A longtime corporate lobbyist with a record of helping America’s wealthiest individuals and largest corporations avoid paying taxes now holds one of the most powerful positions in U.S. tax policy. Ken Kies, a Washington insider with decades of experience lobbying for financial giants and multinational corporations, was recently confirmed as assistant treasury secretary for tax policy—an office that will oversee the implementation of the new Republican budget law signed by President Donald Trump earlier this month.
Kies was confirmed by the GOP-controlled Senate in a party-line vote following his nomination by Trump in January. His appointment puts a professional tax avoidance strategist in charge of writing the rules for a tax law that nonpartisan analysts say will direct approximately $4.5 trillion in tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans over the next decade.
That role is “enormously powerful,” according to The New York Times’ Jesse Drucker, who profiled Kies earlier this week. Kies now oversees roughly 100 attorneys and economists at the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Policy, a small but potent division of the federal government responsible for issuing regulations and guidance that can either enable or eliminate tax avoidance strategies.
“The office issues regulations to help the government administer tax laws and provides guidance that can render the latest tax-dodging strategy a gold mine—or doom it,” Drucker wrote.
As campaign director for the progressive group Unrig Our Economy, Leor Tal expressed alarm over Kies’s appointment. “By putting a professional tax-dodging consultant in charge of their tax law, Republicans are continuing to make their intentions crystal clear—this law is a gift to billionaires and huge corporations like those Ken Kies has spent his career looking out for,” Tal said in a statement Monday.
The tax law in question—passed by the Republican majority and signed into law earlier this month by Trump—extends many of the provisions of the 2017 Trump-GOP tax cuts, including a 20% deduction for certain business income that primarily benefits top earners. That provision was one of many that Kies personally lobbied for during the crafting of the 2017 bill.
“In the George W. Bush administration, Mr. Kies successfully pushed for legislation to make such offshore tax dodges even easier to execute. During the Obama administration, he fended off another attempted crackdown on those strategies,” Drucker wrote. “In 2017, as part of a sweeping package of tax cuts signed by Mr. Trump, Mr. Kies lobbied for a new tax break that provides a 20 percent deduction to certain businesses, which overwhelmingly benefits the richest Americans.”
Kies’s deep ties to corporate lobbying are well documented. He previously served as managing director of the Federal Policy Group, a high-powered Washington lobbying firm where, according to a now-removed biography, he “delivered significant legislative and regulatory results for his clients, which include major corporations, trade associations, and coalitions of companies with common objectives.”
The biography further stated: “Mr. Kies has led coalition efforts to enact legislation responding to the World Trade Organization’s ruling against U.S. foreign sales corporation benefits, to avert enactment of broad ‘corporate tax shelter’ legislation that would have an adverse impact on legitimate business transactions, and to reverse Treasury regulations targeting ‘hybrid’ arrangements of U.S. multinational corporations, among other projects.”
Kies’s client list includes some of the most powerful players in the U.S. economy, including Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, and Pfizer. In his decades of work, he has consistently pushed for tax policies that benefit multinational corporations and the wealthiest individuals in the country.
The appointment has drawn fierce backlash from progressive lawmakers, including Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who called the Trump administration “wallowing in corruption.”
“Five trillion dollars in tax cuts for the wealthiest, written and administered by the wealthiest,” she wrote. “On the backs of stripping healthcare and food from working and poor people. Shame on you.”
The controversy comes amid broader concerns about the direction of U.S. tax policy under the Trump administration. On the heels of the GOP budget law’s passage, Republican lawmakers and right-wing organizations are now pushing the administration to pursue a regulatory change that would drastically reduce capital gains taxes—another policy that would overwhelmingly benefit the rich.
According to The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein, the proposal would involve changing how the Treasury Department calculates capital gains taxes by indexing them to inflation.
“The plan rests on changing how the Treasury Department calculates those taxes,” Stein wrote. “The highest-earning 1 percent of Americans would receive 86 percent of the benefits from indexing capital gains to inflation, while the bottom 80 percent of income earners would get just 1 percent of the benefits, Penn Wharton projected in 2018.”
The push for further tax cuts comes as millions of Americans face economic hardship and cuts to essential safety net programs. Republicans have pursued reductions in Medicaid and SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), programs that serve low-income families, while pushing for policies that shift more tax benefits to the wealthiest households.
“As families struggle with rising prices from Trump’s tariffs and face devastating cuts to Medicaid and SNAP,” Tal noted, “Republicans are doubling down on helping the richest of the rich, while working people pay the price.”
Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, responded to Stein’s reporting with harsh criticism. “After gutting health care for millions of Americans and passing massive tax breaks for billionaires, Republicans are now working on even MORE tax breaks for the ultra-rich,” Boyle said. “They aren’t interested in fighting for working families—only their rich friends.”
Kies’s elevation to one of the most influential tax policy positions in the U.S. government is part of a broader pattern under the Trump administration: placing industry insiders and lobbyists in key regulatory roles. His new authority over the Office of Tax Policy gives him the ability to shape future tax policy not just through legislation, but through regulatory interpretation—often shielded from public scrutiny and oversight.
With another round of potential tax breaks on the horizon and one of the wealthiest-serving lobbyists now writing the rules, critics warn that the growing economic divide may only deepen.
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