Political Strategy. Corporate Advisory. Policy Intelligence.
My latest, on a new approach to influence, lobbying, advocacy, and political strategy in Washington.
For me, it’s a paradigm shift. An evolved thesis of how to win in Washington.
After 20 years at the intersection of politics, policy, and media—the last 15 of them lobbying Congress and the Administration—I’ve come to a few conclusions about the state of the trade:
On this week’s Lobby Shop, we dug into tariffs, trade turbulence, government funding, and the shutdown threat.
This week on The Lobby Shop, the team dives into the storm brewing in Washington as Congress heads into August recess. Josh Zive and Paul Nathanson dissect President Trump’s latest tariff moves and their ripple effects on American manufacturers already navigating a volatile trade landscape. Meanwhile, Liam Donovan and Dylan Pasiuk forecast the high-stakes battle over government funding, with a shutdown threat looming large.
I joined Thomas Hochman and Pavan Venkatakrishnan on Right of Way, alongside Yogin Kothari, to talk through the energy title of the One Big Beautiful Bill, foreign entity of concern rules, and what all of it means for permitting reform.
Donovan: To understand this bill, even zooming up out of the energy title, you have to understand the dynamics within the Republican coalition right now, which is transitional. This is not yesterday’s party. It is not the 2017 Republican Party that gave you the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, even though the core of what this ultimately did was extending those legacy policies.
There’s a “Willie Sutton” issue of how do you offset the things that they wanted to do. There were only so many pools of cash to go after… IRA was a ripe target, especially given the fact that every time you went back and had JCT run the numbers, the cost ballooned. So it went from being a $300 billion tax title in 2022 to a trillion dollars, depending on who you ask, in 2025.
On FEOC, I think there was a misstep by industry seeing this as, “oh, well this is unworkable.” That was a feature, not a bug to the people that wrote it. That was very deliberate… So I think it’s here to stay, and — particularly for stakeholders, for companies and industries — you need to embrace this. Embrace it to the extent that it fits your model, and you can find yourself skating where the puck’s going rather than trying to play catch-up.
Timothy Cama quoted me in POLITICO’s Power Switch, on reporting by Kelsey Brugger, about the wind and solar tax provision that appeared and vanished in the reconciliation bill.
“It was a perfect MacGuffin for the most frenzied point in the process,” said Liam Donovan, a political strategist at the firm Bracewell. He called it a “reminder to industry that things could get worse.”
Adam Wren and Dasha Burns quoted me in POLITICO Playbook on Republican midterm strategy.
Fabrizio and LaCivita — who don’t have a formal partnership — are helping the GOP as a whole avoid messy primaries by getting the president to weigh in early in favor of his preferred candidates. In the process, the operation is consolidating support behind those candidates as they gear up to face flush Democrats who, as Republican strategist Liam Donovan notes, will “beat each other up on personal and ideological grounds for the ensuing year [in] an inversion of the dynamic that has plagued the GOP in competitive races for the better part of the past decade.”