Washington has long been notorious for its revolving doors. A city where politicians, regulators and other officials spin out of one capital building only to return at another as highly paid lobbyists and spin doctors for the people they used to watch over.

As the 2016 election approaches those doors are likely to spin faster. A rash of senior White House staff jumping ship for well-paid lobbying jobs at some of America’s biggest and most controversial companies could pose a threat to open government, governance and transparency campaigners have warned.



Leading the pack of former White House staff accepting the corporate shilling is Jay Carney, President Obama’s former White House press secretary, who this week joined Amazon as its head of global corporate affairs reporting directly to its multibillionaire founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos.

Carney follows David Plouffe, Obama’s former campaign manager and senior White House adviser, who quit the White House in 2013 and joined Uber as senior vice-president of policy and strategy in 2014. Others to have left the Obama administration for the serious cash of the corporate world include Alyssa Mastromonaco, the White House’s former deputy chief of staff for operations, who joined Vice Media as chief operating officer earlier this year.

Samuel Maruca, who was director of transfer pricing (multinational company taxation) at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), joined law firm Covington Burling as partner where he leads on helping multinationals create “tax-efficient structuring”. Shara Aranoff, chair of the US International Trade Commission, also joined Covington & Burling.

Bill Allison, senior fellow of the Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit that campaigns for open government, said the number of senior government officials switching to lobbying roles in big companies poses “a huge problem for transparency”.

“Whether they are going to roles where they will be directly lobby government or go into positions where they are directing lobbying, you have these extremely well-connected people who know the people in government to call to sort out problems for the company,” Allison said. “Seven years into the Obama administration, this is the time when people are leaving and cashing in by joining companies.

“Obama was very clear – he didn’t want people to switch between lobbying and the government, but that’s what is happening.

When he took office Obama, signed an order that the White House said: “closes the revolving door that allows government officials to move to and from private sector jobs in ways that give that sector undue influence over government”.

In the campaign before the 2008 election, Obama said: “I am in this race to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over.”

Allison said Obama’s lobbyist ban, which was watered down following a legal challenge from lobbyists, was “about as solid as swiss cheese”.

Viveca Novak, a director at the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-profit that tracks the effects of lobbying on public policy, said: “People who have held key posts in the administration or in Congress are prized in the private sector because of their connections and their knowledge of how the process works, two things that are instrumental to getting anything done – or undone – in Washington. The private sector believes these former government workers are often worth the princely sums they are paid, given how much money can be at stake when business interests intersect with public policy.”

“To the degree that they are trying to influence government policy without registering as lobbyists – and they don’t have to as long as they are providing ‘strategic advice’, for instance, to a colleague who is doing the more direct lobbying – the public isn’t fully informed about who’s behind an effort.”

Steve Barrett, editor-in-chief of PR Week, said White House staffers are top of big companies’ recruitment wishlists when they are looking for new lobbyist and public relations executives. “There is a long history of people going into business after working at the White House, the skills you learn in the White House are incredibly useful in an in-house PR job,” he said. “There is nowhere like the White House for working under constant pressure and dealing with crises.”



“And, of course, the contact base you build up in that job is a big reason why those people are really attractive to the commercial sector. Politics is a contacts business, so is PR, so is journalism. That’s why so many people make the switch.”

Barrett said White House staff are tempted into the corporate world by the massive increase in salary, bonuses and stock options they will be able to command. “Obviously they are attracted because in government they are not paid that much, this is their chance to cash in on their skills and contacts.”

The salaries paid to Carney, Pouffle and others mentioned have not been disclosed. Barrett said they would be collecting many multiples of their previous pay. Carney and Plouffe were on the White House’s highest pay scale of $172,000.

A survey by PR Week found the average corporate chief press officer’s salary is $340,000. “You can assume the White House press secretary guys will be on a much higher rate than the median figure here – at least twice as much and probably more. The west coast also has the highest salaries regionally,” Barrett said.

The importance of White House connections was shown in Uber’s press release announcing it had hired Plouffe, which included personal praise from the governor of Massachusetts, the mayor of Chicago and the Google chairman, Eric Schmidt. “David is uniquely suited to scale and lead the same kind of insurgent campaign he did in 2008 for a Silicon Valley tech company, bridging the worlds of business and politics,” Schmidt said.