When he was profiled five years ago, Robert Weissman, the president of Public Citizen, told a reporter that his group was “fueled by a bottomless pit of anger and outrage.” In 2020, that anger has only grown, as the Zelig of progressive issue campaigns raged against the Trump machine. In the progressive arena, there seem to be few issues that Public Citizen does not address.
Even people who know the group often fail to recognize its breadth, Weissman says. “People who interact with our health research group believe that drug safety is its primary focus,” he says. He ran into another progressive colleague, aware of Public Citizen’s “amazing record” as public interest litigators, and thought that was “the thing” Public Citizen does. And when Weissman met with Public Citizen’s Texas office, he found similar confusion: “I had someone say—but this was really a sentiment expressed by many—‘Oh, are you the D.C. arm of Public Citizen Texas?'”
“I just said, ‘Yes,’” Weissman says, somewhat ruefully. Pressed to capture the group in one sentence, Weissman defines Public Citizen as “a public interest group focused on protecting health, safety, justice and democracy, and concerned about the effects of excessive corporate power.”
A sprawling agenda
The group’s website uses eight categories to describe what Public Citizen cares about: Protecting Democracy, Making Government Work, Consumer and Worker Safeguards, Safe and Affordable Drugs and Devices, Health Care, Globalization and Trade, Climate and Energy, Justice and the Courts. Click on any category, and activists can view a menu of reform issues Public Citizen is working on, which usually include a call to action. It’s a progressive smorgasbord of good works.
With about a half-million members and supporters, a staff of more than 100, a large donor base and grants from major foundations, including Ford, Open Society and the Energy Foundation, and an annual budget of close to $20 million for its advocacy and public education arms, Public Citizen is a presence inside the Beltway, even if its scope is often underestimated. Weissman and colleagues are always good for a sharp, memorable quote about the lapses of members of Congress, or the latest corporate assaults on public health, safety and the environment.
Its many facets require two sites in D.C. Public Citizen’s main office is in an elegant red-brick building steps away from the toney Dupont Circle neighborhood. Decades ago, during the savings and loan meltdown, then-President Joan Claybrook picked up the building for a song. It also has a less posh office near Capitol Hill.
And then there is Public Citizen, Austin. Nearly 35 years ago, founder Ralph Nader thought it crucial for Public Citizen “to be in the backyard of all these important Texas Democrats who are chairing key committees in Congress,” Weissman explains. “As I like to say, they’re all gone. But we’re still there.” Public Citizen remains because the state group has had “extraordinary leaders” who are focusing on Texas state politics and energy issues, he says.
Its mission is so broad that when asked to name Public Citizen’s one or two greatest achievements in 2020, Weissman reacted like the father of a large family asked to name his favorite child. “If I pick out one piece, I’m upsetting somebody else.” Not that he’s an indulgent father. The ideal Public Citizen staffer, he says, is “committed to the mission and passionate about the overall work of your organization and progressive agenda, but also the ‘specific’ tasks they have within the group. We want people who are going to work hard and think creatively, and be fearless.”
Public Citizen’s ultimate goal is to influence elected officials, Weissman says. And while Public Citizen does lobby members directly, much of its power lies in the voices of voters throughout the country. While the group has thousands of activists, coalitions expand that number and represent an important arrow in its quiver.
Team player
To that end, Public Citizen belongs to more than 40 coalitions and is a major player in several. Public Citizen co-chairs the Coalition for Sensible Safeguards, (CSS) formed in 2010 to fight congressional efforts to weaken consumer, environmental, financial, public health and safety rules, and since 2017, to challenge the rule rollbacks of the Trump administration. The Clean Budget Coalition, which began as a CSS program, has now assembled more than 250 progressive groups with diverse interests to stand together to oppose all conservative policy riders on federal spending bills.
When the nonprofit published a history of the organization in 2016, it took a 277-page book, “Public Citizen: The Sentinel of Democracy,” to describe its multi-decade journey. But while its portfolio is diverse, Weissman says, there’s a coherence to all its activities: “The connecting tissue for about 98% of what we do is corporate power.”
Nader, one of the fathers of consumer activism, wanted his organization to be as nimble as the corporations it would challenge. “If corporations can lobby Congress, Public Citizen can lobby Congress,” he wrote. “If they can attack the safety regulatory agencies, Public Citizen can challenge those attacks. If they can use the courts, Public Citizens can use the courts. If they’re going to use the media or if they control the media, Public Citizen will use the media. If you don’t do that, you can be outflanked.”
Public Citizen may be adaptable, but even its practice of “scenario planning” could not prepare it for the Trump years. Weissman says the group “had lots of plans in place” for a Hillary Clinton victory, but did not bother to prepare for a Trump victory. It wasn’t that a Trump victory was out of the question, Weissman says. The calculus was that a Trump presidency “was going to be so disruptive and chaotic that it would be too hard to figure out how things can play out. And I think that was true. So I think it was the right decision. And then, you know, the day after [the election] we settled our stomachs and got to work and adjusted very quickly.”
