I mean, Bernie world has long embraced going on Rogan, and none of Warren world spoke out against the idea – who is the left to which the FT refers?

More importantly, though, the reporting is simply, demonstrably false. The source they cite, Jennifer Palmieri, literally came out and admitted that the decision was made for scheduling reasons, plain and simple (as Jeff predicted from the jump). Neither reporter has acknowledged that on Twitter and, at time of our publishing, the story has not been edited to reflect that. It’s pretty basic journalism 101 to issue a correction or retraction promptly.

Saying nothing is simply slandering progressive staff for no good reason. It’s also irresponsible and doesn’t reflect well on FT.

In the Wilderness, With a Map

So what comes next? Well, here at Hackwatch we’ll be getting back to a more usual workload with more, shorter pieces on a range of topics. Now, perhaps more than ever, our work of calling out cynical pundits is important. As the new administration comes in, expect new hacks to crop up as devil’s advocates on cable news shows, and for some of our least favorite people to make reappearances (looking at you David Sacks). And the fight over the legacy of progressive economics is just getting started. Some have already counted it down and out, but Bidenomics isn’t over yet.

My colleague Hannah wrote a great newsletter this week that I highly recommend. It lays out the real lessons that need to be internalized from this election.

Hopefully, Democrats find a spine and start standing their ground against the rapacious villains out to loot the country. Hopefully. 

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(Ed note: Fair warning, today’s Hackwatch is definitely on the longer side. Also, if you want something to listen to before, while, or after reading, I think “Blame It On Me” by George Ezra would pair well with today’s column.)

Everyone has inevitably seen a bevy of recriminations, stark assessments of what comes next, and noble clarion calls that all ring as hollow as an echo growing a bit fainter each time it’s heard. We all needed a beat to gather our wits, but our political discourse has become a prisoners’ dilemma where all sides are motivated to lay out grand new ideological cases in hastily written op-eds and underbaked tweets, lest they miss out on a first-mover advantage. 

That’s not what this is. RDP’s theory of change has been the same for years and we aren’t going to pretend it’s some new staggeringly insightful plan tailor-made for this exact outcome in the last 48 hours. Our mission is to oppose corporate influence that creates incentives to disserve the public interest. We organizationally do not engage in electoral politics, even as we do educate people about them. But we do want American policymakers to take note of when ideas are popular with the American public. 

Our theory of politics is that it revolves around narratives and that controlling that narrative is all about defining the central animating conflict. This is something that was done by Biden appointees like Lina Khan,Gary Gensler, Jennifer Abruzzo, Jonathan Kanter, and (eventually, after two years of being pushed) Pete Buttigieg. Others have as well, and sadly most of them will be cleaning out their offices come January. We don’t know exactly what the new administration will bring, but based on the last Trump administration we can expect a lot of gladhanding, kickbacks and political cronyism.  And we will be here to vocally call it out just as we have for the last two administrations. 

We made the case that Vice President Harris could own this type of corporate crackdown to her political benefit. And while she flirted with this idea at the outset, she opted not to run that kind of pugilistic campaign in the end.

Despite this, the business wing of the Democratic party and right-wing pundits continue the insipid “heads we win, tails progressives lose” game they play after every election. When Dems win, pro-corporate pundits always applaud and say that it was because of savvy appeals to centrists and running as a moderate. If Dems lose, it was because they were too lefty. This reaction is so common that it has become instinctual. Within hours of Harris’ defeat, this analysis emerged from the same pundits who were praising the Harris campaign’s moderation just days or hours before. 

The Very Serious People crowd of pundits have made clear that they think any time Democrats move left, no matter how small, it’s too much. And any time Democrats pivot right, no matter how hard, it isn’t enough. Where have Dems moved to the left? That’s for you to intuit, since these same pundits refuse to explain how Harris had moved the party left since 2020 (she in fact moved it back to the center; this Osita Nwanevu thread is brilliantly done, as is this from Daniel Finn). 

Harris did not run a progressive campaign, although she did run some populist ads. That campaign’s failings cannot be pinned on progressivism. In the waning days, Ritchie Torres, Liz Cheney, and Bill Clinton were the ones dispatched to Michigan. The idea that any campaign doing that wasn’t pivoting right is laughable. Again, read this Osita Nwanevu thread or this one from Daniel Finn. 

Just read this reporting from The New York Times:

“When two of Vice President Kamala Harris’s closest advisers arrived in New York last month, they were seeking advice. The Democratic nominee was preparing to give her most far-reaching economic speech, and Tony West, Ms. Harris’s brother-in-law, and Brian Nelson, a longtime confidant, wanted to know how the city’s powerful financiers thought she should approach it.”

“Over two days, the pair held meetings across Wall Street, including at the offices of Lazard, an investment bank, and the elite law firm Paul, Weiss. Among the ideas the attendees pitched was to provide more lucrative tax breaks for companies that allowed their workers to become part owners, according to two people at the meetings. The campaign had already been discussing such an idea with an executive at KKR, the private equity firm.”

The campaign pivoted right on immigration, police, crypto, and more. The main talking point on gun control was about how cool it was that both Harris and Walz were gun owners. Harris talked up having the “most lethal” military on the planet. David Shor’s firm got to call messaging shots. In part through Tony West—bro-in-law/campaign advisor/Uber executive—the campaign welcomed input from corporate executives and shifted their economic messaging away from populism in response. Harris received debate prep from Karen Dunn, who was also busy defending Google for (alleged) antitrust law violations while she was also supposed to be one of the central pillars of an underdog campaign’s tone-setting.

