Making Government Transparent and Accountable
The Sunlight Foundation uses cutting-edge technology and ideas to make government transparent and accountable. Underlying all of our efforts is a fundamental belief that increased transparency will improve the public's confidence in government
The Sunlight Foundation Blog
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Pfizer CEO Gets Raise for Behind Scenes Deals With White House
The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.
Billy Tauzin was bounced from his perch as President and CEO of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) after the deals he helped strike with the White House and Sen. Max Baucus were stalled with the health care bill.
Jeff Kindler, the CEO of Pfizer, the nation’s largest drug company, got a 12.5% raise after he helped block drug reimportation and other cost cutting measures by striking a deal with the White House and Sen. Max Baucus. From the Pfizer statement:
During 2009, Mr. Kindler was actively involved, through both Pfizer and external organizations, in developing and advancing U.S. and global public policies that serve the overall interests of our Company and our shareholders, as well as doctors and patients. These efforts included constructive participation in the U.S. legislative process to advance Pfizer’s goals of achieving a more rational operating environment; improving Americans’ access to quality, affordable health care; preserving the doctor/patient relationship; and enhancing policies that promote innovation. Also, through both Pfizer and external organizations, he has sought to ensure the availability of safe medicines by opposing legislation that would allow for importation of prescription drugs that could jeopardize the integrity of the drug supply chain in the U.S.
For the full story on the deal struck between the pharmaceutical companies and the White House see this article.
(hat tip to Timothy Carney at the Washington Examiner.)
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Researching and Writing the White House-PhRMA Deal
At the end of last year, the White House dropped a new pile of visitor log records into the public, online record. Upon returning in January from a near month long vacation I decided to take a look at these new records. One story that I wanted some more information on was the oft-reported on deal between the White House and the pharmaceutical companies. I started looking up meetings for pharmaceutical executives, PhRMA lobbyist Billy Tauzin and so on. After a bit of searching and reading some articles from last summer two things dawned on me: 1) There was no singular resource that brought together all of the reporting and all of the data in one place and 2) No one reporting on this deal seemed to know that Sen. Max Baucus posts his schedule online.
The second point is what really crystallized the need to write this piece for me. Last summer, I dug into Baucus’ publicly available schedule (which wouldn’t be available if it weren’t for Sunlight’s efforts) examining his meetings with leaders in the health care industry. When I was looking at the White House Visitor Logs, a lot of the dates looked familiar. That’s because they matched up precisely with dates in Baucus’ schedule with the same actors meeting at the White House and with Baucus. Data that was available online all this time showed how closely the White House and pharmaceutical companies were coordinating with Baucus’ office in crafting a health care reform bill. (Continue reading…)
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The Legacy of Billy Tauzin: The White House-PhRMA Deal
More than a million spectators gathered before the Capitol on a frosty January afternoon to witness the inauguration of Barack Obama, who promised in his campaign to change Washington’s mercenary culture of lobbyists, special interest influence and backroom deals. But within a few months of being sworn in, the President and his top aides were sitting down with leaders from the pharmaceutical industry to hash out a deal that they thought would make health care reform possible.
Over the following months, pharmaceutical industry lobbyists and executives met with top White House aides dozens of times to hammer out a deal that would secure industry support for the administration’s health care reform agenda in exchange for the White House abandoning key elements of the president’s promises to reform the pharmaceutical industry. They flooded Congress with campaign contributions, and hired dozens of former Capitol Hill insiders to push their case. How they did it—pieced together from news accounts, disclosure forms including lobbying reports and Federal Election Commission records, White House visitor logs and the schedule Sen. Max Baucus releases voluntarily—is a testament to how ingrained the grip of special interests remains in Washington.
In the 2008 campaign, Obama declared his intention to include all stakeholders as he sought to reform the nation’s health care system, but also supported key Democratic health reform policies. Among these were several that targeted the pharmaceutical industry: Allowing re-importation of drugs from first world countries with lower drug prices and providing Medicare with negotiating authority over prescription drug prices in the recently enacted Part D program. These weren’t just promises, Obama had already voted for both of them as a senator in 2007. (Roll Call Vote 132 and Roll Call Vote 150.)
Set to carry out this agenda were two Capitol Hill veterans, schooled in the monied Washington culture, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and deputy chief of staff Jim Messina. Emanuel was a former fundraiser, Clinton administration official, investment banker and member of the Democratic leadership in Congress. Messina was the former campaign manager and chief of staff to the powerful Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus. Both were known for their unparalleled legislative abilities.
