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Some fintech and energy startups haven’t announced that Summers is leaving; they just took him off their websites.

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.

Several top officials in the Department of Health and Human Services worked for the very corporate interests their boss claims to oppose.

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

The Texas senator has introduced a bill allowing any AI company a streamlined path around regulations.

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. 

“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.

The private sector rewards for public sector experience creates a conflict in which the public good and an employee’s own career prospects may be in tension. Not only does it incentivize public servants to consider the interests of the private sector (and how their decisions as a public servant might impact future employment prospects), but it erodes public confidence in civil servants.