It was a campaign made up of centrist strategy, run by centrists, and run for centrists. It failed. And that, at the end of the day, is on the campaign. Pundits have already heavily criticized Harris and Walz for not being able to answer detailed questions well enough. That’s a fair point, but do you know who you should be angry with about it? The leaders of Harris’ communications team, particularly Anita Dunn. But the oh so serious punditocracy won’t blame Dunn or Jeff Zients because they like them.

Not to forget that Dunn, Zients, and co. are also the individuals most likely to have helped hide President Biden’s decline until as late as they could. Were it not for the debate in June who knows how long this charade would have gone on for?

On top of all of that, the lack of a primary actually helped centrists get the party platform they wanted. There was no major block of progressive delegates to negotiate for liberal priorities. This campaign was about as close to a natural experiment on the undiluted ideas of conventional Democratic operatives (David Plouffe, Anita Dunn, Jen O’Malley Dillon, etc…) as you could get. And it failed. 

With that out of the way, this is Hackwatch. And Hackwatch is about pushing back on bad media narratives, so let’s play a little whack-a-mole. Here’s something of a grab bag of talking points making the rounds in the establishment commentary world.

The Hot Takes That Need to Go

Progressives are the problem because they keep trying to purge the party. 

This is risible. Who has been purged? Sam Bankman Fried? He wasn’t ever on any side, as he himself admitted. For the most part, this is a conflation between trying to force people out of the party and trying to limit the control of a single faction that has categorically misrepresented major parts of the Democratic coalition. It’s not about “shrinking the tent,” it’s about not giving the same ringmasters total top down control. Liz Cheney is welcome to vote for whoever she likes, but it doesn’t make the opportunity cost of wheeling her out on a multi-state campaign tour, rather than hopscotching between the headquarters of the least popular corporations, a good idea.

Some of the usual suspects worried that progressives were alienating Wall Street and Silicon Valley by implementing basic regulations on their industries. While there were prominent billionaires who have become obsessed with Republican “anti-woke” ideology (looking at you Bill Ackman, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos), Democrats did not suffer with well-paid, educated workers. And there is more than enough anti-fascism money* to have run a well enough funded campaign with somewhat less catering to the oligarch class. All Tuesday’s awful results for Democrats were largely as a result of defections among minority groups and working class Americans.

Blame trans people

I was worried that it might take a few days for centrists to start trying to sell out trans people. But they’ve really gone above and beyond this time. Within hours of the race being called, and in some cases even before any results at all were released, takes about how being too liberal on LGBTQ issues turned off moderates began streaming in. 

Polling has shown that this is an incredibly low salience issue, so singling it out is not a reasoned reaction to the election—it’s a knee-jerk inclination to scapegoat members of the center-left coalition that pundits view as a liability. Hell, Kentucky’s Democratic governor refused to cave to anti-trans bullshit while campaigning for reelection in his ruby red state. And he won.

Now, for the most part, pundits have been insisting that no, it’s just Democrats need to moderate on trans kids playing sports. That’s a non-factor. It’s so much of a nonfactor that multiple GOP governors have vetoed bans on trans student athletes. It’s so much of a non problem that the ads that Republicans ran at the end of the campaign fear mongered about men in women’s sports by highlighting a cisgender olympic boxer. 

More importantly, high school sports are not the real battleground. Trump and Project 2025 only use it as a wedge issue for messaging. Their real LGBTQ agenda is about banning trans people from homeless shelters, making discriminating against trans people legal in both employment and housing, and blocking all non cis-hetero couples from being able to adopt. Some republicans want to ban all gender-affirming healthcare for trans people of all ages. There’s even a possibility that federal non-obscenity laws could be weaponized to criminalize simply existing without conforming to the sex on your birth certificate.

Offering up people to be sacrificed when they are at their most vulnerable is just cruel. 

Blame Bidenomics

Cost of living was definitely one of the single biggest issues and it’s clear that inflation definitely fueled that. But some neoliberals will try to blame Biden’s economic policies, especially covid stimulus, for that inflation. But that isn’t the cause. The entire anatomy of how inflation rose and ebbed doesn’t fit the traditional demand-side model that they rely on. 

I had a piece out in The Sling on Tuesday that discussed how the Fed clearly hadn’t helped matters and had actually made things worse. I like to think it made a compelling point that economic discourse was misunderstanding both inflation and cost of living. If Biden’s stimulus had been the cause, or Powell’s monetary interventions the cure, we should have seen much more of a textbook story. Instead, higher interest rates inflicted needless harm without materially impacting how voters experience the cost of living. For more, read the piece!

Moderate on everything

Strategic pivots can be good but there are caveats. More than anything, they need to be genuinely strategic. 

Too many of the issues Harris pivoted on were not strategic. Moderating on crypto was useless. It’s one of the most low-salience issues to the electorate. The number of people who care is pretty low. And on top of that the crypto industry has already made itself into a fearsome Republican ally, to say nothing of the fact that the whole thing is a scam built on pillars of securities fraud. 

But the absolute worst pivot we saw from Harris was moving away from economic populism. And it was corporate executives and these same moderate pundits who forced it. Poll after poll after poll found that anti-corporate economics was arguably the single best message across swing states. 

Every time a speech went thirty seconds without mentioning RealPage, or oil price-fixing, or Kroger executives admitting to gouging customers, or any of the many other examples of corporations’ exploitation of workers and consumers, was a wasted opportunity. Touting caps on overdraft fees, mandatory refunds from airlines, and taking on non-competes were layups that were never shot.

