Recent Examples of the K Street Shuffle on Main Street

In 2006, Jack B. Siegal wrote a wonderfully titled Special Report for Tax Analysts: The Wild, the Innocent, and the K Street Shuffle: The Tax System’s Role in Policing Interactions Between Charities and Politicians (subscription required). Since then there have been numerous examples of the behaviors he chronicled at both the federal and state level. 

In particular, recent examples from several states that otherwise are politically and geographically very different caught my eye:

• In Florida, the Tampa Bay Times published an article titled [Governor] DeSantis officials assigned $10 million to his wife’s charity. Was it legal? The funds reportedly came from a health-related settlement fund controlled by the state and went to the Hope Florida Foundation, even as funding for the Foundation and a related government initiative is apparently held up in the legislature. 

• In Massachusetts, the Boston Globe published an article titled “Ripe for corruption”: Lobbyists in Mass. skirt campaign finance laws by donating to monprofits run by lawmakers (subscription required). According to the article: “It’s a well-used path. As hard as such giving can be to pin down, a Boston Globe review found that some of the state’s most influential lobbying firms and businesses with interests before the Legislature are contributing thousands to some of the state’s most powerful players on Beacon Hill.”

• In Minnesota, the Minnesota Star Tribune published an article titled Minnesota Senate president sought funding for nonprofit run by legal client, and for former employer (subscription required). According to the article, “Minnesota Senate President Bobby Joe Champion advocated for a violence prevention nonprofit to receive millions of dollars in state funding in 2023, just months after he had represented the nonprofit’s founder in court in his capacity as a private attorney.”

Lloyd Mayer