Future Now Action

Future Now Action pursues three related activities: the States Project, the Lawmaker Network, and its PAC for America’s Future. The Future Now organizations focus on efforts related to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. ²

Background and Activities

Future Now Action was founded in 2017 by former New York state Senator Daniel Squadron (D-Brooklyn), Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs, and businessman Adam Pritzker. ²

Future Now joined numerous organizations pursuing the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, a list of 17 policy priorities that include establishing gender equality, ending world hunger, and combating climate change with substantial investments in weather-dependent wind and solar energy by 2030. ³

Future Now Action pursues three related activities: the States Project, the Lawmaker Network, and the PAC for America’s Future. The States Project combines with PAC for America’s Future and the PAC for Minnesota’s Future to identify and promote Democratic state-level candidates that will support Future Now’s environmentalist agenda and help achieve Democratic majorities. ^{4 5} As of 2022, the States Project is focused on eight states: Arizona, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. ⁶

The States Project is funded by PAC for America’s Future, which was previously known as Future Now Fund. ⁷ According to OpenSecrets, the PAC spent $18.7 million between 2018 and 2022. ⁸

The Lawmaker Network supports a variety of left-of-center policy ideas, such as the $15 minimum wage, expansion of unions, and government-run health care. ⁹

People

Executive Director

Executive director Daniel Squadron resigned from his New York state Senate seat in 2017 to help found Future Now. Early in his career he worked on the New York City mayoral campaign of former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY). He was also an aide to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who endorsed Squadron’s campaign for the state Senate, as did Weiner and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. ¹⁰ As New York State senatorial candidate in 2014, Squadron utilized New York’s fusion voting scheme to run under the banners of both the Democratic Party and the left-wing Working Families Party (WFP). ¹¹

For the fiscal year ending June 30, 2020, Squadron received direct compensation of $132,532. ¹² He received an additional $142,226 from related organizations. ¹³ Future Now Fund paid salaries of all Future Now Action employees and is reimbursed. ¹⁴

Jeffrey Sachs

Co-founder Jeffrey Sachs is director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, and former economics professor and director of Columbia’s Earth Institute. Sachs’ economic theories and projects have faced criticism. Vanity Fair reporter Nina Munk, who followed Sachs’ project for six years, wrote a book about it, The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty. She states that his projects have often left people “worse off after the fact than they were before.” ¹⁵

In one example, Sachs’ African Millennium Villages Project provided fertilizer and seed to grow a bumper crop of corn. The local people didn’t like corn, a factor Sachs hadn’t considered. Their favorite crop, meanwhile, was not grown. Flooding the market with unwanted corn collapsed prices, so farmers lost money. Most was left to rot and attracted rodents and insects. Farmers protested by smashing windows in the Millennium Project office and setting a car on fire. ¹⁶

Sachs’ work in Eastern Europe and Russia earned him criticism in 1999 from left-wing Nobel Laureate and then World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz, who, without directly naming him, said Sach’s failed efforts in Russia resulted from “an excessive reliance on textbook models of economics.” ¹⁷ He mocked Sachs for blaming it on others, who “failed to follow the doctor’s orders.” ¹⁷

Adam Pritzker

Co-founder Adam Pritzker is a member of the multibillionaire Pritzker family, founders of Hyatt hotels. ¹⁸ Six members of the Pritzker family made the 2021 list of Forbes’ wealthiest 400 Americans, with a net worth of $24.5 billion between them. ¹⁹

Adam co-founded General Assembly, a company that later sold for $413 million. ²⁰ In 2016 he was listed in Inc. magazine’s 30 under 30. ²¹

His cousin, Penny, served in the Obama administration as Secretary of Commerce and chaired Obama for America during Obama’s second presidential campaign in 2012. ²² Another cousin, J.B. Pritzker, is a Democratic politician who serves as governor of Illinois. ²³

Pritzker studied under Jeffrey Sachs and later worked for Sachs at Columbia’s Earth Institute. ²⁴