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Welcome back to the Revolving Door Project’s weekly newsletter, which is getting a new name: Watchdog Weekly. We’ve been writing this newsletter since the end of 2018, through three presidential administrations, two general elections, and an ongoing crisis of corporate accountability. Since the beginning, we’ve scrutinized the subtle ways in which corporate wealth shapes our politics: not only through direct spending and lobbying, but via the revolving door between industry and government, through interest groups and formal and informal networks, media influence, and more. We exist to help fill the vacuum of knowledge about who holds power and how power is wielded. We are watchdogs, and we wanted a name for this newsletter that reflects our mission to shed light on the ways that money corrupts politics which may otherwise evade scrutiny.

Recent history reveals a better way to politicize public health.

Scrutinizing the “ideological warfare” a business community mouthpiece says drove Corporate America into the arms of a fascist.

Russell Vought has systematically orchestrated a shutdown of critical government services as budget chief. It’s time to end that.

As currently constructed, AI is an oligarchy-enriching, worker-immiserating, energy-depleting, brain-rotting economic bubble in waiting. Democrats can get on the public’s side here.

These are not good people. They do not bat an eye at facilitating a mental health epidemic, hurting millions of people with reckless foreign aid cuts, destroying our media ecosystem, or even abetting genocide. Any tent able to accommodate their outsized egos and influence will have no room for the common good or basic human decency.

In his latest broadside against the left, Mattew Yglesias took aim at longtime critics of Uber’s blatant lawbreaking. In Yglesias’s view, these critics who range from anti-monopoly voices like Lina Khan to anti-corruption experts like our own Jeff Hauser and academics focused on financial regulation like Professor Hillary Allen, constitute a coterie of economics-hating zealots eager to make people’s lives worse. 

As we’ve been documenting every week of Trump 2.0 in our Corruption Calendar newsletter, the second Trump administration has been egregiously corrupt. Many key appointees, as well as Trump himself, have blatant conflicts of interest and are using their positions to enrich themselves and their friends. Indeed, Trump’s cabinet contains a historic number of billionaires. Every week, more news breaks on the way corporations and the wealthy are lining their pockets due to Trump’s policy decisions, at the expense of the rest of us.

In this week’s installment, we look into Scott Turner’s demands for palatial accommodations, Stephen Miller’s plans to profit from mass deportations, and the administration’s enforcement agencies’ redefinition of their roles as corporate protection agencies.

“We’ve lost the culture war on climate,” Harvard law professor and former Obama administration adviser Jody Freeman told Politico last Wednesday. The article amounts to a dry eulogy for efforts to combat climate change, with Freeman’s refrain that the climate movement failed to go mainstream in the background. What goes unmentioned: Freeman’s extracurricular work as oil industry whisperer.

According to a new report out from TRAC this week, federal prosecutions of corporate crime have continued to decline under the second Trump administration, after hitting a 30-year low under Biden’s Attorney General (and shameless Big Law revolver) Merrick Garland and his Deputy AG Lisa Monaco.