Saikat Chakrabarti is a far-left political activist currently serving as chief of staff in the office of U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Before Ocasio-Cortez’s election in 2018, Chakrabarti led Brand New Congress (a predecessor organization to Justice Democrats), worked on the 2016 presidential campaign of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and helped build the payment technology platform Stripe.

Early Career

After graduating from Harvard University in 2007, Chakrabarti moved to California where he co-founded a tech startup, Mockingbird, and later became a founding engineer for the payment processing company Stripe.^[1]

Political Activism

After several years of working in the tech industry in California, Chakrabarti transitioned into left-wing political activism.  By 2015, Chakrabarti was a director of organizing technology for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign.^[2] After the end of Sanders’s campaign, Chakrabarti and former Bernie Sanders campaign staff founded Brand New Congress, a political action committee (PAC) created to support left-wing congressional candidates in 2018 midterm elections.^[3]

Brand New Congress

Brand New Congress is a centralized platform for progressive candidates to coordinate campaign staff, mailing, fundraising, and strategy. Brand New Congress recruited and trained approximately 400 candidates for the 2018 elections.^[4] Brand New Congress ultimately endorsed 30 candidates for primaries and general elections; eight of 27 won primaries and one of eleven won general elections.^[5]

The one Brand New Congress candidate who won a general election in 2018 was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She won an upset of longtime incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY) in a functionally determinative Democratic primary election.^[6] Brand New Congress spent over $600,000 during the 2018 election cycle.^[7]

Justice Democrats

By mid-2017, Chakrabarti and fellow Brand New Congress co-founders Alexandra Rojas and Zack Exley left Brand New Congress to help found Justice Democrats, a new left-wing PAC, where Chakrabarti would serve as Executive Director.^[8] Justice Democrats was also founded with The Young Turks’s Cenk Uygur and Kyle Kulinski, with the aim of recruiting progressive working-class political candidates to challenge incumbent Democrats.^[9]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was the only candidate of the 12 candidates sponsored by Justice Democrats to win an election. Justice Democrats worked with Brand New Congress^[10] and spent over $2.5 million during the 2018 election cycle.^[11]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Chakrabarti supported the candidacy of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez through Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats; he became her campaign chair following her primary election victory.^[12] After Ocasio-Cortez won the general election, she appointed Chakrabarti chief of staff in her congressional office.^[13]

With Chakrabarti serving as Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, Ocasio-Cortez released the highly controversial far-left policy initiative known as the Green New Deal.^[14] Ocasio-Cortez’s office, led by Chakrabarti, released an “FAQ” which it withdrew after criticism for its extremist positions, including appearing to demand the elimination of animal agriculture, replacing commercial aviation with “high-speed rail,” and providing “economic security for all who are . . . unwilling to work.” ^[15] Chakrabarti was forced to admit the office’s authorship of the FAQ after Green New Deal supporters retweeted by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez asserted quotes from the document about “unwilling to work” were fabricated.^[16]

Politico’s “Playbook Power List” 2019, which “highlights politicians, activists and operatives across the country who are positioned to play a critical role in the political landscape leading up to 2020,” included Chakrabarti.^[17]