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revolving door project
Progressives Fume as Democrats Fold in Face of Trump's 'Corporate-Owned Cabinet'
"Defeating the MAGA movement does not require clever theories, it requires the hard work of opposition on behalf of the millions who will suffer at the hands of Trump's corporate Cabinet."
Jan 13, 2025
The government watchdog group Revolving Door Project on Monday denounced Democratic lawmakers for the "perfunctory resistance" with which they appear to be preparing for confirmation hearings on President-elect Donald Trump's nominees to lead federal agencies, saying some in the party's upper ranks appear willing to allow far-right appointees to sail to top government positions without facing a true opposition party.
As Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) toldNOTUS on Monday, some of Trump's nominees are "objectionable," but others "are going to get bipartisan support."
Jeff Hauser, executive director of Revolving Door Project (RDP), acknowledged that with Republicans now holding 53 seats in the Senate and the Democratic Party holding 45, "Democrats do not have the votes to kill any of these nominations."
"But they do have the ability to begin drawing attention to the cronyism that will inevitably appear from within the Trump administration. Contrary to the party's current position, being able to say 'I told you so' is helpful to future success," said Hauser.
Democrats aren't ensuring they'll have the ability to say that, Hauser warned, as they signal little resistance "to the few Trump nominees so brazenly offputting that they draw nearly uniform skepticism."
"For all the Trump nominees not accused of killing a dog or committing heinous crimes, Democrats do not seem poised to offer even a whisper of resistance, no matter how unqualified," said Hauser.
"Democrats must find their inner populists and fight at all times, even in battles that they will almost certainly lose."
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) held a meeting Monday with Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee to discuss the upcoming questioning of defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth this week, saying his upcoming confirmation hearing on Tuesday will provide the party an opportunity to attack the GOP's "brand." Hegseth has been accused of sexual assault, which he has denied.
But the party has not called attention to problems with nominees like Scott Bessent, Trump's treasury secretary nominee, or Chris Wright, the fracking CEO who has denied the climate emergency and whom Trump picked to run the Department of Energy (DOE).
"Senate Democrats have failed to question how Scott Bessent's experience of running a second-tier hedge fund with declining assets under management qualifies him to hold one of the most powerful economic policymaking in the world," said Hauser. "Or how Chris Wright's experience as an unhinged plutocrat out of touch with scientific reality would qualify him to manage some of the world's most important laboratories."
Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) told NOTUS that Democrats are prepared to use the confirmation hearings to answer the question: "Are they fighting for Americans, or are they going to fight for the kind of cronyism politics that's really hurt this place?"
"I want to support nominees that are going to really fight for the American people, not fight for special interests, not fight for rich people, not fight to take away our freedoms," he told NOTUS.
But with nominees like hedge fund manager Bessent, former corporate lobbyist Pam Bondi for attorney general, cryptocurrency promoter Howard Lutnick for commerce secretary, and Medicare Advantage proponent Mehmet Oz to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Hauser said Democrats shouldn't act as though the nominees' conflicts of interest and loyalty to the wealthy are a question.
"Every senior Trump administration official will have the discretion to exercise presidential authority on behalf of corporate interests in ways that will hurt ordinary Americans. Workers, consumers, breathers of air—every typical American is at risk from the most corporate captured set of nominees in American history," said Hauser. "Democrats should be telling this story now, not only to raise alarms ahead of the inauguration, but to be able to tell a compelling story about what went wrong and why when things inevitably decline across so many critical fronts in the next few years."
Instead, Booker told NOTUS that the party is "not looking to make this partisanship or tribalism."
Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), for his part, met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and told NOTUS his plan going into confirmation hearings is "to listen." He has expressed support for secretary of state nominee Marco Rubioubio, United Nations ambassador nominee Elisa StefanikStefanik, and transportation secretary nominee Sean Duffy.
"Senate Democrats are seeking strategic retreat wherever possible, convinced that 'opposition' is a bad strategy for the opposition party," Hauser warned.
