‘Lobbyists could have more power than the president of the United States.’

A conversation with Brody Mullins, author of ‘The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government’

Brody Mullins is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who spent nearly two decades at The Wall Street Journal covering lobbying, money, and politics.¹ He is the co-author of the new book The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government.²

This conversation has been condensed significantly and edited for clarity and accuracy. To listen to our full fifty-minute conversation, head here, or search for “Reframe Your Inbox” wherever you listen to podcasts.

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ADAM: This is a very impressive book on a lot of levels, including the pure scope and scale of it. You cover a lot. Can you give us an overview of the arc of this book?

BRODY: There’s sort of several overlapping arcs, but the broad one [is] about the modern lobbying industry and modern corporate power. And to do that, we have to start at the beginning—literally the founding of the country—and have a century of history [of] how companies or industries try to have influence in the government.

The next arc begins in the early 19th century, when companies had tons of power after the industrial age and before the Progressive Era. This is the Rockefellers and the railroad barons and the Standard Oils and JP Morgans of the world, who had tremendous power over consumers. That resulted in the Progressive Era, which then reined in these big trusts with the antitrust laws. From that point through the New Deal and to the Great Society, companies actually had very little influence in Washington.

[In this book] we really focused on the period starting in the 1970s, which is the rebirth of corporate power in DC. In the 1970s, the country had huge a economic downturn. We had stagflation. We had inflation. Corporate profits evaporated. Companies looked around and said, Hey, what happened to our profits? What’s going on with our businesses?

They realized that the government had grown so big and so unwieldy and so involved in business activity that they were spending a tremendous amount of money complying with rules and regulations and dealing with the government. What companies did for the first time in a century was really invest in Washington, hiring lobbyists, making campaign donations, and building their size, presence, and influence.

Most of the book is about the period from the 1970s to the present, when companies have only gotten more and more powerful. That’s the broad arc of industry power that ebbs and flows over time. But we’re really writing about five really interesting lobbyists and their career arcs. Their individual stories teach us about the broader march of corporate power in DC.

Let’s talk about one of those lobbyists, Tommy Boggs. One of the early turning points in the evolution of lobbying from what you describe as [its] “Stone Age” to this post-1970s corporate awakening is a fight that Tommy Boggs and his firm lead to keep the FTC [Federal Trade Commission] from regulating advertising to kids.

Tommy Boggs teaches us about how lobbying used to work. [He] was the ultimate insider in Washington when insider connections and lobbying really held sway.

Boggs grew up in Washington, DC. His dad, Hale Boggs, was a powerful [Democratic] House member from Louisiana. He rose up to be the House minority leader, which is the number two most powerful person in the House of Representatives. In 1972, Hale Boggs went on a fundraising trip in Alaska, and his plane disappeared in a storm. To replace him, the citizens of Louisiana elected Tommy Boggs’s mom, Lindy Boggs, who served for twelve years.

Tommy Boggs grows up in DC. Both parents are members of Congress. John F. Kennedy would come to breakfast and dinner at his house. LBJ was friends of the family. All the important, powerful people in Washington knew the Boggs family at a time—before 1974, before Watergate—when power in Washington was concentrated in just the hands of a few people.

So Tommy Boggs decides to become a lobbyist, and he knows all the key players. He’s basically family friends with the president of the United States, with the House majority leader, with Sam Rayburn, who is the speaker of the House.

You asked about his fight with the FTC. This is a real turning point in the late 1970s. Until that point, consumer groups and labor unions held most [of the] power in DC. Companies didn’t have much influence in Washington.

That was in part because, for most of the century, companies were making money. Corporate profits were high. Companies had good relationships with their employees, for the most part. These companies really didn’t fight the growth of the government. And, in fact, Republicans really didn’t fight the growth of the government. The EPA [Environmental Protection Agency], we forget, was created by Richard Nixon—with the support of many industries.

But things started to change in the 1970s when, as I mentioned, the economy cratered and companies started hiring lobbyists to go to DC. One of the first big fights over what companies saw as over-aggressive regulation, or over-aggressive interference in the marketplace, involved the Federal Trade Commission and its then chairman, who was trying to ban cereal companies from advertising to children.

Many U.S. industries, particularly the sugared cereal industry and the advertising industry, said, Hey, this is going too far. So they hired Tommy Boggs and started this big lobbying campaign against the FTC, and eventually won.

They not only blocked the FTC from implementing the rule, but then Tommy Boggs went to Congress and talked to his friends on the House and Senate appropriations committees and got the committees to stop funding the FTC. The FTC literally had to shut down for a few days because Boggs and the industry had blocked it from having any resources to function.

