Many progressive nonprofits are pushing the Biden administration to avoid placing people with ties to the corporate world in key cabinet and White House positions. But the Revolving Door Project is unique for its candor. Indeed, Jeff Hauser, its outspoken founder and executive director, was christened by Politico as “the media’s go-to left-wing critic of the incoming Biden administration.”
Although his group has an annual budget of about a half-million dollars and a staff you can count on the fingers of two hands, he’s so gotten under the skin of some Democrats that they appear to have done opposition research on him, telling journalists that he once lobbied for an immigrant rights group that supported bipartisan reform legislation that also included funds for border security—pretty thin gruel for a scandal.
Hauser began his work on the executive branch in early 2015 at the nonprofit Center for Effective Government. When CEG was dissolved in 2016, his revolving door project shifted over to the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
“I remained a solo act from the beginning of 2015 until the beginning of 2019,” he adds. Hauser’s nonprofit, now a program housed at CEPR, does its own fundraising and is growing, Hauser says. RDP has received support from Google co-founder Chris Hughes’ Anti-Monopoly Fund.
Hauser often publicly attacks the people he doesn’t want the administration to appoint. For example, his group raised concerns about Lael Brainard, the candidate many thought was a Biden favorite to become treasury secretary. Hauser was the only progressive the New York Times could find who was willing to fault Brainard on the record, criticizing her inaction on China’s currency manipulation when she served as undersecretary for international affairs in the Obama administration. “It was her bailiwick, and nothing happened,” Hauser said.
But Hauser is also willing to give credit where it’s due. When Biden named former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen to the post, Hauser was buoyant. Yellen “has centered workers over profits,” and has had an “amazingly accomplished” career, focused on “fighting unemployment … without a “serious history of closeness to banking,” he says. Yellen will be the “first progressive treasury secretary in my lifetime and … quite arguably in the lifetime of my mother, as well. … That doesn’t mean she’s perfect and won’t have to be pushed in any way,” he says, adding however, that her selection was “a huge win” for progressives.
Treasury secretary is one of four jobs most crucial to a progressive domestic agenda, Hauser says, along with the head of the National Economic Council, attorney general, and director of the Office of Management and Budget. As of Dec. 4, Biden had announced his picks for three of the four slots. While none were the win Yellen was, Hauser views them as passable. He describes Brian Deese, the new NEC head, and Neera Tanden, set to take the reins at OMB, as “middle of the road.”
“It’s hard for progressives to be angry, which is a significant step up for progressives from being routed in 2008-09. But not a radical shift, and hard for progressives to be ecstatic,” he observes. He describes Tanden, the head of the Center for American Progress, as someone who “views herself as more progressive” than supporters of Bernie Sanders would see her. Hauser himself raised conflict of interest concerns about Deese, who left the Obama White House to work at the $25 trillion asset management fund Blackrock. Nevertheless, Hauser considers it “a sign of progress” that Deese needed endorsements from progressive environmentalists like Bill McKibben of 350.org to get the job.
Hauser says that while his group does not talk directly to the Biden transition team, “we do work with all sorts of progressive organizations privately, to help share our understanding of the executive branch,” and also understanding of “specific individuals, both positive and negative. We are working with a lot of people who are talking to the Biden campaign,” he adds.
RDP doesn't lobby Congress
There’s a reason his group can be franker about Biden’s choices, Hauser says. Other nonprofits have a legislative agenda to advance on Capitol Hill. But his group is focused almost exclusively on the executive branch. “We think the executive branch is enormously consequential and radically under-scrutinized,” he says. He adds that polling shows “bipartisan concern” about “revolving door” hires that permit “corporate elites” to hold jobs in government, who then use their positions to benefit their former employers and/or enrich themselves.
RDP has a good relationship with the left-leaning publication American Prospect. “They’re independent of us, but we have a collaboration with them,” he says, praising the media outlet for helping its readers “understand executive actions available to the [new] president,” and for their “cabinet watch series.”
His group also works with a number of nonprofits, including Americans for Financial Reform, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, the National Employment Law Project, Demand Progress, Data for Progress, Action Center on Race and the Economy, the Color of Change, and Indivisible, along with many “labor-associated entities,” Hauser says. But, he stresses, “none of these allies should be held responsible for the most incendiary comments we issue.”
Some of those incendiary comments have been aimed at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif). “We can be honest about Pelosi,” he says, criticizing her “inattention to the executive branch and her unwillingness to allow her committee chairs to engage in basic oversight.” The House Speaker “has done a terrific job of holding grudges against people in progressive politics. She has gotten a bunch of people to be quiet when they know better,” he contends, adding, “I understand why other groups are quiet. So it’s our job not to be.”
Media Attention and Grassroots Education
Getting the attention of the media is part of the group’s strategy. But so is “trying to talk to both the traditional D.C. groups that have political weight and good values that may not be as focused on the executive branch,” he says. The project is also increasingly going beyond the beltway to “help demystify the transition process” to grassroots groups.
Public education is meant to help grassroots groups understand that, whatever their agenda, executive branch appointees will carry considerable weight. Grassroots groups may know that certain agencies make a difference to their respective agendas, but may not understand the impact of OMB on federal regulations, he says. The goal is to help such groups understand that pressure on “your member of Congress or your mayor or senator or governor” to “interact” with certain transition figures could make a difference.
He adds that the timeline for filling vacancies on independent agencies depends on the terms of current Republican commissioners. One “critical” agency is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, he says, adding the Federal Communications Commission and the National Labor Relations Board to the list.
“There’s just a lot of appointments that are very consequential,” he says. “If you have a muckraking U.S. attorney in an area,” the person can “take on unlawful practices in the corporate sector,” while having a “more humane and realistic approach” to issues like the war on drugs.
RDP is also proposing ethics reforms for the new administration. There are two principles that the Biden team has to get right, he says. They must recognize that an ethics rule that merely excludes registered lobbyists from serving in the new administration is not helpful. Such a policy does not take into consideration all the individuals who are not registered lobbyists, but nevertheless work to advance a corporate agenda. “To the extent to which you are keeping lobbyists out but failing to keep out the shadow lobbyists … you’ve accomplished nothing,” he says.
The second principle is that ethics rules should treat public interest lobbyists differently than they do corporate lobbyists. “There is no reason why a civil rights lobbyist should be barred or presumed problematic by an administration,” he says. “It’s very easy to write rules that reflect a distinction between for-profit and not-for-profit lobbying.”
The Power of the Executive Branch
The reason executive branch leaders are important, Hauser contends, is that existing laws alone, if enforced aggressively, could improve the lives of average Americans. “We have 230 years of laws on the books,” he says, but it takes the executive branch to enforce them effectively.
“We are increasingly working in a space that we think of internally as governance,” Hauser says. The goal is to “elevate” a “broad set of issues” focused on “what an administration could do to make government work better.” Part of that strategy is making the case that Biden doesn’t have to rely solely on Senate confirmation to ensure his appointees take office. A president has the power to make a recess appointment, he says, or to use the Vacancies Act to name federal officials to serve in an “acting capacity.”
In addition, Hauser says, there is a need to “insource work that has been outsourced to government contractors” and to “rebuild” the capacity of the federal civil service. “We want to reduce the number of political appointees at the top of agencies and empower more civil servants,” he says. While the Trump White House “radically undermined” the federal civil service, he says, the system had been weakened by “at least 45 years of attacks from presidents” of both parties.
Hauser doesn’t view his group’s work as time-limited. “First off, the transition doesn’t ever end,” he says. “Obviously, the pace will go down. But given the number of jobs to fill, and turnover of positions, there are always appointments to be made.”