In a post at RDP's Substack newsletter, research assistant KJ Boyle wrote that the problem with Booker and Fetterman's approach "is that Trump's picks are partisan, chosen for their loyalty both to him and the moneyed interests they'll ostensibly be tasked with overseeing. Now is not the time to sit back and listen. It's time to make a big stink about how unqualified and dangerous these nominees are, and explain how that will translate to real world consequences that harm everyday people."
The group plans to release suggested questions for Democrats to ask at each of the confirmation hearings in the coming days; Boyle started with Wright, interior secretary nominee Doug Burgum, and Office of Management and Budget director nominee Russell Vought.
He suggested senators ask Wright about his former company, trade association Western Energy Alliance, and its public comment opposing energy efficiency standards for gas stoves.
"The public comment erroneously claimed the DOE's rule was 'intended to ban new gas stoves and compel a transition to electric,' rather than a commonsense rule to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and save consumers money," Boyle wrote in a suggested question. "Moreover, are you aware that approximately 13% of childhood asthma cases can be attributed to nitrogen dioxide exposure from gas stoves? Do you believe the federal government has no role in protecting our children from exposure to these hazardous airborne pollutants?"
Boyle suggested senators ask Vought about his record of budget cuts that have harmed low-income families, and ask Burgum why he opposed a rule requiring coal plants to reduce mercury emissions, which are linked to heart attacks, cancer, and developmental delays in children.
"Why do you think that the coal industry should be given handouts and allowed to make people sick?" Boyle suggested senators ask.
Hauser said that Democrats' electoral defeat in November has left them "doubling down on an ostrich-like strategy of hiding their heads until Donald Trump goes away."
"But the MAGA movement will not go away on its own, it will have to be defeated," he said. "Defeating the MAGA movement does not require clever theories, it requires the hard work of opposition on behalf of the millions who will suffer at the hands of Trump's corporate Cabinet. Democrats must find their inner populists and fight at all times, even in battles that they will almost certainly lose."
"There is never a better opportunity to find an opposition's voice," he said, "than when a would-be populist president appoints a corporate-owned Cabinet."
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New Campaign Urges Biden to Commute Sentence of 'Public Hero' Who Leaked Trump Tax Data
Patriotic Millionaires and Revolving Door Project are leading the push for Biden to reduce IRS whistleblower Charles Littlejohn's prison term.
Dec 16, 2024
Update:
Patriotic Millionaires senior vice president for tax policy Bob Lord and Revolving Door Project senior researcher Kenny Stancil on Wednesday published commentary in Rolling Stone highlighting the campaign urging Biden to commute Littlejohn's sentence. This, a day after the campaign launched a website where people can add their voices to the chorus of calls for commutation.
Earlier:
With just over a month left in U.S. President Joe Biden's term, a pair of advocacy groups this week launched a campaign urging the outgoing Democrat to commute the sentence of an Internal Revenue Service contractor serving five years in prison for exposing tax dodging by wealthy Americans including Republican President-elect Donald Trump.
The campaign, which is a collaboration between the Revolving Door Project and Patriotic Millionaires, is planning a week of action to push Biden to commute the five-year sentence of Charles Littlejohn—who was also ordered to pay a $5,000 fine after pleading guilty in October 2023 to unauthorized disclosure of tax returns and return information to media outlets—to 10 months, the maximum term of imprisonment he was supposed to receive under the federal guidelines.
On Monday, the campaign letter to Biden from four tax law professors calling on Biden reduce Littlejohn's sentence, which the experts called "particularly harsh in comparison with some recent sentences meted out to blatant tax evaders."
The letter asserts that Littlejohn—who gave The New York Timesinformation on Trump and shared with ProPublica data on Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and others—acted "out of a sincere belief in the public's right to know."
"I've been a tax lawyer for 40 years. For the past decade, I've been pretty outspoken about the various maneuvers that the ultra-rich deploy to avoid tax," Bob Lord, the senior vice president for Tax Policy at Patriotic Millionaires, said in a statement. "But despite my best efforts, I fully recognize that no technical explanation that I could give about any of the myriad tax loopholes that the rich exploit would ever stick in the public conscience the same way that Charles Littlejohn's leaks did about billionaires like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos paying $0 in income tax."
