Lobbyists expect a banner year in Washington
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump may soon learn just how difficult it can be to drain a swamp.
He banished lobbyists from his transition team and says his hires will be barred from lobbying for five years after leaving the administration.
But Trump’s priorities, including a tax overhaul and trillion-dollar plan to rebuild crumbling roads and bridges, are more than likely to produce a lobbying boom.
“It’s going to be a field day for special interests and for lobbying,” said Craig Holman, a lobbyist for the advocacy group Public Citizen. “Trump is proposing fundamental changes in the federal government and deregulation across the board.”
Holman said he expected corporate America to be “hiring lobbyist armies in force to try to deregulate and pursue the Trump agenda.”
Lobbying has declined in recent years, Holman said, but that’s largely because little legislation has moved because Congress is stuck in a partisan statemate.
“Now it’s a perfect storm, with Republicans holding both chambers and the White House and likely the Supreme Court,” Holman said. “Now it’s going to be full steam ahead.”
Trump has put tax cuts and changing the tax code at the top of his agenda, and many lawmakers think it’s the best opportunity in years for a tax rewrite.
Yet “it’s going to have lobbyists coming out of the woodwork because they’re all going to be defending their particular interests, their tax breaks,” said Rep. Bill Flores, R-Texas, chairman of the House Republican Study Committee.
Trump has also vowed to “unleash” the U.S.’s untapped shale, oil and natural gas reserves.
“And fossil-fuel industry lobbyists right now are popping the corks out of the champagne bottles,” said Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., citing Trump’s Cabinet selections, including the attorney general of the oil- and gasrich state of Oklahoma to head the Environmental Protection Agency. “We are going to see billions spent to undermine and dilute clean air, clean water and public health protections.”
But that’s democracy, said Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., who also said he expected “everyone and their brother” to lobby lawmakers to protect their tax exemptions if Congress takes up a tax overhaul.
“You can’t stop people from exercising their constitutional right to be involved,” Diaz-Balart said.
Diaz-Balart said he found no contradiction in Trump’s hiring big-business executives for his Cabinet while excoriating lobbying for the same interests.