The real problem with Washington lobbyists - Providence Journal

Lee Drutman: The real problem with Washington lobbyists

01:00 AM EST on Sunday, February 8, 2009

LEE DRUTMAN

WASHINGTON

BARELY IN OFFICE a day, President Obama was already on the case of the lobbyists, signing an executive order on Jan. 21 that banned lobbyists’ gifts to the executive branch, limited the lobbying-career options for departing executive-branch personnel and brought unprecedented transparency to White House deliberations. Though unable to quite deliver on his campaign promise that lobbyists “won’t find a job in my White House,” he did impose a two-year moratorium on their working on issues on which they had recently lobbied.

All of this is well and good and promising as a first step: It shows that Obama is concerned with the often distorting role of lobbyists in our policy process and is interested in transparency and good government. And yet at the same time, there is also something troubling about the approach, because these rules fail to acknowledge the murky complexities of lobbying, and in so doing, may ultimately undermine our ability to curtail the most troubling biases that lobbyists introduce into the system.

As Exhibit A in the complexities of “lobbying,” consider the case of would-have-been Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Daschle, who for the past four years worked as a “special policy adviser” at Alston & Bird, one of the largest lobbying law firms in Washington. Daschle did not register as a lobbyist. But let’s say he did, as he probably should have. Would his track record in the Senate and deep knowledge of the health-care system suddenly have been less valuable?

Who knows: Perhaps his experience working with Alston & Bird clients like Roche and the American Hospital Association and CVS Caremark gave Daschle a greater understanding of what is wrong with private health care and how to fix it, an understanding he can now turn to progressive ends. Why is it that we always assume that once somebody has spent time as a lobbyist, he or she is rendered incapable of shedding those particularized loyalties upon joining the government, but that once somebody leaves government, he or she will immediately shed any allegiance to the commonweal? Does Obama have so little faith in the people he has selected?

Consider also Daschle’s options upon leaving the Senate in 2005. Alston & Bird offered him the chance to get rich and to stay active in Washington. Sure, he could have taken a job at a think tank or a public-interest organization, but such jobs pay far less and are also harder to come by. Ultimately it was the perks in this world that got him into trouble — a cautionary tale more than anything else.

But Daschle’s decision followed a well-worn Washington career trajectory for elected officials and staffers alike: Spend some time in the federal government, build up some policy expertise and some political connections, and then “go downtown” and cash in by working for a lobbying firm or a well-paying corporation’s Washington office.

And so, every year more and more policy and political experience and knowledge migrate to those who can pay top dollar for it. By my calculations, corporations and business associations combined now have a 25-to-1 personnel advantage over public interests and unions combined in registered lobbyists. This, however, surely understates the advantage. Not only are corporations able to hire the most experienced and connected operatives, they also are able to support the ever-increasing number of ancillary lobbying activities that don’t get publicly disclosed — the issue advertising and research studies and private polling and “grassroots” mobilization and coalition building and other shadow lobbying that go into honing and relentlessly pressing arguments.

Which means that if Obama is truly interested in transparency, a great first step would be to require full disclosure of the whole range of lobbying activities, not just direct lobbying as required under current rules. Doing so would help us to see lobbyists more fully for what they actually are — producers and promoters of argument and information, some of which is quite valuable to the policy process. Indeed, lawmakers and their staffs frequently depend on lobbyists to do much of the legwork in researching, drafting, and ginning up support for various policy proposals.

But herein lies the challenge. Lobbyists are not an evil class apart, a flock of shady operatives whose sole trick is manipulating the social norms of reciprocity, and who therefore must be quarantined. For better or worse, lobbyists have become an integral part of the Washington policymaking process. The problem is that lobbyists represent only those who can afford to hire them, and this turns out primarily to be corporations and wealthy special interests.

One way to ameliorate this massive representation bias would be to set up an Office of Public Lobbying, which would seek ways to give more volume to the public interest voices that so often get drowned out by wealthy corporate interests. Another would be to do more to support policy expertise in government, both by expanding entities such as the Congressional Research Service and the Government Accountability Office and doing more to attract and maintain top talent. But most of all, let’s stop treating lobbying as a problem of corruption and ethics. The deeper, more fundamental problem is one of representation and voice.

Lee Drutman, an occasional contributor, is a research fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. He is working on a book about the growth of corporate lobbying in Washington, D.C.

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