Evan Vucci/AP Photo
President Biden’s picks to staff executive branch agencies deserve much closer scrutiny.
Progressives are feeling pretty good that reformers have gotten major posts on climate and energy and in key financial regulatory agencies such as the SEC (Gary Gensler) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (Rohit Chopra). But watch out for what’s happening under the radar.
Last Friday, I wrote about how Cass Sunstein was primed to return to a White House job. More than any other person, he was the scourge of progressive regulation when he was head of OIRA under Obama.
Biden and his team promise to do a lot of needed re-regulation. Why on earth bring back Sunstein?
One explanation could be the influence of one Jessica Hertz. She is a longtime protégé of Sunstein, both in his days at the University of Chicago and as his counselor when both were at OIRA.
From there, after a stint as deputy counsel for then–Vice President Biden, Hertz went on to work as the key house counsel in charge of fending off regulation for Facebook, the number one target for reformers of platform monopolies. And then she got herself a prime job as general counsel in the Biden transition, where she was the ultimate arbiter of ethics and conflict-of-interest issues.
But it gets worse. Hertz was recently named to the post of staff secretary in the Biden administration itself, a powerful role that among other things filters the paperwork flow to the president.
Do you think maybe Hertz is foaming the runway for Sunstein? And who foamed the runway for her?
The Hertz/Sunstein story is part of a larger pattern that deserves much more scrutiny. Just below the good news of progressives leading some agencies is the infiltration of people into hundreds of subcabinet and senior staff posts, either coming directly from Silicon Valley platform monopolies and Wall Street investment banks, or serving as their longtime allies and enablers.
