Is Google too close to the White House?

The relationship between the White House and Google is the closest of any branch of government and multinational corporation, according to areportreleased by The Intercept and the Campaign for Accountability. The report found that between Jan. 2009 – the first month of Obama’s presidency – and Oct. 2015, Google and its affiliates have had at least 427 meetings at the White House and that “no other public company approaches this degree of intimacy with government.”

“Google representatives attended White House meetings more than once a week, on average, from the beginning of Obama’s presidency through October 2015,” the report says. “Nearly 250 people have shuttled from government service to Google employment or vice versa over the course of his administration.”

It’s hard to quantify influence bought from White House visits and revolving-door employment. And, as Campaign for Accountability executive directors Anne Weismann notes, “Americans know surprisingly little about what Google wants and gets from our government.” But the relationship appears to be paying off for Google: the White House weighed in recently in favor of the set-top box proceeding at the FCC, colloquially referred to as “the Google proposal.” What the American people get out of the close relationship is less clear.

Google isn’t the scrappy upstart it was 15 years ago; it’s a multinational corporation worth $500 billion with interests that may not align with the public’s. It spent $3.8 million on lobbying in the first quarter of 2016. What has it bought with that money?

Read the full report and view the interactive datahere.

The Android Administration: Google’s Remarkably Close Relationship With the Obama White House, in Two Charts (The Intercept, Apr. 22, 2016)

Report finds hundreds of meetings between White House and Google (The Hill, Apr. 22, 2016)