Commentary: How a lobbyist ban hurts Trump
Donald Trump’s incoming administration, in an effort to live up to all that “drain the swamp” rhetoric, has announced that it will make all potential White House officials pledge to abstain for lobbying for five years after leaving government. And while this sounds nice in practice, it may be rather bad for the country.
Let’s put aside that there’s no enforcement mechanism for this, meaning a potential Trump appointee could just sign the pledge and then ignore it the second they’re out of government. Let’s also put aside the legal realities that helped sink many of President Obama’s anti-lobbying initiatives.
Because in the immediate sense, the thing that should worry us most is a Trump White House being staffed by people who have no idea what they’re doing.
You don’t really get the sense in Washington that people are itching to join the Trump administration. Former Bush foreign policy aide Eliot Cohen recently wrote in the Washington Post and tweeted that he’s even advising people to stay away from it.
And while that may come as a comfort to Americans who want Trump to be a change agent first and foremost, it also means a lot of experienced civil servants won’t be filling roles that could benefit from their expertise.
In another administration, this wouldn’t be much of a worry. People always want to work in the White House for all the obvious reasons: prestige, proximity to power, etc. This would overwhelm other concerns.
But with this shambolic transition that follows a shambolic campaign, the feeling in Washington is that, should the Trump administration turn into a total disaster, a White House posting could might not have the cachet it typically does. Plus, most of Washington’s conservative wonks and career political aides have a low opinion of Trump, which means it was always going to be difficult for him to attract the GOP’s best and brightest.
Regardless of your opinion of Trump, this should worry you. We need the executive branch to function with some degree of competence, particularly when it comes to matters of national security.
Is it a bit gross that public officials so often pursue lucrative lobbying careers on behalf of corporations and foreign governments? Of course. But that doesn’t change the fact that Team Trump needs to be using everything at its disposal right now to attract top talent.
But Team Trump seems resistant to this message. “They’re angry, arrogant, screaming ‘you LOST!’ Will be ugly,” Cohen, who criticized Trump during the primary, tweeted on Tuesday about a staffing meeting he attended at Trump Tower. It’s an anecdote that rings true.
In a way, you can understand the gloating. Trump won with the Bad News Bears of campaigns. His biggest supporters, the ones who are now in line for the top jobs, are mainly castoffs from the Republican establishment and the national security state. It’s a bunch of people who found their careers in twilight before Trump came along, often for good reason.
But if Trump White House is going to run at all well, he’s going to need people from outside his orbit. He seems to understand this, to some extent, which is why we keep hearing about various Trump detractors getting appointed to this or that cabinet post – Mitt Romney, for example.
However, you still need pros lower down the totem pole. When devising American policies for Southeast Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa or what have you, it’s crucial to have career civil servants you know these places inside and out.
And some of those people might want to become lobbyists somewhere down the line, perhaps when their kids are looking at colleges and the financial realities of tuition become apparent. Even Obama had trouble keeping lobbyists out of his administration, and that was a White House people were actually excited to join.
That’s because lobbyists are often, if not always, experts in a particular field. That’s a big reason why policymakers tend to listen to them: they know what they’re talking about, and have a nuanced understanding of the facts at play.
This is what Trump needs right now. He might hate official Washington and all that it represents. And he might have some good reasons for that hatred. But if he’s looking to administer a halfway-successful government, he’s going to have to work with and hire people who know their way around town.