Lobbyists and the Senate Parliamentarian

Many posts have discussed lobbying.

Taylor Giorno at NOTUS:

The time during which a reconciliation bill is with the Senate parliamentarian would be a prime opportunity for lobbyists to get provisions tweaked or washed out.

Except the industry built on access has little influence with her: Elizabeth MacDonough is one of the rare players on Capitol Hill that refuses to meet with lobbyists.

“Cursing them. Yes. Lobbying them. No,” one Republican lobbyist texted NOTUS of the parliamentarian.

MacDonough is “effectively one of the most powerful women in the free world,” a Democratic lobbyist told NOTUS. Senate committees have been working for weeks with the parliamentarian on several facets of the Republican mega-bill, and they’ve already had to rework parts of the bill that the parliamentarian rejected.

While lobbyists can’t directly lobby the parliamentarian, several said they are trying to backchannel their demands through the process. Their targets include Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a tax on profits from third-party litigation funding and a 10-year moratorium on new state artificial intelligence regulations.

“A large part of the role we play is helping educate the staff and give them the ammunition to make the best arguments to their boss, for the parliamentarian,” Rich Gold, a Holland & Knight partner and leader of the firm’s public policy and regulation group, told NOTUS.

If a client is concerned about a provision in the bill, lobbyists could draft a Byrd memo to bring to senate staffers or provide them with “whatever supplementary information I think would be helpful in making the argument to knock a provision out of the bill,” the Democratic lobbyist said.

“A lobbyist like myself, we insert ourselves into the process by supplying evidence and arguments and detail to the minority, if they wish to use it, for including in their memo and their arguments to the parl,” they added.

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“If you’re asking me, ‘Can you bamboozle Elizabeth?’ The answer is no,” said Jim Manley, who spent more than two decades working in the Senate, including a stint with the late Democratic leader, Harry Reid.

“There’s no lobbyists sitting there manipulating the process,” Manley added, although he noted lobbyists “serve increasingly as a research arm for staffers on Capitol Hill.”

 

College Lobbying

Many posts have discussed the politics of colleges and universities in the United States.

Daniel Barnes at Politico:

Some of the nation’s small liberal arts colleges are hiring Washington lobbyists for the first time — seeking to distinguish themselves from the Ivy League universities at the center of President Donald Trump’s attacks on higher education.

While managing government relations has always been a main responsibility for college presidents, at least five of U.S. News & World Report’s top 20 liberal arts colleges have recently hired lobbyists for the first time in their histories, according to lobbying disclosures: Williams College, Pomona College, Claremont McKenna College, Davidson College and Washington and Lee University. All five schools declined to comment or did not respond to interview requests.

“There are some institutions that have decided that because of the risk, they feel like they need to hire some outside expertise to bolster what they’ve already been doing,” said Steven Bloom, assistant vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education.

Firms hired to lobby on education-related issues for those five schools include Lewis-Burke Associates for Williams College, theGroup DC for Pomona College and Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck for Davidson College. Holland & Knight has received the largest payday of the firms hired by those five schools, netting $80,000 in the first quarter from Washington and Lee University and Claremont McKenna College, according to disclosure reports. The lobbying firms declined or did not respond to requests for comment.

A key factor driving the K Street hires, according to disclosure reports and people familiar with the matter, is worry about an expanded endowment tax — the 1.4 percent tax on university investment income that was first adopted in 2017 to help offset Trump’s broader package of tax cuts.

 

Foreign Influence on US Politics

Many posts have analyzed how foreign governments try to influence American politics and policy.

 Catherine Kim at Politico:

So what’s behind this surge of foreign cash allegedly influencing U.S. politics? Are public officials simply getting more brazen in their interactions with foreign governments? According to Casey Michel, author of the upcoming book Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World, illegal foreign influence has been entrenched in our political system for decades — but it’s happening now more than ever.

Foreign lobbying of all sorts is a big business in the U.S., with countries and other entities spending over $5 trillion since 2016 to influence U.S. policy and burnish their own images. And despite bipartisan interest, attempts at reform have largely stalled out thus far.

Now, though, a confluence of factors including the Justice Department getting more aggressive on the issue, have led to this recent series of high-profile indictments. To better understand how foreign actors influence our politics and what their own goals are, Nightly spoke with Michel. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Are we seeing an uptick in foreign interference in our politics through lobbying? And if so, why is that the case?

