Moneyman brings budget prowess to lobby firm

Capitol Hill’s top moneyman is taking his budget savvy to K Street after more than two decades years on the job.

Will Smith, who has led the House Appropriations Committee’s Republican staff for the last three years of his congressional career, will be joining Cornerstone Government Affairs, a lobbying firm that handles a slew of appropriations work. He starts March 20.

Smith worked for the panel, which crafts legislation to fund the federal government, for five years, but spent the bulk of his time — 12 years — in Rep. Hal Rogers’ (R-Ky.) personal office, where he rose to chief of staff. 

Rogers called Smith his “right hand in the halls of Congress” in a statement to The Hill.

“Will has been my right hand in the halls of Congress for nearly two decades, and I cannot imagine a more thoughtful advisor, a more capable strategist, or a more loyal friend,” the Kentucky congressman said. 

“His professionalism and commitment to the task at hand are truly unmatched.  Congress as an institution will not be the same without Will’s strong leadership and steady hand, but Cornerstone is fortunate to have such a talented and hard-working individual join its ranks,” he added. 

Rogers, who represents Smith’s hometown of Beattyville, Ky., just ceded the gavel of the Appropriations committee to Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.) at the beginning of this congressional session due to term limits. 

Smith helped to shepherd the passage of 66 bills in the span of five years, and worked on the committee for a total of 600 budget and oversight hearings and more than 200 different investigations. 

He talked about the power of using the budgeting process to fund repairs for damaged roads and infrastructure and creating programs to combat problems like the prescription drug and opioid addition epidemic, an issue he is passionate about. 

“I grew up in a family where my dad was sort of the sole town doctor in a really small town in Kentucky, he served the people there for 60 years,” Smith said on in the Rayburn cafeteria on Friday on one of his last days of work.  

“And so when I got out of college, I came up to Washington not really knowing what I wanted to do, but knowing that I wanted to spend some time up here and be a public servant and help the people back home,” he said. 

Before prescription drug addiction made national headlines, Smith saw its impact in Kentucky. 

While working as Rogers’s chief of staff, he helped the congressman create Operation UNITE in 2003, an organization to fight substance abuse. Smith looks at the organization and its evolution as one of the accomplishments of which he is the most proud.

The organization’s name is an acronym for Unlawful Narcotics Investigations, Treatment and Education, which it describes as the “three-pronged” approach to combating drug abuse — resources for law enforcement, treatment for addicts and drug education in schools.

In terms of what policy areas he plans to focus his advocacy efforts on, Smith smiles and says that he’s done it all. 

Once he leaves, Smith cannot lobby any of his former colleagues on the Appropriations committee for one year.

Cornerstone, which racked up $16.8 million in federal lobbying revenue last year, has clients including Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Boeing, H&R Block and ACT for NIH: Advancing Cures Today, an organization that seeks to increase funding for the National Institutes of Health. In addition, the firm has a reach outside the Beltway, with offices in eight states. 

“Will is the consummate professional and a class act,” said Jim Richards, a principal and director at Cornerstone. “Will’s well-deserved and excellent reputation on both sides of the Capitol, and amongst both parties, brings tremendous value to our clients on a multitude of fronts.”

In the fall of 2013, Smith slogged through the government shutdown, when Congress failed to enact spending legislation by the end of the fiscal year.

Faced with an impasse over a GOP push to stop ObamaCare, the government shut down for 16 days that October, the first stoppage in more than 17 years. 

“There’s not a day that’s not challenging out here,” Smith said, but “it was challenging in the sense that we were here every day, every night, for almost a month … producing legislation, putting bills across the floor,” he said. “[We were] trying to come up with— helping leadership come up with— a solution.”

The House passed nine “mini” funding bills aimed at pumping cash into various agencies and programs, including the Department of Veterans Affairs, the National Institutes of Health and the National Park Service, but all of them died in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

“It was a tough time,” Smith said.

He glowingly refers to the Appropriations Committee as the “most collegial, bipartisan committee in the House.”

“If you’re not funding the government, you’re in a bad situation, right?  The appropriations process is vital obviously to the functioning of government. We’re the only committee that absolutely has to produce every year, there’s no getting around that,” he said.  

“We buckle down, we get our work done, we work best behind the scenes,” he adds, calling the members and staff on the panel, “work horses, not show horses.”

When Smith first started on Capitol Hill in 1994, he worked for Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), now the Senate majority leader. He then spent a yearlong stint on a Senate Appropriations subcommittee, before starting with Rogers in 1998, a job he says he had moved to Washington to try and get. 

“It’s a good time to leave, and it’s a good time explore new opportunities,” Smith said. “I feel like I’ve done what I’ve set out to do since I got here.”