Month: March 2017

The health care debate in Congress is one I take personally. I worked on the Affordable Care Act. When my job as an Obama-appointee at the FDA ended, my lovely young wife and I signed up for health insurance on the DC health exchange. On Friday morning I was humming the song Schadenfreude from Avenue…

Schadenfreude isn’t exactly the right word to describe how I feel watching Republicans flail around on health care reform, but it moves in the right direction. It must be tremendously frustrating to be a Republican Senator, Representative or staffer right now. Your party controls the House, Senate, and the White House. You ran on fixing…

  Donald Trump is leaning hard on Republicans in Congress to support whatever version of health care reform hits the floor of the House later this week. Members of Congress concerned that the bill might hurt their constituents (and ultimately their own re-election prospects) may be willing to go along with Trump because if they…

  As the White House makes headlines for claiming not all government ethics rules apply to them, I thought I would share my own experiences with federal ethics offices. The punchline is that the rules can be a pain to follow, but are important to ensure people don’t take advantage of their position for personal…

  This is the first in what may become a series of posts about ethics and politics. No one has ever handed me a bag of cash in an airport parking lot in exchange for taking a political action that I thought was unethical or illegal. I’m sure it happens, it has just never happened…

Time and attention are the scarcest resources a policymaker has. The best advocates know that getting a piece of that time and attention, and getting that time and attention focused appropriately, makes their preferred solution likely if not inevitable. It is not the pitch for or against a bill alone that wins the day, but…