Watchdogs concerned about some Biden appointees’ opaque consulting work

A number of senior officials joining the Biden administration have been working in consulting firms with opaque client lists, which ethics experts warn may undercut President Joe Biden’s efforts to ensure Americans have faith in the independence of its leaders.

In choosing his cabinet-level appointees and agency heads, Biden has demonstrated a preference for veterans of government service, many of whom are returning to control the levers of power after holding private-sector jobs as Washington consultants for corporate clients.

Many of Biden’s picks have passed through the revolving door between public and private work, but have done so without ever appearing on the official registry of K Street lobbying firms, which must follow strict reporting rules that require them to disclose to the U.S. government the names of clients and the government agencies they contact. Instead, ethics experts say many have navigated the murky alleyways of corporate consulting and geopolitical risk management — work that can occur in secret, often protected by confidentiality agreements.

Among the boutique D.C. firms from which Biden appointees have come are Macro Advisory Partners, Albright Stonebridge Group, and WestExec. These firms and others like them tout their insider connections and the government experience of their partners, who serve as consultants for a range of companies. While not performing direct lobbying functions, consultants offer these firms’ clients guidance and advice about navigating federal policy and regulations. If the guidance is used to directly or indirectly influence public policy, the practice is referred to by ethics experts as “shadow lobbying.”

“They’re not necessarily making a lobbying contract or doing the direct work of what would be defined as lobbying under the [Lobbying Disclosure] Act, so they don’t have to file lobbying disclosure reports,” said Delaney Marsco, ethics legal counsel for the Washington-based nonprofit Campaign Legal Center. “So that’s a problem. That’s a loophole.”

Instead, these firms operate as consultants — guiding private entities through the massive government infrastructure and leveraging knowledge gleaned during their prior roles to inform their clients’ decisions — without directly lobbying the government. This model allows the consultants to avoid disclosing clients, unless they later go on to become public officials.

And even consultants who go on to public service aren’t required to disclose clients if they were bound by a nondisclosure agreement or if their former clients paid them less than $5,000. They also aren’t obligated to disclose clients if they only played a general strategic advisory role at the firm.

“We now have these private entities that don’t have a lot of transparency,” said Virginia Canter, chief ethics counsel at the nonpartisan good-government group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). “It would be better if we knew more about them, but we’re not there yet.”

Both political parties have to various degrees crusaded against the “swamp” of Washington — the idea that insiders have for years dominated the corridors of power to benefit the wealthy and well-connected, often at the expense of regular Americans. And in recent decades, former officials on both sides of the aisle have gravitated toward the kind of consulting that does not require lobbying disclosure.

During the Trump administration, close allies of Donald Trump including former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and Trump confidant and fundraiser Brian Ballard ran lucrative lobbying businesses, and hundreds of other lobbyists revolved around the Trump administration despite Trump’s pledge to “drain the swamp.”

For its part, the Biden team has vowed to be “the most ethically rigorous administration in American history,” Biden transition team spokesperson Andrew Bates wrote in a statement to ABC News.

“Every cabinet member will abide by all disclosure requirements and strict ethics rules — including recusals when appropriate,” Bates said.

Disclosing former clients

On his first day in office, Biden tried to speak directly to those concerns by issuing ethics rules that he said “every appointee in every executive agency” must sign. Similar to the ethics rules of the Obama and Trump administrations, Biden’s ethics order prohibits officials from dealing with issues “involving specific parties” or ones “directly and substantially related” to a former employer or former client for the next two years, and prevents officials from lobbying the executive branch or registering as foreign agents for two years after leaving the administration.

In addition, Biden’s ethics order attempts to curtail his officials’ post-government “shadow lobbying” by prohibiting them from communicating with administration officials for two years after leaving their posts.

Meredith McGehee, the executive director at the bipartisan government ethics advocacy group Issue One, said that given what she called the Trump administration’s lax ethics practices, it is “critically important” for the Biden administration to “go above and beyond” existing legal requirements to do more “robust disclosure.”

“There is an urgent need for his officials to bend over backwards to ensure the public that first and foremost in the minds of decision-makers will be the public interest and not their past relationships,” McGehee said.

Several of Biden’s appointees have taken the added step of disclosing their former clients. But at least a couple high-ranking members of the new administration who have previously…