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**FEBRUARY 1, 2021**

Kuttner on TAP

Biden's Progressive Appointees: Watch Out Below the Radar

****

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.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter

Robert Kuttner's latest book is
The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy
.

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