Grant investigator: Alexander Berger
This page was reviewed but not written by the grant investigator. CPD staff also reviewed this page prior to publication.
The Open Philanthropy Project recommended a renewal grant of $1,100,000 to the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) to support the “Fed Up” campaign. The campaign aims to encourage more accommodative monetary policies and greater transparency and public engagement in the governance of the Federal Reserve, and specifically in the selection of regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents and leaders. We have written in more detail about our rationale for supporting this campaign on our 2014, 2015, and 2016 grant pages. CPD expects to use this funding toward campaign expenses such as salaries, travel, sub-grants, and overhead.
We decided to renew our support based primarily on CPD’s continued success drawing attention for its agenda from the press, Congress, and the Fed; ongoing opportunities to potentially influence the appointment or priorities of new Federal Reserve governors and regional Fed presidents; and our intention to provide the campaign with enough sustainable funding to last through the next recession, when CPD’s advocacy might be especially useful and when we could better evaluate its performance.
Since our last grant, one new area of uncertainty introduced for the campaign is the degree to which the Trump administration and a unified Republican Congress might support policies that reduce the need for expansionary monetary policy. Additionally, as unemployment rates have declined, we have become less confident in the appropriate short-term stance of monetary policy, and could imagine disagreeing with the Fed Up campaign about the appropriate direction for interest rates to move. However, our primary reason for continuing to support the campaign is that we believe it may be able to potentially prevent extraordinary harm during the next recession, when we think it will be more likely to have a meaningful short-term influence (as compared to the current gradual tightening cycle).
The Open Philanthropy Project has separately recommended a grant to CPD Action, a 501(c)(4) organization affiliated with CPD.