The special-interest "swamp" breeds new life-forms under Trump
Reince Priebus, right, President Donald Trump's first chief of staff, now is a lobbyist whose firm represented business requests for tariff exclusions. Credit: AP/John Locher
Campaign chants of "Drain that swamp!" once promised an end, or at least a blow, to special-interest influence in government.
The swamp, however, seems to be breeding new life forms.
The Trump administration's domestic taxes on imports — called tariffs — created a sub-industry for lobbyists seeking to get this burden on their clients lifted.
The bureaucracy of the U.S. Trade Representative, the Commerce Department and other agencies makes many decisions about whom to exempt from tariffs case by case and product by product.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the number of clients lobbying on tariff and trade issues has jumped in the past two years.
Firms that won tariff exclusions include those with which Trump inauguration committee chief Brian Ballard, former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and Trump campaign fundraiser Marc Lampkin are affiliated, the news site ProPublica reported.
Varian, a medical company, paid Ballard and a colleague to lobby the White House, the trade office and Vice President Mike Pence. Four of Varian's five tariff exclusion requests were approved, ProPublica reported, citing securities filings.
Big companies that hire connected lobbyists to do their government bidding traditionally enjoy a competitive advantage over small firms that cannot afford to do the same.
At the same time, President Donald Trump keeps repeating that China is funding the federal tariff revenue. If China were doing that, of course, U.S. manufacturers would have little motive to pay top-dollar lobbyists to try to avoid the tariffs.
“U.S. tariffs continue to be almost entirely borne by U.S. firms and consumers,” Mary Amiti, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, states in a new National Bureau of Economic Research paper.
Tariffs overall haven't brought the catastrophe some critics predicted. And trade officials still see them as key to prodding eventual concessions from rival China.
The administration also has helped spin the revolving door between industry and government.
As of October, the number of lobbyists who had moved into government jobs far exceeded the same number for the Obama administration's first six years, a research project by ProPublica and Columbia Journalism School found.
Often the ex-lobbyists are assigned to help regulate industries they worked in.
While the White House imposed tariffs on U.S. businesses for various materials and products, tax rates fell for various kinds of corporations.
New taxes were included in the massive tax bill hastily crafted by Congress in 2017. These were aimed at raising hundreds of billions of dollars from companies that had been avoiding tax payments, in part by asserting their profits were earned outside the United States.
Lobbyists for big companies besieged the Treasury Department to influence the way the rewritten tax law would be carried out. Their campaign succeeded, The New York Times reported. Exceptions were crafted with the result that some top U.S. and foreign firms will owe little or nothing in new taxes on their offshore profits.
That's a far cry from the populist convention chants.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
