The term “corporate capture” refers to an environment in government when a private industry exerts its political influence to take control of the decision-making apparatus of the state within regulatory agencies, law enforcement entities and legislatures. The past four years of the Trump administration was the very embodiment of corporate capture. Trump appointed men and women from corporate America to lead a long of list government agencies. Once installed, they regularly used their positions to deregulate the very industries they came from and more generally abused their power to severely weaken or dismantle government oversight altogether. A 2019 study found that the Trump administration granted the National Association of Manufacturers 85 percent of their specific requests for industry deregulation.
As the new Biden Administration completed its first 100 days in office, the Revolving Door Project published a report card on President Biden’s success at preventing corporate capture of his executive branch. The watchdog group issued an overall grade of B-.
The study found Biden to be the “least captured and most public-oriented president of any of our lifetimes.” But the report’s authors did level criticisms at some of the administration’s personnel choices with ties to Big Tech, Wall Street, Big Pharma, the military-industrial complex and the fossil fuel industry. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Max Moran, research director with the personnel team at the Revolving Door Project, who summarizes the findings of Joe Biden’s Corporate Capture Report Card.
MAX MORAN: We have a bit of a mixed view of the Biden administration thus far, although it’s a more positive mixed view then I think we would have of basically any other president within our lifetime. Our view overall is that Biden is doing a lot to really try and make a break from sort of the neoliberal consensus of the 1980s through the 2010s and is reflecting a lot of developments within economics, within politics, within political economy in order to show that a lot of those assumptions, which — for a bit of a simplistic boiling down, really more or less boil down to — “do whatever the biggest corporations want, then the details will work themselves out.” Biden is really making some efforts to break with a lot of that. You saw a lot of that with the COVID-19 bill and you do see a lot of that with the appointees that he’s choosing.
He is choosing from a broader variety of backgrounds than just corporate executives to have to decide if they want a turn as the regulators of their own industries, which has sadly been the consensus among Democratic and Republican presidents for quite some time. You see Biden choosing from figures within labor. You see Biden choosing from figures within the civil rights community, academics and so on. So, we are very deeply heartened by that. That by no means indicates that corporate interests have no seat at the table or that they won’t still be able to have enormous amounts of power, including over the Biden agenda where, before you might’ve seen, like a Wall Street executive appointed treasury secretary. Now you’re seeing Wall Street’s figures in some of the more advisory roles and some of the more staffer level roles and so on.
You also have progressives in those fields as well. So it’s a little bit more up in the air, I suppose, which again is far better than has happened under most presidents of our lifetimes. The challenge here is that — and this is a little bit unfair, but it is the truth — that Biden is coming in in the middle of the intersection of at least four enormous crises, any one of which has incredible, incredible consequences for years to come. You have COVID-19, a public health crisis. You have the continuing racial crisis, which arguably straight dates back to the founding of this country. You have the climate crisis and of course you have the economic crisis of economic inequality in this country. So the decisions that are made in these next — really over the course of these two years while Democrats very narrowly have the Congress as well — have enormously high stakes.
And so the shortcomings of Biden’s administration of which, of course there are some, have a much wider echo effect as a result of that, we think. So while Biden is doing good, there is an enormous amount still to do so. Our overall grade for Biden on terms of corporate capture is basically a B-minus. We think that he’s doing good, but there is plenty more that needs to get done. And from there, we break things down into across a range of different industries — Big Oil, Wall Street, Big Tech and so on in terms of our assessments of how well they have, or have not, been able to capture or control the key appointees for their respective issues.
SCOTT HARRIS: This report could certainly be the basis for pressure on the Biden administration to move their policies in a different direction or hire different folks to be regulators within the administration. Tell us a little bit about how our listeners can find this report and what you’re recommending in terms of how people use it.
MAX MORAN: Sure. So you can find the report and all of our work at TheRevolvingDoorProjects.org. As for as how to use the reports, I would first of all, just hope that people read it and try to familiarize yourself with how many different sections of the executive branch matter and also how much overlap there is in how certain specific agencies or certain specific positions they probably never even heard of wield enormous amounts of power over our lives in different sections and different segments of society.
And from there, just try to integrate that into your own advocacy, whether that’s within a union, whether that’s within an activist group and activist circle that you’re a part of. The more specific that you can be when you are protesting or when you are calling for change within the federal government, the more you can really pinpoint and direct your demands and your criticisms to the specific individuals and regulators who make those decisions, the more powerful that is, and the more effective the chance that they have of being implemented. Most regulators, most bureaucrats are really not used to hearing from the public. They really are not accustomed to facing public pressure of the decisions they make every day — the decisions that affect the public everyday. That actually gives you a tremendous amount of power if you are the group that is able to call them out.
For more information about the Revolving Door Project at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, visit The Revolving Door Project at therevolvingdoorproject.org.
