Mike Lofgren spent 28 years working in Congress, the last 16 of which as a senior analyst for the House and Senate Budget Committees. As a GOP senior staffer, Lofgren had an insider’s perspective on budgetary debates of national consequence, including the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), Hurricane Katrina disaster relief, and national security defense spending.
Frustrated by political infighting related to the 2011 debt crisis, Lofgren turned in his Washington badge to write about the increasingly polarized political climate on Capitol Hill. Soon after retiring, he published a powerful essay in September, 2011 entitled “Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult” on Truthout.org. Lofgren’s take on Washington’s gridlock quickly spread throughout the web, exposing what he viewed as a broken system where both parties are “rotten” and “captives to corporate loot.” A year later, Lofgren expanded his analysis of America’s political dysfunction into a book, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted.
Since retiring, Lofgren has written for publications including The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Monthly, Truthout, and Counterpunch, and has appeared on numerous radio and TV news interviews.
In January 2016, his book The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government was published. You can read an excerpt from it here at Moyers & Company.
Lofgren earned his B.A and M.A. in history from the University of Akron, and was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship for his studies in European history.
