CSQ Virtual Events

DEMYSTIFYING DC:

WHAT EVERY CEO SHOULD KNOW

VIRTUAL ROUND TABLE REPORT Friday, November 12, 2020 Business leaders from coast to coast want to know how to best position their companies for success over the next four years.

CSQ brought together some top politicos and government affairs experts for some exclusive insights from inside the Beltway—and the inside scoop on what to watch for in the next administration.

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PRESENTED BY

// Expert Analysis DEMYSTIFYING DC: ROUND TABLE PANEL

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ABOUT THE MODERATOR: JANET CLAYTON

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Senior Strategist, Vectis DC WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION

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Hon. Tony Coelho, Former House Majority Whip WHY BUSINESSES SHOULD PRIORITIZE GOVERNMENT RELATIONS

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Virginia Grebbien, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, Parsons Corporation WHO TO KNOW IN THE 117th CONGRESS

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Don Polese, Founder & Managing Partner, Vectis DC

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PRESENTED BY

// Demystifying DC: Round Table Panel

Hon. Tony Coelho Former House Majority Whip

Virginia Grebbien Chief Corporate Affairs Officer Parsons Corporation

Don Polese Founder & Managing Partnet Vectis DC

Tony Coelho brings a national reputation as one of the top strategists of the Democratic Party. Coelho is the current DNC Disability Council Chair and was a 2020 Democratic National Convention Vice Chair. He has served in Congress as House Majority Whip, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and chairman of Al Gore’s presidential campaign. He is credited as the author and leader of a bipartisan movement in support of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Coelho is a Founding Partner of Vectis DC and serves on the Board of Directors of publicly-traded Service Corporation International and AudioEye. He is Chairman of the Board of Esquire Bank in New York.

Virginia Grebbien is Chief Corporate Affairs Officer of Parsons Corporation (NYSE: PSN), a $3.6 billion digitally enabled solutions provider in the defense, intelligence, and critical infrastructure markets. She is one of three women on the seven-member Parsons Executive Leadership Team and oversees government relations, marketing, branding, communications, and corporate social responsibility. Grebbien helped lead the company’s 2019 listing on the New York Stock Exchange, collaborating on sales strategy and leading internal and external communications for the successful $500 million initial public offering. She currently serves on the board of Liberty Utilities.

Don Polese has spent over three decades on Capitol Hill working with leading Republican Members of Congress and consulting with private and public companies as well as public agencies.

Serving as District Chief of Staff to San Diego/ Orange County Congressman and Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Ron Packard (R), he specializes in the federal budget and appropriations process. He has also developed many years of close relationships within key Federal agencies in DC and California, including Defense, Energy, Education, Interior, Transportation and EPA.

MODERATOR Janet Clayton Senior Strategist

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PRESENTED BY

// About the Moderator Janet Clayton is a former two-time Pulitzer prize-winning editor at the Los Angeles Times. Her distinguished career as a key member of the newspaper’s leadership team is matched by her C-suite experience at Edison International and Southern California Edison, where she served on Edison International’s 9-member executive management committee as senior vice president of corporate communications. She currently serves as the Senior Strategist at Vectis DC and on the Board of Directors of CalMatters.

Janet Clayton Senior Strategist

“There’s already talk, at least among the Democrats, that there’s the pragmatic wing and there’s the so-called progressive wing. How is that tension going to play out? Is it just part of the usual conversation, or is it going to really lead to some problems for legislation and for the President?”

Janet Clayton Senior Strategist Vectis DC

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// WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION Hon. Tony Coelho, Former House Majority Whip How will President-elect Biden’s long relationships in Washington impact his administration?

People don’t really realize because it’s never been played up that much, but relationships will count here again.

Leader McConnell and President-elect Joe Biden are good friends. They’ve had to deal with issues going back and so forth. People only hear about the negatives and the attacks, but really, they are good friends. And I think you’re going to find that Joe is going to be a totally different type of leader than our current President. He is someone who reaches out to people and brings them in and makes them part of his decision-making.

Leadership at many government agencies has been altered quite a bit. Do you think those are going to be lasting changes, or do you think that’s going to happen quickly?

There will be change in practically every agency in the first 100 days. There will be major changes as we go along, a lot depending on what happens in the Congress. If you can’t get the legislation through the Congress, expect Biden to do what other Presidents have done, and that is use executive orders. They will use executive orders to make changes. They don’t have to check with anybody. They just issue it and go with it. And so they’re already talking about the need for executive orders in different things. It’s a result of what’s going to happen in that first month with the Congress.

How will the two parties—or will they—work together to benefit small businesses?

What Speaker Pelosi will have to do is to make sure that she gets legislation through the House that helps her party prevail for the next election. It’s going to be a task, but that’s something that she has to do. You basically have a situation where the majority party, if it is the Republicans, that they’re looking at 2022, when they have a majority of the candidates up in 2022. So they have to be careful about what they do. And so it’s that opportunity for compromise.

Both parties need to be very careful. As opposed to just blasting off on whatever they want, they’ve got to be careful. I think it sets up a situation with a President that wants to compromise, a President who wants to get

things done. I think it sets up an opportunity that we haven’t seen in some time.

Provide us an insight on President-elect Biden.

