Over the past five decades, according to author Brody Mullins, the center of power in America has shifted from mainly elected officials to paid operators—thus bringing the term “shadow lobbying” to the core. Mullins, an investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal, covers the topic of lobbying in his recently published book, The Wolves of K Street, which he co-authored with Luke Mullins. The book follows 50 years of corporate influence in Washington as they trace the rise of the modern lobbying industry.

In an interview with N Magazine, Brody talks about the world of lobbying and its incredible influence on our lives, a topic he is discussing at an event at the Great Harbor Yacht Club on July 30.

The world of lobbying is foreign to many people, but it is something that affects almost all of us. How pervasive is the impact of lobbying on day-to-day life for average Americans?

Most people don’t [understand] lobbying or hear about it, but it affects everything. It affects the air people breathe, the cars they are driving in, and the boats they navigate. I mean, everything in the world is affected by corporate lobbyists who make the rules for how the rest of us live.

And when you say they make the rules, can lobbyists influence just about any piece of legislation?

100 percent. They might not be able to write any piece of legislation exactly the way they want, but they certainly have input on it. ... The problem is when they edit the book, there’s not much pushback. If there’s no public interest, lobbyists can push back against the power of corporate America, and therefore companies have more influence over the ultimate laws and regulations than the American public.

When you started researching and writing about the power of lobbying, did you have a point of view as to whether lobbying is good or bad? And do the counterbalancing forces of one side versus another wash themselves out?

I did not go into it with a theory that lobbying was good or bad. Corporate lobbying exists. And corporate America has had a tremendous influence on our public policy for several decades. What we’re trying to figure out is how that’s different from the past, how things have changed, and how lobbying has evolved in terms of the actual technique.

One thing we found in the last 40 years is an era in which companies have tremendous power. But it has not always been that way. Before the 1980s, consumer groups, Ralph Nader’s, and environmental and labor unions were the ones who had the power. Lobbying is constantly protected. People, executives, and businesses have a right under the First Amendment to make their grievances heard in the government. But it certainly supports the premise that one side has their thumb on the scale and the other side doesn’t.

Could you give a dramatic, and possibly egregious, example of where effective lobbying was done to serve the interests of a few?

There are hundreds of examples. I’ll pick out one that’s a really good example, [which] was the 1993 Clinton health care bill. So Bill Clinton was elected in the 1990 election. He wasn’t tremendously popular because he was elected in that three-way race with Ross Perot, but once he was elected, his popularity shot up. He had a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate, and he proposed as a first bill, national health care reform, which many people including Ted Kennedy supported. The prior year, many Republicans supported mass health care reform. ... So everyone seems to be saying—Republicans, Democrats, Clinton, Congress, and the people—that we should have some sort of national health care system.

Then the lobby started getting involved. Lobby for major insurance companies and for hospitals and for other medical providers, and doctors started pushing back against the bill, saying that the government shouldn’t have so much control over people’s health care.

In less than a year, the bill went from being incredibly popular and very likely to pass to being completely dead. The reason that example is a good one is because Bill Clinton, as a centrist but also an old-school democratic liberal, got his butt kicked. He realized that in order to be a successful president, he would have to be more modern. And so he moved to being a more centrist president governing from the middle, and he went on to approve NAFTA, welfare reform, and other free trade bills, so he shifted his presidency from being more liberal to a more provisional centrist president, and he was elected to a second term. One law showed him that in order to be successful, you need to be more pro-corporate going forward.

Who are the most powerful lobbying voices in the country?

Pharma, 100 percent. The drug companies, since the 1950s, have blocked just about every attempt to limit the cost of prescription drugs or any drug. And they’ve done that with the help of Republicans, they’ve done that with the help of Democrats. They’ve done that with the help of George Bush. They’ve done that with the help of Barack Obama. We just now finally got to a limited victory, to eliminate the price of a couple of drugs. But that industry and pharma itself are definitely the most powerful lobbying group in Washington in the last 50 years.

What do you think is the most surprising impact on an individual case where a piece of legislation was changed by the influence of lobbyists?