We have seen an absolute explosion in recent years in terms of the scope and the scale of both foreign lobbying as well as foreign interference — without any kind of precedent in American history itself. And that’s for a few reasons: You had folks in Washington asleep at the wheel as it pertained to both the regulations and even the potential threat to these kinds of unchecked foreign lobbying. On the ground, there was a proliferation of Americans willing to provide foreign lobbying services beyond just traditional lobbying to authoritarian regimes, who were realizing just how wide open Washington was. It was really in the mid-2010s when things began to shift. And finally, folks started paying attention and realizing what the cost of ignoring these networks for so many years truly was.

From the FBI:

The counterintelligence and economic espionage efforts emanating from the government of China and the Chinese Communist Party are a grave threat to the economic well-being and democratic values of the United States.

Confronting this threat is the FBI’s top counterintelligence priority.

To be clear, the adversary is not the Chinese people or people of Chinese descent or heritage. The threat comes from the programs and policies pursued by an authoritarian government.

The Chinese government is employing tactics that seek to influence lawmakers and public opinion to achieve policies that are more favorable to China.

At the same time, the Chinese government is seeking to become the world’s greatest superpower through predatory lending and business practices, systematic theft of intellectual property, and brazen cyber intrusions.

China’s efforts target businesses, academic institutions, researchers, lawmakers, and the general public and will require a whole-of-society response. The government and the private sector must commit to working together to better understand and counter the threat.

Grassroots and Grasstops

At WSJ, Brody Mullins and Luke Mullins report on the outside game of grassroots and grassroots lobbying.  Things really took off in 2011 when Google and other tech companies pushed back hard against IP legislation.

Today’s most effective corporate lobbying no longer involves wooing members of Congress with Chateau Margaux, five-star meals or tickets to professional sporting events. K Street’s elite now works in secret to influence lawmakers with the help of an unlikely ally: you.

Though appealing to the public has long been part of the lobbying playbook, it has taken a much more sophisticated form in the years since lobbyists were banned from using the traditional tools of their trade to curry favor with elected officials. They recognized that, given the new restrictions, the best way to influence members of Congress was through the people who sent them to Washington in the first place.

In 2021, the focus was on proposed tax hike.

The oil-and-gas industry killed their proposed tax increases by getting voters in Texas and Louisiana to tell their members of Congress that the tax increases would kill jobs back home. Lobbyists for tobacco companies and convenience stores worked to persuade Black Americans that a new $100 billion tax on tobacco products would drive up illegal tobacco sales and increase the likelihood of conflicts with the police, like the violent encounter that led to the death of 43-year-old Eric Garner on Staten Island in 2014. Black lawmakers responded by striking the tobacco taxes from the bill.

The private-equity industry, meanwhile, got even more creative. Months before Biden proposed a $1 billion-a-year tax increase on private-equity investors, its lobbyists quietly launched a public-relations campaign to convince a few dozen centrist Democrats that increased taxes would lower the amount of money invested in small businesses and real-estate development in their states. A key target of the effort was Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.

To win her over, the private-equity lobby identified her top political advisers, staff and campaign donors. The industry purchased advertisements on Twitter and Facebook pages targeting this inner circle, stating that higher private-equity taxes would lower investment and jobs in her state. “Private Equity is directly supporting 138 small businesses in Arizona,” read one social-media post from the industry’s Washington trade association. The lobby also paid for advertisements in Arizona that encouraged voters to call Sinema’s office and urge her to oppose the tax increase.

Industry lobbyists contacted Arizona business leaders and got them to sign opinion pieces in local media outlets to catch the senator’s attention. Most of the pieces were written by lobbyists, according to one of the private-equity strategists involved in the campaign. “Raising taxes on individuals and small businesses who contribute funds or sweat equity to a project will diminish the incentive to take on risk,” read one piece.

Facing pressure from her constituents in Arizona, Sinema came out against the tax increase, and it was dropped from Biden’s plan before it was called up for a vote.

When The Wall Street Journal reported that industry lobbyists had persuaded Sinema to oppose the tax increases, her spokesman said it was impossible because the senator never spoke with any lobbyists for the industry. But the private-equity lobby didn’t have to speak to Sinema. They spoke to her constituents back home.

 

Chefs as Lobbyists

Helena Bottemiller Evich at Food Fix:

About a decade ago, I started noticing chefs were showing up in Washington to lobby on all kinds of issues — child hunger, school nutrition, antibiotics in agriculture, fisheries management, the list goes on. A lot of these cooks-turned-lobbyists had gone through a James Beard Foundation advocacy training program called the Chef Bootcamp for Policy and Change. Katherine Miller, the force behind that program — which has now trained hundreds of chefs — recently came out with a book about this work and the impact it’s had over the years. “At the Table: The Chef’s Guide to Advocacy” is targeted primarily at chefs, but it offers insights on advocacy that are applicable far beyond the culinary world.

