The Honorable Robert S. Walker, known on Capitol Hill as Bob Walker, is a former member of Congresswho represented Pennsylvania’s 16th District for 20 years. When he left the US House of Representatives in 1997, he joined the lobbying firm the Wexler Group, which then became Wexler & Walker Public Policy Associates. The firm reported billings of more than $10 million in 2011, representing a wide range of clients in aviation, communication, finance, automotive, health, and technology sectors. It gave $131,000 in campaign contributions during the 2012 election cycle.

Former members of Congress make up only one percent of all lobbyists in Washington, according to research conducted by Timothy La Pira of James Madison University, and most of them work for lobbying firms such as Wexler & Walker. The prestige of former members, along with their insider status and knowledge of the system, make them sought-after advocates, hired primarily by major corporations (although Wexler & Walker also has some nonprofit and governmental clients). Walker himself has been cited as one of Washington’s top lobbyists by several national publications.

While in Congress, Walker was chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology (then called the Science Committee) and rose to become chief deputy minority whip. As part of that leadership position, he was responsible for counting votes and mobilizing support for legislation among the Republicans in the House. After leaving Congress, he served as chairman of the Commission on the Future of the United States Aerospace Industry, and as a member of the Presidential Commission on the Implementation of the United States Space Exploration Policy and the President’s Commission on the United States Postal Service. He serves on the boards of the Aerospace Corporation and Space Adventures, and as a director emeritus of the Space Foundation. He was chairman of the US Department of Energy’s Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technical Advisory Committee.

Walker received a bachelor’s degree in education from Millersville University in 1964, and taught high school for three years before earning a master’s degree in political science from the University of Delaware in 1968. He then served on the staff of Rep. Edwin Eshleman of Pennsylvania for 10 years; when Eshleman retired, Walker ran for and was elected to his seat.

Beth Leech: I know that you spent twenty years in Congress before you came to this firm. Why did you choose to come here over any other place you could have gone?

Bob Walker: Well, this organization impressed me for a number of reasons. Coming off the Hill, I was interested in finding someplace where the culture would be somewhat similar to what I was used to. As I did my interview, it was clear that the teamwork approach and the bipartisan approach that was taken by this firm was similar to the kind of atmosphere that I grew up with on the Hill. My own orientation toward this was to be able to extend my public service career, but do so in a venue that gave me a little more latitude than what I had in Congress, both in terms of schedule and in the issues.

Leech: Who, in general, are the clients that you tend to deal with? I understand that your areas of expertise come from your time on the Hill, right?

Walker: Yes, a lot of it. I deal primarily in science, space, technology, and energy issues because those were things that I was deeply involved in as part of my work on the Science Committee when I was in Congress. I was also a parliamentary tactician when I was on the Hill, so a lot of what I do here is strategizing based upon what’s possible inside of the operational process of the Congress. But my role in the firm is such that I get involved in broad, general issues, most of which are familiar to me because of my years in leadership in Congress, where we had to deal with a little bit of everything.

Since coming here, I’ve expanded my range of issues because of some of my corporate board work and so on in the areas of intelligence and defense, but it largely builds off of some of the things that I was doing when I was in Congress.

Leech: And how did you happen to get interested in those areas when you were in Congress?

Walker: I got assigned to it. I went to Congress with the intention of ultimately getting on the Rules Committee. As a member of a minority party, that was not going to happen in my early career, so I asked to be assigned to a generalist committee. I asked for what was then called Government Operations because of its broad, general jurisdiction, not so much legislatively but in oversight. My representative on the Committee on Committees called me to say, “Well, I can get you Government Operations if you’re willing to take Science, Space and Technology as a second assignment.” I said, “Sure, why not?” And about three science professors flipped over in their graves.

Leech: That was not your subject in your early years?

