The Biden administration has emphasized through its early actions that consultants are every bit as insidious as lobbyists. While lobbyists are required to register with the government, former officials have increasingly flocked to the amorphous space of consulting. They help companies by doing everything except formally lobbying policymakers, all without having to face any lobbying restrictions.
This type of “shadow lobbying” is how Jake Sullivan earned a living, before joining the Biden White House as national-security adviser.
As part of his ethics pledge conceived in his first days in office, Biden issued a shadow-lobbying ban for former officials. The pledge bars departing staff from working for a year as consultants on the very policies they’ve worked on in office. Virginia Canter, chief ethics counsel of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, hopes that the rule will act as a deterrent for aides who seek to play the influence game. “It always seemed to some that there was a gap in the rule. If you could help behind the scenes, it didn’t capture you as a lobbyist, but you were profiting as much as a lobbyist, or maybe even more,” she told me.
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