"Littlejohn did break the law, but at the end of the day, he actually did the country a great service by exposing the full degree to which our tax code privileges the wealthy and well-connected," Lord added. "And if lawmakers are inspired by Littlejohn's leaks to finally take meaningful steps to reform our tax system and rein in extreme wealth, he will have undoubtedly done more to save American democracy than harm it."
University of Michigan law professor Reuven Avi-Yonah, the letter's lead signer, has called Littlejohn a "public hero."
According to the professors:
There are many cases that involve massive tax evasion and do not lead to a criminal indictment. Consider for example the case of Alon Farhy, who transferred more than $2 million to a sham foreign entity, which then transferred the funds to a bank account in the name of a Belize-based corporation Mr. Farhy created solely for that purpose. Mr. Farhy's scheme violated a variety of tax-related obligations beyond his duty to correctly report and pay the income tax he owed. The [U.S. Department of Justice] entered into a nonprosecution agreement with Mr. Farhy immunizing him from criminal prosecution in exchange for paying his taxes plus interest and penalties.
"Many other cases involving tax evasion do not result in jail time," the letter notes. "For example, Raj Mukhi ran a business that manufactured and sold professional uniforms in many countries. He was indicted in 2014 for hiding the proceeds in a private bank based in Zürich. He pleaded guilty to one count of filing a false tax return and one count of failing to disclose a foreign bank account and was sentenced to three years of supervised release."
"Even if there is a prison sentence, it is usually much shorter than five years," the professors stressed. "To mention just some cases from this year, an Oklahoma man who instructed a payroll company working with his business to falsely characterize over $2.6 million as reimbursements rather than income was sentenced to 30 months."
"An Indiana woman who electronically filed false income tax returns for clients that reported fictitious businesses and also filed a false tax return for herself that underreported gross receipts from her business was sentenced to 21 months," the letter adds. "A New Jersey man was sentenced to 29 months for evading taxes and not filing income tax returns while earning over $2.5 million in wages. All of these cases involve conduct that is much more culpable and less public-spirited than Mr. Littlejohn's."
"There is a big difference between leaking tax information and tax evasion in the size of the universe of potential violations and the number of violators escaping punishment," the professors said. "The universe of potential violators leaking tax information is infinitesimal compared to the universe of potential tax evaders. And the number of potential violators escaping punishment for leaking tax information is close to zero, whereas the number of evaders escaping punishment is huge."
As his term winds down, Biden has issued approximately 1,500 commutations and 39 pardons, including controversial clemency for his son Hunter Biden and Michael Conahan, a former Pennsylvania judge convicted in a "kids-for-cash" scheme in which he and a colleague funneled thousands of juveniles into private detention centers in exchange for millions of dollars in kickbacks.
With the looming return of Trump—who presided over more federal executions during his first term than numerous presidents did over several preceding decades—advocates are pushing Biden to commute the sentences of 40 federal death row inmates. Advocates are also calling on Biden to pardon figures including Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier and environmental attorney Steven Donziger.
Earlier this month,
Politico Magazinereported that Biden is weighing preemptive pardons for numerous public officials who could be targeted by Trump—who has vowed to exact revenge on his political enemies—during his second term. Kash Patel, Trump's pick to head the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has threatened to prosecute the president-elect's political opponents and journalists.
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There Is No Such Thing as 'Normal' Trump Nominee
And Doug Burgum proves it. Backing false climate solutions is hardly less corrosive than outright climate denial when it comes to the goal of mitigating climate change.
Dec 15, 2024
Trump has spent the month since the election firing off a rapid torrent of Cabinet picks. His nominees generally fall into two types: obviously whacko (see Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, RFK Jr.) and superficially normal (think Marco Rubio, Doug Burgum, Pam Bondi). While the headline-grabbing scandals and general trumpery of the first group easily draw scorn, it’s important that we not grade the second group on a credulous curve, overlooking the economic interests behind their soothingly conventional manner.
