Trump White House keeps open borders between governance and big business
President Donald Trump speaks to reporters about border security in the briefing room of the White House, Thursday, Jan. 3. Credit: AP/Evan Vucci
If President Donald Trump ever aimed to avoid the odor of special-interest coziness in his executive branch, you wouldn't know it from the pattern of his appointments.
Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan spent 31 years at Boeing, where he became a high-ranking executive. The corporation supplied the military with Apache and Chinook helicopters and worked on the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor.
Shanahan's spokesman said this week that the interim successor to Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis has recused himself "from participating in matters in which the Boeing Company is a party."
The Environmental Protection Agency's interim director, Andrew Wheeler, worked for one of the nation’s largest coal-mining companies and lobbied for chemical and big-oil interests.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar was president of the U.S. division of Eli Lilly and Company. He served on the board of directors of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a pharmaceutical lobby.
Since Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke quit under an ethics cloud three weeks ago, David Bernhardt, a former oil-industry lobbyist, has been in the job. His clients once included Cobalt International Energy and the Independent Petroleum Association of America.
Maybe "drain the swamp" really meant getting rid of the disinterested.
The timeworn revolving door between private industries and the offices that regulate them turns for more than Cabinet posts. Charles Rettig, the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, was a prominent tax lawyer who represented wealthy individuals and corporations seeking to avoid paying taxes to federal and state taxing authorities.
Scott Gottlieb, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, had deep and lucrative ties to Big Pharma while in private business.
That said, a number of consumer advocates give Gottlieb's job performance positive reviews. But Matt Whitaker, serving as Trump's acting attorney general, continues to draw suspicion for having served on the advisory board of the defunct World Patent Marketing, which the Federal Trade Commission called “a scam that has bilked thousands of consumers out of millions of dollars.”
The website OpenSecrets.org in July linked to the profiles of 164 former lobbyists serving in the Trump administration and noted 18 former staffers who went the other way and became lobbyists. Trump had signed an executive order early on barring executive branch employees from lobbying for five years after working in the administration and forbidding former registered lobbyists in the White House from dealing for two years with areas they lobbied on.
"Despite this directive," state the website's administrators, "these men and women made their way through the revolving door."
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
