President Obama promised to stop the revolving door. Lobbyists “won’t work in my White House,” he said. On his first day, Obama issued an executive order that he would later say “excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs.”
The Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin studies to what extent Obama has kept that promise. The piece is pretty good, weighing the costs of such a policy and the holes in it. But there’s one part here that strikes me as terribly misleading.
Eilperin writes that the Obama administration “has not experienced the type of conflict-of-interest scandals the past two White Houses experienced.”
My response: If the “scandals” haven’t been as big as in past administrations, it may be because the conflicts of interest are largely ignored by the media.
Since we’re discussing “conflict-of-interest scandals” and lobbyist restrictions in the Obama Administration, it’s worth recalling some episodes that didn’t make it into Eilperin’s article:
• Former Google top lobbyist Andrew McLaughlin went to work in the White House’s technology policy office. While there, he communicated with Google lobbyists about net neutrality, an area where the White House was advancing policies favored by Google. This violated White House rules.
• Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson instructed registered corporate lobbyists, whose company stood to profit from the EPA’s policies, to use her private email account.
• In 2013, Obama hired revolving-door lobbyist Chris Jennings, who represented drugmakers and insurers, to help implement Obamacare. While he deregistered more than two years before joining the administration, there’s reason to believe he never stopped lobbying until he joined the White House. After deregistering, Jennings kept his firm operating, kept his corporate clients, and kept on meeting health-policy aides at the White House.
• Obama’s IRS hired former H&R Block CEO Mark Ernst to draft new rules regulating tax preparers. This clearly would have violated the ethics rules Eilperin discusses, except they dubbed Ernst a career bureaucrat rather than an “appointee,” thus exempting him from the ethics rules. The regulations Ernst helped shape were beneficial to H&R Block, but also illegal.
I could add other stories, such as the revolving-door path of Obamacare-crafter Liz Fowler, Duke Energy’s $10 million contribution to the 2012 convention, or many elements of the Solyndra saga. My point is, these would be scandals if the media cared about them, because they clearly clash with Obama’s rhetoric and probably with his ethics executive orders — and sometimes with the law.
Two more comments on the Post story:
1) Eilperin understates the number of waivers. She says four. The correct number is 17.
2) She notes that “The measure prohibits those who have been registered lobbyists in the past two years from working at an agency they had lobbied, or on an issue they had worked on.” But it hasn’t done that. Consider Mark Patterson, who became chief of staff at the Treasury Department less than a year after having been a lobbyist at Goldman Sachs.
