#westexec

[odinsblog]

FROM ITS HEADQUARTERS just blocks from the White House, a small, high-powered team of former ambassadors, lawyers, and Obama appointees has spent the past few years solving problems for the world’s biggest companies.

Less than six months into the Biden administration, more than 15 consultants from the firm WestExec Advisors have fanned out across the White House, its foreign policy apparatus, and its law enforcement institutions. Five, some of whom already have jobs with the administration, have been nominated for high-ranking posts, and four others served on the Biden-Harris transition team. Even by Washington standards, it’s a remarkable march through the revolving door, especially for a firm that only launched in 2017. The pipeline has produced a dominance of WestExec alums throughout the administration, installed in senior roles as influential as director of national intelligence and secretary of state. WestExec clients, meanwhile, have controversial interests in tech and defense that intersect with the policies their former consultants are now in a position to set and execute.

The arrival of each new WestExec adviser at the administration has been met with varying degrees of press coverage — headlines for the secretary of state, blurbs in trade publications for the head of cybersecurity — but the creeping monopolization of foreign policymaking by a single boutique consulting firm has gone largely unnoticed. The insularity of this network of policymakers poses concerns about the potential for groupthink, conflicts of interest, and what can only be called, however oxymoronically, legalized corruption.

WestExec does not affirmatively share its clients, and public financial disclosure forms only offer broad outlines. Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, says that government ethics laws written decades ago aren’t equipped to handle a situation in which a single firm launches 15 senior officials. “Yes, they’re employed by the government, I’ll grant you that. But are they actually working for the American people or not? Where does their loyalty lie?” said Clark. “The private sector can in essence co-opt the public sector.”

Read more: https://theintercept.com/2021/07/06/westexec-biden-administration/

[kenyatta]

The secretive consulting firm that’s become Biden’s Cabinet in waiting

WestExec Advisors, which now looks like a government-in-waiting for the next administration, was founded in 2017.

WestExec is loaded with other former top Democratic national security and foreign policy officials who raised money for the Biden campaign, have joined his transition team, or have served as unofficial advisers.

At least 21 of the 38 WestExec employees listed on the firm’s website donated to the Biden campaign; Flournoy alone raised more than $100,000.

Five WestExec staffers — all veterans of the Obama administration — are on leave from the firm to help staff Biden’s review teams for the Pentagon, the Treasury Department, the Council of Economic Advisers and other agencies, which are charged with coordinating the transfer of power between outgoing Trump officials and Biden’s appointees.

Two other WestExec principals were among those who briefed Biden last week on national security: Bob Work, who served as deputy secretary of defense in the Obama administration and was asked to remain on for the first few months of the Trump administration, and David Cohen, a former deputy director of both the CIA and the Treasury Department who is also in the running for a top post.

Meanwhile, Jen Psaki, a former White House communications director under President Barack Obama who went on to work for WestExec, is now advising Biden’s transition team. And two other former WestExec hands, Lisa Monaco and Julianne Smith, are considered potential Biden administration hires.

In fact, WestExec was so prepared to storm a new Democratic West Wing that the firm negotiated a clause when renting its office space that states it can break the lease if members are called back to public service, the American Prospect reported this month.

WestExec is one of a number of Washington consulting firms staffed by former diplomats, military officers and former White House aides that often “serve as the government in waiting for the party that’s out of power,” said Meredith McGehee, the executive director of Issue One, a Washington good government group.

And it’s not the only such firm with ties to the Biden campaign or transition.