Congress has outsourced its policy expertise to well-funded corporate lobbyists.

Evidence

In November 2013, National Public Radio aired an excellent story on the subtle mechanisms of corporate domination in state policy, tracking how neoliberal economization of government generates a new vulnerability of legislators to corporate interests. One interviewee explained how lobbyists now write legislation and organize its passage. He offered the example of Citigroup’s authorship of a bill to roll back a piece of financial regulation imposed after the 2008 finance-capital meltdown. “To me,” says Lee Drutman of the Sunlight Foundation, a government watchdog group, “it is just another tick-tock on a story that’s been developing for a long time—that Congress has basically outsourced its policy expertise to the private sector.” As outrageous as this story seems, Drutman says, it’s now unfortunately business as usual on Capitol Hill. “People on the Hill don’t stay as long. You don’t get as good people on the Hill. The expertise on policymaking more and more has moved to the private sector, and it’s moved to represent those organizations and companies who can afford to pay for it, which generally isn’t you and me. It’s big banks and Big Oil and big companies.” Drutman worked as a banking policy staffer in 2009 and 2010, handling financial-overhaul issues, and what he saw around the Capitol was that congressional staff members were stretched incredibly thin. Lobbyists know this, says Drutman, so what they offer lawmakers is an all-in-one package—they’ll help a lawmaker round up cosponsors for the bill, even write talking points, as well as the bill’s specific language. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 457

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the causal mechanism in ‘On Sacrifice’—oligarchic capture—though more formally it feeds the reader’s overall thesis on how state capacity erodes under corporate domination.
• XREF: Connects to Winner-Take-All Politics (Hacker & Pierson) and the broader literature on regulatory capture cited nearby.