I recently caught up with Miller about her new book and what I find most interesting about chefs jumping into food fights.

The following conversation excerpt has been edited for length and clarity:

Helena: In the beginning of the book, you note that you were very skeptical at first that chefs should even be advocates. It reminded me of when I first wrote about this trend for Politico back in 2014 and a Republican aide gave me a great snarky quote that it’s hard to take policy advice seriously “from a group who thinks neck tattoos are a good idea.” Let’s start there. What changed your mind about the role chefs can play here?

Miller: I think it’s how some people feel about anyone with a public profile. When Bono started talking about aid to Africa, everybody was like, ‘What does he know about that subject? And why should we listen to him?’ I remember I was on the way to the first Chef Bootcamp, and I picked up a bunch of magazines, and in every single magazine I had picked that week there was Sean Brock with his tattoos. He was in Vogue. He was in TIME. He was everywhere. He was at the first bootcamp. I remember thinking ‘Oh, [chefs,] they’re everywhere!’ But in talking to the chefs, I realized the flip side of being everywhere.

There’s a restaurant on every corner of America, essentially — they are places that we trust. They buy from local farmers. They employ our kids, they employ us, they sort of serve as this living embodiment of a food system. Because chefs are so close to their community, they can have a conversation with a member of Congress who comes in, they can talk to the governor when they come in,

Google's Astroturf Amicus

Haley Fuchs and Brendan Bordelon at Politico:

As Google awaits a U.S. Supreme Court decision that could dramatically upend portions of its business model, a group of prominent online content creators and a nonprofit for authors have rushed to its defense.

In January, a number of prominent internet influencers and the nonprofit Authors Alliance filed an amicus brief defending the tech giant in Gonzalez v. Google. The case, which is slated for oral arguments on Tuesday, could weaken — or even upend — the company’s treasured liability protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. And those same protections, the creators wrote, are vital to them too.

Left unmentioned in the brief was that the parties behind it had direct financial ties to Google. The group that funded the brief, a nonprofit advocate for startups called Engine, is funded in part by Google. And at least one of the content creators who signed on to the amicus brief has said that employees from YouTube, a Google subsidiary, invited them to sign onto the brief. In addition, the firm representing the creators and Authors Alliance — Keker, Van Nest & Peters — represents Google in other litigation.

Football Lobbying

Previous posts have described lobbying and political activity by sports organizations.

Kelly Kauffman at Open Secrets:

As the National Football League prepares for its final game of the season this Sunday with the Philadelphia Eagles taking on the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LVII in Glendale, Ariz., year-end lobbying disclosures reveal that the NFL spent over $1.3 million on federal lobbying in 2022.

The NFL’s federal lobbying expenditures are a slight increase from its $1.2 million in 2021 spending, according to an OpenSecrets’ analysis of year-end lobbying disclosures.

While the 2022 lobbying spending didn’t reach the league’s high of $1.6 million in 2018, the NFL led the recreation and live entertainment industry in terms of federal lobbying spending last year. Major League Baseball followed close behind, spending over $1.2 million.

A majority of the NFL’s lobbyists went through the “revolving door” with 22 out of 29 NFL lobbyists in 2022 having previously held jobs in the government.

Not only is the NFL active in the lobbying space, the league also donated $402,000 to federal candidates through its PAC in 2022. This included $10,000 each to Reps. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.). Additionally, the PAC contributed $10,000 each to Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Tim Scott (R-S.C.).

The Supreme Court HIstorical Society and Interest Groups

Many posts have discussed the political uses of philanthropy.

 Jo Becker and Julie Tate at NYT:

The charity, the Supreme Court Historical Society, is ostensibly independent of the judicial branch of government, but in reality the two are inextricably intertwined. The charity’s stated mission is straightforward: to preserve the court’s history and educate the public about the court’s importance in American life. But over the years the society has also become a vehicle for those seeking access to nine of the most reclusive and powerful people in the nation. The justices attend the society’s annual black-tie dinner soirees, where they mingle with donors and thank them for their generosity, and serve as M.C.s to more regular society-sponsored lectures or re-enactments of famous cases.

The society has raised more than $23 million over the last two decades. Because of its nonprofit status, it does not have to publicly disclose its donors — and declined when asked to do so. But The New York Times was able to identify the sources behind more than $10.7 million raised since 2003, the first year for which relevant records were available.

