Agency review teams for the Biden-Harris presidential transition have added Silicon Valley insiders in droves, an analysis shows.
The teams are charged with planning for the incoming presidency, holding sway over thousands of political and staff appointments, including positions atop the Federal Trade Commission, Federal Communications Commission, and leading the Justice Department’s antitrust division.
Facebook is fending off regulatory action by the FTC, with Google fighting off the Department of Justice.
“Big Tech understands the executive branch. They know that beyond antitrust and communications policy, from trade law to defense contracting and beyond, Big Tech has an enormous amount at stake with how Biden chooses to staff his administration and what initial policies it implements,” the Revolving Door Project’s Jeff Hauser told the Washington Examiner.
Dropbox Head of Public Policy Ted Dean has joined the Commerce Department team, where he spent three years as deputy assistant secretary and acting assistant secretary working on digital trade, privacy, and data issues, according to a biography. Dean is the former chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, where he ran a tech, media, and telecom consulting firm for 16 years advising U.S. companies.
Will Fields, a senior associate at Sidewalk Labs, a technology and “urban innovation” firm owned by Google parent company Alphabet, and Nicole Isaac, a senior public policy director at LinkedIn, are on the Treasury Department teams.
Amazon’s director of international tax planning, Tom Sullivan, has joined the State Department team, while Mark Schwartz, enterprise strategist for Amazon Web Services, is on the Office of Management and Budget team.
Last month, the transition quietly added four new Facebook and Google employees to its agency review teams, Politico reported.
Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, a Republican, in a tweet last week called the Federal Trade Commission’s suit, which seeks to unwind Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and Whatsapp, “a necessity.”
In October, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, also a Republican, said he had one message for Silicon Valley’s “big tech oligarchs,” announcing on Twitter that “winter is coming.”
Though Biden’s ethics rules ban anyone who’s worked as a registered lobbyist in the last year from joining the transition, exemptions were granted months ago, a transition official told Politico.
Others, such as Nicole Wong, who joined Biden’s National Security Council and Office of Science and Technology Policy review teams in November, or Schmidt Futures’s Martha Gimbel, have ties to Big Tech.
Wong, who served as deputy U.S. chief technology officer in the Obama administration, is no longer an executive at Google, where she held positions as vice president and deputy general counsel, or at Twitter, where she was legal director. Wong’s LinkedIn biography states, however, that she “specializes in assisting high-growth technology companies to develop international privacy and regulatory strategies.”
Council of Economic Advisers team lead Martha Gimbel is a senior manager at Schmidt Futures, ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s philanthropic venture.
Schmidt, a big Biden fundraiser, is rumored to be under consideration for a White House tech industry post, according to a Financial Times report.
And leading the transition effort are longtime Biden aides who boast their own close ties to tech giants.
Transition co-chairman Jeff Zients is a former Facebook board member, while the operation’s ethics czar is Jessica Hertz, associate general counsel for Facebook’s regulatory team and a director at the company. Apple’s chief Washington representative, Cynthia Hogan, and Twitter’s public policy head, Carlos Monje, both left to join the transition team.
A top Obama aide who twice led his Office of Management and Budget and directed the National Economic Council, Zients came under fire this month after Politico cited a raft of timely edits to his Wikipedia page.
Hertz was Biden’s principal deputy counsel under the Obama administration, where she handled “a wide range of government inquiries and regulatory investigations,” according to her Columbia Law School biography.
Citing lobbying disclosures, the Intercept said Hogan “was one of a team of Apple lobbyists who lobbied the House, Senate, and Treasury Department on ‘corporate tax reform,’ ‘international tax reform and issues related to foreign regulatory actions,’ as well as ‘issues related to state sales tax, mobile workforce, and taxation of digital goods.'” She has also defended Apple’s business operations in China on the Hill, including in a 2019 letter to Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, a Republican, and Patrick Leahy of Vermont, a Democrat.
As a vice presidential vetting committee member, Hogan helped select Vice President-elect Kamala Harris to be Biden’s running mate.
Hauser, of the Revolving Door Project, said Big Tech suffered “headline-grabbing insults” under President Trump, though it still enjoyed support from the Treasury Department over tax domicile issues. It remains an open question “whether Biden will truly rein in Big Tech Goliaths,” Hauser said, adding that each addition to the transition with industry ties “increases our state of alarm.”
