Porter on Harris
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One assumes Katie Porter will get a good appointment in a Harris administration. She lost the primary for the California Senate seat and she has worked for Harris in the past. In fact, she has shared her thoughts on her former boss as Democratic nominee (and really, thank God, literally everything is better now that she has replaced Biden and I really can’t believe we once debated this obvious point).
I asked Porter about the flurry of billionaires and donors now calling on Harris to dump Lina Khan as chair of the FTC if she gets elected. “Corporate America wanting to write regulations that benefit them is a story as old as time,” she said. “Something I admire about Kamala and have tried to mimic, she’ll take a meeting with any CEO. She wants to sit down, wants to hear, wants to understand their perspective. But what I saw is someone who is not for sale.”
Porter said that she would consider working for Harris again, calling her “an amazing boss. She equipped me with everything I needed to help people. What more can you ask for?”
Of the issues where Porter thought she could be most helpful, she cited affordable housing. The way housing problems were “solved” before the financial crisis was with gimmicky no-money-down loans and other tricks that blew up spectacularly. Eliminating those was critical for consumer protection, but the affordability crisis was never really dealt with.
During her unsuccessful run for U.S. Senate, Porter released a ten-point housing plan, which focused on increasing supply through federal construction and renovation subsidies, incentives to communities to change housing rules, making government land available, fully funding rental vouchers, investing in assistance for new homebuyers, making it easier to build manufactured homes, encouraging land trusts, and cracking down on Wall Street investors. By the end of the race, the whole field was scrambling to put together their own housing platforms.
“The president talked about rent control,” Porter said, citing a policy Joe Biden proposed earlier this month to limit rental inflation on units owned by large landlords. “I don’t think that’s the way to go, but the [recognition of the] problem is right. He was seeing the problem fully, which is exciting.” She expressed interest in helping the Harris campaign with working through the policy on a substantive level.
After losing the Senate race, Porter announced she would return to teaching at UC Irvine. But there could be a lot of open positions in a hypothetical Harris administration in 2025, and former employees with experience working in government and managing programs with meaningful impact on a shoestring are hard to come by.
Porter at HUD seems like a good potential Cabinet spot for her.