At least $6.4 million — or 60 percent — came from corporations, special interest groups, or lawyers and firms that argued cases before the court, according to an analysis of archived historical society newsletters and publicly available records that detail grants given to the society by foundations. Of that, at least $4.7 million came from individuals or entities in years when they had a pending interest in a federal court case on appeal or at the high court, records show.

The donors include corporations like Chevron, which gave while embroiled in a 2021 Supreme Court case involving efforts by cities to hold the oil company accountable for its role in global warming. Veteran Supreme Court litigators gave while representing clients before the court that included Tyson Foods and the Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China.ER

Getting GOP Support for the Marriage Bill

 At NYT, Annie Karnie explains the successful effort to swing 12 GOP senators in support for the Respect for Marriage Act:

“The inside maneuvering can only go so far without the outside mobilization,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi noted on Thursday before signing the bill, the last official act by Congress before transmitting it to the White House so it could become law.

The push was led by Ken Mehlman, President George W. Bush’s campaign manager in 2004 and a former chairman of the Republican National Committee who came out as gay in 2010, and Centerline Action, a centrist nonprofit funded by him and Reginald Brown, a lawyer in Mr. Bush’s White House, among others.

It involved flooding the phone lines of Republican senators with calls from constituents who favored the same-sex marriage measure, presenting them with polling that showed that voters were more likely to support a proponent of the bill than somebody who opposed it, and a public pressure campaign aimed at demonstrating widespread conservative support for the legislation.

“When this popped in the House, we immediately went into action and reached out to all of those operatives and supporters and activists who had been engaged in this issue and kind of got the gang back together,” said James Dozier, the president of Centerline’s board. A former Republican congressional aide, Mr. Dozier is married to a man and has long pressed for same-sex marriage rights.

The work got underway in July, after 47 Republicans — a surprisingly high number — joined Democrats in supporting the bill when it initially passed the House. While the G.O.P. backers amounted to less than a quarter of the party’s contingent in that chamber, the degree of bipartisanship was enough to transform the measure from a mere messaging exercise into a serious legislative effort.

Tech Beats Antitrust Push

 Emily Birnbaum at Bloomberg:

A passionate and bipartisan legislative effort to rein in the country’s largest technology companies collapsed this week, the victim of an epic lobbying campaign by Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta.

The internet titans spent hundreds of millions of dollars, sent their chief executives to Washington and deployed trade groups and sympathetic scholars to quash two antitrust bills co-sponsored by Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, and Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican. The companies treated the bills like an existential threat.The years-long US legislative effort, which harnessed outrage over tech companies’ power and dominance, would have cracked down on the practices of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Amazon.com Inc, Meta Platforms Inc. and Apple Inc. for the first time in the nearly three decades since the internet was unveiled to the public.

The closely-watched bills advanced farther than any other antitrust overhaul in decades and emerged from an 18-month House investigation led by Rhode Island Democrat David Cicilline. The American Innovation and Choice Online Act would have prevented the tech giants from using their platforms to disadvantage competitors, while the Open App Markets Act would have pared back Apple and Google’s control over app stores.Despite an aggressive eleventh-hour push, the bills were not included in the end-of-year spending package released Monday, the final shot this year. The Senate included a narrower trio of antitrust bills in the end-of-year spending package. That legislation will give more money and resources to the country’s top antitrust regulators, marking the first time Congress has voted to expand antitrust enforcement measures in decades. But those provisions will not make the sweeping changes to the law that some advocates hoped for.

Saudi Oil and Influence Operations

 Hiroko Tabuchi at NYT:

Saudi Aramco has become a prolific funder of research into critical energy issues, financing almost 500 studies over the past five years, including research aimed at keeping gasoline cars competitive or casting doubt on electric vehicles, according to the Crossref database, which tracks academic publications. Aramco has collaborated with the United States Department of Energy on high-profile research projects including a six-year effort to develop more efficient gasoline and engines, as well as studies on enhanced oil recovery and other methods to bolster oil production.

Aramco also runs a global network of research centers including a lab near Detroit where it is developing a mobile “carbon capture” device — equipment designed to be attached to a gasoline-burning car, trapping greenhouse gases before they escape the tailpipe. More widely, Saudi Arabia has poured $2.5 billion into American universities over the past decade, making the kingdom one of the nation’s top contributors to higher education.

