Elizabeth Warren’s Methods to Mold the Federal Government

The Democratic Senator is a law professor who entered politics late in life, but has shown political talent, prioritizing government staffing and founding new federal bureaucracies.

Elizabeth Warren in 2019. Photo by Gage Skidmore. Source.

Elizabeth Warren has served as the senior U.S. Senator from Massachusetts since 2013, her first and only elected position. Although currently 75 years old, she is running for a third six-year term in November 2024 in an election she is very likely to win.¹ Warren is a high-ranking Democratic Party politician. She serves as Vice Chair of the Senate Democratic Caucus and ran a high-profile campaign for president in 2020, during which she was briefly considered the Democratic frontrunner and was one of the finalists to be eventual winner Joseph Biden’s running mate, a position that instead went to current Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.² Most U.S. congresspeople, in both the House of Representatives and Senate, are dead players with little individual influence or even idiosyncratic worldviews or policies, having risen to their positions from successes in electoral politics at lower levels.³ Warren is an exception to this rule. She espouses a particular strain of anti-corporate economic progressivism arising out of her decades as a professor of law at America’s most elite universities, and has had an unusually successful focus on changing both policy and personnel at the bureaucracies of the U.S. federal government to further her vision.