It was a real beginning of a turning point for corporate America. They went from feeling like they were being abused by over-aggressive bureaucrats, to finally turning the tables on the FTC, pushing back, blocking the regulation, and then humiliating the agency by having it shut down for a few days. It was a big turning point in our story on how companies got so powerful.

One of the transformations that you track around this time is the emergence of CEOs and executives as the “good guys.” Now we think of that as just the way things are: CEOs are thought leaders, celebrities. But that was not always the case. And that transformation happened as corporations gained more power in Washington and started to shape policymaking.

In the 1970s, there was a real anti-corporate feeling in the country. Universities were having protests against companies. People who went to college didn’t want to be business majors. Companies had a really bad reputation.

At that time, the most powerful influence in Washington was Ralph Nader, who ran a consumer group. Nader published a book saying that General Motors was putting out vehicles that were not safe for consumers and causing deaths. GM was one of the biggest companies in the country at the time. We had that phrase, What’s good for GM is good for the country.

Ralph Nader took on GM and won. That shows how much power Ralph Nader and a single consumer advocate could have in government at the time, but also how little influence General Motors had. Because even big companies like General Motors didn’t have lobbying operations in DC.

That all started to change in the 1980s. The stock market took off, and Ronald Reagan was elected president, and companies and industries were really being revitalized. American manufacturing was coming back.

We had these important, kind of heroic CEOs who dominated the landscape. We had Carl Icahn, who took over TWA. We had Rupert Murdoch, who was starting Fox. We had the people at Salomon Brothers, big Wall Street CEOs. Even Donald Trump—that was Donald Trump’s heyday, when he came to power in New York.

That was a period of transition for American CEOs going from really being in the dumps to being seen as American heroes.

Tommy Boggs helped usher in a new era of campaign finance that made legislators a lot more reliant on corporate money. And you guys [along with co-author Luke Mullins] describe this as a “lucrative feedback loop.” Can you explain how that works?

Our book tracks the many cases in U.S. history of well-intentioned reforms backfiring. Members of Congress are constantly trying to rein in corporate influence, the influence of lobbyists. It seems like every time they pass a law, it ends up having the opposite effect.

[One] reform that backfired was the 2002 McCain-Feingold reform. Before 2002, companies found a loophole where they could give millions of dollars directly to the Republican National Committee (RNC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). People thought that that was a problem. Why [are] AT&T and Microsoft and Philip Morris allowed to give millions of dollars to the Republican and Democratic committees? And is that currying favor? Is that corrupting?

And so [senators] John McCain and Russ Feingold introduced a law that would ban those unlimited contributions, which sounds like a great idea. The problem is that individual members of Congress were still dependent on money to run for reelection and unable to get the millions of dollars from the RNC and the DNC. They still had to raise money, but now they had to raise it in much smaller chunks. They had to raise it from individuals—and from corporate CEOs and from lobbyists and from corporate employees.

Lobbyists like Tommy Boggs became real conduits for that money. Boggs had, let’s say, 100 clients, and each one of his clients had 50 or 100 well-paid executives. An individual could only donate—at the time, I think—around $1,000 to a candidate per year. Boggs could go find hundreds of individuals, get each one of them to write a check for $1,000, and then bring those checks to a member of Congress.

So Boggs himself sort of replaced the million-dollar donation that had been outlawed [by campaign finance laws] because he was able to raise money in chunks of $50,000 or $100,000 or more [for] members of Congress.

What that meant is those members of Congress were all of a sudden dependent on him. And so when he came calling on behalf of a client, he was at the very least going to get a meeting and, hopefully for him, get some favor stuck in a bill on behalf of his clients.

That was that feedback loop.

Exactly. Where the members of Congress are dependent on the lobbyists [for campaign contributions], and the lobbyists are dependent on the member[s] of Congress to get legislation for their clients.

I found [Tommy] Boggs’s legacy kind of tragic. [Making] government work for the people was one of the legacies of his father. And then [Tommy Boggs] spends pretty much his whole career rolling back that legacy.

It’s one of the really fascinating personal dynamics in this book. Here’s a guy who grew up in Washington, DC. Both of his parents are leading liberal Democratic members of Congress who were raised during FDR’s New Deal, who came to power during LBJ’s Great Society.

Everything they did was to make government work for the people, [to] create new rules and regulations that sought to help the American people and rein in corporate power, to champion the little guy.

And then Tommy Boggs becomes a lobbyist and spends his entire life dismantling those very same regulations.

That brings us to Tony Podesta, who has a similar trajectory in some ways. He started his career in Washington as someone running really effective “outside influence” campaigns for progressive organizations—fighting the good fight, as I might describe it. His brother, John Podesta, [is] still in the government [and] really a pretty committed public servant over decades.³

[Tony Podesta] is similar to Boggs in that sense: A family member is fighting this progressive fight. And then here’s Tony Podesta, who is either fighting against, rolling back, or just making a lot of money off of [his brother’s work in government].

