The New Chief Campaign Finance Regulator Has a Plan to Make Her Agency Matter for the First Time in Years
Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. Ellen Weintraub, the sole Democratic commissioner on the Federal Election Commission, just became chairwoman of the agency in January and she’s already trying to shake things up at her “dysfunctional” agency. The FEC chairmanship, which rotates among the commissioners each year, is mostly a ceremonial…
Elizabeth Warren Announces Plan to Reject Big Donors
Larry Burton Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has decided to up the ante with her latest campaign finance pledge: No more fancy fundraising dinners, donor calls, or wooing wealthy donors. The 2020 Democratic candidate announced on Monday that her campaign “will be run on the principle of equal…
Former Trump Officials Signed a Pledge to Avoid Lobbying. At Least 33 of Them Have Found a Way Around It.
Carolyn Kaster/AP Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. This story was originally published by ProPublica. It’s been more than two years since President Donald Trump, who rallied campaign supporters with calls to “drain the swamp” of lobbyists and their ilk, took office. But despite that campaign promise, Washington influence peddlers continue to move…
EPA Scientists: The Toxic Chemicals Our Agency Won’t Regulate Are Definitely in Our Drinking Water
Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. Update (2/14/2019): At a Thursday morning press conference, acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler released what he called a “Comprehensive Nationwide PFAS Action Plan” (press release here). However, the agency put off its decision about whether to set a maximum contaminant level in drinking water for two ubiquitous PFAS…
10 Years of Privacy Violations, Disinformation, and Friend Requests From Facebook
Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. As Facebook assumed its central role in the information landscape, the company quietly made decisions that boosted profits with little regard to the consequences for privacy, politics, and the news industry. When those controversial calls and other travails associated with abuses of the platform gradually…
The One Thing All the 2020 Democratic Candidates Agree They Hate
Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. The field of Democratic candidates running for president in 2020 is still taking shape, but so far the contenders have agreed on one policy: Cash from corporate political action committees (PACs) is bad. That’s not an entirely new idea—in 2008 and 2012…