Walker: No, it was not. Although I must admit that as a kid, the space program really fascinated me, and so when I realized that this was one of the areas I was going to get a chance to deal in, I found that exciting. I got there and figured out that I didn’t have to know theorems in order to do science policy. What I was getting a chance to do was look over the science and technology horizon ten or fifteen years to see if I could figure out what those technologies were going to do to impact culture, and culture to impact politics. And so I ended up specializing in it because I found it fascinating. When I became the chief deputy whip for the Republicans, I had to give up a committee. I gave up the Government Operations Committee in order to stay on the Science Committee. Later, just a few months after that, I was offered a chance to go to the Rules Committee, but I turned it down in order to stay on the Science Committee.

Leech: Oh, that’s interesting. Your ideal committee assignment changed as science policy drew you in.

Walker: Yes, and I’ve remained close to it—and not just because of work here, but I’ve done a lot of special projects for NASA on a pro bono basis. I served on two presidential commissions that worked with NASA, defense aerospace issues, and commercial aerospace issues. I’m on the board of Aerospace Corporation, which is a major, federally funded research and development center. So I’ve stayed involved even beyond the work that I do here.

Leech: Could you give the reader an idea of what life is like when you’re you? Could you walk me through an average day at work?

Walker: Yesterday, I played in the congressional golf tournament on behalf of the Wounded Warriors Project, and so I spent my day on the golf course with some of my former colleagues and some of the present members of Congress. We were golfing with a group of just outstanding people who were wounded in either Iraq or Afghanistan and are in the process of recuperating.

Leech: Was it a fundraiser?

Walker: Yes. We raised about $300,000 for the Wounded Warriors organization.

Leech: And when you’re at an event like this, do people talk shop, talk about politics—or is that considered sort a faux pas?

Walker: No, it’s minimal. Usually, it’s just kind of reminiscing about time on the Hill, but, for example, I had a conversation with the chairman of the Armed Services Committee about sequestration before we teed off. One of the fellows who was playing with me was playing for the Democratic team, but we rode together and talked a little bit of shop—but not much in the course of the day. So that’s not a faux pas, but it just usually doesn’t fit. Most of what you talk about is how bad your golf game is.

Leech: So the golf tournament yesterday—and I know last week you were out of town part of the week. Is there another day that would be closer to typical?

Walker: Well, today is semi-typical. I started the day by meeting with a client in a large group meeting. We have a coalition of lobby organizations around town that work for a client, and so I had a meeting this morning where we were discussing strategy with them. I came back down here and worked for a while on just catching up with news and events, and so on, because I’d been out of town. I went up to the Hill and had lunch with a former colleague who is a current member of Congress, but she is leaving Congress and wanted to talk to me about what life would be like on the outside and discuss some of her options about that.

Then I came back here and, again, worked on answering e-mails and so on. I’m chairman of the Australian American Leadership Dialogue. I just got off the phone with the president of that group. We just did our big event last week, which is the reason why I wasn’t in the office. So we were doing an after-event analysis of what had gone on. And I just got off the phone with a scientist who wants to come in and talk to me about some research that she’s doing, so we’re making arrangements on that. Now I’m doing an interview with you. I do press interviews on a lot of days. Later on today, I have another client meeting that I have to do. And then—I lose track myself—it seems to me I have something this evening as well.

Leech: How often will you have something going on in the evening that’s work-related?

Walker: Fairly often. It’s certainly not every night, but fairly often there will be fundraising events or something of that kind. Oh, yeah, and I have another meeting here in about a half an hour with somebody who’s doing a job search. I meet with a lot of foreign groups. I’m involved with the US Association of Former Members of Congress, and through that, I have worked to build communications between countries. I have worked on issues relating to China and some on Europe.

I sometimes do seminars in the evenings. I do a lot of speaking to federal employee groups that come into town.

Leech: And when you do these seminars or you’re speaking to visiting groups, what are the topics that you speak on?

Walker: It’s usually the legislative process of one kind or another. Brookings Institution has me talk fairly often and it’s usually on how science policy is developed inside the Congress.

Leech: You were talking about the different meetings you’re having with clients. How do clients come to you? How does one get clients?

