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“It’s going to be really difficult to fully flesh out a working government if you’re not able to collect the talent of people who know how to pull the levers of government,” said Democratic lobbyist Zach Williams, a partner at the lobby firm Forbes-Tate.

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When Barack Obama took office in 2009, he imposed strict rules on lobbyists working in the executive branch, barring political appointees, if they were lobbyists within the previous two years, from working for agencies they’d lobbied. The policy hasn’t always worked. The administration ended up issuing several waivers — including one to allow former Raytheon lobbyist William J. Lynn III to serve as deputy defense secretary — prompting critics to say the rule was just for show.

Under fire for loading up his transition team with lobbyists, Trump transition leaders have announced a trio of new restrictions on lobbyists working for the administration since Vice President-elect Mike Pence took control of the operation Tuesday.

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One would ban registered lobbyists from working in the new Trump administration. The second would prohibit officials leaving the administration from becoming lobbyists for the next five years. The third would place a lifetime ban on outgoing administration officials from becoming lobbyists for foreign countries. The exact language of the proposals and how they would be implemented are unclear, and transition leaders did not provide further details.

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Taken together, they could usher in some potentially groundbreaking changes to the way Washington does business — but ethics experts and lobbyists said that there are easy ways to circumvent them and that the lifetime ban on lobbying for foreign governments could be illegal.

“Lifetime bans are really problematic from a legal standpoint because it prevents people from making a living,” said Brett Kappel, a political-law and government ethics attorney. “A lifetime ban on anybody in the administration ever becoming a representative of a foreign government? I don’t see how that would hold up in court.”

The most significant part of Trump’s plan is the five-year ban that administration officials would face if they want to become lobbyists after leaving jobs in Trump’s executive branch. It would significantly lengthen the amount of time departing officials must wait before taking a lobbying job.

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The ban is something Trump proposed on the campaign trail in October, and it expands lobbying-rules law imposing a one-year or two-year ban — often referred to as a “cooling-off period” — on lawmakers and administration officials joining the ranks of lobbyists after leaving government.

“That is fairly meaningful,” said Al Mottur, a Democratic lobbyist at the law and lobby firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck. “It’s not just window dressing. I don’t think it’s a good idea, but I think it’s meaningful. It will reduce people leaving the administration from going into lobbying. If that’s what they want to accomplish, they’ll probably accomplish that.”

But the five-year ban may have the unintentional side effect of deterring qualified people from joining the Trump administration to begin with if they know their job prospects after government could be severely limited.

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It is common for administration officials at all levels to join the law and lobbying industry after leaving government, because of their policy expertise and high-level connections. Such a ban is likely to hurt midlevel agency staffers the most, such as deputy assistant secretaries, who are less high-profile than Cabinet secretaries, who have far more varied employment prospects because of their prominence and top-notch network.

The same phenomenon occurred when Obama was first elected and implemented a ban on lobbyists serving in his administration. At the time, some complained that it was harder to fill jobs with qualified people because of Obama’s campaign pledge.

“When you ban lobbyists from going in, that’s people who understand the interplay between the executive and legislative branch and how to run a government, which is the largest, most important enterprise here,” said Williams, the Democratic lobbyist.

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The five-year ban is also likely to prompt some people to de-register as lobbyists before being considered for Trump administration jobs or to not register as a lobbyists after they’ve left the White House, even if they are involved in similar activities intended to influence public officials.

One sign indicates this may already be happening. A close aide to Vice President-elect Mike Pence, Josh Pitcock — a Washington lobbyist for the state of Indiana — filed paperwork with the Senate on Monday to terminate his status as a federal lobbyist.

Pitcock advised Pence, Indiana’s governor, during the presidential campaign and has lobbied for the state since 2013, earning $280,000 a year to lobby on issues including health-care marketplace exchange rates and resources for the state’s response to the Zika virus, lobbying records show.

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Under federal lobbying laws, people must register as a lobbyist if they spend at least 20 percent of their time lobbying for a single client. Many people who lobby do not register and instead call themselves “consultants” or “advisers” to avoid the lobbyist label. This class of unregistered “advisers” has been rising in recent years as the actual number of registered lobbyists has declined.

“You could see it driving lobbying more underground and people not registering, which would be terrible,” Mottur said. “When you don’t register and you’re advocating, it’s worse than the transparency involved in the registration, where you know someone is a lobbyist.”

“Transparency is a great disinfectant, and sometimes these rules have the reverse result of shadow lobbying,” he added.

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Trump would also impose a lifetime ban on anyone serving in his administration from lobbying for any foreign government, a proposal he touted during the campaign. But it is unclear how such a ban would be implemented.

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Such a ban raises constitutional issues, and would have to be more narrowly tailored to pass muster in the courts,

Kappel said such a ban would have a better legal chance if it were narrowed to apply to employees of specific federal agencies — such as certain State Department or Defense Department officials whose jobs involve working closely with foreign governments.

Observers also noted that some of the ex-government officials Trump is considering for Cabinet positions appear to have violated the rule Trump is now advocating. The most prominent of those include Rudolph W. Giuliani, who runs a firm that has worked for various foreign governments and is reportedly being considered for the secretary of state, among other posts.

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There is no law that imposes a lifetime ban on post-government employment for administration officials, with one exception — certain members of the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office cannot represent foreign governments after leaving the agency. The reasoning is to prevent them from essentially “switching sides” and using the knowledge they gained while representing U.S. interests to weaken or amend the agreement to the benefit a foreign country.