The head of the group aiding the presidential transition process is urging President Barack Obama to consider killing his executive order restricting lobbyists from serving in the White House, saying it’s provided limited benefits and could hurt the next administration.

The nudge provides a quandary for Obama.


Nixing the order could be seen as an acknowledgment that he failed to uphold one of the major pledges of his 2008 campaign, or that the change he brought to Washington wasn’t built to last. But punting the issue to his successor, especially if it’s Hillary Clinton, would risk thrusting upon her the bad optics of welcoming lobbyists with open arms.

For Max Stier, the CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit that’s working with both campaigns and the White House to facilitate an orderly transition of power, it comes down to math.

Clinton or Donald Trump will have roughly 4,000 jobs to fill, and they would benefit from anything that greases that pipeline.

“There are political optics reasons why there’s a lot of attractiveness to make the ethics bars really strict,” said Stier, who previously served as a deputy general counsel in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, in an interview. “But in governing, you’ve got to be careful that you’re not losing on actual talent.”

He added that there’s “a real advantage” to the outgoing president clearing the decks for his successor. “It’s important because you want the new president, in my view, to have as much latitude to do what he or she thinks is best without having to worry” about the backlash, Stier said.

But Obama also has his legacy to tend to. In 2008, the then-senator repeatedly pledged that lobbyists would not run his White House and on his first full day in office in 2009, Obama issued two executive orders and three presidential directives that included strict limits on the work that former lobbyists would be able to do in his administration. Obama officials credit the rules with keeping the administration free of conflict-of-interest scandals, unlike his recent predecessors.

Though he no longer thinks the costs outweigh the benefits, Stier himself praised the executive order in 2009 as a guarantee that officials are “committed to public service, not their private enrichment."

Critics, however, immediately claimed that Obama undermined his own restrictions by quickly issuing a waiver and nominating former Raytheon lobbyist William J. Lynn to be a deputy defense secretary.

Since then, some good-governance types have argued that Obama’s strict guidelines have simply pushed the still-robust art of lobbying into the shadows and made the influence game harder to track.

“These rules were created for assuring the public that there wouldn’t be lobbyists manipulating the political system, even though that is not really prevented by the executive orders,” said Sarah Bryner, research director at the Center for Responsive Politics. “Lobbyists have, we think, found a way around the rules.”

She pointed to the fact that the number of registered lobbyists has plummeted over the course of the Obama administration, from 15,000 in 2007 to around 9,700 in 2016. Watchdogs have debated the cause of this. Some point to Congressional gridlock to explain less need for lobbyists, while others have worked to document “shadow lobbying” by people who operate just below the threshold for registering. That kicks in when someone spends more than 20 percent of their time lobbying.

A POLITICO investigation late last year uncovered a number of Obama appointees whose lobbying activities both before entering and after leaving the administration didn’t meet spirit of Obama’s ethics rules, which also bar people from lobbying their former colleagues two years after leaving government.

While the White House declined to discuss whether Obama would consider dropping his ethics standards, current and former officials say they're proud of the results.

"This president has done more to reduce the influence of special interests in Washington than any Administration in history," said White House spokeswoman Brandi Hoffine, in an e-mail. "On his first day in office, the President issued an executive order designed to reign in the influence of lobbyists and shut down the 'revolving door' that carries special interest influence in and out of government by prohibiting executive branch appointees from accepting gifts from lobbyists, prohibiting former lobbyists from working on issues on which they lobbied, and by preventing appointees from lobbying the White House after working here."

And other ethics experts say it would be rash move to scrap Obama’s restrictions all together.

Norman Eisen, who policed Obama’s rules as in-house ethics czar until 2011, acknowledged the law should be tweaked. But the solution, he said, “is not to throw it out. The solution is how do we expand, to close these loopholes.”

Indeed, other watchdog groups are actually laying the groundwork for backlash if the next president doesn’t broaden Obama’s reforms, much less keep them.

“I’m quite confident that the next administration -- which is going to be the Hillary Clinton administration -- is going to hang on to the executive order,” said Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist with Public Citizen.

He pointed to Clinton’s op-ed with Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) supporting her bill aimed at reducing Wall Street’s influence by increasing how long officials with ties to the private sector must recuse themselves from oversight affecting their old firm. Holman said he’s also been reassured by discussions with members of Clinton’s policy staff, whom he declined to name.

“I see her strengthening [Obama’s] rule and expanding it to everybody and perhaps even applying it to a larger category of officials,” Holman said.

Neither the Clinton nor Trump campaigns responded to questions about ethical considerations for appointments, but some experts said it was hard to imagine how they’d fill their administrations under Obama’s standards – Byrner of the Center for Responsive Politics said she’d be “astounded” if they kept them.

Either of them could simply wipe out Obama’s orders with the stroke of a pen, but that could be bad optics, especially for Clinton, who has most recently struggled to dismiss questions about inappropriate influence on her State Department by donors to the Clinton Foundation.

Trump has campaigned on his independence from special interests, backed up by his ability to self-fund – but his pledge to tear up all of Obama’s executive orders on Day One could give him cover when the ethics rules hit the shredder.

The debate about the future of Obama’s executive order also reveals a broader disagreement among watchdogs about how effective his administration has been at achieving a shared goal of filling the government with knowledgeable public servants who deserve the voters’ trust. While some say that’s exactly what it’s done, others suggest it’s created an unrealistic ethical sheen while making conflicts of interest harder to spot.

Over his two terms, Obama has issued four waivers to exempt individuals who had been registered lobbyists from the rules. Depending on whom you ask, that’s evidence that there’s no need to populate the bureaucracy with lobbyists – that Obama was too rigid with his rules and kept good people out of his administration – or that there have been plenty of more insidious ways for people in the influence industry to skirt his requirements.

“It’s worked,” said Holman, pointing to the unprecedented lack of corruption prosecutions or even grand jury investigations into Obama administration officials. He also dismissed suggestions that K Street is a necessary feeder for government expertise.

“One would have to believe that us lobbyists are just such geniuses that the administration is going to suffer if we don’t get appointed, and that is just baloney,” Holman said. “There are plenty of competent people in Washington, D.C., and throughout the country that may or may not be lobbyists.”

Eisen said he hopes to see the next president expand on Obama’s transparency precedent beyond the executive order, like extending his policy of posting the White House visitor logs to the cabinet agencies.

That type of thing might be more consequential than hiring restrictions, Bryner said, noting that even under Obama, the practice of meeting off campus – notoriously at a coffee shop across the street from the White House – has kept an unknowable number of meetings off the logs.

“What’s critical is that information about who’s meeting with politicians, when they’re meeting with politicians, and what their financial stakes are in the outcomes of these political decisions are easily accessible in the public record,” she said.