Walker: A lot of it is what we call “over the transom.” It’s just people who know the reputation of the firm and have an issue that they think would fit, and they come to us. Many of our clients here have been here for a long, long time. We have a couple clients here that have been here ever since the firm opened back in 1981. So we’ve got some traditional clients, and then there is special project work, and usually those projects come to us based on reputation. It may be the reputation of the firm. It may be the reputation of individual members of the firm. New clients also come from the outreach we do. All these things I’m wandering around doing are ways of getting to know people who then get some impression of your capabilities.

Leech: Things like the Australian American Leadership Dialogue?

Walker: Well, we haven’t actually gotten very much business out of that. We served as the secretary for that group for a long time. It was a joy of my former and late colleague, Anne Wexler. She was one of the founding members, but it hasn’t been something that’s generated an awful lot of business. Of course, I have made contacts with other people inside the group that sometimes are business possibilities.

Leech: What does a lobbyist do when someone comes to him and says, “Can you help me?”

Walker: Well, a large portion of what we do is educate our clients. Often, when they come in, they think that there’s some magical button that can be pushed or some string that can be pulled that automatically gets them what they want. And they think that what they’re hiring you to do is to talk with people who can then magically make what they want happen. A lot of what we have to do is to educate clients that it doesn’t work that way. In fact, it often takes a considerable period of time to educate people within government about what the client is doing, what it is they want, and why it would be good for the country, not just for a particular group or individual.

You have to convince the client that they’ve got to be in this for the long haul—this isn’t something that’s probably going to happen in weeks or months. The legislative process or even the business of working inside the agencies is a very long-term type of thing. So, the first thing is to educate the client, and then give them a strategy—begin to give them some idea of what we’d have to do in order to be successful.

Once a strategy is put together, we decide here what the team would be that would be necessary to carry out that strategy. Then, depending upon where the client’s needs can be met, we begin to work. Usually people come here and say, “Just give me a piece of legislation passed.” Well, that’s one of the toughest things to do, so what you have to say is, “It probably doesn’t take a piece of legislation. It probably takes language in a committee report, or it takes an amendment to an authorization bill.” We try to give them ideas about routes that they can go. Sometimes, it just involves a member of Congress writing a letter to the agency involved and pointing out what the advantages of some action would be. That gets the agency interested in it and then begins the conversation. Then it is a process of getting all the people on board that have to be on board in order to accomplish the end result.

Leech: When you’re presented with a problem, how do you figure out what to do?

Walker: You rely upon the expertise of the people that you’ve gathered in the firm. We usually start with the premise that we want to do the thing that is likely to be the most successful to get the project done and in the shortest amount of time. We want to treat the client fairly, and at the same time, recognize everything that we would have to go through. And so we rely upon our people to know whether there is any provision in law that would give us an ability to do what the client wants. If not, we might have to consider whether a piece of legislation is necessary to get it done.

We have a client right now for whom we would like to get a tax provision that would allow their work to be a tax deduction. There is no such provision in law at the present time. Maybe it’s something that would be good policy because it would affect the entire industry, but we have one client who is paying us for it. So, in that case, we’re going to have to get the law changed. We’ve looked at a lot of other avenues, but in the end, it’s going to take that.

In other cases, it’s clear that the law already authorizes whatever it is that the client is seeking, but that it simply has not been detailed. And so often what is necessary at that point is just a report from a congressional committee that says that, inside the provisions of law, this is an activity that we would like to see happen. But to do that, you’ve got to work to find somebody who’s willing to put the needed language into the committee report and is willing to be the sponsor to do that. So then we have to figure out who might be the potential member of Congress to do what is needed, and whether they have a constituency interest in the issue. Do they have a personal interest in it? Do they have a committee interest in it? Then we locate that person and then try to figure out who here has relationships with that person or that person’s staff so that we can begin to educate them about the need.

So everything we do is customized to the precise nature of the issue or problem that we’ve been presented.

Leech: How would working on an issue that’s primarily regulatory be different, or do you not handle things like that very often?

Walker: Well, the regulatory stuff is really more in the range of legal rather than legislative policy. So we do some of that, but it’s usually an informational campaign. It is not really lobbying, because it’s very difficult to lobby independent commissioners of regulatory agencies. But there are times when what we at least try to do is provide them with information off the shelf as it were, and we usually team with regulatory lawyers if we’re deeply involved in some matter that takes regulatory approval.

