So Long, Revolving Door

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President Obama just signed executive orders prohibiting any of his current and future administration officials from leaving office and then turning around to lobby the administration on the issues of his or her expertise. This ban is in place not for two years, not for four years. It is in place for the full length of Obama’s term in the White House. In a statement, Fred Wertheimer, president of good government advocacy group Democracy 21, called the move “the toughest and most far reaching revolving door provisions ever adopted.” (For the full slate of new ethics rules, click here. For Wertheimer’s full statement, which is almost gleeful, click here.)

Asked for comment, John Wonderlich of the Sunlight Foundation said that while he’s waiting to see the details, “today’s announcement is a significant shift in the executive branch’s stance toward being held accountable to the public it serves.” He called the move “very encouraging.”

And it’s not just encouraging for open government reasons. It’s also smart politically. If you create a culture where industry shills can’t run or work in Interior, the FDA, the EPA, and other federal agencies, you’re left with a pool of civic-minded people who care about reform, regulation, and the environment to choose from when making appointments. It will be tough, one would assume, for a Republican president to change that culture in eight years. I think it makes the bureaucracy, on balance, less corporate and more progressive.

President Bush didn’t just let former lobbyists work in his administration. He let them run entire departments. And he let current lobbyists make policy. That era is over. Decisively.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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