I mean, hypothetically you decide that Democrats must compete with Trump on the nihilistic, climate be damned cheap gas agenda. Understandable impulse – but couldn’t Harris have focused on apparent price fixing efforts between Trump donor American oil interests and the Opec + cartel?

One parting thought

This has already gone too long, but I want to close out with one final note. If we can all agree on anything about the election, it’s that people were angry about their economic situation. That anger was directed at Harris because people blamed the Biden-Harris administration for the cost of living struggles they were facing. That rage was too powerful to overcome, but it didn’t have to be. And while some will say that blaming messaging is cope, voters really didn’t know what the Democratic economic platform was. 

Cost of living was the issue and economic populism was the solution. 

The road not taken was for Vice President Harris to point to the (very real) corporations that were harming the American public and say, “those are my opponents’ friends, vote for them and these corporations will have free reign to exploit you more. But they’re my enemies, look at the way they attack me and at how our administration has been standing up to them.” Alas.

Thanks for making it this far! If you’re interested in the intersection of economic discourse and politics, here’s some of our other recent work that may interest you:

The Federal Reserve Isn’t Responsible for the Soft Landing—Though to Understand Why, We Need More Than Econ 101

The story of the Fed single-handedly taming inflation is deeply out of step with reality. There is no sign of the demand destruction that would have been necessary for monetary policy to slow inflation. I took a look at both the conventional causal path, unemployment, and several other plausible options. A drop in real demand is nowhere to be seen.

The Climate Crisis Is a Cost-of-Living Crisis

My colleague Kenny explains why the changing climate is a pocketbook issue. Kenny walks through why failure to tackle climate change leaves us vulnerable to higher energy, food, and housing costs. 

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Correction: A previous version of the post erroneously implied that Anita Dunn represented Google in their antitrust trial. Google's lawyer was Karen Dunn, who was involved in debate prep but did not lead the communications team. The post has been edited to clarify this.

* More in a future piece from Jeff Hauser, but in fact, it seems like if anything Harris wasted money. Her campaign was much better funded than Trump and ran vastly more television ads in August and September as a result. But Trump matched her on ads in October when it mattered–TV ads have little staying power, and sacrificing a populist message in order to run more ads more than a month out from a campaign is an insane quid pro quo. 

Yesterday we released a whitepaper on how the next administration can help rebuild public trust in the federal government through six common sense rules for creating a transparent ethics regime. While we think the case for strong ethic rules is a pretty easy one to make on the merits (we’re firmly in the “corruption is bad” camp), we also believe that it’s a politically expedient one.

Blueprint research, the Reid Hoffman-backed polling firm, recently released a report on the political beliefs of young men that found that even in an increasingly cynical political culture, young men are particularly jaded about the behavior of politicians. While, on net, 37% of men over the age of 50 agreed with the statement that “nearly all politicians are corrupt, and make money from their political power,” a whopping 57% of men aged 18-29 agreed with the statement. This was the most widely held belief tested amongst young men, even though it was tested alongside statements like “I am proud to be an American” and “America is a force for good in the world.” Those upbeat claims polled 15% and 24% points, respectively, below the belief in widespread political corruption. Even more interesting, the statement that “America has become an oligarchy, not a democracy” polled with net 20% agreement in young men, versus just net 1% among men over the age of 50. 

Source: Blueprint polling, No Country for Young Men, Oct. 22nd 2024

This polling shows that the heart of young men’s political beliefs is an idea that the federal government is captured by corporate and wealthy interests intent on shaping political outcomes to their own benefit. Who can blame an age group whose political environment has been so shaped by the unlimited money spigot of Citizens United and Supreme Court decisions effectively legalizing bribery from being a little jaded? But this does not mean that these young men are unreachable, cynical to the point of refusing to engage in the political process. By embracing an ethics framework that not only adheres to the bare minimum, but embraces public scrutiny and avoids even the appearance of corruption, politicians stand a real chance of rebuilding trust and, eventually, winning over this large part of the electorate.

(it would also help if some of the corrupt were occasionally held accountable for their crimes–a task made more difficult, albeit not impossible, by our comically corrupt Supreme Court)

With only a week before the election, there’s little hope that either campaign will shift gears to make this a messaging priority (especially considering the fact that one of the candidates is outright in favor of corruption) but it’s still worth reminding folks in DC that becoming the party of good governance and ethical behavior does pay off (even if it means giving up personal payouts). The next four years are an opportunity for one party to reinforce public trust by marketing itself as the party of transparency and public interests. But to do so requires breaking with the influence machine that has made many in DC so wealthy. 

Other RDP Work:

Remembering Bush v. Gore

Next Tuesday’s election is slated to be yeat another nail biter. It's worth remembering that conservative attempts to steal elections and the court’s obvious conflicts of interest are not a new phenomenon but part of a longstanding tradition of unethical behavior.

Corporate Crackdown Successes: The CFPB’s Revival of Robust Consumer Protection

Cracking down on corporate malfeasance is yielding huge dividends for the Biden Administration and the American public. We should celebrate the CFPB’s wins on behalf of the American public.

See our other Corporate Crackdown Successes here:

• Corporate Crackdown Successes: The SEC

• Corporate Crackdown Successes: The Department of Labor

• Corporate Crackdown Successes: The FTC

• Corporate Crackdown Successes: The NLRB

Report: Gas Industry Ramps Up Deceptive Effort to Influence Democrats

The oil and gas industry’s front group, Natural Allies for a Clean Energy Future, has flown under the radar while attempting to shape Democratic priorities. Our latest report shines a light on their multi-million dollar influence campaign. 

