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Last year, Jake Sullivan earned $138,000 for providing part-time “advisory services.”
It’s common for diplomats who leave the government to wear many hats at once. So common, in fact, that very few people notice.
When I began researching Joe Biden’s national-security team, I noticed that every key adviser seemed to hold three different roles at once: a university affiliation, a think-tank job, and a gig advising corporate interests. The last one, usually linked to a consulting firm, was most often left off bios.
The way Washington works is that the university or think-tank affiliations are the label of choice. Radio hosts never introduce former officials by their corporate consulting titles. The jobs where they really earn their living are omitted from campaign, transition, and White House announcements.
I began to wonder how all of these former leaders had so much time to hold down three jobs at once, and why serving corporations after a life in public service was so routine. One former official who was working as a consultant, and has now entered the Biden administration, dismissed my questions out of hand. “I don’t think there’s a big mystery here,” they told me. “People have to earn a living. You can’t have the jobs we’ve had and not multitask.”
But this isn’t just multitasking. The corporate work has an influence on the scholarly and the policy work, in ways that can be difficult to understand because so little is disclosed. Consultancies do not reveal their clients unless forced to through government-mandated disclosure. Corporations don’t discuss who offers consulting work for them or why they need it. And policymakers, even when they have to, divulge as little as possible.
The forms offer an incomplete picture of Sullivan’s advisory work. We know nothing about whom he advised, or how much he earned, before 2019.
Newly released ethics forms show that Biden’s national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, earned $80,000 last year from an academic position at Dartmouth College and $80,000 from Yale. But look to his affiliation with consulting firm Macro Advisory Partners for the less public but more lucrative work. Sullivan earned $138,000 for providing part-time “advisory services.” He worked for Uber, Mastercard, Lego, and big investment groups like Bank of America, Aviva, Standard Life Aberdeen, and Standard Chartered. (The Prospect reached out to all of the companies listed on Sullivan’s forms. Each one declined to comment or didn’t respond.) Separately, Sullivan earned $45,000 from Microsoft for providing advice to its president on policy issues.
Is there something dishonorable about working for big business? Sullivan never mentioned his role at Macro Advisory Partners in his bios on the websites of Yale, Dartmouth, or the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he was also a researcher. His corporate affiliation never appeared in articles he wrote for Foreign Affairs or Foreign Policy, The New York Times or The Washington Post.
At the same time as he was advising these companies, Sullivan was also serving as a top adviser to Biden’s presidential campaign. That’s a seven-days-a-week, 13-plus-hours-a-day job. Yet he still carved out time for the firm.
In public disclosures, administration officials are only required to share sources of income and investments from the past year, and clients from the past two years. During 2020, Sullivan must have appreciated the probability that he would go into the government. As a former senior official, he likely culled his clients carefully, with the knowledge that everything would be made public if he went into office. So the forms offer an incomplete picture of his advisory work. We know nothing about whom he advised, or how much he earned, before 2019.
Undisclosed corporate work is detrimental to policymaking in part because it leads to a limited cross section of policy thinking. “If you’re in a room where everyone comes from a corporation, or a hedge fund, or a BigLaw firm that represents corporations or hedge funds, there isn’t intellectual diversity,” Walter Shaub, who served as President Obama’s chief ethics official, told me.
At least 20 senior Biden officials come from just three business advisories: Macro Advisory Partners, Albright Stonebridge, and WestExec Advisors, which I profiled last year. This has led Politico to describe the administration as “a team of rival consulting firms.” These staffers work on diplomacy, national security, and communications, and there are likely more that we don’t yet know about. Yesterday, the White House revealed that Biden’s senior Middle East director, Ambassador Barbara Leaf, served as a WestExec consultant in the fall.
A consultant’s job is to help corporations, hedge funds, and investment groups, based on what they know or would think may happen in the next administration. Now, firms are hiring former colleagues of Team Biden who can speak to how the administration might approach the world.
Macro Advisory Partners wasn’t hiring Sullivan for his experience writing op-eds and speeches. As Walter Shaub put it, “I suspect his advice goes beyond Dale Carnegie.” A founder of Macro Advisory Partners described Sullivan as a “super-thinker,” who provided “really important judgements for corporate leaders.” Founded by former British spy chiefs, Macro Advisory Partners does work that goes beyond the typical consulting firm. A promotional video for the firm says it’s increasingly serving the needs of Big Tech in grappling with new government regulations.
At its worst, consulting work leads to conflicts of interest. Earlier this month, when hackers broke into Microsoft’s email platform, tens of thousands of organizations, including government agencies, were under threat. Sullivan tweeted that he was “closely tracking” the breach and urged all users to download a patch to address the vulnerability. But since his ethics forms were not published at that point, the public could not have known that he had recently served as an adviser to Microsoft’s executive.
Shaub, the former Obama ethics official, told me that through disclosures and recusals, it’s possible to narrowly address the potential for conflicts. But there is a bigger question, he says: “What kind of message are you sending about the purpose of public service if you’re bringing in people who were peddling influence based on their prior public service?”
A spokesperson for the White House said in a statement that Sullivan “spent the vast majority of his adult life in public service and academia” and “briefly did part-time consulting work for Macro Partners that was centered on his expert analysis of global policy trends.” Exactly. He wore many hats, some more visible than others.
