Preparing for After the Election

This is a crossroads moment like few others in American history.

The results of this November’s election may see us descend into a perilous time of authoritarianism, with real threats to the long-term viability of our democracy and a race toward climate catastrophe.

Or, it may see us vanquish the proto-fascist movement that has grown in America in the last decade, enable us to win transformative democracy reforms and drive forward the progressive agenda American wants and desperately needs.

For what it’s worth, we’re cautiously optimistic about winning the better outcome – but we’re certainly not counting on it.

That means we have to plan for wildly different scenarios come November – and be ready to scale up immediately to capitalize on a generational opportunity and, simultaneously, be prepared to mobilize immediately to head off Trump’s most dangerous plans.

I’m writing now to give you a window into our plans – how we’re preparing, what we hope to achieve and how we’re coordinating with allies.

I’m going to start with the frightening scenario and then turn to the more optimistic one. Okay? Here we go —

Planning for the possibility of a Trump win

It’s certainly a mistake to take Donald Trump at his word.

But when he says he wants to be a dictator for a day, weaponize the Department of Justice, turn on the spigots for Big Oil, roll back the achievements of the Inflation Reduction Act, fire federal workers who choose to honor their agencies’ mission instead of function as Trump loyalists, and more, we should take him seriously.

When his associates publish a detailed agenda of what they hope to achieve in a second Trump presidency — Project 2025 – we should believe them.

And when he and his acolytes say they intend to govern much more ruthlessly than they did in Trump’s first term, we should assume they aim to do exactly that.

The good news is, we have our own playbook for dealing with Trump.

Public Citizen was enormously effective in confronting Trump in his first term. We:

• Helped drive three cabinet secretaries from office;
• Generated a major focus on Trump’s personal conflict of interests and the corporate capture of his administration;
• Won multiple lawsuits against the administration, including to force disclosure of the White House complex visitors’ log and to preserve a teen pregnancy prevention program;
• Sued and forced the U.S. Postal Service to deliver absentee ballots in a timely way;
• Helped lead massive mobilizations to hold Trump accountable, including to support both Trump impeachments. During the Trump administration, we built a coalition and network that ended up with more than a half a million people signed up to take the streets in more than 1,500 cities, in a broad coalition that spanned labor, environmental, civil rights, women’s, LGBTQ and many other organizations.

To prepare for the possibility of a second Trump term, we’re doing deep research on potential Trump appointees, studying the Project 2025 agenda to discern specific potential policies of a second Trump term, preparing legal theories to challenge his planned actions, and readying our coalitions for activation.

If Trump is elected, we’ll be ready immediately to:

• Call attention to his personal and family conflict of interests, involving everything from a new Trump cryptocurrency to billions in Saudi investment capital managed by Jared Kusher.
• Highlight ethical breaches, conflicts of interest and abuses by cabinet nominees and campaign to defeat as many outrageous nominees as possible.
• Activate our coalitions – and expand them even further – to defend the rule of law and fight against all manner of Trump authoritarian actions.
• Lobby and pressure our friends on Capitol Hill to stay unified and block Trump’s legislative agenda.
• Sue the administration to obtain documents and block all manner of illegal action.

We are hard at work preparing detailed plans for each of these areas of work.

Let me give you an example. During the first Trump administration, we litigated effectively to block the administration’s authoritarian maneuvers and block its corporate giveaways.

We’re preparing to move even faster and do even more in the event of a second Trump administration.

Right away, and throughout the administration, we will provide training for nonprofit allies, including environmental justice and grassroots groups, on the use of Freedom of Information Act, and we will be prepared to represent various groups, reporters, and researchers in litigation if and when the administration refuses to respond to open records requests.

Similarly, we will provide training for nonprofit allies on administrative law and regulatory practice, focusing on key concepts that may form the basis for legal challenges to Trump anti-regulatory action. We’ll give them guidance on how to identify strong cases, and we’ll be available to provide representation if needed.

We’re doing work now to prepare legal challenges to Trump actions based on three grounds that are highly likely to come into play:

• Emergency powers: We sued Trump over his funding for the so-called border wall, which took money from other purposes based on a purported emergency. We expect that a second Trump administration would make more widespread claims to emergency powers, particularly on matters relating to energy and immigration. On our own and with colleague organizations, we anticipate litigating to block the invocation of emergency powers to justify otherwise illegal actions.
• Impoundment: Trump and his minions have already signaled they simply will refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress for purposes they don’t like (such as renewable energy), even though this is a violation of something called the Impoundment Act. We blocked Trump from doing this in the first term and expect many more such lawsuits in the second.
• Arbitrary and Capricious: Project 2025 announces a long list of regulatory protections that Trump II would try to undo. Under administrative law rules, however, the administration cannot act in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner – it must be able to justify its actions. We used this to block Trump in his first term and we’ll do it again in the second.

Against this backdrop, we’ll be closely monitoring existing and proposed rules we expect Trump’ staple of corporate-friendly regulators to try to roll back – from heat protections for workers to standards for banks to account for climate risk, from Medicare drug price negotiation to safeguards against consumer fraud, and much more – and ready to rush to court to stop them.

Believe me when I tell you, we know exactly how dangerous Trump would be in a second term and we’re appropriately frightened for our nation and the world.

But we’re even more determined to mitigate the damage and confront and defeat his authoritarianism head on.

Planning for the possibility of a Harris win

The good news is, as I write this, the oddsmakers say Kamala Harris is more likely to win than Trump. Just slightly, but more likely.