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Everyone is tired of stressing about the election and the possibility that it might usher in the end of the American experiment, so I thought I’d provide a little change of pace as we head into the last full week before election day!

So, let’s talk about the state of the media. And the role it might usher in the end of American democracy. See? Better already!

On Monday October 21, New York magazine ran its yearly “Power Issue,” a deep dive into the influential people who shape our country from behind the scenes. Last year’s issue was about NYC insiders. This year’s issue centers on the future of the media. And it was… not a fun read.

From the start, New York avoids discussion of the many failures of the very sort of media titans interviewed for the issue, and how they contributed to the current (dire) state of media in the US. That problem is compounded because much of the discussion reveals an intent to double down on the same trends that have left us with an uninformed citizenry. Rather than discuss how to rebuild trust in the media, suspicion is treated more like an exogenous variable completely unmoored from media behavior.

The fact that Big Tech sold the news media down the river prompts hardly any introspection. Google didn’t wreck havoc on journalism by happenstance; they did what monopolistic behemoths always do: wrap their tentacles around entire industries and squeeze them for every last dime. If outlets didn’t blithely go along with it, maybe we wouldn’t be here. But they followed insidious advice like: “rely more on ads (using our adsense program)” and “make video and shorter content” and “focus on maximizing clicks.”

Instead everything in the piece was about revenue growth and how to expand business models. Perhaps most worryingly, the executives being quoted view The New York Times as the gold standard, not because of journalistic quality, but despite it. 

Right after the section entitled “Everybody is Jealous of The New York Times,” NY Mag highlights that this is “Not Necessarily For Its Journalism.” They quote an anonymous executive as saying “I envy their business model; I don’t envy their newsroom. I think it’s bloated and kind of self-indulgent.” Of course “bloated” here means it has more than the bare minimum of writers and researchers and editors, but to an executive, these key factors in journalistic quality are wasteful expenditures. 

If you want to read a deeper critique of the piece, I’d recommend this from The Nation’s Chris Lehman. In particular, Lehman’s piece does a great job of pointing out the total abandonment of civic values (I ctrl+f’ed and the word “civic” doesn’t appear once, nor does “ethic” or “informed,” while “citizen” only appears in a reference to Citizen Kane and “value” is only used in a monetary sense). Journalism has always had its flaws, but the abandonment of any commitment to a mission beyond business machinations still leaves a bitter taste. 

I want to leave you with two last thoughts: one on the hidden economic messaging right below the surface and a second on why I’m telling you any of this. 

First, it’s worth noting that this piece was run while New York is actively involved in a dispute with its staff union. Which adds a bit of color to why they slip in a lot of stray remarks quotes bashing unions and employees, such as:

• This from the piece’s author directly: “Perhaps unsurprisingly for a group of owners and managers, the rise of media unions over the past decade was treated mostly as a nuisance.” And this is probably the most positive example.

• From an anonymous executive: “I’ve always been supportive of unions, but I think the unions today are different and the guilds today are different” because they’re too activist-y now.

• Also anonymously: “It’s gone wrong over too many years. The unionization has made everything more expensive.”

This is why we have Hackwatch: to call out when the media and pundits have vested interests in what they are offering opinions on. Everyone who goes into reading this feature knows executives have a particular view, but most probably don’t know about the union dispute. Those quotes are a two-fer. They represent “insider” knowledge and can be offered as examples of why the company simply couldn’t meet workers’ demands. And that’s the second point.

Especially in an age where news media has cheapened itself to fit in better with digital brain rot, it’s necessary to think about what it could be. That’s why criticizing pundits and outlets has value. To draw attention to shortcomings. In an era of misinformation, there has to be an ideal to strive for that represents more than corporate bottom lines. 

In other news:

What Harris Needs to Say About Hurricanes

In this piece our very own Kenny Stancil breaks down why insurance markets need to be a bigger issue in the campaign—and the public discourse. As home insurers leave markets wholesale, there’s a (insurance) title wave of issues heading straight for the people most at risk of climate disasters.

A Brief History Of Matt Yglesias Screwing Workers

Here, Julian and Max take a stroll through our old pal’s comments on labor and workers, including highlights like a moral issue with the minimum wage and arguing that it’s not so bad for workers in a developing country to die because of lax safety standards.

The Worst Milton Since Friedman

This one’s from me! I walk through why climate change is a serious risk to the financial system because of how it impacts businesses and why—because of shortfalls in insurance coverage and a lack of  guidelines on appropriate risk management—policy makers, including the Fed, need to look at doing more.

Support for a Corporate Crackdown is the Norm

There’s new polling on just how popular cracking down on corporate ne'er do wells is. (Hint: it’s very popular) Henry’s got a little more info for you!

TD Bank Settlement Shows DOJ Needs To Go Even Bigger To Crack Down On Corporate Criminals

Even after Attorney General Merrick Garland has specifically discussed the importance of holding financial criminals liable for their crimes, all the upper echelons at TD Bank apparently had their get out of jail free cards handy, because none of them will face indictment for a massive amount of money laundering.

