Khan vs. Cutter: A Tale of Two Careers. It was the age of corruption, and maybe, it was also the age of integrity.

https://prospect.org/2026/04/14/khan-vs-cutter-tale-of-two-careers/


Lina Khan (left) and Stephanie Cutter. Credit: Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via AP Images, Charles Rex Arbogast/AP Photo

In early April, Stephanie Cutter, a former senior adviser to the 2024 Harris campaign and former Obama deputy campaign manager, was announced as a policy adviser for the prediction market firm Kalshi, where she will presumably work alongside Kalshi’s strategic adviser, Donald Trump Jr. In addition to her new gig, Kalshi has hired Precision Strategies, the communications firm Cutter co-founded, where she currently works as managing partner. Precision Strategies will help bolster the quasi-gambling firm’s presence in Washington as lawmakers become increasingly skeptical of the prediction markets industry. So far, so revolving door.

Cutter’s announcement, however, was not the only high-profile career move from a prominent Democratic insider last week. The very same day, Lina Khan, the former progressive chair of the Federal Trade Commission, unveiled her role heading the new Center for Law and the Economy at Columbia University, a brand-new institution “dedicated to advancing the study, practice, and implementation of laws and policies that structure the U.S. economy.” The center will also feature Lev Menand, who worked in the Department of the Treasury under the Obama administration, and Tim Wu, a former special assistant to president Joe Biden on the National Economic Council, and a leading figure in efforts to rekindle antitrust enforcement.

Khan’s center aims not only to produce scholarly work, but also to help train law students from schools around the country on the importance of economic policymaking. It offers an alternative vision of what post-government employment can offer for public servants actually dedicated to serving the public interest.

The two stories make for an interesting contrast. Cutter’s new position spinning Kalshi as “one of the rare tech platforms that take a regulatory first approach”—a dubious statement to say the least, as the company is reliant upon the Trump administration crushing state regulation of the firm while it faces criminal charges from the state of Arizona—is not her first trip through the revolving door. After leaving the Obama administration in 2011, Cutter worked for the president’s re-election campaign before going on to co-found Precision Strategies along with future Biden campaign manager and Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon. Though O’Malley Dillon would leave the firm in 2019 to work for the Beto O’Rourke presidential campaign and later the 2020 Biden campaign, she evidently maintained a relationship with Cutter, who was brought on to advise the Harris campaign that Dillon chaired in 2024.

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