That’s a lesson we should remember from the last Trump administration, when scandal-plagued appointees like Scott Pruitt at EPA and Ryan Zinke at Interior were replaced by more circumspect villains like Andrew Wheeler at EPA and David Bernhardt at Interior. Wheeler and Bernhardt wreaked havoc on environmental, public health, and public lands protection while evading the mockery invited by their predecessors.
Even a wannabe-authoritarian like Trump wants his administration to have a veneer of power and legitimacy, and the scandals of Pruitt and Zinke compromised that illusion. As I recapped for our series of Trump retrospectives, Pruitt “misspent millions in public funds on 24/7 private security, first-class plane tickets, chartered jets, and renovations, while misusing EPA staffers to find his wife a job and do his personal errands,” while Zinke “resigned amid over a dozen ongoing ethics investigations.” Mockery can be politically useful, insofar as it deflates authoritarian egos. But corruption doesn’t have to be sensational to be consequential—and those are the harder stories to tell.
Billionaire Burgum and His Billionaire Buddies
Trump’s pick for Interior Secretary and energy czar, the billionaire former software executive and North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, appears to be more in the mold of Bernhardt than Zinke: staunchly anti-regulation, pro-corporate, pro-oil.
Backing false climate solutions is hardly less corrosive than outright climate denial when it comes to the goal of mitigating climate change. It just makes Burgum a more slippery villain.
Bernhardt, a former oil lobbyist, had so many potential conflicts of interest at Interior that he walked around with a card listing them all. Burgum leases his family land for oil and gas drilling to Continental Resources, which is owned by his billionaire friend and collaborator Harold Hamm. Hamm’s name might be familiar to you, as he is the billionaire with whom Burgum is orchestrating Trump’s energy policies. Burgum also leases land to oil company Hess, whose billionaire CEO John Hess gave Burgum $25,000 for his 2016 gubernatorial campaign. Burgum’s spouse also owns over $100,000 of stock in fossil fuel companies, according to Burgum’s 2023 financial disclosure.
Harold Hamm organized the dinner between Trump and oil executives last spring where Trump asked for $1 billion in donations in order to demolish Biden’s climate agenda; Burgum attended it. (Eighteen days after that dinner, Hamm’s Continental Resources donated $1 million to Trump.) Hamm and other Big Oil executives present at that dinner have defied congressional Democrats’ requests for information about this meeting. John Hess, meanwhile, was scrutinized by the Biden administration’s Federal Trade Commission for colluding with OPEC and Saudi Arabia on oil pricing, and as a result of their preliminary investigation he was banned from joining Chevron’s board. Hess has said he may appeal this ban once Trump takes office. If confirmed, Burgum will have personal ties to these “drill-ionaires” in the crosshairs of federal oversight while helming the federal agency that leases the land and issues the permits to drillers.
Burgum told wealthy Trump donors that the “the No. 1 thing that President Trump could do on Day 1” would be to “stop the hostile attack against all American energy, and I mean all. Whether it’s baseload electricity, whether it’s oil, whether it’s gas, whether it’s ethanol, there is an attack on liquid fuels.” In reality, every single year of the Biden presidency, the U.S. produced more crude oil than any other nation at any other time, and remained the world’s largest methane gas producer, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Burgum is Bullish on Carbon Capture Bullsh*t
As governor of North Dakota, Burgum has been a vocal supporter of the controversial Summit Carbon Capture Pipeline, which would transport carbon captured from ethanol production facilities across state lines and sequester it underground in North Dakota. As Molly Taft brilliantly documented in “Unrest in Carbon Country,” opposition to Summit’s carbon pipeline and the use of eminent domain to seize land for it has united people across parties and walks of life in the rural Midwest.
Burgum’s support for the massive carbon pipeline project is unsurprising when you consider that Harold Hamm’s Continental Resources is one of the project’s main investors. But more broadly, Burgum’s support for carbon capture should not be understood as an admission of the need to mitigate climate change, but rather as an extension of a shrewd maneuver from the oil and gas industry to secure federal climate funding for a technology that helps them extract more oil and gas.