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Henry’s perspective:

As a former Capitol Hill staffer, Furman’s claim that hosting agency leaders at district town halls is campaigning is laughable. I have helped plan countless events with federal agencies ranging from the VA to Social Security and the USDA. I’ve even planned events where Trump-appointed officials came to the district of my then boss, a Democrat, for a listening session with local stakeholders. None of these events were an attempt to co-opt nonpartisan civil servants of the VA or Social Security into a political campaign. Nor did the political officials see it to be a campaign event. After all, if they had, why would a Trump official show up to support a California Democrat? It’s just how members of Congress serve their district; ensuring that federal agencies are aware of the problems their constituents face, and are working to resolve them.

As the FTC’s Director of the Office of Public Affairs Douglas Farrar explained about Khan’s events, she was “attend[ing] official events at the request of Members of Congress.” Largely these events are town halls and listening sessions—things that government officials should be doing in general, regardless of how soon the election is. 

Members of Congress inviting the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission out to their district to speak with their constituents about the effects of things like junk fees, monopolization, and other FTC-relevant issues is part of that. Portraying Khan as doing “campaign-like events” with Democrats is disingenuous without proof she’s turning down invitations from Republicans to do similar events. So far, there is no evidence of this. 

It's hard for some people to wrap their heads around, but a lot of the work of being a member of Congress is being the customer service department for the federal government. It's crucial, non-glamorous, underreported work to ensure that their constituents are taken care of. This is why things like town hall events are able to be paid for with government funds and staffed by government employees rather than campaign staff. Listening to your constituents can be seen as an insidious plot to build your reputation and win reelection, but it’s also just the job of being in Congress. One would have expected an experienced political insider like Furman to know this. 

(This is why, frankly, RDP is an antidote to ignorant neoliberal think tanks – we’ve long focused on Congressional oversight of the executive branch as one of the most important and least well understood aspects of how our government falls short.)

What makes this even more galling is Furman’s comparison of the FTC to the Federal Reserve. Furman points to the Federal Reserve’s “norm” of nonpartisanship (without addressing the fact that Federal Reserve Chair Powell has acted suspiciously partisan), but fails to explain how that has been maintained – through budgetary independence. The Federal Reserve is not funded through Congressional appropriations, which allows it to operate quite freely from political interference. We’ve written before about how funding separate from Congress allows for greater independence, but unfortunately, this does not apply to the FTC as it does to the Federal Reserve. As a result, if Chair Khan wants her agency to have the funding necessary to carry out its mission, she must be solicitous of Congress. 

In Furman’s defense, Punchbowl News wrote their piece in the most scandalous way possible, but falling prey to Punchbowl’s clickbait-style writing is even more concerning when discussing a supposedly insightful pundit like Furman. Here’s a quick breakdown of the most glaring lines in Punchbowl’s deceptive piece:

• “But the latest headline-grabber to spend the week with members courting votes isn’t an Instagram influencer. It’s Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan.” 

Khan is not doing events with members of Congress as they are “courting votes.” Just because you do an event with someone running for office, does not mean you are participating in a campaign.

• “That makes [Gallego] the kind of candidate who might want to echo concerns about the FTC expressed by Silicon Valley figures who are key supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign. Instead, Gallego’s embracing Khan.”

Polls show that being tough on corporations is extremely popular in battleground states, including Arizona. The idea that somehow “Silicon Valley figures” are representative of Arizona swing voters is farcical; they have hardly anything in common.

• “Khan’s events with lawmakers have nominal policy themes, of course.”

The word nominal is doing a lot of editorializing here and Punchbowl lacks any evidence to back up the implication that the policy themes are token. Is Lina Khan such a prominent and popular figure amongst the general public as to make the assumption that she’s there as an electoral rockstar the default?

• “Khan-limbo: The FTC chair’s appearances on the road with Democrats come as her own future in Washington is in doubt. Khan’s term is up, and her hard-charging approach to the job seems to make the chances of a renomination slim no matter who holds the White House.”

As David Dayen has pointed out, Khan doesn’t need to be renominated, she can simply keep doing the job in accordance with FTC statute. This is an intentional part of how independent agencies were designed by Congress; sometimes the work is important enough that it needs to be done regardless of nomination fights.

While Furman may have fallen prey to the bogus piece by Punchbowl, it seems unlikely. Given that Khan is the progressive in the Biden Administration taking the most heat from the center and right in recent months, I’m weary of giving Furman the benefit of the doubt.  

We’ve also picked fights with other hacks and flacks. Here’s what we don’t want you to miss:

YIMBYism Doesn’t Mean You Have To Ignore Price Fixing

Matt Yglesias believes that solving the housing issue is simple. So simple in fact that he gets frustrated by anyone who mentions RealPage’s alleged price fixing scheme as a distraction from the “real” issues. We’re as confused as you are. 

The Harris Campaign Doesn't Need Adam Kovacevich's Advice

Big Tech lobbyist, friend of Senator Tom Cotton, and proud picket line-crosser Adam Kavocevich has issues with RDP’s work to keep corporate stooges like himself out of the executive branch. That’s why this week he lambasted our work in a Twitter thread that both misrepresents our stances and seeks to blame us for… Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo’s failures? Trust us, we’re as confused as you are.

Unions In Sweden Don’t Do This, Says Man Who Opposes Efforts To Make US Unions As Strong As Swedish Ones

The Institute for Progress is not a democratic socialist think tank. It’s not even a liberal think tank. In fact, its co-founder, Alec Stapp, readily identifies as a neoliberal. So why is he using a Swedish union head to bash American labor leaders? Nothing more than a cynical ploy. He and his organization’s close allies on the right are not interested in Swedish labor laws, just in bashing the US labor movement.

