No single bill can address all these problems, because they come from different places - bureaucratic process, money, revolving doors, culture, career pipelines, etc. But the north star should be pluralism. The expertise of regulators should come from input from a wide range of views & interests.

Corporations are great at framing & amplifying their interests with expertise by paying for research, legal experts, lobbyists, etc. Other groups by contrast seem unprofessional, irrelevant, illegitimate. Expertise can widen the gap btwn bureaucrats & the public, making them feel "unaccountable"

I'm glad they are thinking through ways to get the public more involved. And I actually think this is where the emphasis should be, rather than expertise. Expertise is obviously important, but how it is defined & used to exclude certain interests has also left agencies vulnerable to capture.

"By the time a Federal Register notice has come out, there’s already been a huge conversation. And if you weren’t part of that conversation [...] you couldn’t educate people and give them things to think about, as they were forming their questions and the notice… You’re already on the back foot."

...and also a very clear illustration of how steep the battle is for civil society, social movements, professional associations, etc. to exercise countervailing power

Cool this is in the Lancet! Nitpicky but some of the claims they're making might be overstated, e.g. calling the revolving door "government infiltration" and equating association membership w/ coordination. That said, this is a great review of all the forms corporate political activity is taking now

We may be laughing but this is the prose style that makes for NYT best-sellers and multi-million dollar book deals these days