Congressional tax writers and lobbyists have one familiar contact in the White House: Shahira Knight, a special assistant to the president for tax and retirement policy.
The rest of President Trump’s top advisers didn’t come from Washington or from the tax world. Knight, in comparison, is a Washington insider and knows how government works and the people inside it.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn have been the two-headed public face of the Trump administration’s tax reform push. The two of them outlined Trump’s reform principles in a joint press appearance and have been making the rounds together on Capitol Hill to talk to lawmakers about the path for tax legislation.
The top tax writers in the House and Senate speak highly of Mnuchin and Cohn. In particular, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch has lavished effusive praise on their intelligence and on their private-sector accomplishments.
Both come from Wall Street. Mnuchin was a hedge fund manager and before that a regional banker after working for Goldman Sachs earlier in his career. Cohn joined the White House after being president of Goldman Sachs.
While business success is attractive to Republican voters and is considered a sign of organizational ability, overseeing tax reform takes other skills. Neither Mnuchin nor Cohn has deep familiarity with the tax code. Also, neither has experience working the congressional process, which can be frustrating to business executives.
Knight does. More importantly, she has familiarity with Washington insiders and the way they work.
Knight, who has a master’s degree in economics from George Mason University, joined the administration after working as a lobbyist for Fidelity Investments, a role that brought her into contact with members of the tax-writing committees. Before that, she was an aide on the House Ways and Means Committee under Republican Chairman Bill Thomas of California, which coincided with the tenures of some of the more senior members of the committee today.
“She speaks the language of the Ways and Means Committee,” said Rep. Kenny Marchant of Texas, a member of the panel.
“Shahira is a total rock star,” said Sandra Swirski, a tax lobbyist and partner at Urban Swirski. “She’s smart, she’s reasonable, she looks for solutions, she works well with others. She’s the total package.”
Knight reportedly played a major role in drawing up President Trump’s one-page, bullet-pointed tax reform plan in the space of less than a week after an abrupt announcement from Trump that he wanted to release a plan and it needed to include a corporate tax rate of 15 percent.
While Knight worked with Republicans in Congress, she is not ideological, as some in the Trump administration and many Republicans in Congress are. In that respect, she is not a marked difference from Cohn, a registered Democrat, and Mnuchin, who has donated to Democrats in the past.
Instead, it appears that conservative, supply-side ideas filter into the Trump administration from the outside. Longtime free-market advocates such as CNBC personality Larry Kudlow and Heritage Foundation scholar Stephen Moore worked with Mnuchin in devising Trump’s aggressive tax-rate-cutting campaign tax plan. An op-ed that they wrote with Steve Forbes, the publishing executive who ran for president on a supply-side platform, and Art Laffer, the former Reagan adviser and self-described father of supply-side economics, calling for an immediate corporate tax rate reduction caught Trump’s eye and spurred him to demand the tax plan, according to Politico.
Those four men formed the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a small group that promotes low tax rates and light regulations. They are frequent commentators in the media and have close ties to the White House. On Wednesday night, Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said he was having dinner with Moore and a group of his friends.
Another White House official with close ties to congressional Republicans is Joyce Meyer, Trump’s liaison to House Republicans. Meyer joined the administration from House Speaker Paul Ryan’s office, where she served as deputy chief of staff. During his brief tenure as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, she was the staff director.
The administration still remains short-staffed in some key areas. It is still without a Treasury assistant secretary for tax policy, the position responsible for working out the details of proposals and one that is thought to be important for the tax reform push. This month, the Trump administration nominated David Kautter, a partner at RSM, a tax, audit and consulting firm, for that position, but he has yet to get through the confirmation process.
