What do interest groups want from presidential candidates? Three stories

- Crypto cash is flooding the 2024 election. Here’s who’s benefiting.

A new political network funded by the cryptocurrency industry has spent more than $134 million trying to elect dozens of allies to Congress, mounting an unprecedented political effort to influence voters and secure favorable regulation.

The spending comes from an organization called Fairshake, along with two other affiliated crypto-funded groups, known as super PACs, which by law can spend unlimited sums in politics. Since January 2023, they have blitzed television and radio airwaves with ads involving 67 candidates, many of whom support crypto interests, according to a Washington Post analysis of data from AdImpact, a monitoring firm.


- Trump has vowed to gut climate rules. Oil lobbyists have a plan ready.

An influential oil and gas industry group whose members were aggressively pursued for campaign cash by Donald Trump has drafted detailed plans for dismantling landmark Biden administration climate rules after the presidential election, according to internal documents obtained by The Washington Post.

The plans were drawn up by the American Exploration and Production Council, or AXPC, a group of 30 mostly independent oil and gas producers, including several major oil companies. They reveal a comprehensive industry effort to reverse climate initiatives advanced during the past nearly four years of Democratic leadership. At the same time, the documents contain confidential data showing that industry’s voluntary initiatives to cut emissions from burning natural gas have fallen short.

The lobbying blueprint takes particular aim at a new tax on emissions of methane, a gas that the International Energy Agency (IEA) says is responsible for nearly a third of human-caused global warming. The documents show the relative amounts of natural gas, including methane, burned by nine of 19 AXPC member companies that responded to an internal survey are increasing — in many cases sharply. After this article was published online, AXPC said 11 other member companies had eliminated such emissions.


- The big business that opposes wiping medical debt from credit reports.

The task of collecting Americans’ delinquent medical bills has become big business in recent years but now, the debt collection industry says, its work is threatened.

A federal proposal championed by Vice President Kamala Harris would ease the financial problems of people with unpaid bills by removing medical debts from the credit reports that determine eligibility for home mortgages, car loans and credit cards.