Capturing the carbon created as a byproduct of industrial processes in order to pump it back underground and recover more oil and gas from a well—also known as enhanced oil recovery (EOR)—has become increasingly important to the fossil fuel industry as oil reserves and the productivity of existing wells diminish. As the great Amy Westervelt explained last week:
“The carbon capture and storage (CCS) boom is neither a greenwashing campaign nor a genuine attempt to tackle carbon emissions, it has been driven almost entirely by the industry’s increasing reliance on EOR to deal with oil fields in decline. Compressed carbon turns out to be the best way to get dwindling oil reserves out of the ground, but it’s also one of the more expensive methods. Solution? Re-brand the process as a climate solution and get taxpayers to fund it. That is what the 45Q tax credit, passed as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, is all about.”
And that is definitely what carbon capture is about for the oil industry in North Dakota. The state’s primary drilling region, the Bakken formation, contains a massive amount of hard-to-get oil. The Bakken has a low “recovery factor” of less than 10 percent of oil in place being extracted. The fracking boom in the Bakken basin, which made Harold Hamm’s Continental Resources a fortune, unlocked more productivity for oil extraction. But enhanced oil recovery could potentially extend production further, prolonging the polluting lifespan of fossil fuel extraction even as major producers in the Bakken can foresee the time when production dwindles.
As Molly Taft reported for Drilled, “In April, North Dakota’s top oil and gas regulator warned that without importing CO2 from outside states, production in the Bakken could go into ‘terminal decline.’ Governor Burgum…called enhanced oil recovery carbon capture’s ‘biggest prize.’”
Earlier this year, Reutersreported that while Summit Carbon Solutions “has repeatedly pledged its project will not be used by drillers to boost output from oil fields,” its message to prospective clients from North Dakota’s oil industry is decidedly different: “if you want to use our project for enhanced oil recovery (EOR), where gas is pumped into oil fields to increase production, just write a check.”
Burgum’s support for carbon capture is among the factors that led some to view him as a less extreme pick than climate change deniers Chris Wright and Lee Zeldin, who Trump has tapped to head the Energy Department and the EPA. When he ran for president in 2023, USA Todayreported that “Burgum believes human activity has caused climate change, and as governor he made it a goal to get the Roughrider State carbon-neutral by 2030. But he rejects the Democratic worldview of using regulation to curtail fossil fuel use and instead emphasizes innovative technology to capture carbon emissions.” After Burgum was tapped by Trump for Interior, Politicodeemed Burgum to be “maybe the best hope for policymakers who favor an ‘abundance agenda.’”
Burgum’s selection has indeed gathered praise from pro-development voices on the center and right, including Alec Stapp of Institute for Progress, who called Burgum a “YIMBY abundance guy.” Joe Pitts of American Enterprise Institute called his selection “really, really good news.” Matt Yglesias called him “a totally solid pick who’ll do good things.” In what a telling glimpse into what the abundance agenda may be gunning for—cheap energy for AI data centers—Thomas Hochman of the Foundation for American Innovation tweeted that Burgum would help the U.S. “win the AI arms race.” Christopher Barnard of the American Conservation Coalition tweeted that he was “excited to see how [Burgum] drains the permitting swamp over the next 4 years.”
Backing false climate solutions is hardly less corrosive than outright climate denial when it comes to the goal of mitigating climate change. It just makes Burgum a more slippery villain. His gubernatorial track record gives us a sense of what we might expect from him at Interior. As governor, Burgum opposed a federal rule requiring gas companies to cut down on methane leaks when drilling on federal and tribal lands, while his state sued the Biden administration’s Interior Department for establishing conservation as a valid use of federal lands. Burgum opposed a federal rule reducing mercury emissions from coal plants that cause cancer, heart attacks, and developmental delays in children, while exempting the coal industry from $100 million in taxes over five years. Burgum applauded federal funding going to corporations pushing false climate solutions like carbon capture from coal production and gas-powered hydrogen production, but wants to repeal federal subsidies for consumers purchasing electric vehicles.
Unfortunately for the climate left, there will be little solace in “I told you so” when Burgum reveals himself to be just as irredeemably oily as the rest of Trump’s pollution promoters.
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