LegiStorm

After seven years working for one of Congress's top advocates for firefighters, a GOP staffer has taken on an advocacy job in the industry.

Ryan Woodward joined the International Association of Fire Chiefs as government-affairs manager this month. The association has disclosed spending about $80,000 a year to lobby on issues ranging from health care to trade.

Woodward spent the last eight years with Rep. Pete King (R-N.Y.), most recently as senior legislative assistant. King, who did not run for reelection this year, co-chairs the Congressional Fire Services Caucus and has been instrumental in directing funds to 9/11 first-responder programs.

With 94 percent of races called, the incoming freshman class is shaping up to be among the House's youngest in recent memory.

The average incoming freshman representative will turn 49 during her or his first year in office, the same as last year's freshman class. In the last two decades, the only younger freshman class was that of the 107th Congress, which turned an average of 45 in 2001, their first year in office. The average representative currently in office is 59.

Madison Cawthorn, age 25, is the youngest member-elect in decades and the youngest member of his class by several years. He's followed by Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) at age 31. Reps.-elect Peter Meijer (R-Mich.), Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.), Kat Cammack (R-Fla.), Jake LaTurner (R-Kan.) and Ritchie Torres are each 32.

Amid COVID-19 spikes, private sponsors have continued to send members and staffers on trips, although few in number and mainly for Republicans.

In September, the Bipartisan Policy Center sent Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) and a staffer in Comer's Madisonville office to Joint Base Charleston in South Carolina. The pair, who report that they traveled by rental car, met with Rep. Joe Cunningham (D-S.C.). South Carolina experienced a spike in COVID cases around the same time. 

The think tank also sponsored a September day trip to Maryland for Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), who "met with civic and business leaders, along with health care experts in addiction issues and mental health in MD-06," according to a disclosure.

This brings the total number of trips since March to three. The Red River Valley Sugarbeet Education Foundation was the first private group to resume congressional trips, with early September travel for four staffers to North Dakota for agriculture-related meetings and tours.

In 2018, more than 1,100 members and staffers disclosed accepting private travel worth a combined $2.3 million in the six months before Election Day. This year, trips during the same time period have totaled less than $6,000 for only seven travelers. None were overseas.

Six of those seven have been Republicans. This number does not include Rep. Cunningham, a Democrat, who has not disclosed accepting travel reimbursements for his participation in Rep. Comer's South Carolina trip.

The pandemic may have brought much of the U.S. economy to a standstill, but K Street is booming.

Last quarter saw the highest lobbying activity of any third quarter in years, according to LegiStorm data. Lobbyists disclosed a total of 21,431 federal contracts in the third quarter - a ten percent increase over the 19,444 filings from the same time period in 2019. The number of Q3 contracts shrank annually from 24,999 in 2015 to 14,616 in 2018 and has grown each year since.

Of course, many hundreds of contracts this year have explicitly listed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act and other COVID-19 issues among their lobbying issues. But trade and tariff lobbying also represented a sizable proportion of filings, with 1,876 mentions versus 1,388 in 2018 Q2.

A Green New Deal cosponsor has lost an aide to NextEra Energy — one of the companies most predicted to flourish under a Joe Biden presidency.

Kevin Stockert will finish up work today with Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) and move to the renewable-focused utility firm early next month. He was most recently a senior legislative assistant handling Blumenauer's energy and environment portfolios, among other legislative issues. Stockert previously worked for Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and the Senate Budget Committee.

NextEra recently overtook ExxonMobile as the country's most valuable energy company, as measured by market capitalization. As the world's biggest solar- and wind-energy provider, NextEra is expected to grow even more under a Biden presidency, which Biden claims would move the country toward renewable-energy sources.