A Harris win saves us from the Trump authoritarian threat, a speeded-up rush to climate catastrophe and preserves gains from the Biden administration. Without anything more, these are monumentally important.

But they are not nearly enough.

From our point of view, a Harris administration opens up possibilities – for transformative democracy reform, to curb corporate power, to advance health and justice, to address the climate crisis.

But those are just possibilities. They are definitely not certainties. The corporate class will rush to influence the Harris administration and prevent the bold action we need.

Yet we have the possibility to be difference makers, if we prepare and mobilize. Which is exactly what we’re doing.

An overarching priority will be to win transformative democracy reform. In 2021, we fell just two votes short of reforming the filibuster in order to pass the Freedom to Vote and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Acts (both of which had majority support).

Both Candidate Harris and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer have said that passing these bills will be a top priority in the next Congress, assuming a Democratic majority in the Senate.

That doesn’t make it a sure thing!

Our Declaration for American Democracy is planning right now to make sure we’re prepared to deliver the national and state-focused mobilization we need. That means preparing each of the 200 members of the coalition, bringing in new members, and focusing on in-state allies to be ready to push their members and senators, especially senators who need support to agree to filibuster reform.

If and when the time comes, we’ll be ready to organize hundreds of rallies and events around the country, place letters to the editor and opinion pieces from local leaders, generate hundreds of thousands of emails and calls to Members of Congress, bring grassroots activists to Washington, DC to lobby their representatives and senators, and deploy our top-notch lobby team to advocate directly with elected officials.

 

In short, it’s going to be a full-scale campaign and mobilization. And we have every intention of winning.

Our other primary legislative opportunity with a Harris administration will come from the “budget reconciliation” process – this is how the Inflation Reduction Act and the American Rescue Plan passed.

Budget reconciliation is important because it allows the Senate to pass legislation without regard to the filibuster. Under the process, however, legislative items must relate exclusively to matters that will raise or spend money.

We’re developing plans now for the specific items we will prioritize for reconciliation and building coalitions and lobby strategies to advance them.

These include:

• Raising taxes on corporations and the super rich, including with a financial speculation tax. The Harris campaign has committed to advancing a progressive tax agenda, and tax reform is definitely on the agenda for 2025 – but how far it goes will depend on how much the public demands.
• Lowering prices of prescription drugs: The Inflation Reduction Act empowered Medicare to negotiate the price of some drugs for the first time ever – saving $100 billion over 10 years. This was a direct result of work Public Citizen has done over the prior decade. Candidate Harris has endorsed proposals to expand drug price negotiation and deliver cost savings to Americans, but Big Pharma will pull out all the stops to block such measures.
• Improving and expanding Medicare: The savings from drug price negotiations can be used to pay for improvements to Medicare, such as reducing out-of-pocket costs and covering hearing, vision and dental care. Who might oppose such common sense measures? For-profit insurers, who don’t want to see traditional Medicare strengthened.
• Addressing the climate crisis: The Inflation Reduction Act contained the most aggressive measures ever to advance renewable energy – but we must do more, much more, to avert climate catastrophe. This includes more investments in renewables – and ending government subsidies for fossil fuels.

Again, for each of these bullet points, we are developing a detailed policy agenda, engaging with coalition allies, and preparing a campaign strategy.

That’s not all we’re looking at. We’re also building plans for how a Harris administration should use its executive power. For more on that, read below.

Split Government Scenarios

Of course, it’s entirely possible that the election results in a split government situation, with one party holding the presidency and the opposition party controlling at least one house of Congress.

If Donald Trump wins, of course we’ll rally Congressional allies to oversee his administration’s actions and to resist his legislative agenda. The core of our plans will basically be the same irrespective of who controls Congress, however.

If Kamala Harris prevails and the Republicans control at least one chamber of Congress, our legislative prospects will dim substantially from the hopeful story above.

Instead, our biggest opportunities will involve measures that the Harris administration can pursue using its executive power.

So, we’re strategizing around key appointments the administration can make and key officials at regulatory agencies they can keep in power.

We’re evaluating executive orders the administration can issue, identifying the legal authority for action and the key concepts, on matters ranging from disclosure of corporate political spending to preventing officials’ conflicts of interest.

We are preparing a series of regulatory proposals, advocating action that government agencies can take based on existing law. Our proposals involve everything from drug safety to worker health protections, from climate rules to restrictions on dangerous artificial intelligence practices.

Here’s an example of the creative strategies we are pursuing: The drug corporation Novo Nordisk charges Americans up to 15 times more for the diabetes and obesity drugs Ozempic and Wegovy than their peers in Canada, Japan, or Europe. Medicare is paying $6,000 per enrollee and spending more than $4.6 billion annually on the drugs and the amount is skyrocketing. Private payers are spending even larger amounts and many people who might benefit from the drugs can’t get them because they are priced so high.

We have petitioned the government to take action, but the issue is almost certain to be resolved by the next administration. Our petition explains the government’s existing authority to authorize generic competition for these drugs, which would bring prices down to a tiny fraction of the current cost.

We’re confident that we’re right on the law and policy – but we have to generate the political will for action.

Moving Forward

That’s an awful lot, right?

The times demand that we do this work – all of it.

Public Citizen staff have the policy expertise, legal acumen, communications skills, organizing chops and strategic vision to meet this moment, whatever it brings.

And, of course, we have the passion and commitment.

However the election turns out, we’re going to be hard at work, side by side with you, working to make our country what it should be.