Saudi interests have spent close to $140 million since 2016 on lobbyists and others to influence American policy and public opinion, making it one of the top countries spending on U.S. lobbying, according to disclosures to the Department of Justice tallied by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Lobbying, Sports Betting, and the Vitality of Mythical Numbers

 Mythical numbers and graphics distort public policy debates.  Sometimes the distortion is deliberate.  They call it "juking the stats."

A 2018 SCOTUS decision struck down a federal law forbidding state authorization of sports betting,  Then lobbyists went to work.

Eric Lipton and Kenneth P. Vogel at NYT:

Gambling companies and their allies deployed a bare-knuckled lobbying campaign, showering state lawmakers with money, gifts and visits from sports luminaries and at times using deceptive arguments to extract generous tax breaks and other concessions, according to a New York Times investigation. It was based on thousands of pages of documents and communications obtained in part through open-records requests and interviews with dozens of industry and state officials.

Industry lobbyists, for example, dazzled lawmakers with projections about the billions of dollars that states could expect to collect in taxes from sports betting — projections that, at least so far, have often turned out to be wildly inflated, according to a Times analysis of state tax data.

The gambling industry managed to scare state lawmakers into keeping tax rates low, in part by trotting out data about a sprawling underworld of illegal gambling. The Times found that those figures, which suggested that Americans were placing as much as $400 billion of illicit bets each year, were unreliable.

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Where did the eye-popping figure come from? The N.B.A. and the American Gaming Association identified the source as a 1999 report by the National Gambling Impact Study Commission, which Congress created to assess the harms of gambling.

“Estimates of the scope of illegal sports betting in the United States range anywhere from $80 billion to $380 billion annually,” the report said.

In a footnote, the report attributed the range not to an academic study or even an industry analysis, but to an Associated Press article from the month before the report was released. That article, in turn, reported that “commissioners were told” the estimate, though it did not indicate by whom.

A transcript from a commission hearing in 1998 points to the likely source. One of the panel’s commissioners, citing unidentified testimony and staff briefings, said that “there’s somewhere, depending on whose guesstimate you take, within $80 to $380 billion worth of illegal sports gambling.”

Former Brass Working for Antidemocratic Governments

Craig Whitlock and Nate Jones at WP:

More than 500 retired U.S. military personnel — including scores of generals and admirals — have taken lucrative jobs since 2015 working for foreign governments, mostly in countries known for human rights abuses and political repression, according to a Washington Post investigation.

In Saudi Arabia, for example, 15 retired U.S. generals and admirals have worked as paid consultants for the Defense Ministry since 2016. The ministry is led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, who U.S. intelligence agencies say approved the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a Post contributing columnist, as part of a brutal crackdown on dissent.

Saudi Arabia’s paid advisers have included retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones, a national security adviser to President Barack Obama, and retired Army Gen. Keith Alexander, who led the National Security Agency under Obama and President George W. Bush, according to documents obtained by The Post under Freedom of Information Act lawsuits.

Others who have worked as consultants for the Saudis since Khashoggi’s murder include a retired four-star Air Force general and a former commanding general of U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

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Brandon Brockmyer, POGO’s director of investigations and research, said retired senior military officers often testify before Congress and appear on television to debate national security, but rarely divulge whether they are on a foreign government’s payroll.

“The public is working on the assumption that their sole loyalty is to the United States,” he said. “The public has the right to know whether and how a foreign power has access to their expertise.”

Craig Whitlock and Nate Jones at WP:

Under federal ethics rules, military personnel who manage weapons programs or major defense contracts must observe a “cooling off” period of one or two years before they can accept jobs from companies they did business with while in uniform. The regulations, which also apply to other federal officials who interact with government contractors, are intended to prevent conflicts of interest and self-dealing. In some cases, officials face a lifetime ban from taking such jobs.

But the conflict-of-interest rules do not apply in the same way to retired U.S. troops who want to work for a foreign government. While they must obtain federal approval for the job, they are allowed to negotiate foreign employment before they retire, whenever they want, even with countries where they have been stationed for the U.S. military.

 

Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA)

 Caitlin Oprysko at Politico Influence:

FARA BY THE NUMBERS: The Justice Department’s reinvigorated focus on enforcing FARA in recent years has continued paying dividends for the department, a top DOJ official said Thursday, with the FARA office recording what could be record numbers of new registrants and foreign agents in 2021.

— The department’s 543 active FARA registrants as of Thursday is the highest number since at least 2013, Jay Bratt, who leads the department’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section which oversees FARA, said in a keynote address at the American Conference Institute’s FARA forum yesterday. Bratt shied away from calling that number the largest ever at a given time because the Lobbying Disclosure Act and FARA’s LDA exemption siphoned off some registrants. “But probably post-LDA that could be the highest number that we have,” Bratt said.

