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.
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
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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Betsy DeVos Caused A For-Profit College Meltdown and Now She’s Doing Nothing for the Students
Trump Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos owns the ongoing, awful meltdown of the chains of career colleges — the Art Institutes, Argosy University, and South University — formerly operated by for-profit Education Management Corporation. Yet now, as campuses across the country have devolved into chaos, faculty and staff have lost their jobs, and students are
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Dream Center Receiver Says DeVos-Blessed Studio Enterprise Is Taking Money for Nothing
The court-appointed receiver now overseeing the operations of distressed Dream Center Education Holdings (DCEH) has written to the Betsy DeVos Department of Education that Studio Enterprise, a company designated to service former and current DCEH schools, is taking service fees from the deal without providing any services, draining badly-needed cash from the operation. That
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Certainly the President, By Sarah Huckabee Sanders
SANDERS: Certainly the President wants, in moments where our country is hurting, like we’ve seen in the last several days, to find ways to bring our country together, and we’ve seen him do exactly that. SANDERS: Certainly the President is calling on everyone to come together and if you have a problem with one another, let’s
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