The midterms are rapidly approaching, and while it's unclear whether Democrats will take control of Congress, top Republican staffers are already heading for the hills. The reason is simple: Money. Non-elected Republicans who had even a small part in the crafting of the Republican tax giveaway to the wealthy are now looking to receive the quo for their quid, bowing out of the public sector for new roles in the lobbying firms and law offices who pressed most vigorously for those tax breaks.
And boy, are there a lot of them.
Perhaps the most high-profile departure this year was Mark Prater, the longtime tax counsel of the Senate Finance Committee who joined the tax advisory firm PricewaterhouseCoopers in June. In May, Brendan Dunn, the policy adviser and counsel to the Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, left to become a policy partner at the lobbying firm Akin Gump to focus on tax policy matters.
The staff of the House Ways and Means Committee, which started the tax-writing process, has experienced an exodus of its own.
The short version is that Republicans looking to cash out now can expect to earn a pretty penny as (cough) "experts" in the tax laws they helped write, but come this time next year their talents may be slightly less in demand.
Hats off to Treasury official Drew Maloney in particular, who is couching his own head-for-the-hills moment in the language of my work here is done:
“If you think about administrations historically, a lot of what is accomplished is in the first year or 18 months,” Mr. Maloney said in an interview. “Many staffs spend years and never accomplish what we did at Treasury in a limited amount of time, between tax legislation, financial services reform, Cfius reforms and sanctions.”
It's not that Maloney is getting out while the getting is good, it's that the Republican administration has accomplished so much that it is practically unfair to ask him to stay. Or something.
Maloney in particular will benefit from a loosening of ethics rules under Trump that will allow him to serve as chief executive of a top financial industry lobbying group (in other words, to be a lobbyist) so long as he is merely giving advice to the Trump administration on what their lobbying groups are demanding the White House do, rather than lobbying them to do it—and if you understand the difference between the two things, Mr. Maloney has a bridge to sell you. (No, really, he might actually have a bridge to sell you.)
This is not a new problem, but like many ethical concerns it's been getting rapidly worse as money becomes ever more tied to our elections and, therefore, to each individual political office. There are generally two sorts of people attracted to public service. Some are devoted to it as a way to better the nation and do good; others are attracted to it as an easy path to a mountain of cash after they've put a few years in and have become recognizable faces.
It doesn't tend to be hard to tell which people are which.