More than 80 former administration officials have registered as lobbyists, according to a POLITICO analysis.
On a February morning in 2018, representatives of several California water agencies arrived at a meeting at the Interior Department’s austere Washington headquarters to discuss a long-sought goal: weakening the Endangered Species Act so more water could be diverted for farming.
Less than three months later, one of the Interior officials at the meeting, Jason Larrabee, stepped down from his government post. Word reached one of the water agencies he’d met with that he was “considering various offers from lobbying shops in D.C.,” as one lawyer put it.
“At the moment, he’s not working for any water district or irrigation district in California, so a great opportunity exists to hire him prior to others seeking his services,” the lawyer told the water agency at the time.
The water agency quickly hired Larrabee. And he has spent the past two years lobbying officials who once worked down the hall from him to side with farmers over environmentalists in California’s water wars.
Larrabee is one of at least 82 former Trump administration officials who have registered as lobbyists, according to an analysis of lobbying disclosure filings. Many more former administration officials have gone to work at lobbying firms or in government affairs roles in corporate America but have not registered as lobbyists.
The mass migration to K Street highlights how little effect President Donald Trump’s campaign pledge to “drain the swamp” has had on Washington’s revolving door 3½ years into his presidency.
As Trump prepared to sign his administration’s ethics pledge in 2017, he joked that “most of the people standing behind me will not be able to go to work” on K Street. Yet one of the people standing behind him — then-White House chief of staff Reince Priebus — is now the chairman of a lobbying firm that’s hired several other former White House aides, two of whom have registered as lobbyists.
Rick Dearborn, who served as a White House deputy chief of staff, is now a lobbyist for clients such as MetLife and Verizon. Chiefs of staff from Vice President Mike Pence’s office, the State Department, the Treasury Department, the Health and Human Services Department, the Transportation Department, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, and the Environmental Protection Agency have all been absorbed by the influence industry, though not all of them have registered as lobbyists. Onetime Trump administration officials have lobbied for companies including McDonald’s, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, Amazon, FedEx, SpaceX, Boeing, T-Mobile, Oracle, JPMorgan Chase, General Electric, Apple, Verizon, Pfizer, American Express, United Airlines, Lockheed Martin, Comcast, Uber, American Airlines, Wells Fargo and Purdue Pharma, a pharmaceutical company that helped fuel the opioid crisis.
Some former administration officials decamped for K Street so quickly that they’ve already returned to the government. Chris Shank, who became a senior adviser to the Air Force secretary after Trump took office, managed an even more impressive feat: He left the administration to become a lobbyist in 2018, returned to the Pentagon a few months later — then went back to the private sector last year.
………
- Discussion
-
More than 80 former Trump administration officials have cashed out on K Street, according to a POLITICO analysis https://t.co/IIewMZFKZA
— POLITICO (@politico) July 8, 2020
You must be logged in to reply to this topic.