Leech: And do you have those regulatory lawyers on staff, or do you go outside?

Walker: No. We go outside.

Leech: How big a firm is Wexler & Walker?

Walker: We’re twenty-two professionals and then some support staff on top of that, and we keep it right in that range. We’re usually anywhere from twenty to twenty-five professionals.

Leech: You mentioned going to lots of fundraisers at night. To what extent is the firm involved in fundraising here?

Walker: We have a PAC. We have our own PAC that we utilize on behalf of our clients, and individual members of the firm do fundraising for individual members of Congress—usually members who they’ve worked with before or that they know from other venues. So we give individual contributions to candidates. We do individual fundraising. And we have our own PAC.

Leech: I’m sure you know the public view on all this, and that news stories pretty much portray PAC contributions as equaling bribery—that you’re buying the vote. I would just like to hear your opinion about this public view of what PACs are doing.

Walker: It’s a public view that’s been largely formulated by the press because it’s an easy story to write, but it looks ridiculous on the face of it. Most of my contributions are in the $250 to $500 range. This is to people who are raising hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars, for their campaigns. The dirty little secret of lobbying is that nobody can persuade anybody to do something that they wouldn’t be in favor of doing anyhow.

Most of the money goes to your friends—to people who have supported you in the past and who have had a record of being supportive of your issues. So there’s no sense that any of this is a pay-off for anything. Our PAC has a maximum contribution level of $1,000. Again, not enough money there to make a huge difference, but what it does is, it allows you to go to dinners or receptions and so on where at least the individual gets a chance to say hello to you and knows that you’re being supportive of the work that they’re doing. And that’s about all you get out of it.

Every once in a while, if you have a direct issue and so on, you actually get a chance to say, “I’d like to come in and see you about such-and-such and so on,” and the answer will usually be, “Sure, stop by and see me sometime.” That’s about as much work that gets done at any of these events.

Leech: And if you go and see somebody, how likely is it that they’re going to respond in the way that you want them to?

Walker: You don’t know. I mean, there’s no quid pro quo in any of this. The idea that because they saw you at the fundraiser, they’re immediately going to say, “Oh, yeah, absolutely! I’ve got to do this!” It just doesn’t work that way. By the time you go and have the appointment, the chances are that they’ve forgotten the fact that you were in the room, so it’s not as though all this is easily recognized as a part of a relationship. Most of this is—you’ve done it because you have an acquaintance with them, and you’ve contributed to them, and you go in to see them because you have an acquaintance.

I do know that there are places around town where the way in which they build those acquaintanceships is through fundraising. They become an instrument of raising a lot of money. It’s not just the money they contribute, but they raise a lot of money for candidates from other people and become personally associated with members of Congress through that mechanism. But again, that often causes you more problems than it gets you results, because you do get in the public eye. You become one of these hated bundlers at this point who are seen as people who have undue influence inside the process.

Again, I’ve just never found that to be the case. Are there people who do something that looks like it’s directly related to the money that they got? Well, yeah. The press can write that easy story. But the fact is, even without the money, the legislator probably would have made that decision anyway, because it’s where they are philosophically, or it’s where their district is. I mean, for a whole variety of reasons, they would be in that position.

Leech: So why do you think a legislator listens to you?

Walker: Because you have credibility with them. Because they know that you’ll give them an honest viewpoint about the issues that you’re discussing. You’ll discuss both the pros and the cons. You have a long-term reputation for being substantive on issues. There are a variety of reasons why legislators would listen to us, and one reason is to get educated. The fact is that their staffs are not capable of keeping up with all the issues, and certainly not capable of dealing with them in depth.

Even committee staffs that tend to be far more specialized don’t have an opportunity to deal with issues in the kind of depth that we do out in the lobbying community, because we’ve narrowed down the field into the universe of clients that we have. In the case of Wexler & Walker, we have probably between fifty and one hundred clients at any given time, and that means we can get very much in-depth on those issues, so that when we go in to talk to legislators or we go in to talk to staff, we give them detailed information that they don’t have.

