With Daniel Lippman BAILEY HEADS TO KKR: Brad Bailey , a former aide to two Republican speakers of the House, has joined private equity giant KKR as a managing director on its public policy team. Bailey spent the past five years at the American Investment Council, the private equity industry’s main trade group, most recently serving as senior vice president of government affairs. — Before that, he served as one of the Treasury Department’s Capitol Hill liaisons during the Trump administration, a lobbyist at O’Rourke & Nappi and an economic policy adviser to former speakers Paul Ryan and John Boehner. — While Bailey has a background in tax policy (he also worked for former House tax writer Pat Tiberi and focused on tax and budget issues in Treasury’s legislative affairs office during passage of the 2017 GOP tax bill) he told PI that the timing of his move isn’t tied to the upcoming fight to renew large portions of the 2017 bill. — Bailey said in an interview he’ll be “advising companies internally on the broader policy trends of what's going on, and trying to figure out how they're going to affect the investment decisions that are being made.” — Public policy is playing a growing role in driving private equity’s investment decision and vice versa, Bailey noted, with private equity helping to provide capital for policymakers’ goals of spurring domestic investment generally as well as infrastructure, the energy transition and retirement policy. — Private equity has, of course, also been ponying up to invest in some of D.C.'s top policy and communications shops amid booming demand for their services — KKR included. (KKR also holds a significant stake in Axel Springer, POLITICO’s parent company.) — Firms like KKR are also going to be closely watching next year’s fights over the debt limit and taxes, especially if Democrats remain in power and the so-called carried interest loophole becomes a target to help pay for a tax bill. Happy Monday and welcome to PI. Send any and all tips about how you’re preparing for the transition, invites for briefings or memos you’re preparing for clients, influence-related transition scoops and anything else you and your colleagues are gabbing about around the office: coprysko@politico.com. And be sure to follow me on X: @caitlinoprysko. INSURANCE LOBBYIST JUMPS TO VENN: Jennifer Taft is joining Venn Strategies as a senior vice president in its tax and financial services practice. She was most recently corporate vice president of government affairs at New York Life Insurance Company, and before that, she spent more than a decade working for Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) — including four years as his chief of staff. BUSINESS WORLD WARY OF VANCE: “Business leaders watched with growing frustration as Donald Trump pushed the Republican Party toward a kind of populism they fear will threaten their bottom lines. Now, they’re worried about JD Vance,” our Hailey Fuchs and Sam Sutton report. — “Vance has consistently bashed big business, expressed antipathy toward corporate merger activities, sided with labor and emphasized his support for costly tariffs. He’s spoken favorably of the Biden administration’s Federal Trade Commission chair, Lina Khan, who is universally viewed as a thorn in the side of major businesses, and forged unlikely alliances with progressives including Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren,” giving way to concern among some business leaders that “a second Trump administration would be even more hostile to their interests than the first was.” — Vance defenders point to his time as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. And while many in corporate America still prefer a Trump victory over Vice President Kamala Harris , they worry about how Vance’s brand of populism and unpredictability could further encourage those same tendencies in Trump, rather than act as a check on them. — “You got a guy who you can’t count on to be a solid yes or a solid no on kind of shirts and skins votes in Congress — what do you think they will do when they have the power of the administrative state?” one Republican lobbyist told Hailey and Sam. “So I think there’s a lot of fear.” TRUMP TRANSITION FEATURES FAMILIAR FACES: As both sides prepare for the potential transition of power, Trump is leaning heavily “on many of the people who served in top positions in his first administration to help prepare an aggressive set of policies he plans to pursue right out of the gate, if elected,” our Gavin Bade, Hailey, Meridith McGraw, Betsy Woodruff Swan and Robin Bravender report. — “The policy preparations have been far lower profile — by design, given the backlash the conservative Heritage Foundation attracted for its Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump administration. But behind the scenes, the Trump transition is leaning on a diffuse roster of former Trump administration officials,” per our colleagues. — That includes several familiar faces from in and around the influence industry like former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, who is a senior adviser at Robert O’Brien’s consulting firm American Global Strategies and is working on national security personnel and policy planning for the transition. Former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who landed at the pro-Trump think tank America First Policy Institute, is putting together trade and economic plans. — Former Interior Secretary David Bernhardt , who before was a lobbyist at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck and returned to the firm after working in the administration, is also reportedly involved in transition planning, as is former OMB general counsel Mark Paoletta, who lobbied for clients including Oracle as recently as last year and is advising on DOJ policy. DEMOCRACY IS … SAVED? IN DARKNESS: Sludge’s Donald Shaw reported over the weekend on a grim campaign finance milestone: That Future Forward USA Action, the dark money arm of pro-Harris super PAC Future Forward, is now the biggest booster of her campaign, meaning that “for the first time in modern presidential fundraising history, a nominee’s largest funder is a black box designed to mask the identities of its donors.” — Future Forward’s nonprofit offshoot has “given more than $136 million to her super PACs since the beginning of 2023,” according to FEC records covering up to Oct. 16. As of that date, “the next highest contributors this cycle to super PACs that have made independent expenditures for Harris are two other ‘dark money’ groups, AB Foundation (about $32 million) and League of Conservation Voters Inc. (about $42 million), and Trump’s largest dark money funder, Building America’s Future, has contributed just over $25 million.” SECRETARY PETE’S ANTITRUST AWAKENING: “While high-profile economic populists in President Joe Biden’s administration … might get more headlines for their attempts to reshape American industry,” Nancy Scola writes in POLITICO Magazine that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg “might be up to something just as radical.” — Though it’s not clear whether his efforts to remodel the airline industry will remain in place, “Buttigieg has emerged as a surprising ally to, and asset for, the slice of the political left that has embraced an antimonopoly, antitrust framework — a wing of the Democratic Party now fighting to maintain its dominance in a post-Biden Washington, and that once saw Buttigieg as an adversary.” TAFT STANDS UP INFRASTRUCTURE ADVISORY: Ohio-based law and lobbying firm Taft has launched a new branch offering infrastructure advisory services, becoming just the latest firm looking to capitalize on the bipartisan infrastructure law. — Seth Miller Gabriel and Umer Yaqub will lead Taft Infrastructure Advisors as principals, working with clients with projects across a number of sectors including social infrastructure, housing and real estate, energy, transportation, water and telecommunications. — The advisory offshoot will provide clients with financial and structuring analysis and guidance for infrastructure projects, along with government affairs services. Miller Gabriel and Yaqub both come from the infrastructure and public-private partnerships practice at BDO USA.
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