Lucy Dean Stockton is a New York–based reporter with the Lever. Her work focuses on privatization.
President Donald Trump has been carrying out a frenzied deregulation of financial markets. Recently, the administration stacked the US’s top watchdog of corporate auditors with Trump loyalists and former executives of the companies they will now oversee.
The Food and Drug Administration has relaxed guidelines on the health effects of alcohol consumption. Much more than any new scientific findings, the move reflects a yearslong lobbying effort by the alcohol industry.
Over the past year, corporate actors who stand to benefit from US-backed regime change in Venezuela spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying the Trump administration, including over their economic access to the resource-rich nation.
Before Donald Trump’s capture of Nicolás Maduro, corporations filed lawsuits against Venezuela seeking damages tied to state nationalization, international sanctions, and political instability. A Trump-installed government could tilt the courts in their favor.
The Trump administration is working to privatize a legal defense program for tens of thousands of unaccompanied immigrant children, opening the door for a for-profit ICE technology contractor to take over in partnership with Angelina Jolie’s NGO.
At the behest of the pharmaceutical lobby — and after millions in political donations — Republican lawmakers have defanged rules that would lower the prices of life-saving medicines, amounting to a more than $8 billion windfall for Big Pharma.
A new report reveals that a significant portion of Donald Trump’s defense budget is going to a select few private military contractors — the same firms who have spent hundreds of millions lobbying the federal government.
Across the US, people are increasingly defaulting on their car loans — a dire economic indicator because these loans are usually the last payment Americans are willing to miss. Meanwhile, auto insurers are raking in record profits after hiking rates.
Nearly half of US federal judges took crash courses in economics at a conservative-leaning economics institute between 1976 and 1999. After attending the trainings, judges ruled against regulators more often and imposed harsher sentences on criminals.
Right-wing media outlet PragerU is known for its misleading viral videos that it has long created for teens and adults. The operation is increasingly seeking to reach children, hoping to fill the Sesame Street–sized hole left by the defunding of PBS.
Donald Trump’s SEC chair, Paul Atkins, just sold his financial services firm for more than $25 million and is set to receive a huge tax break on the proceeds. He has refused to disclose who is behind the payout or if they have business with the SEC.
Despite the rising threat of climate disasters like last week’s deadly flash flood in Texas, US lawmakers continue to underfund the federal government program supporting a nationwide flood warning system.
GOP lawmakers have just added a ten-year federal preemption of state-level artificial intelligence laws to the House’s budget reconciliation bill — effectively nullifying all local efforts to regulate AI technology.
Donald Trump is granting tariff exemption deals to wealthy donors and politically connected businesses, echoing the corrupt tactics of his first term. But this time, he’s fired the government watchdog that raised the alarm about them.
Donald Trump has fired more than a dozen inspectors general, officials who provide independent oversight of federal agencies. At least five of them worked at agencies with previous or ongoing investigations of Elon Musk’s business practices.
Fossil fuel companies are profiting off a state tax break depriving California of up to $146 million of annual tax revenue that could be used to combat climate-change-fueled wildfires — like the inferno currently tearing through Los Angeles.
Donald Trump’s pick to head the Department of Transportation, Sean Duffy, is a former airline industry lobbyist who has voted to make it harder to impose safety regulations on airlines. The industry is already celebrating his nomination.
Many of the Biden administration’s final policy measures could soon be rolled back and permanently prohibited by the incoming GOP Congress, thanks to Democratic gambles and an obscure federal law increasingly weaponized by Republican lawmakers.
If Donald Trump wins the election and keeps his promise to appoint Elon Musk to a prominent government position, Musk could reap one of the largest personalized tax breaks in US history — on top of the massive tax cuts Trump wants to give billionaires.
In the years before Hurricane Helene ravaged North Carolina last week, Republican lawmakers and corporate interests continually sabotaged efforts to prepare the state for stronger storms and a rising sea.