Democratic candidate Joe Biden has filled his transition team with Big Tech insiders, according to a recent analysis.
The transition team helps the incoming president make thousands of political staff appointments to influential agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission, Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Department.
Each of these agencies will implement and enforce policies that could directly affect Silicon Valley, and now Big Tech has people on the inside.
“Big Tech understands the executive branch,” the Revolving Door Project’s Jeff Hauser told the Washington Examiner.
“They know that beyond antitrust and communications policy, from trade law to defense contracting and beyond, Big Tech has an enormous amount at stake with how Biden chooses to staff his administration and what initial policies it implements,” he said.
Among these Big Tech insiders is Will Fields. Fields is a senior associate at Sidewalk Labs, an a “urban innovation” firm owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet.
Fields has been assigned to the Treasury Department transition team, as has Nicole Isaac, a senior public policy director at LinkedIn.
At least two Amazon executives have joined Biden’s transition teams: Tom Sullivan, Amazon’s director of international tax planning, is working with the State Department, and Mark Schwartz, enterprise strategist for Amazon Web Services, is working for the Office of Management and Budget team.
Biden’s transition team also quietly added four new Facebook and Google employees to its agency review teams, according to Politico.
Even the leadership on Biden’s transition team is connected to Big Tech: The co-chair of the transition team, Jeff Zients, is a former Facebook board member, and the team’s operations ethics czar, Jessica Hertz, is the associate general counsel for Facebook’s regulatory team.
Apple’s chief Washington representative, Cynthia Hogan, and Twitter’s public policy head, Carlos Monje, have also joined Biden’s transition team.
