Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via AP Images
The U.S. Treasury Department headquarters, August 4, 2020
On Tuesday, the Biden presidential transition announced the formation of agency review teams. I don’t want to overemphasize the importance of these groups, sometimes known as “landing teams,” but I don’t want to underemphasize them either. They are intended to study the federal agencies, work with the existing officeholders on the transfer of power, and recommend policy changes for the Biden-Harris administration. The incoming Cabinet official, and Biden himself, can take them or leave them. You could see this as make-work for people who want a say in policy for the president-elect’s White House.
However, this does offer a first look at the type of personnel that a Biden administration will seek out. Members of the review teams are obviously favored by the incoming administration and could very well staff it, up to the subcabinet level. And looking at it through that lens, in what I imagine will become a familiar refrain for the next four years, there’s good news and bad news.
Starting with an area I know a lot about, the Treasury and Federal Reserve landing teams are composed of a promising number of rock stars. I’ve been in a room once before with Don Graves, a counselor to Biden when he was vice president; he spent the Trump years at KeyBank in Cleveland and is the team lead for the Treasury team. But members of that team include expert on racial equity in banking Mehrsa Baradaran (full disclosure, a Prospect board member), former Jeff Merkley staffer and Securities and Exchange Commission official Andy Green, bank reform advocate Simon Johnson, anti-monopolist Sarah Miller of the American Economic Liberties Project, and Damon Silvers of the AFL-CIO. There’s a bit of a “team of rivals” aspect to this and many of the review teams, but that’s significantly more progressive financial names in the room that you’d have expected in any presidential transition over the past 50 years; Obama-era veterans are at more of a minimum, too.
The Federal Reserve, Banking, and Securities Regulators team is even better. Gary Gensler, who has been rumored as part of the Biden transition, is the team lead; he’s likely to get any number of jobs in the administration, including perhaps SEC commissioner. Gensler was a Goldman Sachs expat whom Obama put into the top job at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, expecting a bank-friendly posture; he surprised everyone by being a hard-charging fighter trying to crack down on bank derivative practices. He even surprised the Obama team, who froze him out of any position in the second term.
Now Gensler’s back, and his team includes Baradaran, Green, Silvers, and Simon Johnson, along with Better Markets’ Dennis Kelleher, Columbia University’s Lev Menand (co-author of the “FedAccount” proposal to give everyone a bank account at the Federal Reserve), SEIU’s Renaye Manley, and Amanda Fischer, who was Sherrod Brown’s top banking staffer and Katie Porter’s chief of staff before moving to the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. If these review teams are any indication, the quiet Day One Agenda work of financial reform will be in very aggressive hands.
There are other bright spots throughout the agency review teams, including heavy doses of members of the labor movement. Josh Orton, a top adviser to the Bernie Sanders campaign, is on the Department of Labor review team. But so is Seth Harris, a labor secretary hopeful who actually devised the labor policy that Uber and Lyft just passed in California with Prop 22 to deny its workers employee rights. Again, there’s a team-of-rivals aspect here.
One area where the team has no rivals, however, is the landing team for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). And while this may not get as many headlines, it represents an effort by the tech industry to essentially commandeer the most critical agency for the Day One Agenda.
The review team is led by Martha Coven, a Princeton professor who spent six years at OMB during the Obama administration. But the team includes representatives from Lyft, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, and WestExec Advisors, the strategic consulting firm set up as a landing spot for Obama national-security types to get rich advising corporate clients. The tech industry is decidedly overrepresented here.
A big reason why this matters is that OMB houses the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), an obscure but powerful agency that reviews all regulations across the federal government. The Prospect has written an absurd amount about OIRA, because every way in which government acts flows through this team of fewer than 50 economists, who use cost-benefit analysis to determine whether it’s worth it to avoid noxious fumes in the atmosphere, or to prevent harmful chemicals from being ingested, or even to stop prison rape.
OMB houses the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), an obscure but powerful agency that reviews all regulations across the federal government.
Historically, the agency has successfully delayed or even blocked rules, and has set itself up as an administrative gatekeeper, even in the Obama administration. If you control this one agency, you have the ability to influence the entire output of the executive branch. As it’s been explained to me, environmental groups would rather see no climate czar and a strong head of OIRA than a White House–level commitment to the climate crisis and a bad head of OIRA. “Big business is trying to take it over,” was the assessment from Matt Stoller of the American Economic Liberties Project. “It’s the choke point.”
One member of this OMB team, Bridget Dooling of George Washington University, has ten years of OIRA experience across Democratic and Republican administrations. She’s now a research professor with something called the Regulatory Studies Center at GW, the head of which is Susan Dudley, George W. Bush’s chief administrator of OIRA. Dudley once argued that smog is good, because of its potential to reduce incidences of skin cancer by blotting out the sun.
Public Citizen wrote last year that the Regulatory Studies Center, under the guise of nonpartisan research, is actually intended “to provide scholarly rationales against government regulation, focusing on measures that would affect the fossil fuel industry.” Its public comments on agency rules are almost entirely anti-regulatory. And its major donors include $1.2 million from the charitable foundation of Charles Koch. It is seen as part of the Koch array of hyper-libertarian groups laundered through allegedly neutral academic institutions, which comprise “the brains of the conservative regulatory fight.”
Dooling, who again is on this OMB review team, also taught a course at the Koch-funded George Mason University law school while she was working at OIRA. Her work history includes “a U.S. airline’s legal department, and the economics team at an aviation trade association.” Her recent papers argue to entrench cost-benefit analysis, typically an excuse to take down rules, and to expand OIRA review to the IRS, which would frustrate the ability to rapidly reinterpret some of the Trump administration’s worst directives. Based on this tweet, she appears to agree that OIRA should block rules even if the president favors them.
The combination of Dooling’s inclusion and the healthy representation from Silicon Valley firms on the OMB landing team is really perilous. “While tech’s interests are wide, diverse, and universally problematic, there is one particular job to zero in on: Will tech get to control OIRA?” said Jeff Hauser of the Revolving Door Project, which takes a keen interest in personnel.
A few years ago, deep analysis of the agency review teams would be the furthest thing from progressives’ minds. But there has been a real sea change on the subject of personnel, and awareness that who’s in the room when the decisions are made really matters. This morning, the Sunrise Movement and Justice Democrats, which have worked in this election cycle mostly as campaign organizations, are out with climate-based recommendations for a number of Cabinet agency heads and even chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. In short, progressives are engaged on personnel.
The impression that one gets from this list of agency review teams is that progressives will be sometimes heartened and sometimes disappointed in the Biden administration, perhaps simultaneously. But now that industry has shown its cards somewhat, expect the fight over OIRA to intensify.
