Corporate Special Interests
Big Pharma, defense, healthcare, manufacturers, automakers, the movie industry, even the U.S. Lumber Association — Gina Raimondo’s been captured by corporate special interests. She’s not just bowing to their demands; she’s neglecting the basic duties of her office.
Tell me who your friends are…
When the lobbyists for giant corporations are singing your praises, maybe you should take a long look in the mirror. Secretary Raimondo has nurtured close ties with the corporate leaders in her orbit, and held more than a thousand meetings with CEOs, top execs, and industry trade groups. She’s particularly close to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, one of the most regulation-hostile trade groups in America. In the cheery words of their president and CEO, lobbyist Suzanne Clark, “she is always open to hearing our perspective.”
“I talk to CEOs every week, across industries,” the Secretary of Commerce has said, and her calendar backs that up. Gina Raimondo doesn’t discriminate, as long as your corporate revenue is a hundred million dollars or more. In just one day, she held separate meetings with executives and lobbyists from the finance, defense, telecom, manufacturing, and automotive sectors. Her family has personally profited off some of the world’s most destructive industries, too: her husband, senior McKinsey consultant Andy Moffit, co-authored a report advocating for expanding the practice of hydraulic fracking to extract oil and gas, calling it an economic “game-changer” and touting its GDP, job, and trade benefits.
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She's the Cabinet voice for the American business community and she's taken that role seriously and has embraced it. And as a result, we feel like we have a very strong advocate.
- Al Thompson, lobbyist and Intel VP of U.S. Government Relations
Meeting with corporate executives is all well and good. Industries like these are part of the economy, and they represent trillions in international trade and tens of millions of jobs. “She likes talking to businesses,” says Ravi Kumar, Infosys president. Fine; let her have some CEO meetings, as a treat. But why are the CEOs of General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon so eager to get into the Commerce Secretary’s office? She’s not the Defense Department; she’s not the Senate Appropriations Committee. For that matter, why is she meeting with Eli Lilly, Pfizer, and Merck? She’s not the FDA or HHS. (There’s more to say about Big Pharma below, unfortunately.) What business does Carnival Cruise Line have with the Department of Commerce?
The inescapable conclusion is that Raimondo has been entirely captured by corporate special interests, and her extensive tour of trade groups bears that out. She’s spoken and presented in front of the U.S. Travel Association, the Association of Equipment Manufacturers, the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, the National Association of Home Builders, Autos Drive America, the Payments Leadership Council, the American Hotel & Lodging Association, the U.S. Lumber Coalition, the National Council of Textile Organizations, the World Economic Forum Alliance of CEOs, the Motion Picture Association of America, the Business Roundtable, and many more.
No wonder she calls herself the Biden administration’s “sympathetic ear” to corporate America; she’ll listen to lobbyists from any trade group that will fly her to Vegas (or can come up with the $3.65 Metro fare from Alexandria to her office on Constitution Avenue).
Americans need so much from our Commerce Department. But Raimondo isn’t delivering.
The Commerce Department oversees several important government functions that are critical to the future of our country, and the world. But Raimondo doesn’t seem interested in any of them.
She oversees the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Research and reports like the National Climate Assessment and the annual Arctic Report Card, and the National Climate Assessment will help drive change that will determine our planet’s future. The Biden administration has committed to centralizing the fight against climate change; but without Raimondo in charge of the assessments, that’s a non-starter.
She oversees the U.S. Census, which determines how elected representatives are apportioned.
This in turn establishes the national balance of political power (not to mention the allocation of hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer funds). The ongoing politicization of the Census is a dire threat to representative government, and without support from Raimondo, it’s very hard to maintain Census integrity.
She oversees the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, whose decisions can drive or choke off medical research and the availability of lifesaving medications.
The Biden administration is attempting to use its power to make generic medications more widely available and cut the cost of drugs, but this is much harder to do unless Raimondo throws her weight behind it.
Trade policy under her purview is a driver of manufacturing growth, a primary source of union jobs; and she is in a position to investigate policies based on their impact on workers.
But a review of her schedule suggests that she’s giving these critical responsibilities little of her attention. Climate scientists and climatologists aren’t meeting with her. In contrast, the CEO of ExxonMobil had no trouble getting a meeting. Demographers aren’t meeting with her. Union leaders aren’t meeting with her. Instead, it’s one big-company CEO after another, one trade group after another.
She puts Big Pharma over human lives.
Alarmingly, in 2021, when COVID-19 was still ravaging the world even though a vaccine had become available, Secretary Raimondo pushed back on President Biden’s administration-wide global effort to save lives. Her commitment to protecting Big Pharma’s profits are so strong that she reportedly had to be shut out of a meeting about waiving intellectual property protections to allow the vaccine to be manufactured more widely around the world.
Unfortunately this is no surprise, given her longtime coziness with pharmaceutical companies as governor of Rhode Island. She poured $1 million of public funds into a Johnson & Johnson project that hardly created any jobs. She took thousands of dollars in donations from the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma — the company that deliberately created the opioid crisis for profit.
She and her husband Andy Moffit personally profited off Big Pharma, too. Moffit spent years at consulting giant McKinsey, eventually rising to a global leadership position in the company, even as they were developing Purdue Pharma’s strategy to “turbocharge” opioid sales, stymie drug enforcement efforts, and counter negative press about the consequences of OxyContin. The company recommendedthat Purdue target high-prescribing doctors, and send sales reps to visit them all year long. McKinsey settled state lawsuits against it for $573 million.
After McKinsey, Moffit moved to for-profit healthcare companies in the artificial intelligence space — which constitutes a serious conflict, since Raimondo herself is responsible for regulating the sector. He worked at PathAI, a Big Pharma-financed AI-driven health technology company aiming to outsource disease diagnosis and treatment from human physicians to machine learning models. Congressional leaders expressed their concern about Chinese venture capital investments in the company. Now he’s Chief Business Development Officer at Sword Health, a technology-driven healthcare company that says it is working to find alternative treatments for pain, including AI-driven virtual physical therapy, to reduce dependence on opioids. Given that Moffit’s own firm’s work was directly responsible for exacerbating the opioid crisis in the first place, it’s a little late for that.
Big Tech
Over and over, Raimondo and her staff take meetings with CEOs and execs at Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon — and push for the policies they ask for — even as the rest of the government is investigating them for squashing small businesses, invading your privacy, and endangering your kids.
Learn more about Raimondo's connections to Big Tech.
Wall Street
America’s financial fat cats — like the CEOs and board chairs of shadowy banks and investment firms like BlackRock, Carlyle, JPMorgan, and Bank of America — won’t stop talking about how much they love Raimondo, who’s a former private equity executive herself.
Learn more about Raimondo's connections to Wall Street.
