Michael Grunwald is a senior staff writer for Politico Magazine.

The leader of the world’s most valuable company doesn’t typically fly to Washington to fight one obscure amendment to a 2,300-page bill, especially a motherhood-and-apple-pie-style amendment designed to prevent and expose corruption abroad. But back in 2010, ExxonMobil’s then-CEO, Rex Tillerson, was deeply worried about Section 1504 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms, a bipartisan amendment that required drilling and mining companies to disclose any payments they make to foreign governments. So Tillerson and one of his lobbyists paid a half-hour visit to the amendment’s Republican co-author, then-Senator Richard Lugar, to try to get it killed.

Tillerson argued that forcing U.S. oil firms to reveal corporate secrets—such as paying foreign governments—would put them at a competitive disadvantage. He also explained that the provision would make it especially difficult for Exxon to do business in Russia, where, as he did not need to explain, the government takes a rather active interest in the oil industry. But Lugar believed greater transparency could help alleviate the “resource curse” of corruption that plagues so many mineral-rich countries, so he told Tillerson they would have to agree to disagree. Section 1504 stayed in the bill, the bill became law, and the disclosure requirement became an international example: France, Canada and the United Kingdom all went on to use it as a model for similar rules.


Today, seven years later, Republicans confirmed Tillerson as President Trump’s secretary of state, despite allegations that he’s too cozy with Russia. At the same time, the GOP is preparing to try to kill the disclosure rule created under Section 1504, despite warnings from international aid groups that the move would provide a wink-and-nod blessing to hidden corporate payments to petro-thugs. The House is expected to act this afternoon, and since the move relies on a special mechanism for reversing rules enacted late in a presidential term, Senate Republicans will need a mere majority rather than a filibuster-proof 60 votes to follow suit.

So after all of Trump’s promises to drain the swamp, an anti-anti-corruption bill pushed by Big Oil and his own top diplomat might be the first policy legislation to reach his desk.

“It would be a real tragedy for democracy and human rights,” says Lugar, the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who now leads a center in his name focusing on global issues. “It’s hard to believe this would be such a high priority right now.”

The so-called resource extraction rule is not one of President Obama’s most prominent legacies, but one reason getting rid of it is such a high Republican priority is that it’s one of his most vulnerable legacies. That’s because it was finalized only last June, two weeks too late to avoid scrutiny under the Congressional Review Act, a law allowing Congress to strike down end-of-term regulations with simple majorities. The CRA has been used only once before, when Congress erased a Clinton-era workplace ergonomics rule in 2001. But now that the Republicans have control of both houses of Congress and the White House, they hope to use the CRA to wipe out a variety of Obama rules, starting today with this and another measure opposed by extractive industries, a “stream protection” rule restricting discharges from mining operations.

Aside from anti-Obama politics, the other reason gutting the Section 1504 rule is a high priority for Republicans is that their supporters in the oil industry really hate it. In fact, oil interests successfully sued to block an earlier version of the rule, contributing to the delays that pushed the final rule past the CRA deadline.

Yesterday, American Petroleum Institute President Jack Gerard sent a letter to House leaders reiterating the industry’s long-standing complaints that the rule would damage the competitiveness of U.S. firms. He noted that America already has laws like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that specifically ban U.S. firms operating abroad from making illicit payments, describing the additional rule as regulatory overkill. And he said the rule injected the Securities and Exchange Commission into a “social agenda issue” that had little to do with its mission of policing fraud and protecting investors. By striking it down, Gerard wrote, “Congress can reclaim its authority, and in the process protect American companies, workers, and investors.”

Tillerson alluded to those competitiveness arguments in his written responses to Senate questions about his confirmation, noting that since the Section 1504 rule would impose restrictions on U.S.-based companies, part of his job as secretary of state would be to make sure "foreign companies or investors do not get an unfair advantage by cheating or keeping to a lower standard." But groups that specialize in fighting global poverty and corruption argue that those arguments make no sense now that foreign nations have adopted similar rules; in fact, conglomerates like BP, Total, and even Russian oil majors listed in London have already filed disclosures under those rules. A blog post on the issue yesterday from Oxfam America—which sued the Obama administration in 2014 for moving too slowly to revise the rule after the initial effort was struck down in court—was titled “From Russia With Love,” characterizing the GOP effort as a gift to Vladimir Putin and other authoritarian leaders of resource-rich countries.

“Why would Congress want to take a stand for facilitating corruption?” asked Jana Morgan, director of Publish What You Pay USA, a coalition of groups focused on accountability in the extractive industries. “Why would anyone want to help the oil industry hide payments to kleptocracies?”

Senator Lugar pointed out that in 2010, his amendment introducing Section 1504 with Democratic Senator Ben Cardin had a fair amount of bipartisan support. But so far, no Republicans have come out against the resolutions to strike it down, filed by Bill Huzienga of Michigan in the House and James Inhofe of Oklahoma in the Senate. If the GOP can cobble together a majority for the resolution in the Senate, Democrats can spend five hours of floor time delaying it, but they can’t stop it. And nobody seems to think that Trump, who had lunch with Tillerson today, would veto it, regardless of his fiery rhetoric about taking on special interests. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Most of Obama’s most important regulations, like his Clean Power Plan to rein in greenhouse-gas emissions or other Dodd-Frank financial rules designed to rein in Wall Street, were completed early enough to avoid CRA challenges. Trump and the Republicans will have to take on protracted legislative and judicial fights to kill those rules. But there are plenty of less prominent late-term rules that Republicans can take on if they’re willing to devote the floor time, on issues ranging from paid sick days for federal contract workers to energy efficiency for ceiling fans to carcinogenic beryllium in the workplace.

In general, the rules that are most likely to face challenges are the rules that could cause problems for the best-connected Republicans. And the kind of rules that inspire impassioned lobbying campaigns by the CEO’s of megacorporations like ExxonMobil seem unlikely to survive in the current Washington environment.

“It’s a tough political landscape,” says Zorka Milin, a senior legal adviser for the anti-corruption group Global Witness. “The issue of corruption ought to resonate with both parties, but we know this won’t be easy to stop.”