Khan vs. Cutter: A Tale of Two Careers
The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.
In early April, Stephanie Cutter, a former senior adviser to the 2024 Harris campaign and former Obama deputy campaign manager, was announced as a policy adviser for the prediction market firm Kalshi, where she will presumably work alongside Kalshi’s strategic adviser, Donald Trump Jr. In addition to her new gig, Kalshi has hired Precision Strategies, the communications firm Cutter co-founded, where she currently works as managing partner. Precision Strategies will help bolster the quasi-gambling firm’s presence in Washington as lawmakers become increasingly skeptical of the prediction markets industry. So far, so revolving door.
Cutter’s announcement, however, was not the only high-profile career move from a prominent Democratic insider last week. The very same day, Lina Khan, the former progressive chair of the Federal Trade Commission, unveiled her role heading the new Center for Law and the Economy at Columbia University, a brand-new institution “dedicated to advancing the study, practice, and implementation of laws and policies that structure the U.S. economy.” The center will also feature Lev Menand, who worked in the Department of the Treasury under the Obama administration, and Tim Wu, a former special assistant to president Joe Biden on the National Economic Council, and a leading figure in efforts to rekindle antitrust enforcement.
Khan’s center aims not only to produce scholarly work, but also to help train law students from schools around the country on the importance of economic policymaking. It offers an alternative vision of what post-government employment can offer for public servants actually dedicated to serving the public interest.
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The two stories make for an interesting contrast. Cutter’s new position spinning Kalshi as “one of the rare tech platforms that take a regulatory first approach”—a dubious statement to say the least, as the company is reliant upon the Trump administration crushing state regulation of the firm while it faces criminal charges from the state of Arizona—is not her first trip through the revolving door. After leaving the Obama administration in 2011, Cutter worked for the president’s re-election campaign before going on to co-found Precision Strategies along with future Biden campaign manager and Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon. Though O’Malley Dillon would leave the firm in 2019 to work for the Beto O’Rourke presidential campaign and later the 2020 Biden campaign, she evidently maintained a relationship with Cutter, who was brought on to advise the Harris campaign that Dillon chaired in 2024.
The clients that Cutter’s Precision Strategies has worked for throughout the years have included both liberal causes like March for Our Lives and major corporations like General Electric and Lyft. In between this work, Cutter has taken time to refresh her connections with Democratic leaders, working to organize the 2020 Democratic National Convention and helping produce Joe Biden’s inauguration, an effort for which she used her campaign managing experience to manage her own campaign for an Emmy.
Perhaps most relevant to the firm’s work on behalf of Kalshi, Precision Strategies ran the cryptocurrency trading platform company Coinbase’s efforts to pressure lawmakers into backing crypto-friendly legislation and convince politicians that cryptocurrency policy would be a major issue for swing voters in the 2024 election. While cryptocurrency as an issue was nearly completely irrelevant even to the supposedly cryptocurrency-obsessed demographic of men aged 18–29, the effort—entitled Stand With Crypto—and Cutter’s Precision Strategies were nonetheless able to convince important campaign surrogates, pundits, and members of Congress that any attempts to rein in the rogue industry would be politically suicidal, an image burnished by the industry’s all-out war on Democrats in key swing seats.
Crypto’s campaign to secure power was anchored by a cover story that the industry had worked at every turn to appease onerous regulations while lobbying for new legislation, ostensibly to protect consumers. While completely dishonest (the crypto industry refused to comply with regulators, and their proposed legislation would only weaken existing regulations), the effort has largely succeeded in securing power, capturing both the Republican Party and centrist members of the Democratic coalition—though the crypto market is not doing so hot, perhaps because AI is absorbing all the hype, or because the product is fundamentally bad.
Cutter’s early tweets about her new partnership with Kalshi seem to indicate that her firm intends to run a similar strategy for the prediction market firm, which is, in reality, a sports betting website disguised as a finance firm. In a thread on the topic of her hiring, Cutter not only claimed that Kalshi was invested in seeking regulatory approval before going to market, but also said that the company is invested in strengthening rules including bans on insider trading. It’s little surprise that Cutter chose this tack rather than the dystopian vision of Kalshi’s CEO Tarek Mansour, who said the company’s “long-term vision is to financialize everything.”
In reality, Cutter’s careful verbiage is an attempt to evade the growing backlash against gambling, particularly on sports. Kalshi not only derives over 90 percent of its trading volume from sports bets, but does so by undermining state laws. By asserting the firm is a federally regulated swaps market, Kalshi has claimed to be exempt from state laws governing sports betting, which has expanded the age bracket of severe gambling addicts down to 18–20 in states that previously required punters to be at least 21. When this regulatory end run was challenged by states, the Trump administration, which is beholden to the prediction markets industry, leapt to the defense of the firms and sued these states for enforcing their own laws. Kalshi’s status as a supposed financial firm has allowed it and other prediction markets to even exempt their clients’ winnings from state taxes on gambling winnings. And perhaps most gruesome of all, prediction markets have fostered means by which government insiders can profit off their knowledge of classified events.
Cutter is not the first prominent Democratic insider to have moved from selling cryptocurrency to peddling prediction markets. Sean Patrick Maloney, the former DCCC chair, recently launched a prediction markets trade group that is backed by Kalshi. David Plouffe, Cutter’s former colleague on the Obama and Harris campaigns and at Precision Strategies, might also be interested in joining the effort. He has previously advised both Coinbase and Binance. Perhaps the most shameless sellout of the Obama presidency, former principal deputy solicitor general Neal Katyal, is also working on behalf of Kalshi.
On the other hand, the post-government employment of Khan (and of her colleagues Tim Wu and Lev Menand) proves that the choice so many veterans of influential policymaking roles have made, to cash out by selling their influence to the highest bidder, was not a necessary one. Khan has not only devoted herself to furthering the issues she championed in government, by starting an institution which will help train the next generation of economic policymakers, but she has lent her expertise to the administration of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. This, unlike Cutter’s periodic advisory positions, is not an attempt by Khan to maintain relevance in the party so she can sell her influence, but an honest commitment to seeing through the success of the political project to which she has devoted her career.
It’s almost fitting—not to mention emblematic of the conflict over corruption in the Democratic Party coalition—that Cutter’s firm Precision Strategies also worked on behalf of numerous companies that Khan’s FTC targeted for violations of antitrust laws, including IBM, Microsoft, and CVS Health.
While not every executive branch veteran has the intellectual chops or credibility to launch a center at an Ivy League law school, it is possible for them to avoid doing political work on behalf of the firms corroding trust in government. While Khan, Wu, and Menand won’t become multimillionaires with their work, they won’t exactly be going hungry either. Future administrations should take care to ask who they want staffing their administrations: those who will serve in government with one eye on potential post-office consulting gigs, or those for which policy commitments come first.
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