Because of Obama’s decision to develop a plan operating through the legislative process, members of Congress also played key roles. Early on, the pharmaceutical companies were told to deal directly with Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus. Baucus would be the vehicle for the deal worked out behind the scenes by the White House and PhRMA. (Continue reading…)
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Why Look At Former Staffers Turned Lobbyists?
Throughout this year I’ve spent quite a bit of time looking at the connections between powerful players in the health care debate and their former staffers turned health care lobbyists. The reason to highlight these connections is simple: it shows how outside organizations get the ear of key lawmakers.
You and I can’t hire a the former chief of staff to Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, but America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) can. Nor can we hire Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s former chief of staff, but a dozen health care companies can. These people have connections that worth more than gold in Washington. They have the ears of the players in Washington.
Roll Call did some more reporting on this and brought us some crucial information on these lobbyists. In particular, I’d like to point to one relationship that I’ve written about more than once. That’s Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s former chief of staff Kelly Bingel. Here’s a visualization that we created showing Lincoln’s connection to Bingel. And here’s what Roll Call has to say:
In the case of key fence-sitter Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti lobbyist Kelly Bingel is said to have the ear of her former boss. Bingel declined to be interviewed for this article, but a former colleague called her “first on the list” of the Senator’s callbacks.
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“She’s Sen. Lincoln’s alter ego,” a former colleague said.
Organizations with a stake in legislation know that the best way to get the attention of lawmakers is to poach their most connected, most knowledgable staffers and hire them as lobbyists. The ordinary constituent can’t call up a senator and lobby them on a policy issue, but their close buddy and former employee can. Just look at this quote from the Roll Call article:
“It is helpful. We have lines of communication open,” a lobbyist and former Senate Democratic staffer said. “We have access to lay out our argument.”
Without that access you can’t get anything done.
(Most of our coverage of health care lobbyists and the revolving door can be found here.)
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Why read the final health care bill?
As noted below, the Baucus health care bill was finally released in legislative language (soon to be available on Open Congress) — finally. The bill has jumped from 262 pages in plain language to 1,502 page in legislative language. Ezra Klein does a good job of explaining why the bill is so long:…writing laws is not like writing blog posts, or newspaper articles: It requires an archaic, clunky vernacular that spends a lot of time explaining how one piece of text amends another piece of text, and expends a lot of words clarifying the most technical matters at the most granular level. Legal language requires more words than plain English, just as Chinese uses more characters. When people complain that legislation is slightly longer than a very long book, they’re saying something about their understanding of the difference between legal language and plain English, not about the law in question.
This is perfectly true and important to note. Bills that cover a giant issue like health care reform are bound to really long. This is still no excuse for Congress to not read or review the contents of the legislation (not that Klein is making this argument).
The Finance Committee’s original, plain language bill version did a decent job covering the major parts of the legislation. I don’t think any reasonable person is going to be surprised by the insurance mandates or Medicare waste reduction or, if it’s included, a version of the public option. These pieces have been debated and read over and over again. What should be most concerning are the provisions that no one is talking about, the enticements inserted for specific states or specific industries that fly under the radar.
Bloomberg reports on some of these enticements in a report today. Increased Medicaid funding for Sen. Harry Reid’s Nevada, extra money for Medicare Advantage recipients in Sen. Bill Nelson’s Florida and Sen. Ron Wyden’s Oregon, breaks for unions and high risk workers (miners). These are just a few of the enticements inserted into the bill in obscure legislative jargon. We aren’t sure what other nuggets could be out there.
The final bill should be made available for at least 72 hours prior to consideration so that these provisions can be found out and determined if they are harmful or not. There have been too many instances of bills passing in the past with small provisions slipped in that have a large effect.
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Calls and Calendars for Congress?
Yesterday, the Associated Press reported on regular phone calls made from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to CEOs of the nation’s largest banks and big shots in the financial services industry.
While the AP story focuses on the results of the examination after they obtained the records, when it comes to transparency, the fact that the AP was able to obtain the records at all is perhaps even more important. In this case, the AP was able to obtain Geithners phone records through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and in so doing, got a “behind-the-scenes glimpse at the continued influence of three companies…”
Now imagine if members of Congress kept these same kind of records and we could ask for access to them? Or even better: your member of Congress voluntarily shared what they were doing and who they were meeting with you…
We elect them; we pay them; and in the same way our organizational calendars are often shared with our bosses, how much more would you trust your member of Congress if s/he did the same?
