Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz
Sullivan left Macro Advisory Partners in July in response to the Prospect’s questions about his work for the firm.
The Biden administration has emphasized through its early actions that consultants are every bit as insidious as lobbyists. While lobbyists are required to register with the government, former officials have increasingly flocked to the amorphous space of consulting. They help companies by doing everything except formally lobbying policymakers, all without having to face any lobbying restrictions.
This type of “shadow lobbying” is how Jake Sullivan earned a living, before joining the Biden White House as national-security adviser.
As part of his ethics pledge conceived in his first days in office, Biden issued a shadow-lobbying ban for former officials. The pledge bars departing staff from working for a year as consultants on the very policies they’ve worked on in office. Virginia Canter, chief ethics counsel of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, hopes that the rule will act as a deterrent for aides who seek to play the influence game. “It always seemed to some that there was a gap in the rule. If you could help behind the scenes, it didn’t capture you as a lobbyist, but you were profiting as much as a lobbyist, or maybe even more,” she told me.
The shadow-lobbying ban will ensure that departing Biden officials act with integrity, but there remain concerns about what appointees were doing before joining the White House. Many Biden advisers were recently providing advice to big business; indeed, Jake Sullivan was advising some of the biggest businesses in the world.
Starting in 2017, Sullivan worked at Macro Advisory Partners, the London and New York–based consulting firm that earns some $37 million a year. According to its website, it “provides leading investors, corporations, and governments with the strategic insights required to navigate the intersection of global markets, geopolitics and government policy in a volatile and complex world.” Sullivan left Macro Advisory Partners in July in response to the Prospect’s questions about his work for the firm.
Sullivan’s recent corporate work could undermine Biden’s intention to create a “foreign policy for the middle class.”
The law has long required all appointees to the executive branch to disclose their incomes and financial holdings within 30 days, which are then certified by the particular agency’s attorney. The Office of Government Ethics then posts the forms online. Nearly two months into the Biden administration, Sullivan’s documents have yet to appear there. After the Prospect’s repeated inquiries, a White House spokesperson said that Sullivan’s forms will be available to request on March 19.
Experts expressed concern at the sluggishness with which the administration is releasing necessary ethics forms. Richard Painter, the top ethics official in the George W. Bush administration, explained that posting the forms publicly is an urgent priority. “The National Security Council is sensitive. You want to get that information pretty quickly,” Painter, who is now a professor of corporate law at the University of Minnesota, told me.
In his disclosure, Sullivan will likely note only the individual clients he worked for. Painter says that from an ethics perspective, a more transparent approach would be to disclose the firm’s entire client list. “I’d like to see more about who the clients are, because you only just discuss your particular clients that you work with, but there are a lot of clients at the firm,” he said.
What makes Macro Advisory Partners unique among consultancies is that the firm doesn’t just advise corporations but also state-owned entities, including sovereign wealth funds and even governments. “None of [Sullivan’s] clients were governments or sovereign wealth funds,” a White House spokesperson told the Prospect.
The firm is structured so that a consultant like Sullivan might be insulated from even knowing who he was providing strategic guidance to. He might deliver presentations or policy papers without knowing exactly which clients will receive them. Even client calls may have a layer of padding to obscure who was on the other end of the line. Nondisclosure agreements ensure that consultants like Sullivan have an excuse to disclose as little as possible.
Those familiar with Sullivan’s corporate work believe that, even in his forthcoming financial disclosures, he’ll do everything in his power to conceal his clients. “Jake Sullivan is a master at covering up his bad behavior inside and outside of government. He never gets caught because he knows how to cover his tracks with legal gymnastics,” a former Obama official told me. “He throws the press off his trail with leaks that keep them dependent on him for inside scoops and wary of crossing him.”
The firm does not share specific names, but the ethics forms of other Biden officials who worked at Macro Advisory Partners give some sense of its clientele. Denis McDonough, the secretary of veterans affairs, worked as a senior adviser at Macro Advisory Partners. He disclosed in January that he had consulted for Apple, Mastercard, the financial services company Charles Schwab, the German communications giant Deutsche Telekom, the global accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, and the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline.
Macro Advisory Partners trades on its proximity to power. For example, Biden’s nominee for CIA director, Bill Burns, worked for the firm as a member of its Global Advisory Board. In that capacity, Burns was further insulated from individual clients, so none were disclosed in his personnel forms. Burns will resign from the consultancy upon confirmation. In the meantime, Macro Advisory Partners continues to list Burns as a member on its website as he awaits a Senate vote.
The Prospect previously reported that when Uber wanted to make sure drivers weren’t classified as employees in California, they hired Jake Sullivan to represent the rideshare giant in behind-the-scenes negotiations with labor leaders. “He gathered input from union officials to help understand their goals, priorities, and needs, to see if an agreement could be reached,” according to a White House spokesperson. “He made calls with labor leaders to ask what kinds of outcomes they were seeking.”
All of this corporate work could undermine Biden’s intention to break down the barrier between domestic and international policy, in what he calls a “foreign policy for the middle class.” Sullivan developed the idea while out of office, and the rhetoric featured in Biden’s landmark foreign-policy speech at the State Department.
“We’re not about trying to make the world safe for multinational investment; we’re about creating jobs and raising wages here in the United States,” Sullivan said recently. And once his disclosures are publicly available, we’ll be able to judge that more clearly.