Addressing Readers’ Struggles With Reading Comprehension

One of Hackwatch’s most cherished readers, Matthew Yglesias, seemed to have a hard time understanding some of our work last week. So we responded to his comment with a breakdown of what we meant, and how he should try to understand the trustworthiness of wealthy, self-interested political donors. 

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And while they insist that “Blueprint does not advocate for any specific policy agenda; this effort is focused on identifying [winning] messaging and narratives,” you’d be forgiven for expecting an organization bankrolled by a (para)social networking website to hew strongly towards the interests of Hoffman and his rich friends. That’s what we were expecting when we heard about it. Largely, though, we’ve been pleasantly surprised; Blueprint has consistently corroborated our common sense theory of electoral politics: name and shame villains who make people’s lives tangibly worse. Blueprint’s findings have routinely been consistent with our preferred political messaging strategy and in line with the larger body of opinion research. There are many examples of this, but here are a few that stand out:

• Blueprint recently found that only 13% of men consider crypto important electorally while providing crypto as the first example of “the least important issues” to men, which really ought to throw a bucket of cold water on Yglesias’ calls for weakening crypto regulation as an electoral triangulation. (if you’re going to sell out, the issue should at least resonate!)

• Another poll found that economic populism played extremely well in swing states, including 64% support for cracking down on price gouging.

• Polling from the run-up to the DNC found that Tim Walz’s policies on healthcare expansion, capping insulin prices, free school lunch, and cracking down on price gouging were all viewed extremely positively.

It’s notable, and pretty funny, that these results are coming from a firm bankrolled by the billionaire who has led the campaign to oust FTC Chair Lina Khan. Through her revival of the dormant Brandeisian tradition of corporate trust busting, Khan has done more than arguably any other Biden administration official to enact policies that are popular with voters.

This Week In Neoliberalism:

Welcome back to our weekly selection of hackery! We know you’re busy and there’s a lot of news, so we’re happy to keep you up to date with the ponderous pundits, neoliberal know-nothings, and kooks of the commentariat. 

Will Catherine Rampell Ever Discuss RealPage?

For a columnist who devotes so much time to “debunking” price gouging arguments and discussing inflation, it sure is strange that Rampell hasn’t discussed the alleged price-fixing app RealPage. I guess she just hasn’t gotten around to it, after all, it’s only been about two years since ProPublica first exposed the issue. 

Declines In Government Capacity Are The Result Of A War On Government Effectiveness 

Could conservative opposition to effective governance be driving declines in government capacity? No. Matt Yglesias bravely takes the evidence-free position that it’s progressives eroding government functions. Ronald Regan who?

Swing State Voters Aren’t Actually Moderate

It turns out swing state voters don’t actually reflect the most moderate views on any given issue. They’re idiosyncratic, strange and really want a crackdown on shady corporate business practices. Maybe the corporate crackdown being done by Lina Khan’s FTC, Rohit Chopra’s CFTC, and (surprisingly!) Pete Buttigieg’s DOT isn’t just good policy, but good politics too. 

FTC’s Crackdown On Invitation Homes Highlights Corporate Landlords’ Exploitation Of Tenants

The country’s largest single family home landlord is up to some shady stuff. I’m sure all the outlets who write lurid pieces on increasing crime rates will cover this and praise Lina Khan for her tough stance on lawbreaking, right? 

Khan’s Prime-Time Interview Dispels Corporate America’s Concerns Raised By Lesley Stahl

60 Minutes interviewed FTC Chair Lina Khan. Despite repeated questions that could’ve been written by the lobbyists of the companies Khan is holding accountable, the Biden administration’s FTC came out on top. 

Inside 'Tax Prom': The Corporate Sponsors and Award Recipients Shaping U.S. Tax Policy

Sometimes DC is the worst. Imagine if prom was only for nerds, extremely boring and also helped shape US policy in favor of the rich. That’s what the Tax Foundation’s annual event is. 

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You’d be forgiven for missing some terrible neoliberal commentary with all that going on. That’s why we’ve been monitoring the ponderous pundits, neoliberal know-nothings, and kooks of the commentariat for you! What with the election and all, we’re going to serve up a weekly(ish) assortment of especially egregious hackery. Don’t worry, the Hackwatch columns you know and love will still be coming your way, but now, we’ll keep you up to date even when we don’t have one.  And all you have to do to get it sent straight to you is hit that subscribe button.

So, with that out of the way, sit back, relax, and join us for a stroll through the senseless.

Which Is Worse: Unorthodox Economics Or Racist Blood Libel? This WaPo Columnist Can’t Tell

Catherine Rampell has been fixated on so-called greedflation for over a year. Her latest attack on progressive economics research involves equating it with the Republican party’s disgusting lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. Isn’t both-sidesism beautiful? 

Journalists Should Be Wary To Declare Harris Uniquely Unpopular With Labor

The Teamster non-endorsement was accompanied by “polling” that seemingly showed a dramatic shift of member support from Biden to Trump after the current president stepped down from atop the ticket. But while the narrative that Harris is bleeding union support is compelling, the data to back this up is significantly less so. 

Last Days of Summer(s)

Everyone was excited by the Fed rate cuts. Everyone but Larry Summers that is. Here’s why his doom and gloom prediction isn’t actually as convincing as he’d like you to believe. 

You Do Not, Under Any Circumstances, Gotta Hand It To Fossil Fuel Companies

Matthew Yglesias wants Democrats to be nicer to big fossil fuel companies, but not even for electoral gain. He claims it’s just good, common sense policy. His arguments aren’t as well put together as he may lead you to believe. 

