What Six Biden Alumni Learned About Ambitious Government

How to Think Big and Govern Boldly

This week, Roosevelt President and CEO Elizabeth Wilkins joined five other former Biden officials on the Law & Political Economy Project blog to offer perspectives on where the administration could have gone further in its progressive governing efforts.

• Wilkins wrote about the Federal Trade Commission’s research into the role of pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs)—intermediaries between drug manufacturers and insurance companies—in raising drug costs and underpaying independent pharmacies.
• While the administration made strides in lowering prescription drug prices (thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act), one powerful tool was left on the table: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had the authority to scrutinize PBMs’ unfair contracts with pharmacies—but chose not to intervene.
• “Policy solutions must be commensurate to the urgency of the problem the public faces,” Wilkins writes. “A whole-of-government approach means acting with the ambition Americans want from every agency, and rebuilding our muscle for doing big things.”

Other Biden-era policy officials also shared insights:

• Roosevelt Board Member K. Sabeel Rahman, who led the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, writes that cleaning up after the current administration’s dismantling of government won’t be enough—progressives should be “imagining the formation and reformation of agencies themselves, looking to create anew their authorities, missions, jurisdictions, and structures.”
• Bharat Ramamurti, former deputy director of the National Economic Council, writes on housing: “It can take years for new investments in housing supply to begin reducing costs.” He urges policymakers to “pursue more creative options” like allowing homebuyers to assume lower-rate mortgages and investing in affordable public housing for renters.
• “Care work is the foundation that enables all other work,” writes former Deputy Director of the Gender Policy Council Shilpa Phadke. She discusses “addressing the caregiving crisis through an industrial policy framework”—an idea echoed by Roosevelt’s Suzanne Kahn in last year’s Investing in Care  report.

Read more from Wilkins and her former colleagues: Six Biden Administration Officials on Reimagining a Progressive Future

The Far-Reaching Consequences of Gutting the CFPB

The Trump administration’s attempts to shutter the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)—established by Congress in the wake of the Great Recession—doesn’t just “make it easier for Wall Street and monopolistic corporations to scam, defraud, and steal from the American public,” Roosevelt’s Emily DiVito writes. It deals a huge blow to public trust in government. “Dismantling it will only recreate dysfunctional pre-2008 dynamics.”

The CFPB’s contributions are vast: The agency has successfully secured monetary relief for victims of corporate abuse, fields and investigates consumer complaints of suspected fraud, and serves as a deterrent to malfeasance in the financial market.

“The CFPB is a textbook example of the government working for people.” DiVito writes. “That it should be a target to this administration is no surprise—but it is a tragedy.”

Read the blog post: Dismantling the CFPB Signals a Return to Pre-2008 Levels of Corporate Fraud

What We’re Talking About

What We’re Reading

• Roosevelt’s author-in-residence, Miranda Yaver, spoke to CNBC about health insurance barriers and the frustrations felt by Americans across the political spectrum.
• Care workers in Colorado fought and succeeded in establishing an industry standards board, a move that “[holds] promise as a means of expanding worker power that might complement traditional labor unions,” Roosevelt Fellow Osita Nwanevu writes for In These Times.
  • For more on the benefits of worker organizing across sectors, read Roosevelt’s Alí R. Bustamante’s brief on sectoral bargaining.
• Roosevelt Fellow Rachel Rebouché spoke with TIME Magazine about the legal fights around abortion shield laws—state-level laws protecting doctors who provide abortions—in the context of the patchwork rules on reproductive health care around the country.
• Former CFPB Director Rohit Chopra told 60 Minutes that the uncertainty surrounding the watchdog “is a huge signal to the industry that maybe they can get away with cheating people.”
• The House passed a budget plan promising $4.5 trillion in tax cuts—which will disproportionately benefit the rich—that are expected to be offset by cuts to Medicaid.
• A team of researchers studied the transformation of media coverage of racial inequity and found that the term “structural racism” was slowly replaced with discussions of diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”).