Another example that we write about was in the late 2000s. Our main character’s name is Evan Moore. He worked for a company called Genentech, a huge biotech firm in San Francisco. They happen to make, among many products, something called Tamiflu. Tamiflu is the best treatment for the flu. So in the late 2000s, before we had the real pandemic, the COVID pandemic, there was talk about a flu pandemic in the United States, and he took advantage of that by trying to get right-wing media and blogs to write stories scaring the American public about a potential U.S. outbreak of avian flu. At the time, a few dozen people had died around the world, and he wanted people in America to be worried about the avian flu. He paid for and promoted stories in the media that then got to members of Congress, important members of Congress—Barack Obama, who was a senator, Hillary Clinton when she was senator, and Joe Biden when he was senator—all three proposed legislation, creating a stockpile of avian flu prevention in case the avian flu came to the United States. They created legislation and passed the bill to create the first U.S. stockpile of treatment for the avian flu. The government allocated $2 billion to create that stockpile. Meanwhile, the Genentech lobbyist who created this in the first place turned around and said, I am the only person who sells Tamiflu, the treatment for the avian flu. The government in turn bought $2 billion worth of this guy’s product.

The use of commercial draggers for fishing is an issue in Nantucket. Many people feel they have started to deplete certain levels of sea life that are critical parts of the food chain and getting legislation to protect waters off of Nantucket and the Vineyard have not been very successful. Are you aware of anything that we should know about in relation to the commercial fishing world?

One of the interesting things is that the commercial fishing industry has been very successful in blocking so many of these regulations and laws. I think the Marine Mammal Protection Act was in the late 1970s ... I mean, that’s the last major legislation that we’ve passed as a country in that area. We understand more and more about what we, as humans, are doing to impact the Earth and species and fish, and it seems like we’d like more information to know how to make better policy. The fact that we haven’t had a new policy in that regard for 50 years shows the interest that big money has on how we live.

If we didn’t have lobbyists, how different would the country look and feel and how different would our lives be?

I think if you didn’t have lobbyists, and didn’t have money in politics—both of which are protected by the First Amendment and campaign money is also protected by the First Amendment—but if you could manage to get rid of those, then absolutely, the country would be very different. There would be a lot more pro-consumer legislation. The 2017 tax cut bill, the last big tax cut we did under Trump, wouldn’t have been all for companies, it would have been for individuals and for the middle class. There certainly would be some pro-corporate tax cuts and pro-corporate bills, but they’d be done because these companies employ millions of Americans. When we go back to the 1993 Clinton health care bill, that certainly would be law. And the last 25 years or 30 years we spent fighting over health care would have been moot because we already have a system like that.

If it were up to you, what would you do to reform the lobbying industry so that it did not have a disproportionate influence on our daily lives?

The problem in our system is big money in that the number one goal ever in Congress is to get reelected. And the number one way to get reelected is to have money to fund your campaign. And if you could remove that—and I don’t think that it’s possible, I think it violates the constitution—but if you take money out of the game, you reduce a lot of the leverage that corporations have, because they control the money. And if members of Congress don’t need that money, then they’re less reliant on companies and then maybe they’ll be more willing to look at both sides of the coin on every issue that comes up, instead of just taking the corporate side because they need the money. Money’s the problem.

Would term limits have an impact?

That’s a tough question. I see both sides on term limits. Look at Ted Kennedy. Look at all the great things Ted Kennedy did while he was a senator. And he was able to do those, in part, because there were no term limits because he was around for long enough to amass the power at the multiple committees that he chaired. And more importantly, the know-how and the staff. The staff was probably the most important. He established staff that were working for him for 20 or 30 years, who were experts in health care policy or welfare or education. And those people knew how to create, expand, and protect the federal safety that Ted Kennedy supported. So if Ted Kennedy was limited to two terms, he never gets into a position of authority; he never gets to a committee chair where he can enact and push for his priorities.



At the same time, I understand the argument of bringing in fresh blood all the time. But look at our current Speaker of the House right now. Mike Johnson has only been Speaker for a few months, he’s only been a member of Congress for a few years, and he’s supposed to govern this unruly body.