If you’ve been skeptical about the prospects that a new congressional “supercommittee” will identify meaningful reductions in federal government spending, Bloomberg Businessweek offers another reason to worry: Washington lobbyists.
Whatever you may think of this creation—last best chance for serious debt reduction, cynical political dodge—the influence industry looks at the panel and sees opportunity. “Supercommittee means superlobbying,” says John Feehery, who was a top aide to former Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert and is now director of government affairs at Quinn Gillespie & Associates, one of Washington’s most prominent shops.
Lobbying firms representing corporations, nonprofits, and interest groups are preparing for an intense autumn as they try to keep the committee’s axe away from their clients’ tax breaks and government contracts. In better times, lobbyists measured their success by how much cash they could wring out of the federal government. Now they’ll consider it a victory just to hang on to what they’ve got. “To try and preserve the status quo, that requires a lot of work,” says Feehery, whose lobbying clients include News Corp., Sony, and Deutsche Börse Group.
Because of a phenomenon known as “concentrated benefits and dispersed costs,” it will be hard for opponents of these various taxpayer-funded goodies to counter the lobbyists’ work.
