There are 65 current members of the Obama administration that were formerly registered to lobby the federal government, according to a Washington Post analysis.
The number of lobbyists working for the administration does not seem to fit with an administration that pledged to "close the revolving door" in its ethics statement.
But this is the Obama administration, which trumpeted its anti-lobbyist position in an ethics statement on its transition Web site. "Free the Executive Branch from Special Interest Influence," one header reads, right above "Close the Revolving Door on Former and Future Employers." It's an administration that quickly announced no lobbyists would be allowed to serve on advisory panels -- a policy that survived until this week, after a legal challenge.
In an organization the size of the administration, 65 people isn't a terribly large number. And the lofty rhetoric of the titles on the new administration's ethics page lie above more subtle proposed reforms. Regardless, it's worth taking candidate Barack Obama at his word when he said, in a February 2008 speech, that lobbyists "won't drown out your voices anymore when I am President of the United States of America." Or in June 2007, when he said that Americans "want real reform, and they're tired of the lobbyists standing in the way." Precisely how many lobbyists you can have in place without such obstruction wasn't made clear.
This is not a new development, as a majority of those lobbyists were with the administration from the beginning.
Most of the people with lobbying experience who are currently serving with the administration have been there from the beginning. Thirty-six of the 65 joined the administration in 2009; only 6 of those currently with the administration joined in Obama's second term. [...]
It's just that this is not quite the picture that Obama offered voters in 2008.