Jay Powell's Delay Caused Unnecessary Damage

The Fed cut rates by 50 basis points (CNBC speak for 0.5%). But that doesn’t mean that Powell should be let off the hook for waiting until the last minute. 

Bonus Blunder: 

Twitter-poisoned hedge fund manager Bill Ackman tagged the NCAA’s Southeastern Conference in a complaint about the supposed bias in the first (and possibly last) Kamala Harris Donald Trump presidential debate. Unfortunately for Ackman, neither the football powerhouse, nor the Securities and Exchange Commission would be the appropriate place for such a complaint. Here’s hoping he tags the correct FCC when he finally figures things out and not the Cincinnati-based soccer team.

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Polling savant Nate Silver is in a feud with actress Bette Midler. Under normal circumstances this is something not worth even a cursory glance on a Twitter timeline. Unfortunately for all of us though, our political discourse is stupid and a feud between an actress and a prominent election forecaster has somehow resulted in people defending the unshakable political insights of gambling addicts and political junkies because it involves a market. 

Midler seemingly began the feud because she is angry that Silver has said that Trump is still the odds-on favorite to win the election come November. I do not understand this criticism. When I played sports, my coaches never talked to us during halftime and said that we should play as if we were winning. Instead, we were always instructed to play as if we were tied or a goal behind. To me, it seems as if this logic would also apply to a presidential campaign, and that running a campaign with a chip on your shoulder could only be an advantage (one that the 2016 Clinton campaign could have benefitted from). 

But, in her anger, Middler alleged that Silver’s forecasts were not in earnest and that instead, his predictions were “bought by Peter Thiel.” There’s a kernel of truth to this claim, Silver is paid by political betting market Polymarket which has received investment from Silicon Valley billionaire (and right-wing weirdo) Peter Thiel. But there’s no indication that Thiel has purchased Silver’s loyalty in an attempt to get him to change his forecasts, and like I said earlier, I don’t know what benefit that would have even if he did. 

But rather than defend Silver with similar reasoning, neoliberals have emerged to defend Silver’s connection to the cryptocurrency-tied, offshore betting market itself. Because it is a market, and markets offer great insight. 

I wrote about the strange faith in political betting markets just last month, but clearly the message hasn’t stuck. While competitive markets can be insightful–that’s why we’re unabashed advocates of strict antitrust enforcement--trusting betting markets to be accurate forecasts of political events is ridiculous. In part this is because political bettors are extremely biased in one way or another, in a way that is not normal for other markets. One 2015 study on the 2012 presidential election betting markets found that 87% political bettors never changed their position, and that only 6% of any given bettors were “unbiased” in their behavior – meaning a willingness to bet on either outcome. While this study concluded that the 2012 presidential election betting markets were not worse at predicting the outcome than polls had been, this hasn’t always proved true since then (and since bettors read and respond to polls, the only question is whether bettors add prognostication capacity to polls–”not worse” is hardly a positive outcome).

In 2016, Nate Silver was lambasted for giving Hillary Clinton a mere 66% chance of winning the election, but his odds proved to be far closer than the outcome predicted on betting market PredictIt, which gave Clinton 80% chances of winning as of election night. In 2020 many people continued to make money by betting on Joe Biden winning the election in December, weeks after the election was over and results had been called. And as we noted in our last piece, the markets had originally given Tim Walz a 1% chance of being named Harris’ running mate. 

The fact that a market exists does not make it insightful. Those with an affinity for markets should not make the mistake of believing that they’re infallible. If they were, I’d be investing in subprime mortgage-backed securities. 

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Ed. Note: As of this morning, we’ve officially reached 4,000 subscribers to the Revolving Door Project Substack! In celebration, we wanted to take a moment to say thank you. There’s no shortage of newsletters and other reading material out there, and we’re so happy that folks find our work interesting and engaging. 

So, on behalf of the entire RDP team, thank you! 

In late August, Heatmap published an article titled “Americans Say ‘Okay, Whatever’ to Permitting Reform.” The piece, which is based on polling commissioned by Heatmap, purports to provide a snapshot of public opinion on the Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024, a deregulatory bill introduced in July by Senators Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) and John Barasso (R-Wyo.). It fails to do so. This writeup is an effort to manufacture consent for a dirty deal whose elements are poorly understood by most U.S. voters—through little fault of their own.

Without seeing the survey, it’s impossible to know how Heatmap defined “permitting reform” when asking respondents whether they endorse the Manchin-led effort to enact it. In his summary of the poll results, Heatmap’s founding executive editor Robinson Meyer wrote that “most Americans support the idea of a bipartisan law that would make it easier to build new clean energy projects while benefiting some oil and gas development.” So that’s the best approximation we have of how the outlet framed the issue.

According to Meyer: “Some 52% of Americans said they backed the general idea of the legislation, the poll found. About a quarter of Americans opposed it, and roughly another quarter said they weren’t sure.” That a quarter of U.S. adults expressed uncertainty regarding how they feel about the Manchin-Barasso bill underscores the folly of this exercise. The fact is that, on most complex policy issues, a majority of people are uninformed or misinformed. This means that pollsters aren’t merely measuring public opinion; more often than not, they’re shaping or even inventing it.

This is not a fresh insight. The problematic assumptions, methods, and consequences of the polling industry have been discussed at length. I highly recommend exploring what David W. Moore—former managing editor of the Gallup Poll and author of The Opinion Makers: An Insider Exposes the Truth Behind the Polls—has written over the past few years for Fairness in Accuracy and Reporting (FAIR).

