Trump puts professional tax-dodging consultant in charge of tax policy

Lobbyist Who Helped Ultra-Rich Dodge Taxes Now Heads Trump Tax Office

Jake Johnson for Common Dreams

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 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.