With help from Daniel Lippman BRIDENSTINE HANGS A SHINGLE: Jim Bridenstine
, the former Oklahoma congressmember who served as NASA administrator under former President Donald Trump, has registered to lobby for the first time, as his space-obsessed former boss teeters on the edge of a return to the White House. — Bridenstine and his former chief of staff Gabe Sherman
registered to lobby beginning today on behalf of nine different clients — all of which are involved in aerospace, have ties to Bridenstine’s home state, or both — through Artemis Group, a strategic consulting firm the pair launched last February. (As NASA administrator, Bridenstine spearheaded Trump’s directive to once again put an astronaut on the moon, renaming the project the Artemis program.) — Their clients include the University of Oklahoma
, the state’s flagship college; the Oklahoma Space Industry Development Authority, a state agency to boost Oklahoma’s aerospace industry; the Native American tribe Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma; and aerospace companies Special Aerospace Services, Redwire, Impulse Space,
Frontier Electronic Systems Corporation and Agile Space Industries. — Bridenstine is in a prime position to cash in on a Trump victory next week, which would almost certainly be a boon to the space industry. It was Trump who launched the new space-focused branch of the military, the Space Force, in addition to reviving the National Space Council.
— Now, the fate of Trump’s reelection bid is in large part in the hands of Elon Musk, who has poured at least $118 million into a super PAC running Trump’s ground game in swing states and whose space and satellite company SpaceX Trump has gushed over. On the campaign trail in recent weeks, Trump has pledged to Musk
to put humans on Mars by the end of his second term. — Even if Trump loses, there’s some optimism about what a Kamala Harris win could mean for space policy as well. The vice president now chairs the National Space Council, hails from a state with several NASA outposts and considered former astronaut Mark Kelly as her running mate. Current NASA Administrator
Bill Nelson has called Harris “a space aficionado,” and our colleagues wrote earlier this summer that “the Biden administration’s policy spearheaded by Harris has largely been a continuation of Trump’s legacy.” Happy Tuesday and welcome to PI. Send tips: coprysko@politico.com
. And be sure to follow me on X: @caitlinoprysko. ICYMI — ANOTHER POTENTIAL TRUMP CABINET MOVE: Former Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette is stepping down as president and chief executive of
Edison Electric Institute, which represents investor-owned utilities, after less than a year in the role, our Catherine Morehouse reports.
— Brouillette, who led the Energy Department for two years under Trump, “said he is hoping to ‘broaden’ his focus ‘to the overarching issues facing our energy landscape,’” per Catherine, who notes that “there has been speculation Brouillette would join the Trump administration if the former president wins the election.”
— Brouillette attributed his decision to step down to various geopolitical conflicts he said are contributing to “the complex energy and security challenges we now face,” along with a shifting domestic policy landscape that is “challenging the creativity that has defined American energy leadership and prosperity.” He went on to say that he’ll be “engaging directly with world business and policy leaders on these existential challenges.” —
Pat Vincent-Collawn, the CEO of TXNM Energy, will serve as interim president and CEO of EEI while the board searches for a permanent replacement for Brouillette. PHARMA LOBBYIST HEADS TO BROWNSTEIN: David Dorsey is joining Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck
as a strategic adviser. Dorsey has spent the past decade working in government affairs for Johnson & Johnson’s pharmaceutical research arm. Before that, he did several stints at FDA, including in the chief counsel’s office and leading FDA’s Office of Policy and Planning, and was a top staffer to former Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) on the Senate HELP Committee.
BEZOS DOES DAMAGE CONTROL: Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is trying to separate his paper’s announcement last week that it would not make an endorsement in the presidential race — despite the editorial board’s drafting of one for Harris — from his business interests, after a top executive and lobbyist for his space exploration company met with Trump on the day of the announcement.
— “No quid pro quo of any kind is at work here,” Bezos wrote in an op-ed in the Post on Monday night. The Post’s non-endorsement announcement had already sparked a firestorm when Post reporters revealed that Dave Limp, the head of Bezos’
Blue Origin, and Megan Mitchell, the space company’s longtime vice president of government relations, met briefly with Trump in Austin hours after the news broke, adding more fuel to accusations that Bezos was trying to protect his business empire from retaliation by Trump.
— “I sighed when I found out, because I knew it would provide ammunition to those who would like to frame this as anything other than a principled decision,” Bezos wrote, arguing that the meeting was “scheduled quickly” that morning and that he wasn’t aware of it ahead of time.
— Bezos said the decision was rooted in falling trust in the media. Though while he underlined the Post newsroom’s independence, Bezos wrote that “every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials.” ANNALS OF ETHICS CONCERNS, PART I:
Before Trump “became president in 2017, he promised to rein in his company’s freewheeling ways, assuring the American people that his family business would not ‘take advantage of’ his presidency. Nearly eight years later, he is making no such promises,” per the New York Times’ Ben Protess, Maggie Haberman and Eric Lipton.
— “The former and possibly future president is cashing in on a variety of new ventures as he seeks a second term, without offering to reinstate the guardrails from his first,” and while “the ethics plan Mr. Trump imposed on himself when he was in the White House had limitations and its share of critics,” even the old framework “would prohibit much of this current deal-making.” ANNALS OF ETHICS CONCERNS, PART II: “As Kamala Harris
ran for president in 2019, labor unrest roiled Silicon Valley, with contractors demanding better pay and benefits from ride-hailing companies. Harris wrote on social media that she was ‘Standing with the thousands of Uber and Lyft drivers across the country striking today,’” the Post’s Michael Kranish,
Tyler Pager and Cat Zakrzewski report. — “On the other side of that conflict was one of Harris’s closest allies: her brother-in-law, Tony West, who served as Uber’s senior vice president and chief legal counsel as the company fended off the strikers’ demands.”
— “Now, more than five years later, as Harris runs again for president, West is on leave from Uber — a company in which he holds millions of dollars in stock, according to securities filings — and playing one of the most important roles in her campaign.”
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