The group took on the Trump White House on many fronts. Public Citizen sued the administration over regulatory rollbacks, his use of emergency powers to build a border wall and a commission he formed to uncover voter fraud. It published reports exposing conflicts of interest related to Trump properties, found that federal penalties against corporate wrongdoers had dropped dramatically and toted up how much Trump and his family’s visits to his resort properties had cost the U.S. taxpayer. It filed 30 ethics complaints alleging violations of Trump’s own rules by lobbyists installed at federal agencies.
A year of crisis
This pandemic year, it’s been in overdrive, even though its staff is working remotely. As early as March 13, Weissman called President Donald Trump a “clear and present danger to the nation’s public health,” urging him to “resign immediately.”
In late summer, it released a report calling out Amazon for hiking prices on goods vital to consumers during the pandemic. It advocated for a third stimulus bill and recommended what it should include. In mid-October, its litigation group sued the administration for withholding information about the contracts it had negotiated with companies developing COVID-19 vaccines.
Public Citizen also strongly opposed efforts by corporations and the Republican Senate to grant immunity to companies from lawsuits by workers, patients and consumers who contract the coronavirus due to lax safety policies. It made the case to the public and at congressional hearings that companies—hospitals, meatpacking plants, nursing homes—that fail to protect their workers should be held accountable for their recklessness.
It used the pandemic and the Democratic primaries to advance its years-long campaign endorsing Medicare for All.
“We are broad, so we have the ability to comment on a lot of topics, including certainly Trump’s unethical behavior, illegal behavior, conflicts of interest, and many dimensions of the pandemic,” Weissman says. He notes that such commentary can often draw media attention.
But the group also continued to direct its activists to collect signatures on a petition to major broadcast networks asking them to use the word “crisis” to describe what’s happening to the planet’s warming climate. It released a report on corporate malfeasance and the need for more reforms curbing executive pay for bad actors. And it continued its long, hard slog to pass a constitutional amendment to ban unlimited corporate and union spending to influence federal campaigns. (In 2019, Public Citizen efforts helped persuade New Hampshire to become the 20th state to support the amendment.)
Under the radar
Those initiatives got less media attention. Anything that strays from breaking news, Weissman observes, particularly in 2020, is “borderline impossible to breakthrough.” That wasn’t the case when a brash young Nader basked in the media spotlight, using the attention to galvanize citizens whose engagement and contributions helped create Public Citizen in 1971. Twenty years ago, however, Nader’s visibility had a downside. Public Citizen suffered collateral damage from a progressive backlash against Nader’s foray into politics. In the tight election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, Nader’s run for the presidency was blamed for Gore’s defeat in Florida, a loss that cost him the election. Despite the fact that Nader hadn’t worked for the group since 1980, his candidacy reportedly cost the organization 20% of its membership and about 1 million dollars in support from donors.
Nevertheless, Nader’s legacy is a point of pride for Weissman, whose entire career has been spent in Nader-founded organizations. “You know we had a historically unique brand identifier with Ralph,” Weissman says. “That was how people knew us for decades.”
These days, he concedes, “college students don’t know who Ralph Nader is. … You have to reintroduce yourself to new communities and new generations.” In a vastly different media landscape, Public Citizen has ramped up its outreach, first by email and now over social media. The “most receptive audience,” he says, “are the politically engaged.” But the goal is to “expand that circle” to include the “majority of people we think are with us” but are not engaged, he says. “The constant struggle is to get them engaged.”
Public Citizen has been working on student loan debt and climate change, both issues that appeal to young people. But Weissman makes clear that Public Citizen does not take on new issues to raise its visibility or to attract more members. “It’s got to be a fit,” he says, adding that while Public Citizen would not take on early childhood education as an issue, “student loan rip-offs” is something that resonates because it has “the intersection of corporate accountability.”
Among the “filters” it uses is expertise—asking whether an issue “draws on work we’ve already done,” and “whether we can play a leadership role and be a value-added.” It also determines whether its involvement “connects to our core themes and concerns and whether we think we can make a difference and win something.”
New frontiers
One expanding issue for the group is Internet privacy, he says. Public citizen’s international work on access to affordable medicines introduced it to intellectual property, patents, copyright and trademark law. Domestically, the group had already been addressing “excessive commercialism” in marketing and advertising on internet platforms. It’s also done work on corporate concentrations and monopolies. “So all those things have converged,” he says. “We’re scaling up a program around privacy and data rights and big tech,” adding that another compelling angle is the increasing political influence of companies. “Google is now the biggest corporate lobbyist in town. … And of course, big tech is just an increasingly important part of our lives.”
The organization may sound wonky, but its public rhetoric eschews polite policy speak. “We don’t pull punches,” Weissman says. He contends that in the presence of “widespread injustice and needless suffering…we think people are outraged, should be outraged. And they should be motivated by their outrage rather than rolled into a sense of hopelessness.”
In 2021, Public Citizen will bring that outrage to bear on its old nemesis, corporate power and its influence on government. But with a new Biden-Harris administration, he adds, “I can imagine actually passing laws that we think are good instead of just trying to stop the ones we think are bad.”
