News Journal:The swamp has taken over Trump’s administration

One hundred days.
If you are a special interest lobbyist in Washington D.C, you have every reason to celebrate. That swamp candidate Trump railed against has suddenly gotten much deeper, with room for bigger and lots more alligators. The feeding frenzy is already breaking previous records, and you can safely bet it is going to get a lot worse.

A couple of weeks ago in these pages, I pointed out how many of the key Trump administration appointments to positions that regulate our banking and financial systems came from Goldman Sachs, the very organization he had demonized in his populist anti-Wall Street campaign.

It is now obvious that broken campaign promises about cleaning up the swamp go well beyond the financial sector. Look at the pharmaceutical industry, for example. According to a recent Gallup Poll, it ranked at the bottom among different business sectors in terms of positive views held by Americans. More than half of those polled had a negative opinion of the industry, and only 28 percent held a positive view.

In the first news conference after his election, President-elect Trump seemed to side with the majority and accused the pharmaceutical industry of “getting away with murder.”

“Pharma has a lot of lobbies,” he said, “a lot of lobbyists and a lot of power. And there’s very little bidding on drugs.” During the campaign, he had vowed to overturn the federal law that forbids the government from negotiating to bring down the price of Medicare drugs.

Really? If you think putting a bunch of Goldman Sachs alumni in charge of our banking and financial systems broke a campaign promise, let me introduce you to Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the next head of the Food and Drug Administration.

Better, let me quote Modern Healthcare, the business magazine of healthcare professionals: “Dr. Scott Gottlieb is by far the most conflicted person nominated to run the 111-year-old Food and Drug Administration. He’s received payments from or invested in dozens of companies with business before the agency, earning millions of dollars in the process.”

Can you imagine Dr. Gottlieb getting tough with pharmaceutical companies about drug prices? Me neither.

To give credit where credit (of some peculiar sort) is due, not all of the alligators in the now-deeper swamp are the result of President Trump’s broken campaign promises. Take Scott Pruitt, who is exactly what was promised. Despite a recent Pew Research poll that found “65 percent of Americans give priority to developing alternative energy sources, compared with 27 percent who would emphasize expanded production of fossil fuel sources,” the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency is a climate change denier who will promote the use of fossil fuels and halt as best he can the development of alternative energy sources.

“Energy companies and their executives have poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into political action committees run by or supporting President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt. And now Pruitt is getting extra help from a new nonprofit that doesn’t have to disclose its donors.

“Pruitt has become a favorite of conservatives as well as oil and coal companies since he has helped lead the legal fight against President Barack Obama’s environmental and climate change agenda — policies Obama’s opponents see as an overreach of federal power and a threat to fossil fuels.”

As the pundits review the first hundred days of the Trump administration, many will zero in on its near total lack of legislative accomplishments. But the newly empowered alligators in the much deeper swamp are capable of doing a lot of damage without any legislative input. The new heads of the Treasury Department, the SEC, the FDA, and the EPA — along with many other heads of cabinet departments and agencies I haven’t yet gotten around to — were all part of or are indebted to the special interest lobbyists who will now, more than ever, help to write regulations that will affect every one of our lives.

The swamp candidate Trump promised to drain has now pretty much taken over his administration. After forty years in Washington, I’m afraid I can spot unmistakable signs of conflict of interest and corruption scandals to come, I suspect on a scale we have never seen before.

Ted Kaufman is a former U.S. senator from Delaware.