Yesterday, it was reported that Joe Manchin’s chief of staff has made the jump to Big Oil. Which makes sense. In reporting the news, Politico’s Influence newsletter made the connection that Kyrsten Sinema’s longtime chief of staff Meg Joseph recently made a similar jump to a Big Pharma lobbying group.
MANCHIN’S CHIEF JUMPS TO API: The top aide to Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), the Senate Energy and Natural Resources chair who played an outsize role in determining the size and scope of Democrats’ policy agenda over the past two years is leaving the Hill to join the American Petroleum Institute. […]
— As PI readers might recall, the health care-centric lobbying firm Tarplin Downs & Young last fall hired Meg Joseph, the longtime chief of staff to Manchin’s fellow swing vote Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.).
Tarplin Downs & Young represents 29 different entities in the pharmaceutical industry, including PhRMA,BIO, Abbott, and Eli Lilly. In 2022 Tarplin Downs & Young lobbied on behalf of several pharmaceutical clients, including AbbVie, Merck, And Roche.
Ms. Joseph’s jump from Sinema’s office to a Big Pharma lobbyist is not that much of a stretch. Take a look at these headlines:
- AZ Central: Sen. Kyrsten Sinema delivers … for pharmaceutical companies
- Politico: Sinema rakes in Pharma and finance cash amid reconciliation negotiations
- The Guardian: Big pharma has a powerful new shill, Kyrsten Sinema, fighting drug price reform
- Insider: Kyrsten Sinema takes thousands in campaign contributions from pharmaceutical giants while stalling prescription drug pricing reforms
- Salon: Big Pharma, medical firms donated $750K to Kyrsten Sinema — then she opposed drug bill
In fact, for the last several years, Sinema has frequently opposed measures aimed at bringing down rising drug prices and championed a bill that threatened to worsen the problem – despite running on lowering the cost of prescriptions during her 2018 campaign.
- Sinema, according to widespread news reports, worked to stall and weaken the provisions eventually passed in the Inflation Reduction Act that enabled Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices.
- Even her usual ally Joe Manchin was critical of Sinema’s interference: “We had a senator from Arizona who basically didn’t let us go as far as we needed to go with our negotiations and made us wait two years.”
- Sinema voted against an amendment to the Inflation Reduction Act proposed by Sen. Sanders that would have established a cap on costs for covered prescription drugs under Medicare.
- Center Forward, a dark money group funded by Big Pharma, ran ads in support of Sinema after she opposed including drug price control in budget reconciliation.
- Sinema’s campaigns have always been “a favorite for big pharma donations”: as of the most recent filing, she has raised just over a million dollars from the pharmaceutical industry into her campaigns and associated PAC.
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