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Gensler’s first order of business at the SEC will be to reverse Trump’s deregulatory agenda and rebuild the agency’s capacity to police American stock-trading. But this should only be a starting point: SEC activity was insufficient even under Obama, and issues linked to the financial system, from climate change to inequality, have worsened in the four intervening years.

Gitenstein’s time as Romanian ambassador earned him a walk-on role in Romanian historian and totalitarianism expert Florin Abraham’s post-World War II history of his country.

Fresh off defending Donald Trump’s historic corruption, conservatives have begun attacking President-elect Biden for his nominees’ ties to Big Tech, Wall Street, and corporate lobbying. While these attacks are transparently hypocritical, they are not without factual substance and could prove to be a major political liability for Democrats unless they commit to adopting much-needed ethics reforms.

At a moment when our country’s divisions seem deeper than ever, there remains one thing on which a consistent majority can agree: corporate America has too much influence over our government. Americans across the political spectrum understand that corporations benefit when people pass in and out of the revolving door between government and the private sector.

As President-elect Joe Biden fills out his Cabinet, progressives have pushed hard on most major positions, save one: Commerce Secretary. Reporting on this role frames the seat as the liaison to the business community, who can “rebuild relationships” with massive corporations like BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and Mastercard. (Were relationships ever frayed to begin with?) This framing makes the Commerce Secretary seem like a glorified middle-man between C-Suites and the White House, overlooking the actual functions of their Department, including the Patent and Trademark Office, the Census Bureau, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and crucial components of US trade policy.

Examples of House Democrats’ failures to take on this administration, from the Postal Service to Schedule F, are piling up almost as fast as delayed Christmas presents this week.

Use this ongoing tracker to monitor the ties to Big Tech from individuals on the agency review teams, individuals who have been officially designated as nominees, and others who we suspect are jockeying for posts right now.

After news broke that Michael Regan, who currently leads the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, was the new frontrunner to lead the EPA — and was also being considered to be director of the EPA’s Southeast Region Office — environmental justice leaders in North Carolina began pushing back immediately.

Americans are fed up with their government working better for corporate America than it does for them. The Revolving Door Project’s proposed executive order on ethics goes further than any in history towards stopping the revolving door from spinning and shifting the balance of power towards the populace.

Environmentalists and foreign policy activists shouldn’t overlook appointments to agencies outside of their usual portfolios.

Pete Buttigieg is now a top contender for Secretary of Transportation in the Biden Administration, but his tendency to shift policy positions based on the preferences of large donors and industry lobbyists remains a significant concern if he were chosen to head DOT.

Concerns over the presence of corporate insiders in the Biden administration are coming opportunistically from so-called “right-wing populists.” This makes it all the more important for Biden and the Democrats to close the revolving door once and for all.

Mary Nichols, the reported frontrunner to lead Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency, has been appointed four times to the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and is best known for spearheading California’s cap-and-trade program. Since the program began, California’s carbon emissions from its oil and gas industry rose 3.5%. For a state that would have the fifth-largest economy if it were a country, anything but a significant and ongoing decline in carbon emissions is disastrous.

The Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is a hugely underappreciated and powerful position. The USDA’s programs and regulations touch policy areas far beyond traditional agriculture, impacting climate change, food policy, immigration, antitrust issues, rural development, and racial justice. Biden’s choice to lead the USDA must be ready and willing to employ the USDA’s power and pursue the following policy goals.

Sally Yates, an anti-Trump #Resistance icon, spent her last year in Obama’s Justice department refusing to act on a high-profile clemency initiative, prompting a furious resignation letter from Obama’s pardon attorney. After her famous firing in the early Trump days, Yates went to work for BigLaw firm King & Spalding’s “Special Matters and Government Investigations” practice, which is BigLawspeak for “teaching corporate America which laws they can violate without DOJ filing suit, and how to tamp down on suits which they do file.”