About: David Halperin
Twitter: @DaHalperin
Bio: David Halperin is the co-founder and editor of Republic Report. Halperin, a self-employed lawyer based in Washington DC, engages in public advocacy, investigative work, and legal representation on a wide range of issues, including higher education, climate change, democracy, corruption, open government, and national security. He also advises organizations and companies on strategy, policy, communications, and legal matters. He is of counsel to Public.Resource.org, a non-profit focused on making legal and government materials available for free to the public.
Halperin’s investigative and advocacy work on predatory for-profit colleges since 2010 has spurred reforms in policy and regulations, triggered law enforcement investigations, and led to the closure of numerous deceptive schools.
Halperin was from 2004 until 2012 the founding director of Campus Progress and senior vice president at the Center for American Progress. Before that, he was: senior policy advisor for Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign; founding executive director of the American Constitution Society; White House speechwriter and special assistant for national security affairs to President Clinton; co-founder of the Internet company Progressive Networks (now called RealNetworks); counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee; law clerk to U.S. District Judge Gerhard A. Gesell (D.D.C.); research assistant to Robert S. McNamara; and research analyst at the Arms Control Association.
Halperin has represented clients in the U.S. Supreme Court and various state and federal courts. Among many other efforts, Halperin helped represent Greenpeace in an unprecedented 2004 Miami criminal jury trial over protest activity, resulting in a directed verdict of acquittal; aided climate groups facing investigation by the House Science Committee during 2015-16; and represented Public Resource in landmark copyright litigation from 2012 to 2024 over efforts to make federal regulations publicly available online without charge.
Halperin writes at Republic Report, and his articles also have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Nation, Politico, Slate, Foreign Policy, and other outlets. In recent years he has testified before the House Oversight Committee and at several federal agencies, and he has spoken at major conferences and events across the country. Halperin has served since 2007 on the board of directors of Public Citizen.
Halperin graduated from Yale College and Yale Law School.
State Colleges Seduced By For-Profit, Online Education
As Betsy DeVos’s Department of Education works this morning to outsource more and more taxpayer-funded student aid to predatory for-profit online education companies, Wall Street investors see a new gold rush. Seeking to avoid the stigma and regulatory requirements of openly running a for-profit college, they are finding willing partners in another taxpayer-funded sector: state
Continue Reading >>>
Senators’ Bill Would Put Serious Curbs On Predatory Colleges
Senators Maggie Hassan (D-NH) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) today introduced the Preventing Risky Operations from Threatening the Education and Career Trajectories of Students (PROTECT Students) Act of 2019, a bill that would enshrine in law many key reforms sought by advocates for veterans and other students in order to prevent predatory practices by for-profit colleges.
Continue Reading >>>
Trump Interior Nominee David Bernhardt Is the Swamp
In October 2016, candidate Donald Trump unveiled a package of government ethics reforms that he said would “drain the swamp” in Washington, DC; it included a ban on former federal employees lobbying the government for five years and stricter rules on what constitutes lobbying. He seemed to be promising to undermine the power of special
Continue Reading >>>
Cohen: I Fear Trump Won’t Leave If He Loses Election
Michael Cohen chose to conclude his dramatic Capitol Hill testimony today with a pointed warning about President Trump. “I fear,” Cohen said, “that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power.” In other words, Cohen raised the concern that Trump would refuse to leave the White
Continue Reading >>>
DeVos Fiddles, Schools Burn
While Trump education secretary Betsy DeVos and her lieutenants have worked to free the worst-behaving predatory colleges from all meaningful accountability rules, they also have spectacularly mismanaged the affairs of schools that have faltered. Exhibit A, in court right now, are the three chains of schools — the Art Institutes, Argosy University, and South University
Continue Reading >>>
Predatory Online Colleges Brag Of Big Earnings Under Booster Betsy DeVos
While some predatory college chain operations, like Dream Center/EDMC, Education Corp. of America, and Vatterott, have been collapsing under the weight of abuses and mismanagement, other for-profits are now bragging to Wall Street investors that boom times are back. Two of the most prominent examples — Grand Canyon University and Career Education Corp. — have
Continue Reading >>>
DeVos Plan Would Aid Predatory Colleges & Hurt Taxpayers, Students, Higher Education
The Trump-DeVos Department of Education is holding another round of meetings this week on a proposed set of regulations governing higher education. The proposals span a ridiculously wide range of issues, but the overriding theme is clear: Just about anyone or anything that wants to call itself a school, or a “provider” to a school, can run just about
Continue Reading >>>
Who’s Who In DeVos-Dream Center College Collapse?
With the Art Institutes, Argosy University, and South University chains of career colleges, and their operator Dream Center Education Holdings, in free fall, with students and staff in turmoil as campuses disintegrate or shut down, and with leading members of Congress demanding an investigation of the Betsy DeVos Department of Education’s role in the debacle,
Continue Reading >>>