The Democratic diaspora: many former Clinton and Obama aides now work in Big Tech, such as Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, seen here in 2012
Credit: Haraz N Ghanbari/AP
Silicon Valley Democrats return from exile
There are certainly many friends to choose from. Donald Trump’s surprise victory in 2016 caused a Democratic diaspora, with particular migration to deep-blue Silicon Valley. Now many of those old hands, often referred to as Obama alumni, are coming home, bringing new connections and potentially new sympathies.
That is what Moran means by a "revolving door": clubbable apparatchiks shifting seamlessly between the corporate and regulatory worlds, forming a cosy loop of influence and back-scratching.
Biden has so far given mixed signals about his own priorities. Despite feuding with Facebook and calling for its legal protections to be "immediately revoked", he has never made tech a focus of his campaign. In the Democratic primary he and his now vice president Kamala Harris, who got her political start in San Francisco, won support from 59pc of known tech industry donors, according to CEPR’s tally.
The conflict broke into the open last month when rumours began to spread that Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google, was being considered for a post.
Two of Biden’s transition aides once worked for Schmidt’s philanthropic foundation, and Schmidt himself has argued that the coronavirus pandemic should make people more "grateful" towards tech giants. CEPR and 13 other left-leaning groups objected that choosing him would "risk fracturing a Democratic coalition that your campaign worked so hard to build over the past several months".
Joe Biden's cabinet
In fact, Biden’s eventual White House roster is only part of the story. Long before his nominees go before the US Senate to be confirmed (or not), great influence will be exerted by his transition team and especially by his so-called "beachhead teams", bureaucratic pathfinders dispatched throughout the federal government to smooth the transfer of power, often ending up as acting officials themselves.
Take Cynthia Hogan, who stepped down as Apple’s head lobbyist only in April. She helped Biden pick Harris as his running mate, and remains a senior transition aide. Or consider Jessica Hertz, a former associate general counsel at Facebook whose online biography, which has since become inaccessible, described how she fought the company’s corner in regulatory disputes. Now she is responsible for signing off on recent lobbyists who want to join the transition team.
Particularly plum roles have gone to members of WestExec Advisers, a secretive lobbying agency once described as Biden’s "government in waiting". Its founder Antony Blinken is an old friend and now on track to be the next Secretary of State. The firm has boasted of helping Silicon Valley start-ups win US military contracts, as well as working informally with both Google and Schmidt’s foundation.
‘When did industry experience become criminal?’
Not everyone in Washington finds all this to be sinister. Rob Atkinson, who has served as an innovation adviser to the last four US presidents and is now head of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), describes the progressive attacks on Biden’s aides and nominees as "preemptive strikes" aimed at opening a path for the Democratic Left’s own allies.
"Since when did we get to a world where coming from industry and moving into government was seen as almost criminal in nature?" he asks. "The progressive Left just reject the whole notion that anybody in business can be legitimate unless it’s Ben and Jerry… Biden actually needs people in government who know how to run larger organisations."
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Some former tech insiders likewise bristle at the idea that their past work disqualifies them from public service. They see the idea of a revolving door as distracting from policy questions, as well as deterring regulators from hiring anyone with direct experience of how the industry works. Those who served in policy or safety roles also tend to look askance at claims that their companies do not care about solving their products’ problems.
There is also an argument that, following a pandemic which has probably deepened our dependence on internet technology for good, Biden will need people with extensive understanding of that world. The risks are illustrated in 2018’s Congressional inquisition of Mark Zuckerberg, during which many Senators revealed their ignorance of the basics of Facebook’s service.
As it happens, Atkinson sees Biden as something of a "blank slate" on tech policy, which pales beside his passion for foreign policy and criminal justice. He expects that the President-elect will be "very open to giving the progressive Left what they want in this space", saving his political capital for other fights.
On the world stage, Biden’s desire to restore the diplomatic relationships trashed by President Trump may make him hesitant to push back against the "digital protectionism" of the European Union.
Indeed, Biden’s volunteer advisory council does include notable tech critics such as Tim Wu, one of the academic brains behind the movement to break up Big Tech, and Diana L Moss, president of the American Antitrust Institute. "We’ve had 40 years of lax enforcement and all the damage to prove it," Moss told The New York Times in August. “We’re really at the crux of needing… some strengthening of the laws.”
Biden will face heavy pressure from his left
To Moran, that offers some hope of jamming the revolving door. He considers Biden’s transition strategy to be "leagues better" than that of 2008, when Barack Obama, at the height of the financial crash, reportedly entrusted much of his hiring to a serving Citigroup executive.
"Biden is a very classical sort of transactional politician – you scratch my back, I scratch yours," Moran says. "He’s trying hard to thread a very difficult needle, picking people who are going to be able to unite this often fractious coalition that he has… it’s perhaps not as much as [we] would ideally prefer, but it is definitely movement, no matter how gradual."
There is one point on which both Moran and Atkinson strongly agree: the backlash against Big Tech is now too powerful to ignore. Whatever his own desires, Biden may ultimately need to make concessions to the determined coalition of legislators, activists, civil rights groups, Silicon Valley apostates that has emerged since 2016.
"I just cannot stress enough how the narrative has shifted," Atkinson says. He compares this moment to the early 1900s, when journalist Ida Tarbell’s investigations into Standard Oil sparked an outcry that eventually led to the division of the company and the passage of the same antitrust laws that are now being wielded against Silicon Valley.
Likewise, Moran says that Biden has been far more willing to give Democratic activists a seat at the table than Obama or Clinton were. "[Biden] largely follows wherever the exact middle of the Democratic Party is in a given moment," he observes. "Well, the exact middle of the Democratic Party has moved dramatically to the left."
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