— There are currently 2,772 active short-form registrants, or individual foreign agents, registered as of yesterday, which Bratt said is another high since 2013. Those agents represent 844 foreign principals. The department has recorded 121 new registrants this year, which is the second largest number, down from the peak in 2019, while the FARA unit has reviewed 5,975 documents over the last year, Bratt added. He chalked the improvement up to renewed attention on the statute since a pretty blistering 2016 inspector general report, as well as Russia’s 2016 election interference as highlighted by former special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of those influence efforts.

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— The turnaround for the unit, which by 2014 had seen active registrations drop by 60 percent from their peak in the 1980s, is enabling DOJ to focus on improving what FARA experts have repeatedly described as a severely outdated statute. “In essence … the department for the last four or five years has been focusing on enforcement,” Brandon Van Grack, the former head of the FARA unit now at Morrison & Foerster, told PI. “Now it's focusing on regulation and administration.”

Russian Influence Spending

Many posts have analyzed how foreign governments try to influence American politics and policy. Russia and China are prominent influencers.

Anna Massoglia at Open Secrets:

Russian media outlets reported spending more than $146 million on foreign influence operations and propaganda in the U.S. since 2016, with over $16 million on propaganda targeting the U.S. in 2021, OpenSecrets’ analysis of new Foreign Agents Registration Act records shows.

And that’s just the spending that Russian foreign agents have disclosed to the Justice Department under FARA.

The U.S. government has identified multiple online media sites that are directed by Russian intelligence services and not disclosed through FARA, spreading disinformation to undermine COVID-19 vaccines produced outside Russia. Social media platforms have also become a breeding ground for even more Russian propaganda campaigns that are often not disclosed in FARA filings.

Faced with rising concerns about Russian interference in U.S. elections and foreign influence more generally, the Justice Department has compelled multiple broadcasters and other middlemen helping Russian propaganda efforts targeting the U.S. to register as foreign agents.

During the 2020 presidential election, the Kremlin poured money into TV and media outlets aimed at influencing voters while tensions rose between the two countries. During the 2016 presidential election, the Russian government interfered to boost former President Donald Trump. Russia’s top media spenders include RIA Novosti and Rossiya Segodnya, government entities that administer global broadcasts of Russian state-funded networks RT and Sputnik.

In August 2020, Rossiya Segodnya contracted with Ghebi LLC, a Washington, D.C.-based production company incorporated by the editor-in-chief of a U.S. production company working for the Russian media entity called RIA Global. Since then, the LLC has reported more than $2.7 million in payments from the Russian government’s media entity that administers Sputnik.

The Russian government’s propaganda spending is rivaled most intensely by China, which spent more than any other country in 2020.

Chinese foreign agents reported about $67.2 million in total 2020 lobbying and influence spending. More than 80% of China’s foreign influence spending in the U.S. came from Chinese state-owned media outlet CGTN TV and the CCP’s English-language newspaper, China Daily.

Revolving Doorman

Hailey Fuchs at Politico:

[Ivan] Adler, 56, is not in fact a lobbyist. But his job shares some key similarities. He is a recruiter — one of the top in D.C. — who specializes in plucking lawmakers and staffers off the Hill or elsewhere in government and placing them into jobs on K Street, whether it be trade associations, corporations, law practices or lobbying firms.

The president of the boutique shop Ivan Adler Associates, he calls himself “The Lobbyist Hunter.” His eponymous firm specializes in matching government relations and public affairs professionals with gigs on “K Street....and beyond.” His task is to convince the idealists who descended on the nation’s capital to become public servants that the lifestyle of influence peddling is more laid back and certainly more lucrative. He maintains that “nobody has a gun to their head,” but he is, effectively, the doorman for the revolving door.

Foreign Influence in the 2020 Election

Anna Massoglia at Open Secrets:

More than $33.5 million in individual political contributions came from foreign agents and lobbyists during the 2020 election, a new OpenSecrets analysis found.

Foreign nationals are prohibited by federal law from making contributions to political groups or campaigns to influence U.S. elections. But foreign nationals can hire foreign agents or lobbyists to advocate for their interests in the U.S. and lobbyists who are U.S. citizens are able to make political contributions, even to the same lawmakers they may be lobbying on behalf of foreign clients.

