Omidyar was spending millions of dollars, largely funneled through dark money groups, to put Joe Biden in the White House. After his election victory, one of Omidyarâs groups, called
Reset, explained how it would use the Biden presidency to implant its people to pursue its goals, specifically targeting agencies it believed had sway.
âMost promisingly, the Biden administration may open the door for specific actions on antitrust and competition policy in the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission,â it said, adding that it would âsupport a constellation of organizations working on research, communications, and advocacy to ensure they are more than the sum of their parts.â
Three years later, the France-born Omidyar has succeeded to an extent seldom seen, with a vast swath of top FTC posts going to people who worked for his âconstellationâ of groups â and sometimes continued to do so even as they joined the federal government.
Lina Khan, the FTCâs chair, was previously the legal director of the Open Markets Institute, funded by the Omidyar Network. Sarah Miller, the government agencyâs chief of staff, left her role as executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project, funded by the Omidyar Network, to take the job.
FTCâs chief technology officer, Stephanie Nguyen, served as a Civic Science Fellow for Consumer Reports, also funded by the Omidyar Network. FTC technology advisor Erik Martin previously worked with the Democracy Fund, which is solely funded by Omidyar. FTCâs spokesman, Douglas Farrar, worked for Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, funded by Omidyar. In May 2022, Alvaro Bodeya, a former board member of the Omidyar-backed group Free Press, was appointed as the FTCâs fifth commissioner, giving it a Democrat majority.
The list goes on, with figures such as FTC associate director Shauol Sussman, attorney advisor Alex Petros, and attorney Kurt Walters all coming from the activist groups seeded by Omidyar.
Perhaps most alarming, by January 2024,
all four officials listed on the website of AI Now Institute, an activist group funded by Omidyar to regulate how big tech firms use artificial intelligence, had been
hired as FTC advisers, while apparently continuing to work at the nonprofit.
The advisers contributed to key FTC outputs including a
report to Congress on âonline harmsâ including âdisinformation.â
The report relied on partisan groups lamenting âfar-right violence,â and adopted critical race theory in questioning the legitimacy of hate crime enforcement because it turns out that minorities, such as blacks and Muslims,
âdisproportionatelyâ commit them. It lamented that âFacebook played a critical role in spreading false narratives about the election immediately before the January 6, 2021, siege of the United States Capitol.â
âThe only effective ways to deal with online harm are laws that change the business models or incentives allowing harmful content to proliferate,â it concluded.