Drum Major Institute - Policy Focus Areas

Policy Focus Areas

According to its website, The Drum Major Institute focuses on a few main areas: immigration policy, combating Tort reform in the United States, and, more generally, policies that they feel benefit the middle class. Publications include:

• Principles for an Immigration Policy to Strengthen and Expand the Middle Class
• Saving Our Middle Class: A Survey of New York's Leaders
• Scorecards for the United States Congress and the New York Legislature which grade elected officials on their votes relating to issues that DMI perceives as being important to achieving a middle class standard of living.
  • As an example of rating, in 2009, their company, themiddleclass.org, gave Representative Barney Frank a rating of 96%.

DMI's Civil Justice Fellowship, originally called the Milberg Weiss Fellowship because it was funded by the indicted plaintiffs' law firm Milberg Weiss, was created to oppose tort reform. Though no longer funded by Weiss, the fellowship still exists, and the Civil Justice Fellow is primarily responsible for maintaining the Drum Major Institute's TortDeform website and contributing to the push for the end of tort reform.

Since 2002, the Drum Major Institute has hosted a series of discussions called the Marketplace of Ideas, promoting legislatures who have succeeded in enacting various policies that the Institute supports including:

• San Francisco's mandatory paid sick leave law.
• Chicago's Green Roofs initiative.
• Maine's prescription drug program
• San Francisco, California's criminal recidivism reduction program
• Minnesota's public subsidy accountability initiative
• Oklahoma's universal preschool.

The DMIBlog public policy blog is written by DMI staff, Fellows and invited guests.