Foreign agents registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act during the 2020 election cycle made at least $8.5 million in political contributions. Another $25 million in 2020 political contributions came from lobbyists representing foreign clients, including U.S. subsidiaries owned or controlled by foreign parent companies, registered under the Lobbying Disclosure Act.

That includes all of foreign agents’ 2020 individual contributions to federal-level campaigns as well as outside groups like political action committees and super PACs that are registered with the FEC. PACs affiliated with firms of registered foreign agents contributed even more.

AI and Astroturf

Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier

This month, the New York state attorney general issued a report on a scheme by “U.S. Companies and Partisans [to] Hack Democracy.” This wasn’t another attempt by Republicans to make it harder for Black people and urban residents to vote. It was a concerted attack on another core element of U.S. democracy — the ability of citizens to express their voice to their political representatives. And it was carried out by generating millions of fake comments and fake emails purporting to come from real citizens.

This attack was detected because it was relatively crude. But artificial intelligence technologies are making it possible to generate genuine-seeming comments at scale, drowning out the voices of real citizens in a tidal wave of fake ones.

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The big telecommunications companies paid millions of dollars to specialist “AstroTurf” companies to generate public comments. These companies then stole people’s names and email addresses from old files and from hacked data dumps and attached them to 8.5 million public comments and half a million letters to members of Congress. All of them said that they supported the corporations’ position on something called “net neutrality,” the idea that telecommunications companies must treat all Internet content equally and not prioritize any company or service. Three AstroTurf companies — Fluent, Opt-Intelligence and React2Media — agreed to pay nearly $4 million in fines.

The fakes were crude. Many of them were identical, while others were patchworks of simple textual variations: substituting “Federal Communications Commission” and “FCC” for each other, for example.

Next time, though, we won’t be so lucky. New technologies are about to make it far easier to generate enormous numbers of convincing personalized comments and letters, each with its own word choices, expressive style and pithy examples. The people who create fake grass-roots organizations have always been enthusiastic early adopters of technology, weaponizing letters, faxes, emails and Web comments to manufacture the appearance of public support or public outrage.

Brain Drain on the Hill

New report from New America:

Congressional Brain Drain

Legislative Capacity in the 21st Century

By: Alexander C. Furnas, Timothy M. LaPira

Executive Summary

This research report comprehensively investigates congressional capacity and governance using publicly available data on long-term trends in legislative branch expenditures and data Furnas and LaPira collected in the 2017 and 2019 Congressional Capacity Surveys (CCS).1 When combined, the CCS is the most comprehensive time-series cross-sectional survey of congressional staffers’ professional backgrounds, career paths, policy views, technical knowledge, substantive expertise, and job experiences ever conducted. We document how the decline in legislative capacity has changed during the era of rising polarization and increasing political party competition. As a consequence, legislative staff in Washington are asked to do more and more, with less and less.

1. Congress is a funnel to lucrative jobs in lobbying. Between 40−45 percent see the private sector as their next career step. Roughly half of staff aiming to enter the private sector after serving on the Hill want to become lobbyists. For the most part, working on the Hill is viewed as an entry-level position for K Street, rather than a stepping stone for a career in public service.
2. Staff resources have shifted to the district. The share of total staffer full-time equivalents dedicated to Washington, D.C. offices has fallen from more than 70 percent in the 1970s to 50 percent in recent years.
3. There are fewer resources to pay staff. In the House of Representatives, the budget allocated for office staff hires fell by 10 percent from 2013 to 2017.
4. Staff pay is declining. Salaries fell among communications, legislative, and administrative staff following the 110th Congress (2007-2008). The decline cannot alone be attributed to the member pay freeze and austerity measures resulting from the Great Recession because the decline in resources allocated for legislative staff started well before 2007.
5. Congressional staffers in important roles are largely inexperienced. Most staff who manage policy portfolios in Congress have only one or two years of Hill experience. That is, roughly one-third of legislative staffers have not yet served the duration of a single Congress. Conversely, staffers in both chambers who have spent more time working in Congress are measurably more knowledgeable about institutional procedures and important policy topics.
6. Capitol Hill is staffed primarily by Millennials. Roughly 60 percent of the congressional staffer population is under the age of 35, and 75 percent under 40 years old.
7. Turnover among congressional staff is exceedingly high. The average tenure for staff on Capitol Hill is 3.1 years. About 65 percent of staffers plan to leave Congress within five years. Even more strikingly, 43 percent plan to depart by the end of the Congress in which they are employed.
8. Most do not see working in Congress as a long-term career option. Even among those who would like to continue careers in the public sector, more than half (55 percent) plan to leave Congress.
9. Staffers work extremely long hours, and are spread thin. More than 65 percent of staff work 50+ hours a week, and 20 percent of staff work 60+ hours. Of senior staffers, 65 percent work 60+ hours a week. The average legislative staffer works on two to six issue areas every single day.
10. Staff like working for their boss, but not so much for Congress. Seventy-six percent report a very strong or strong sense of belonging in their employing office, but only 61 percent feel similarly about Congress as a whole. This institutional deficit is greater for women and staffers who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC).
11. In Congress, experience yields knowledge, but is not rewarded. Staffers that have spent more time working in Congress are measurably more knowledgeable about institutional procedures and important policy topics. This is true across both chambers, and is unrelated to actual work assignments. Yet, turnover is so high and retention rates so low that members fail to keep that knowledge in house, so must rely more and more on K Street.
12. Staffers are highly partisan and highly ideological. Sixty-five percent of staffers identify as strong partisans, and almost no staffers identify as true independents. Staffers are well-sorted ideologically, such that there is little ideological overlap between Democratic and Republican offices.

