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'Wallowing in Corruption': Lobbyist Who Helped Ultra-Rich Dodge Taxes Now Heads Trump Tax Office
"By putting a professional tax dodging consultant in charge of their tax law, Republicans are continuing to make their intentions crystal clear—this law is a gift to billionaires and huge corporations."
Jul 15, 2025
A corporate lobbyist who for decades has helped major companies and rich Americans dodge taxes is now serving as the U.S. Treasury Department's top tax policy official, a position in which he will write rules implementing the newly passed Republican budget law.
That role is "enormously powerful," The New York Times' Jesse Drucker wrote in a Monday profile of Ken Kies, whom the GOP-controlled U.S. Senate confirmed as assistant treasury secretary for tax policy in a party-line vote last month. President Donald Trump selected Kies for the position in January.
The Republican budget measure, which President Donald Trump signed into law earlier this month, contains around $4.5 trillion in tax cuts that will flow disproportionately to the wealthiest Americans over the next decade, according to nonpartisan analysts.
"By putting a professional tax-dodging consultant in charge of their tax law, Republicans are continuing to make their intentions crystal clear—this law is a gift to billionaires and huge corporations like those Ken Kies has spent his career looking out for," Leor Tal, campaign director for the progressive advocacy group Unrig Our Economy, said in a statement Monday.
"As families struggle with rising prices from Trump's tariffs and face devastating cuts to Medicaid and SNAP," Tal added, "Republicans are doubling down on helping the richest of the rich, while working people pay the price."
In his role as a lobbyist whose client list has included Goldman Sachs, Pfizer, Microsoft, and other corporate behemoths, Kies has helped secure major tax giveaways for large companies and wealthy Americans—including in the 2017 Trump-GOP tax law that the new Republican budget package extends.
"In the George W. Bush administration, Mr. Kies successfully pushed for legislation to make such offshore tax dodges even easier to execute. During the Obama administration, he fended off another attempted crackdown on those strategies," Drucker wrote Monday. "In 2017, as part of a sweeping package of tax cuts signed by Mr. Trump, Mr. Kies lobbied for a new tax break that provides a 20% deduction to certain businesses, which overwhelmingly benefits the richest Americans."
Drucker noted that in his new position, Kies "will oversee about 100 attorneys and economists at the Treasury Department's Office of Tax Policy, a powerful corner of the federal government."
"The office issues regulations to help the government administer tax laws and provides guidance that can render the latest tax-dodging strategy a gold mine—or doom it," he added.
Kies previously served as managing director of the Federal Policy Group, a lobbying firm at which he "delivered significant legislative and regulatory results for his clients, which include major corporations, trade associations, and coalitions of companies with common objectives," according to a since-removed biography of Kies.
"Mr. Kies has led coalition efforts to enact legislation responding to the World Trade Organization's ruling against U.S. foreign sales corporation benefits, to avert enactment of broad 'corporate tax shelter' legislation that would have an adverse impact on legitimate business transactions, and to reverse Treasury regulations targeting 'hybrid' arrangements of U.S. multinational corporations, among other projects," the biography stated.
Highlighting the Times profile of Kies, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) wrote Monday that the Trump administration is "wallowing in corruption."
"Five trillion dollars in tax cuts for the wealthiest, written and administered by the wealthiest," she wrote. "On the backs of stripping healthcare and food from working and poor people. Shame on you."
In addition to implementing the new Trump-GOP law, Kies could be positioned to help deliver another sizable tax break to the rich.
The Washington Post's Jeff Stein reported last week that on the heels of passage of the GOP budget law, right-wing organizations and Republican lawmakers are set to push the Trump administration to unilaterally "drastically reduce what investors pay on their capital gains."
"The plan rests on changing how the Treasury Department calculates those taxes," Stein wrote. "The highest-earning 1% of Americans would receive 86% of the benefits from indexing capital gains to inflation, while the bottom 80% of income earners would get just 1% of the benefits, Penn Wharton projected in 2018."
Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, wrote in response to Stein's reporting that "after gutting health care for millions of Americans and passing massive tax breaks for billionaires, Republicans are now working on even MORE tax breaks for the ultra-rich."
"They aren't interested in fighting for working families—only their rich friends," Boyle added.
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Senate Dems Demand Explanation After Big Oil Lobbied for 'Giveaways at the Expense of American Families'
The fossil fuel industry spent big to push through a $1 billion provision in the GOP budget bill, which the senators said would allow some oil companies to "pay no federal income taxes whatsoever."
Jun 27, 2025
Four Democratic U.S. senators are demanding an explanation from Big Oil after a $1.1 billion tax loophole was added to the Senate version of the GOP's budget reconciliation megabill.
Letters sent Thursday by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called out the CEOs of two oil giants, ConocoPhillips and Ovintiv, which they say "lobbied furiously" for the handout.
The companies, the senators said, "[stand] to benefit tremendously from this provision and ha[ve] spent big to support it—while preserving the many government subsidies for the oil and gas industry already in the tax code."
They asked for the companies to disclose how much they have spent lobbying Republicans for the tax break and how much of a windfall they expect in return.
