Donald Trump’s Swamp Gets Murkier

Now that he is president-elect, Donald Trump’s anti-corruption promise to “drain the swamp” of Washington lobbyists and powerful insiders seems to be rapidly dissolving in the swamp itself. An untold number of lobbyists and special interest players have been helping the Trump team’s transition to the White House, their path made easier, according to news reports, by vague and porous ethical standards.

The most mischievous of these is a rule by which applicants merely have to de-register as government lobbyists one day to be ready the next for transition and administration jobs. It’s not hard to imagine a lobbyist taking down his shingle on Monday and joining the Trump team on Tuesday, eager to rewrite government regulations that cover his former clients’ areas of interest.

“I’m calling it the shadow lobbying society,” Paul Miller, president of the National Institute for Lobbying & Ethics, told Politico, the news site, in predicting that more and more lobbyists will de-register if that’s all it takes to join the Trump administration.
According to Politico, the transition team has deviated from the tough code of ethics that Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor, sought to put in place before he was purged as transition leader. That code, adapted from Obama administration standards, would have barred lobbyists from transition work involving all matters on which they had lobbied the previous year. Aides say Vice President-elect Mike Pence, Mr. Christie’s successor, would like to get rid of lobbyists, too. But so far, no detailed ethics code, like the one established by the Obama transition team eight years ago, has been offered, and there is no public confirmation that lobbyists, with their power to trigger big campaign donations, are being reined in.

For all of Mr. Trump’s certainty as a candidate that he could reform the capital’s influence “swamp,” he quickly displayed uncertainty as a president-elect who must master the ways of Washington. “Everybody’s a lobbyist down there,” he said in near wonderment on CBS’s “60 Minutes.” “We’re doing a lot of things to clean up the system,” he contended before concluding, “I mean, the whole place is one big lobbyist.”

Controlling lobbyists, with all their arcane knowledge of government, is a challenge as old as the spoils system. Executives regularly cross into government to run agencies that control the industries they represented, then pivot back out to lobby when the power shifts.

Mr. Trump’s transition team officials have been touting their proposal to bar administration officials from lobbying on their specialties for five years after service. It’s a good idea, but it ignores the bigger responsibility to be on guard while forming the new government. A question hangs over Mr. Trump’s grandiose campaign promise. Is his transition team truly draining the swamp or flagrantly deepening it?