John,

A change in presidential administrations, even as significant a change as we saw in January, does not necessarily change much about some of the core issues that CREW deals with every day like campaign finance reform and transparency.

I emailed you earlier this week about how President Biden is doing on ethics and democracy, and truthfully, all in all, he’s doing pretty well. But there’s a limit to what a president can do about good governance. For many reforms, Congress has to act, and for many day to day decisions in the complex bureaucracy that is the US government, it’s not the president making the call.

That’s where we come in. We demand that every candidate comply with the law. We demand records from government agencies about certain programs and costs. We demand that conflicted appointees resign. Basically, we demand better from our government.

Here’s what we’ve been up to lately:

Last week the Senate committee with oversight of the United States Postal Service advanced President Biden’s three nominees for the USPS Board of Governors. That's progress toward firing Louis DeJoy! But we’re still keeping the pressure on to make sure the full Senate confirms them and they finish the job.
CREW and a coalition of 84 other groups urged the Biden administration to immediately withdraw & reevaluate Department of Homeland Security records destruction schedules. DHS has faced too little accountability in the past, and this plan would make the problem even worse.
We’re still pushing for the passage of the For the People Act, which has many great reforms in it, including requiring a Supreme Court code of ethics, reforming the Federal Election Commission, banning partisan and racial gerrymandering, modernizing and simplifying voter registration, and banning members of Congress from serving on corporate boards. The bill is so important that if necessary, the Senate should kill the filibuster to pass it.
Unfortunately, Republican senators have not embraced the bill, and one, Richard Shelby, even went so far as to suggest that maybe it’s a good thing that the FEC can’t enforce the law. Of course, it comes as no surprise that in his last reelection campaign, he benefited greatly from dark money...
CREW got records from the Secret Service showing that Trump’s February 2020 trip out west funneled $12,000 taxpayer dollars to the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, and that Trump falsely blamed the Secret Service for his detours to the business.
And here’s a bit of a wild card to round out the list: CREW has some concerns about Kanye West’s personal financial disclosure that he filed when running for president, because he claimed not to know about his then-wife Kim Kardashian’s income despite appearing many times on her show.

We couldn’t do any of this without you, so thank you for being with us in the fight for a better government, no matter who is president.

Thank you,

Noah Bookbinder
President, CREW

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