It’s no secret that despite Trump’s campaign bluster about being immune to influence by the Koch Brothers, they have effectively become the Administration of 45th President of the United States.
From VP Pence’s well-documented Koch connections to the appointees now serving obscure positions within agencies, it’s hard to get a sense of just how effective the Koch network has been at infiltrating the administration.
Fortunately, Public Citizen gives us a good idea with its new report, aptly titled The Koch Government, which identifies 44 Trump appointees with ties to the Kochs. In some cases, like Mick Mulvaney and Rick Perry, it’s politicians whose campaigns received Koch donations now serving in leadership positions. Current CIA Director Mike Pompeo, for example (who is also rumored to be the replacement for Tillerson at the Department of State) represented the Koch’s hometown of Wichita, Kansas and earned a reputation as the billionaire brother’s “favorite congressman.”
Then there are the people who worked for the Koch Foundation before arriving in the administration. Some of the folks Public Citizen takes a look at were officially hired Koch lobbyists, while others acted as unofficial lobbyists employed by the vast web of nonprofits funded by the Kochs.
The web is wide and diverse: at the EPA, we’re talking about Pruitt, who’s worked in concert with the Kochs, Samantha Dravis, who was counsel for Koch’s Freedom Partners, Charles Munoz, who was a field organizer for the Koch’s Americans for Prosperity, and more.
Meanwhile, over at Interior, Koch ties manifest in the background of people like Freedom Partners’s Gary Lawkowski, the Charles Koch Institute’s Daniel Jorjani and Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Doug Domenech (and their employee, Kathleen Hartnett White, who is likely to soon be confirmed as chair of the Council on Environmental Quality). At DoE, it’s Koch-donation-receiving Rick Perry, Koch lobbyist Mark Menezes, and people employed by Koch-funded groups like Travis Fisher, Doug Matheny and Alex Fitzsimmons.
And it’s not just the Pruitts and Perrys at EPA and DOE, where we would expect to find people to advance oily Koch interests. The Koch network has also installed operatives at the Department of Education to carry out the Kochs’ longtime agenda against public education under the guise of promoting charter schools.
Public Citizen’s report also includes a list of 16 major targets for the Trump administration, as detailed by the Koch’s Freedom Partners “Roadmap to Repeal” deregulatory agenda document released in January.
Of the 16 issues, the Kochs can count nine clear wins, including rolling back the Clean Power Plan and exiting Paris, which Pruitt’s started, rescinding the moratorium on federal coal leases, repealing the Stream Protection Rule, killing an overtime pay rule, and more. There’s one likely win, 4 issues still unclear, and only 2 losses.
Half the Koch’s wishlist already checked off? And people say Trump hasn’t accomplished anything!
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