Paycheck Protection Program Recipients

Alex Gangitano at The Hill:

Dozens of organizations that lobby the federal government received loans under the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which provides funds to small businesses and nonprofits struggling due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Trump administration released data on Monday about the recipients of the small-business loans, which are forgivable if the money is used for payroll, mortgage, rent and utilities and the recipient maintains employee and compensation levels.

Trade associations, professional societies and local chambers of commerce — all of which are classified as 501(c)(6) organizations — are not eligible for the program. But many groups that conduct lobbying are classified as nonprofit 501(c)(3) organizations and were allowed to apply.

Trade groups have lobbied Congress to make changes to the program, which was part of the $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief bill Congress passed in March, so they can be included as well.

APCO WorldWide, a lobbying firm, received more than $5 million in loans. The company was hired by five clients in 2020, totaling $40,000. Clients included the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints and China Ocean Shipping Co., according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

...
Lobbying firm Waxman Consulting, where former Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) serves as chairman, received at least $350,000 in loans. The firm has made more than $182,000 so far in 2020 and has nine clients, including the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and the Good Food Institute.

...
NARAL Pro-Choice America Foundation received at least $350,000 in loans. The organization has spent $10,000 on lobbying expenditures in 2020 and has three in-house lobbyists, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

The Americans for Tax Reform Foundation, the non-lobbying arm of Americans for Tax Reform, received a loan of at least $150,000.

NYT:

Here are some of the recipients of P.P.P. money that may raise eyebrows:

• Investment firms that manage billions, including Semper Capital Management, Domini Impact Investments and Brevet Holdings.
• At least 45 major law firms, including Boies Schiller Flexner, Kasowitz Benson Torres and Wiley Rein.
• Some companies connected to federal lawmakers or their families, including the Republican representatives Markwayne Mullin and Devin Nunes and the Republican senator Susan Collins (whose brothers’ business later returned its loan), as well as Ms. Collins’s Democratic challenger, Sara Gideon.
• Several start-ups that still laid off employees.
• The Ayn Rand Institute, which is dedicated to the anti-statist philosopher, and an arm of Americans for Tax Reform, the group founded by the famously anti-tax activist Grover Norquist.

ReeseDunklin and Michael Rezendes at AP:

The U.S. Roman Catholic Church used a special and unprecedented exemption from federal rules to amass at least $1.4 billion in taxpayer-backed coronavirus aid, with many millions going to dioceses that have paid huge settlements or sought bankruptcy protection because of clergy sexual abuse cover-ups.

The church’s haul may have reached -- or even exceeded -- $3.5 billion, making a global religious institution with more than a billion followers among the biggest winners in the U.S. government’s pandemic relief efforts, an Associated Press analysis of federal data released this week found.

Houses of worship and faith-based organizations that promote religious beliefs aren’t usually eligible for money from the U.S. Small Business Administration. But as the economy plummeted and jobless rates soared, Congress let faith groups and other nonprofits tap into the Paycheck Protection Program, a $659 billion fund created to keep main street open and Americans employed.

By aggressively promoting the payroll program and marshaling resources to help affiliates navigate its shifting rules, Catholic dioceses, parishes, schools and other ministries have so far received approval for at least 3,500 forgivable loans, AP found.

The Archdiocese of New York, for example, received 15 loans worth at least $28 million just for its top executive offices. Its iconic St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue was approved for at least $1 million.