HARRISBURG — At least 48 former members of Pennsylvania’s General Assembly are now registered lobbyists seeking to influence policies they once shaped, according to a Spotlight PA analysis.
They range from former rank-and-file lawmakers to the onetime most powerful members of the legislature. Their clients span a range of prominent industries — often ones the lobbyist was once involved in legislating, a review of the state’s lobbying disclosure database shows.
Lawmakers-turned-lobbyists generally defend this practice. Petitioning the government is protected speech under the First Amendment, they note, and their elected experience helps clients navigate the opaque legislative process. But critics, from fellow lawmakers to good-government groups, say it incentivizes legislators to be cozy with special interests, then lets them leverage relationships they built on the public's dime to turn a profit.
Efforts to tighten the reins on lawmakers becoming lobbyists have failed in Pennsylvania, despite bipartisan interest just a few years ago. This legislative session, no proposals have advanced outside their assigned committees.
Roy Afflerbach, a former Democratic state legislator for the Lehigh Valley who's been registered to lobby since 2007, told Spotlight PA that he knows that people view a lobbyist as an “overloaded, cigar-smoking, cash-carrying man cutting deals in a backroom.” However, he argued that the job is more about relationships, communication, and information gathering.
“The greater concern is not the public official who becomes a lobbyist, but the industrialist who funds their own person who becomes an elected official,” Afflerbach said. “The lobbyist can ask for a decision, but can’t make it.”
Another legislator-turned-lobbyist, Republican Stan Saylor, argued that the profession is broadly able to self-regulate.
“Lobbyists police our own,” Saylor told Spotlight PA. “If you get a reputation as a lobbyist as rude, crude, or not nice, you’re not very successful.”
But Andrea Beaty, assistant director of the Revolving Door Project in Washington, D.C., argued that hiring former lawmakers can give industries and corporations extra power in their attempts to “exert their influence” on government.
“They're capitalizing on that former official’s really close ties to government and that insider knowledge that they bring from having experienced and been a part of legislative or executive branch proceedings,” she said.
Pennsylvania law does little to impede the close relationship between lawmaking and lobbying. Lawmakers only have to wait a year before they can lobby the chamber or office where they once served.
If someone runs afoul of that law, it’s up to the State Ethics Commission to hold them accountable. The commission, which only investigates potential violations in response to a formal complaint, reported two violations of the revolving-door provision last year, according to its annual report.
Allen Kukovich, a former Democratic state lawmaker from western Pennsylvania, successfully passed a House rule in 1979 that bars representatives who are also attorneys from being paid to represent any person or group before state departments, boards, agencies, bureaus, or commissions. This arrangement, Kukovich said, allowed lawmakers to profit from their office and was a clear conflict of interest. The rule is still in place to this day.
It’s not uncommon for lobbying firms to approach someone with Kukovich’s resume when they retire from the legislature. He received offers, but never followed up on them.
“I wasn't that popular, and I made it clear it was something I’d never do,” Kukovich said. “I was never tempted in any way.”
He added to Spotlight PA that strong ethics rules on issues like the revolving door help government maintain public trust.
“It may not seem like a big deal, but when you look at the whole of Harrisburg, it looks corrupt, and that’s bad for the system.”
‘Why people hire you’
Spotlight PA’s analysis of lawmakers-turned-lobbyists showed that former members are now regularly lobbying for organizations they were involved with regulating — or deregulating — while in office.
Take Aaron Kaufer, a Republican who represented part of Luzerne County in the state House until late 2024. While in office, he sponsored unsuccessful legislation to create an adult-use marijuana program. Earlier this year, he accepted cannabis company Cresco Labs as his first client when he registered as a lobbyist.
Republican Jim Gregory of Blair County, meanwhile, sat on the state House’s Gaming Oversight Committee for two legislative sessions and co-sponsored a bill to regulate skill games at an industry-backed tax rate before he left office in 2024. Now, he represents skill games manufacturer Pace-O-Matic to his former colleagues.
Those types of situations raise a red flag for Beaty. If a lawmaker is focused on ensuring they can get hired as a lobbyist after leaving public service, she said, that could shift their focus while representing their constituents in the Capitol.
“There's this dangling opportunity of the potential of a nice cushy corporate job once they leave government,” Beaty said. “It changes incentives for the folks who are still in government because it makes it a little bit more difficult, a little bit more questioning of whether or not you want to go back on what a corporation is asking for.”
Neither Kaufer nor Gregory responded to questions from Spotlight PA.
David Mayernik, a former Democratic representative who has lobbied since 2007, said it wouldn’t be possible to stop Pennsylvania lawmakers from lobbying on issues they have history with in the General Assembly: “That’s why people hire you.”
If the practice was banned, he said, lobbyists would simply work “behind the scenes” to “pull the strings” by suggesting their friends and colleagues advocate to lawmakers.