The provision in question, approved by the Senate Finance Committee last week, would shield many large oil companies from the Inflation Reduction Act's corporate alternative minimum tax, or CAMT. Introduced in 2022, the CAMT requires that companies making more than $1 billion pay 15% of the profits they report to shareholders.
"The rationale for CAMT was simple," the senators said. "For far too long, massive corporations had taken advantage of loopholes in the tax code to avoid paying their fair share, sometimes paying zero federal taxes despite earning billions in profits."
The GOP bill modifies how oil companies are required to report earnings, allowing them to exempt "intangible drilling and development costs," which in turn allows more companies to fall below the $1 billion earnings threshold.
The senators highlighted a 2023 earnings call by Marathon Oil, recently acquired by ConocoPhillips, in which executives said the CAMT was the only income tax they were required to pay.
"If enacted," the senators said, "this provision would reduce or even eliminate tax liabilities for oil and gas companies under CAMT, allowing some to pay no federal income taxes whatsoever."
The letter highlighted lobbying filings by ConocoPhillips and Ovintiv in which they "explicitly prioritize" securing this handout.
Referenced throughout is the aggressive effort to court Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who wrote the loophole into the Senate bill. According to OpenSecrets, Lankford received more than $546,000 in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry—his top source of industry donations—between 2019 and 2024.
The senators described the industry's lobbying as "especially insulting" because "Senate Republicans are trying to pay for this handout with cuts to other programs that would end up raising energy prices for everyday Americans."
The GOP bill would eliminate tax breaks for clean energy that incentivize consumers to purchase electric vehicles and make their homes more energy-efficient, including the home energy-efficiency and residential clean energy credits.
Citing data from Rewiring America, the senators estimated that ditching the two credits would cost the average household up to $2,200 per year in savings on utility bills.
The Center for American Progress projects that eliminating electric vehicle credits would increase demand for gasoline, raising prices by 27 to 35 cents per gallon by 2035. Americans will pay the oil and gas industry "an additional $339 billion for gasoline and $75 billion for electricity by 2035," the May report says.
"Congress should not raise energy prices for working families to deliver handouts to Big Oil," the senators said.
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Report Exposes Big Pharma Front Groups Posing as Patient Advocates
"When your board is stacked with industry insiders, your primary funding comes from pharma, and your talking points mirror those of drug lobbyists, you're not a patient advocacy organization—you're a PR operation."
May 19, 2025
A report published Monday reveals that a number of organizations claiming to represent the interests of patients are actually pharmaceutical industry front groups working against efforts to bring down drug costs in the United States, including by lobbying the Trump administration to scale back Medicare price negotiations.
The new analysis by Patients for Affordable Drugs Now (P4AD), which stressed that it doesn't take money from organizations that profit from the production or distribution of prescription medications, spotlights six groups: the Alliance for Aging Research, the American Action Forum, the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, the Council for Affordable Health Coverage, the Pacific Research Institute, and Seniors 4 Better Care.
The featured organizations, according to P4AD, "are posing as independent patient or policy groups while acting as mouthpieces for the drug industry's agenda—all while raking in pharma cash, fighting Medicare negotiation, and pushing misleading claims to block reforms."
Seniors 4 Better Care, for instance, is a shell group of the American Prosperity Alliance, the president of which "has a history of lobbying for the healthcare industry, including for organizations at the Healthcare Association of New York and insurance providers such as MVP Healthcare," P4AD's report observes.
"The group's treasurer, Parker Hamilton Poling, is a former lobbyist for pharmaceutical companies like Roche and Cencora," the report notes. "Brian Berry, the organization's secretary, also has a history of lobbying for Chinese biotech companies like Complete Genomics."
Earlier this year, Seniors 4 Better Care bankrolled an ad that directly urged President Donald Trump to end the "pill penalty," a label the pharmaceutical industry has used to describe the treatment of small-molecule prescription drugs under the Inflation Reduction Act's Medicare price negotiation provisions.
Last month, in a major gift to Big Pharma and industry lobbyists, Trump signed an executive order aimed at delaying Medicare negotiations for small-molecule drugs, which represent 90% of prescription medicines currently in circulation.
Another group highlighted in P4AD's report is the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest (CMPI), which describes itself as "a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and educational organization that seeks to advance the discussion and development of patient-centered healthcare."
P4AD notes that "every single member" of the organization's board has ties to the pharmaceutical industry. Peter Pitts, CMPI's president and co-founder, "primarily worked at firms hired by the pharmaceutical industry following an 18-month stint at the Food and Drug Administration," P4AD's report states.
"While working at major firms, such as Porter Novelli, Pitts retained his role at CMPI and insisted it was not a conflict of interest," the report continues. "He also currently teaches at the University of Paris, Descartes School of Medicine, a department that is funded by AstraZeneca."
Merith Basey, P4AD's executive director, said that "when your board is stacked with industry insiders, your primary funding comes from pharma, and your talking points mirror those of drug lobbyists, you're not a patient advocacy organization—you're a PR operation."
"Polling shows that Americans are aware that pharmaceutical corporations are the primary drivers of high drug prices, which is why the industry funds front groups to mislead the public and protect its bottom line," said Basey. "Patients and policymakers deserve to know whose interests these groups truly represent."
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