Tony Podesta grows up in Chicago. Gets involved in politics because his mom followed local politics. He wants to be a big liberal player. Eventually [works] his way to Washington. Volunteers for every major Democratic presidential candidate since 1964, I believe. Really cares about Democratic politics.

Eventually [he] gets [a] job with a group called the People for the American Way. In the 1980s, during the Reagan era, the Christian right has tremendous power. They start trying to ban books around the country and try to get Hollywood to stop airing certain shows that they didn’t like. People for the American Way is this ragtag group, started by Norman Lear, to push back on the well-heeled, influential Christian coalition. And they hire Tony Podesta.

Podesta realizes, We don’t have any money. We don’t have lobbyists. We can’t go head to head with this giant force. So they started more guerrilla tactics, sort of hand-to-hand combat, by going into various states, talking to newspapers, trying to get stories written, trying to rally the American public through TV ads that were done with Hollywood actors. Or get newspaper articles placed here or there, do publicity stunts to get the people on [their] side.

He eventually realizes that that’s a pretty effective tactic, that even if he doesn’t have the resources, if he can rally people and get people to call members of Congress, then he’ll have influence. What’s amazing is that he’s this big liberal advocate. After People for the American Way he works for other Democratic causes, like NARAL and Planned Parenthood. And he plans the first Earth Day, ever.

Then he switches and he starts working for companies. And he realizes that he can make far more money working for companies using the same tactics. He becomes one of the most powerful lobbyists—particularly Democratic lobbyists—after Tommy Boggs. And like Tommy Boggs, he’s battling family members; in his case, it’s John Podesta.

John Podesta took a very similar path to Washington—except that he decided to work for the government. He worked as a chief of staff to Bill Clinton and later high up with Barack Obama. He was running Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and certainly would have been her chief of staff.

Here you have John Podesta fighting for Democratic values, fighting for national health care, fighting for climate change legislation. Meantime, his brother [Tony] is fighting against those things and getting filthy rich in the process.

Let’s talk about one of Tony Podesta’s early victories toward the beginning of his career as a fighter for corporate interests in Washington: the defeat of the health care bill at the beginning of Bill Clinton’s first term. You guys describe that as a “landmark moment” for the industry of influence and also for Democrats.

This is a moment, 1993, when the president of the United States had his top priority defeated by a group of industry lobbyists. Companies have grown so powerful that they’re not just defeating the FTC on some tiny sugared cereal television ban that no one would ever have noticed. Corporate America takes on the top legislative goal of the president of the United States—and wins. And it actually gets worse.

Clinton gets elected in 1992. He takes office in January 1993. He was not elected as the most popular president of all time. But, nevertheless, when presidents first enter office, they enter their “honeymoon” period, and everyone loves them, and they’re [at] the height of their popularity. And that tends to be the time when they can get their biggest priorities done.

Bill Clinton picks, as his top priority, national health care reform, which is the white whale of liberal priorities going back to FDR. For almost a century, Democratic presidents had tried to enact a national health care plan, and every one of them had failed.

Here comes Bill Clinton. It’s his turn, and he’s got a lot of things in his favor. One, it’s his honeymoon, and he’s popular. Two, Democrats had the House, and they controlled the Senate. Three, a Gallup poll showed that 70 percent of Americans didn’t like their health care systems at the time, so you’ve got the support of the public.

And finally, the year before, something like two dozen Senate Democrats had their own national health care bill. Even a good number of people in the Republican Party supported the idea of a national health care bill. It seemed like the cards were lining up. It seemed like a deal could get done.

Clinton starts pushing the bill, and all of a sudden [the] health insurance industry gets involved. The industries hire a bunch of the lobbyists: Tommy Boggs, Tony Podesta, Charlie Black, Paul Manafort. They’re all lobbying against this bill. The industry spends, in that year, about $100 million lobbying against the bill.

They end up destroying the bill. The bill doesn’t even come close to getting passed. There’s never a vote in the House. There’s never a vote in the Senate. It was a huge victory for the industry.

It really altered the course of Bill Clinton’s presidency. He came in trying to be a champion of the liberal ideology of the Democratic Party, following along lines of FDR and LBJ. He ends up getting crushed and switches. He becomes much more of a centrist. He works with businesses. He enacts a whole bunch of business and Republican priorities, including welfare reform; NAFTA, [the] big trade bill; [a] balanced budget.

He did all sorts of things that companies wanted. He ended up being a pro-business, moderate president. And so it really shows that his butt kicking in the national health care fight altered the trajectory of his presidency.

One of the interesting legacies that you talk about in the book is how “going to K Street”—the catch-all term for working in the influence industry in Washington—becomes the new path for folks who want to influence and shape policy, who want to access power. In previous decades it might have been to go work for the government. Can you talk about that evolution?