To its credit, Heatmap gave underinformed respondents an out by allowing them to say they’re not sure how they feel about permitting reform. This is an improvement over notoriously manipulative and deceptive forced-choice polls that require respondents to “approve” or “disapprove” of a policy or the handling of an issue regardless of their level of knowledge.

Had Heatmap relied on a forced-choice poll, it’s likely that more than 52% of respondents would have expressed support for the Manchin-Barasso bill. Nonetheless, Meyer still inflated support for the legislation when he wrote that “permitting reform is about 15 to 25 points above water,” a conclusion that depends on excluding or making assumptions about those who said they weren’t sure.

Notably, Meyer acknowledged the limits of Heatmap’s permitting reform survey in his introduction to the daily newsletter featuring his writeup of the data: “[B]ecause so many of the issues at hand are so wonky, we haven’t gotten a good sense of how the public feels about the proposal. Now, after our latest Heatmap poll, we have a slightly better one” (emphasis added).

Do we have a slightly better understanding now? Not really. “Reform” is a misleading word when it comes to issue-based public opinion polling. That’s because it’s vague but has positive connotations. Given how unjust the status quo is, many people are in favor of reform; there is widespread disagreement, however, over what to change and how. Recent surveys about Supreme Court reform and policing reform are indicative of the problem. On both issues, there appears to be robust support for change across the political spectrum even though Republicans simultaneously convey strong approval of the high court’s justices and law enforcement officials alike (it turns out their enthusiasm for reform declines when proposals are linked to Democrats). Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m pretty sure a “Reform Feeling Bad on Mondays” bill would poll incredibly well irrespective of its specific contents or practicability. It sounds good!

It’s a bit surprising that only 52% of people said they support Manchin and Barasso’s energy  deregulation legislation given how positively Heatmap framed it. First, Meyer misidentified Manchin as a Democrat (Manchin became an Independent in May), presumably so he could describe the bill as a bipartisan compromise. Manchin may caucus with Senate Democrats, but his erstwhile membership in the party was spent scuttling its best proposals (e.g., tanking Build Back Better and leaving us with the decent but watered-down Inflation Reduction Act). More accurately, the Energy Permitting Reform Act is the product of two non-Democrats from fossil fuel-producing states (both are top recipients of oil and gas industry cash and Manchin is a literal coal baron who profits from his family’s gob business). It’s not like Barasso wrote the bill alongside Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) or another Green New Deal champion.

In addition, Meyer also described the Manchin-Barasso bill’s proposed trade-offs in a rather glib fashion. For example, he wrote that the legislation “would make it easier to both build zero-carbon energy and drill for oil and gas on public lands” or it “would speed up the process of building climate-friendly infrastructure in exchange for concessions to the oil and gas industry.” These statements are technically true, but they dramatically undersell how harmful the bill’s polluter giveaways are. We can only assume that the survey used similar language. 

If that’s the case, then downplaying the damaging aspects of the Energy Permitting Reform Act does Heatmap poll respondents a disservice, and it underscores why I said that voters’ general ignorance of this legislation is hardly their own fault. The public ought to be informed that this bill is largely a reformulation of Manchin’s Building American Energy Security Act of 2023, which was reportedly drafted by the American Petroleum Institute (API). They ought to be told that it has received vocal support from API, the Partnership to Address Global Emissions, and other fossil fuel front groups, all of which signals that the dirty energy industry—not the burgeoning clean power sector—stands to benefit most.

As the Center for Western Priorities has explained, the Energy Permitting Reform Act “includes important and needed provisions that would help accelerate renewable energy development,” but it also “props up the continued development of fossil fuels at a moment when the nation should be doing everything it can to transition to clean energy.” According to two recent analyses, the Manchin-Barasso bill’s LNG provisions alone could negate the decarbonization gains derived from building more transmission lines to carry renewably powered electricity. 

Climate scientists have been unequivocal about the need to restrict new fossil fuel production to give the world a fighting chance of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C and thus averting the climate emergency’s worst impacts. Meanwhile, the permitting debate has become so reductive and convoluted that we’re overlooking more straightforward ways to expedite the clean energy transition, such as requiring electric utilities to buy more green power, sooner.

Of course, utilities would probably insist that there’s not yet enough transmission capacity to deliver more clean energy. That’s why a standalone bill to improve existing transmission infrastructure and accelerate the construction of new power lines—with no pro-fossil fuel strings attached—makes sense. Increasing energy efficiency and boosting residential solar would also alleviate pressure on the grid, and lowering interest rates would make it easier to complete capital-intensive offshore wind projects. By portraying the expansion of fracking on public lands and the growth of LNG exports as mandatory concomitant measures to green energy provisions, Meyer’s piece advances the interests of the fossil fuel industry.

All of this begs the question: What’s the point of this Heatmap poll? Meyer suggested that the goal was to provide a “good sense of how the public feels about” the Energy Permitting Reform Act. I’m not convinced that objective was realized. For his part, Meyer described the survey’s findings that over half of U.S. adults are in favor of the Manchin-Barasso bill as “good news for one of the last remaining pieces of environmental policy that Congress could pass this term.” 

But Meyer—one of several prominent supply-side liberals who have advocated for deregulation to maximize production and supply of, for example, all-of-the-above energy sources—is hardly a disinterested party. Put simply, this looks like a media outlet engineering support for an outcome that its leadership favors (even after one of its reporters quoted experts who predicted that the legislation in question would ultimately set back the fight against the climate crisis).

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