My relationship with him goes clear back to when I was pushing the Americans with Disabilities Act over 30 years ago. And Joe was a sponsor and very involved in that effort, very involved in disabilities. And as some of you know, he is a stutterer. And as a result, during the campaign, people were saying, “well, I think he’s suffering from dementia or something.” And he didn’t acknowledge his stuttering. I worked with him because as someone with a disability and a leading advocate in the disability community, I felt that it would be a positive if people knew about his stuttering. We had the young man Brayden Harrington, who talked about his relationship with the then Vice President in regard to his stuttering, how Joe reached out to him and encouraged him and so forth. Then at that convention he then gave a very glowing sort of a display as to what Joe is like in that regard.

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// WHY BUSINESSES SHOULD PRIORITIZE GOVERNMENT RELATIONS Virginia Grebbien, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, Parsons Corporation Why should businesses dedicate resources to government relations and public affairs? Where is the value?

You have the opportunity to not only understand, but to help shape programmatic spending. That’s a very important service that the private sector and also other practitioners of government relations provide to our elected officials and our administration officials. They need to hear from us about what’s important to our stakeholder communities, and that voice is very important in their deliberations.

You spent 20 years in government before going to the private sector. How much crossover is there?

I’ve spent the last 15 years in the private sector, leading sales teams, profit and loss, communications, government relations teams. It’s really funny—when I left the public sector, I thought, “Oh, I’m going to move on. I won’t be doing public policy anymore, and I’ll miss all my friends in the government relations field,” and had a big party and then turned around on Monday morning and saw them all again. When you’re in the public sector servicing—or when you’re in the private sector servicing public sector clients— you don’t get away from public policy and the need for an active government relations effort.

Also, staying ahead of the curve on federal issues enables me to inform my fellow C-suite leaders at Parsons so we can be proactive as opposed to reactive to emerging market trends, so that we can move our business to where the growth markets are, to where our client needs are, and being ahead of that curve. There’s significant value to having an active federal affairs engagement program.

How much do relationships with government officials matter for business?

Your relationship network with elected officials and policymakers and administrative officials is absolutely, totally crucial. In my notes, I put CRUCIAL in capital letters, underlined it, put a circle around it. You have to have not only a personal relationship network, but your organization needs to have a relationship network that is embedded into the elected and regulatory community.

I regularly walk the halls of Congress. Our senior leaders in our organization regularly walk the halls of Congress, and we meet with Administration officials, and we meet with top staff. And by doing that, we are supporting our organization, we’re supporting the legislative process, because it’s a two-way give-and-take of information. And by developing that relationship network, we are, at the end of the day, developing the ability to play both offense and defense on issues that are germane to our business.

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// WHO TO KNOW IN THE 117th CONGRESS

What about some more under-the-radar Members to know?

Don Polese, Founder & Managing Partner, Vectis DC

One of them I really want to mention off the top is Lucille Roybal-Allard, who is a very unsung but a very hardworking member. She’s the first Latina to serve as a Cardinal, one of the most distinguished and important chairmanships in the United States Congress. And Lucille, as a Latina from L.A., very proud to say she just finished her first term as a Cardinal and will be returning this next session of Congress, either as the Homeland Security Chair, and she’ll be keeping her role as a senior member of the committee that oversees the budget for the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education.

What should California business leaders know about the incoming Congressional delegation?

I’ve been working in or around the California Congressional delegation for my entire career, going on 35 years now, both for a member of Congress and consulting for a number of California entities over these many years. I have never—and unequivocally can say—never seen a stronger lineup than what California’s going to have on Capitol Hill moving forward for the 117th Congress, and I wanted to touch on that a little bit.

Very importantly, we have currently Vice President-elect (Kamala) Harris. That’s going to bring the Golden State down to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And that, of course, is going to be a huge advantage for Golden State issues, given her lifetime of service here.

The two other obvious ones are Speaker (Nancy) Pelosi returning and Leader (Kevin) McCarthy, and they are the same pair that has been in charge of their respective parties these last couple of Congresses. And again, I just think between the three of them at the very top tier, needless to say, the Golden State’s going to be well represented and even more so, probably—again, the most I’ve seen in my three decades-plus back here in DC.

The other important person I really want to bring up is Ken Calvert from the Inland Empire, a Republican. Again, a person that if you’re tuning in to the airwaves every day and talk radio, you don’t hear him shouting much across the partisan divide. He is right now the top Republican, as he’s been for a couple of terms now, on the House Defense Appropriations Committee. He’s the co-founder, in a bipartisan way, of the California Aerospace Caucus. And he’s, again, much like Lucille Roybal-Allard, one of those when you really want to get things done on Capitol Hill, he’s somebody you go to. We’ve had a great friendship with Ken. I’ve known him since he was elected back in 1992, and he’s, again, really one of the go-to persons back here. And if we’re really looking to break down and get things done on Capitol Hill, Ken is really one of the folks to go to on the House side.

How can a private company best pursue funding within the appropriations process or Congressional earmarks?

That’s a great question, particularly since again the earmarks are definitely going to be permitted for nonprofits and municipalities. However, there is a way in for private companies, using what we would call the general language programmatic route, where you could actually draw either actual text or report language which is part of an appropriations bill that’s descriptive. The language describe a certain program or project very generally, knowing that it is geared for a particular private or set of private entities that could provide those. It’s a little bit of a form of art, but it’s something that, even in this earmarkless era, over the last decade has been used very frequently, and we’ve been able to use it at great success. So again, while it can’t be a named project with the company named, the description can be used very, very capably and clearly, and the members know exactly and instruct the Executive Branch.

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