However, Mayernik does think there is a way to cut down the number of lawmakers representing the industries they were involved with while in office: extend the cool-down period between a legislative exit and lobbying registration to at least five years. Such a gap would allow for more staff turnover, he argued.
As it stands, the law is permissive about lawmakers who want to start working for lobbying entities, even while still in office.
Take, for instance, a state lawmaker who asked the State Ethics Commission for an opinion last year: Sometime during his term, he planned to accept a job at an organization that lobbies public officials. The lawmaker would recuse himself from certain votes while serving out his final term, but he would represent his new employer before the federal government while still in office.
After leaving office, the lawmaker said he’d refrain from representing the organization before his former chamber for a year, as required by state law. For the other legislative chamber, he would wait just one day.
The plan was fine, the Ethics Commission ruled.
(The lawmaker’s name was redacted in the public filing, but the details match ex-state Rep. Seth Grove, a York County Republican who began leading a trade group last year; Grove declined to say if the filing was his. He is not currently registered as a lobbyist.)
Among lawmakers, it’s not only rank-and-file members who become lobbyists. The most powerful legislators in the commonwealth — who helped shape nearly every aspect of state policy during their tenures — do the same.
Both Jake Corman, who led the state Senate, and Saylor, who chaired the state House’s powerful budget committee, work at One+ Strategies with two other former lawmakers. The firm’s clients include CVS Health, PPL Electric Utilities, and Uber.
Joe Scarnati, another former Senate leader, started his own shop called Allegheny Strategy Partners. His firm’s high-profile client list includes Amazon, UPMC, General Motors, multiple utility companies, and Comcast.
Democrat Bill DeWeese, who was speaker of the state House, joined the lobbying ranks after serving time in prison on corruption charges. DeWeese, who said he isn’t as active in the Capitol as he used to be, firmly denied there being a possible conflict of interest with former public servants becoming lobbyists.
“The Constitution allows for freedom of expression,” he said. “Just because someone served in the General Assembly then went on to their own endeavors should not proscribe their ability to make a living.”
DeWeese also said the modern legislator has so much information available to them, compared to when he served, that he doesn’t think lobbyists do much more than add “extra context on the periphery.”
‘De facto corruption risk’
Pennsylvania has seen a number of high-profile efforts to crack down on lobbying fail.
Five years ago, leaders from both legislative chambers weighed a broad lobbying reform package. Talks included whether to ban lobbyists from participating in political consulting work, bar state agencies from hiring lobbyists, and restrict public officials who were once lobbyists from being solicited by their former co-workers. None of the resulting legislation reached a committee vote.
More recently, in 2023, a key state Senate committee unanimously approved legislation that would have extended Pennsylvania’s wait period to two years, like several other states including, recently, Michigan. The effort stalled without a vote on the Senate floor.
Majority Caucus Chair Kristin Phillips-Hill (R., York) led the charge on the more recent legislation. She still wants to extend the window to two years.
Phillips-Hill told Spotlight PA that an ex-lawmaker’s relationships with their former colleagues can be “used by other entities for biased access,” once the public official offers their services as a lobbyist.
“They have knowledge, expertise, and connections that were acquired in the service of the constituents that entrusted them to represent them, that could be used for other entities,” Phillips-Hill said. “That, in turn, can create problems in terms of public trust.”
State Rep. Joe Webster (D., Montgomery) wants to extend the wait period to five years — which would give Pennsylvania the second-longest moratorium in the country, behind Florida's six years. Last year, he argued in a memo seeking support that the revolving door “creates a de facto corruption risk, and must be addressed.”
Lobbying after serving as a lawmaker is not inherently a negative thing on the surface, Webster told Spotlight PA. What happens behind closed doors, he said, is what “erodes” the sanctity of the institution.
“We should face the fact that if a former colleague is walking the halls of the Capitol, that's a friend,” Webster said. “That's a person who has access and influence.”
Harrisburg leadership offered few specifics on what reforms they support or think are needed when asked by Spotlight PA.
Spokespeople for Senate Republicans and Gov. Josh Shapiro did not reply to requests for comment.
Beth Rementer, a spokesperson for state House Democrats, told Spotlight PA that the caucus is reviewing Webster’s proposal, but she did not say whether Majority Leader Matt Bradford (D., Montgomery) supports the bill.
“Stakeholders are always welcome to share their concerns and ideas with lawmakers because these conversations help craft solutions to make life better for Pennsylvanians,” Rementer said. “No matter who schedules a meeting with a member — whether it’s a concerned citizen, an organization or a lobbyist — all conversations should be treated with the same consideration.”
Did we miss a former lawmaker registered as a lobbyist? Email reporters Jaxon White and Stephen Caruso at jwhite@spotlightpa.org and scaruso@spotlightpa.org.
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