(Continue reading…)
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Tracking Lobbyists’ Real Influence
We’ve got some new data to munch on today that we’re excited about. Essentially, this new data helps show us that when lobbyists from a special interest – in this first case, the health care industry – meet with our representatives, many lobbyists represent much more than just the contributions attributed to them if we were to look them up.
It’s important we know lobbyists’ REAL influence on the people we elect to represent us – and before today, that’s not something we could really do.
The deal is that decision makers (i.e. senators) in the health care debate are not only receiving big bucks from members of the health and insurance industries – but also from the numerous individual lobbyists that represent the industries. All of that money “clustered” or “bundled” together is much more influential than any contribution by itself. So, when one of the lobbyists in a cluster walks into a meeting with a representative, it stands to reason that representative listens to them …how do we say… with a more fully tuned ear.
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Senate Finance Committee Amendments
The mark-up of the Senate Finance Committee health care reform bill is currently underway. (You can watch the proceedings on C-Span here.) While much of this morning may be filled with vacuous speech-making by the committee’s members, there are over 500 amendments to be voted on over the next few days. Slate has done an excellent job in creating a Google spreadsheet of every (or almost every) amendment to the bill. Check it out as a guide to the process.
I’d also like to flag this important comment by Karen Tumulty at Time’s Swampland blog:
One of the worst kept secrets on Capitol Hill is that “mark-ups”–the formal public sessions in which legislation is ostensibly drafted–are not where any real work gets done. Where the real deals get cut, and where the favors get traded back and forth, is in private. The mark-up itself is little more than theater, a chance for everyone to give speeches and then march toward a pre-ordained conclusion.
Whatever you’re watching has already been written and planned by the committee members. Lawmakers don’t like to take their messy discussions onto the television screens; sort of a side effect of putting video cameras into a room.
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Defective by Design?
David Moore at Open Congress has an excellent post up explaining how the current life of a bill in Congress is riddled with disclosure holes. I can’t do more than say, go read David’s post. Here’s some choice graphs:
The reason is that the “Baucus Bill” is only a “mark”, not yet an official Senate bill, which means (to summarize reductively) that the digital text that constitutes the .pdf does not make its way off internal government web servers to the official website of the Library of Congress, THOMAS — and in turn, does not make its way to government transparency web resources such as GovTrack and OpenCongress. Before that happens, this mark of the health care bill needs to be reconciled with other Senate committee versions of the same, which will then be put forward for consideration to the U.S. Senate as a whole. Health care reform is leading news coverage & blog analysis of American politics right now, this is a major document in the mix, and there’s not a widely-recognized, user-friendly resource for online examination by the public at large. You should have better access to this info! You should have — at your fingertips — immediate, unrestricted digital access to the full text of any piece of legislation the very moment it’s released publicly by Congress.
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The current Congressional process for publishing data is, to borrow a phrase from the Free Software Foundation, Defective By Design. As we see in many proprietary, top-down systems affecting the public interest, it’s insistently closed-off. Congress’ processes for distributing legislative info is fundamentally broken — it could and should relatively easily be fixed, starting now. Whether or not you support the Baucus markup or the House version of the health care reform bill, we hope you agree that the public has a right to read this important iteration & political volley in the process.
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Baucus’ Lobbyist Complex: The Real Gang of Six?
Just going to repost the Max Baucus Health Care Lobbyist Complex in light of this AP article:
The latest health overhaul plan circulating on Capitol Hill gives health insurers, drug makers and large employers reasons to heave sighs of relief, sparing them the higher costs and more burdensome rules included in other Democratic-written alternatives.
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But health insurance stocks jumped Wednesday at the news of Baucus’ public option-free measure. And privately, industry lobbyists acknowledged that the plan is far more to their liking than any of the other measures currently under discussion, and expressed confidence that it would improve further as senators and Obama’s team continued to haggle over its details as it approaches a Senate vote.
Senators are not an island unto themselves. They have a network of staffers and lobbyists who help inform and craft their policies. Looking at Baucus’ network of former staffers turned health care lobbyists a few months ago raised serious questions about the ability of Baucus to be impartial in his bill making process. With their clients cheering, it’s hard not to think that the final product was written by these former staffers turned lobbyists (along with the former lobbyist turned staffer, Elizabeth Fowler). It looks like this was the real “Gang of Six.”