In the 1960s, when JFK was president, he called for the “best and the brightest” to come to Washington, DC, to change the world for the better, to help Americans, to fight against big, well-heeled interests, on behalf of Americans. The government had the power.

As corporations gain power, as evidenced by the Clinton health care example, industries and lobbyists could have more power and influence than even the president of the United States. A lot of the best and the brightest, who were drawn to Washington, DC, who wanted to be powerful and make money and be prestigious, realized the best way to do that may not be working as a low-paid aide on Capitol Hill for some subcommittee chairman, but to go become a lobbyist.

One of the people we write about is a guy named Evan Morris, who grew up loving the Clintons and wanting to work in the Clinton White House and be part of [the Clintons’] fundraising machine.⁴

In law school, he took an internship at Patton Boggs, which was the top lobbying firm in DC for more than a decade. While interning there, he had a very similar experience to the Clinton health care bill.

One of Patton Boggs’s lobbying clients, a defense company, was being targeted for a huge cut to a tank program. They made a tank called the Crusader. They got about $2 billion a year to make [it]. [But] the Crusader was overweight. It was behind. It wasn’t meeting its goals. And George [W.] Bush came in and said he wanted to eliminate the Crusader—which is obviously a big problem for the defense contractor.

Over the course of the summer, Evan Morris worked with the lobbyists at Patton Boggs. What they did was a bait and switch. They allowed Bush to kill the Crusader, but then they went to Capitol Hill, they talked to their friends who represented states that manufactured the tank, and basically recreated the exact same tank program, under another name with the same amount of money, elsewhere in the government. Bush pushed down one tank program, and boom, another one pops up.

Evan Morris realizes that, Wow, it’s the lobbyists who have the power. The lobbyists for this company beat the president of the United States. He realizes that power is not held by government officials, it’s held by lobbyists.

Ultimately, when he graduates [from] law school, he switches plans. Instead of trying to be the next Bill Clinton or work in a White House, he becomes a corporate lobbyist.

A sentence toward the end of the book felt like it summed up how we got to Trump. You write, “Lacking the shelter of strong unions and assertive federal regulators—protections that had been gradually whittled away by Tommy Boggs, Black Manafort [Charlie Black and Paul Manafort’s lobbying firm], Tony Podesta, and other Big Business lobbyists—these workers were unguarded against the free market’s destructive potential.”

Trump’s [2016] victory was a shock to a lot of people, very much including me. But when you look back on it, you can see a natural progression to that point—you whittle away consumer protections, environmental protections, the role of the federal government in protecting people, for decades. People are going to notice that.

I think that’s exactly right. I think that companies, to their credit—if that’s the right way of phrasing it—accomplished their goal, which was to whittle away at the government, to destroy labor unions, to reduce the power of consumer groups and environmental groups. And now they are the king of the hill.

When I first came to Washington, I thought that the way lobbying works is Tommy Boggs’s [fight] with the FTC: A federal regulator proposes a regulation, and companies hire lobbyists to try to change it or influence it or water it down or block it.

But so much of lobbying right now is companies against companies. I mean, companies are the most influential forces in DC, and now companies come in to Washington to try to create laws and regulations and rules that help themselves in the marketplace. They create barriers to entry or block or hurt rivals.

Because corporations have so much influence and because regular Americans have so little influence, or feel like they have so little influence, now we see these progressive Democrats returning to their anti-business roots. And, more interestingly to me, you see these populist Republicans who are starting to turn against corporate America.

I think that’s what a lot of the Trump voters were. This is not the pro-corporate Ronald Reagan Republican Party. These are people who don’t like companies and feel like they’re being abused and are out of power and being hurt by Washington and the establishment.

Even since Trump has left office, that evolution has continued. We see more and more Republicans, like Josh Hawley of Missouri, who are partnering with really liberal senators like Elizabeth Warren on legislation that would cap credit card fees or make it easier for workers to join labor unions or block big bank CEOs.

There’s just the beginning of this feeling where there’s a little bit more emphasis on what’s good for workers, and not instinctively doing what’s good for corporate America. We’ll see where this goes. This is sort of a work in progress. Companies still have far more influence in Washington than anyone else. But we’ve passed the height of their power.

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📚 Brody’s book recommendations:

• What It Takes: The Way to the White House, by Richard Ben Cramer

• The Devil at His Elbow: Alex Murdaugh and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty, by Valerie Bauerlein

1. https://www.thewolvesofkstreet.com/about-the-book

2. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Wolves-of-K-Street/Brody-Mullins/9781982120597

3. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/nov/06/inflation-reduction-act-climate-crisis-congress

4. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rise-and-fall-of-a-k-street-renegade-1487001918