Now, somebody else might come in on the same subject and give them detailed information from the other side of the question, but that’s how they learn. The most important thing that lobbyists do—and what gives them credibility—is that when asked the question, “What would the opposition say?”, lobbyists tell clients in detail what the other side of it is, with full confidence that the lobbyist’s point of view is going to carry the day.

Leech: How does having been a member of Congress help in all this? What does that experience bring to the table?

Walker: Well, you simply understand the kinds of things that Congress members are interested in knowing and hearing. You tend not to deal with some of the superfluous issues that people who have never been a part of the process tend to get into. People who are subject-matter experts tend to get into too much detail about the subject matter and not enough about what the policy would be. If you’ve been in Congress, you understand there’s a difference between the practitioner and the policymaker.

On the science committee, I wasn’t a bench scientist, but I learned the policy well enough to understand when I was being told something that just didn’t make any sense. So what I bring to the table as a lobbyist is an ability to speak to people about the policy options, and that’s what gets appreciated. I think that the reason why former members have a great deal of value inside the process is simply because we’ve been there. We’ve been a part of the club. We maintained some ties to the club. That gives us some credibility, unless we destroy that credibility by doing something stupid. We do have ways of telling members, “Let’s get to the bottom line—this is the reason why this is important and why it’s probably important that you be involved.” We intuitively understand that better than people who haven’t been inside that kind of a maelstrom.

Leech: And how does having been a member of Congress differ from someone who, say, was a long-time congressional staffer?

Walker: I was a staffer and then I became a member, and it’s entirely different to be a member than to be a staffer. There are some staffers who believe that they’re members, but the fact is that a member has a very different role than a staffer has. A staffer never has to do the thing that is ultimately the chief role of a legislator, which is cast the vote. It’s fine to stand on the sides and talk about the issues, and be an expert on the issues, and so on, but when you actually have to say yes or no, that’s a very, very different role. When you actually have to put your name on a ballot and have people make a determination about whether or not you’ve done a good job or whether you haven’t, that’s a very different role. It was the thing that I found most intimidating about moving out of the staff role. All of a sudden, it was my name on the ballot, and the voters weren’t making a judgment about the issues—they were making a judgment about me. Staffers don’t have to face that reality in politics.

The communication among people who have been there, done that, is at a different level of communication than people who have performed in a staff role. And I’m not disparaging the staff people. There are people who bring a lot of expertise and who have been inside the committee process and know how it works. We’ve got several of them around here who are just absolutely tremendous assets for this firm. But there is something special about members talking to members.

Leech: That shared experience?

Walker: Yeah.

Leech: I know you said you have a meeting coming up, so we’ll try to get this wrapped up relatively soon. I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about what’s it like to be a lobbyist in terms of personal life. Do you think being a lobbyist is conducive to family life? Is it fun?

Walker: Number one—you have much more control of your schedule than you do in Congress. In the House of Representatives, you have four hundred thirty-four other people whose lives are impacting yours, and you have seven hundred thousand people in the congressional district who have no hesitancy to call you at midnight to discuss their Social Security problem with you. So outside of Congress, you have much more control of your schedule. We operate pretty family-friendly around this firm, so I usually have most weekends available to me, whereas in Congress, I was doing ten meetings on weekends and all kinds of other things. Yeah, I think it’s significantly more family-friendly to be in the lobbying community than to be in Congress.

Leech: What do you like about your job? What’s your favorite thing about your job?

Walker: I’ve always been a person who’s been involved in public policy. I remain involved with public policy. I still believe that the work we do contributes significantly to molding public policies that are good for the country and ultimately good for the world. So I find a sense of excitement in doing that. I’m far more free to do things that I enjoy doing: the work on corporate boards, the work on the commissions, and the broader reach that I now have to use the knowledge that I’ve built during the time I was on Capitol Hill.

Leech: What are some policies that you’re proud of that you’ve worked on as a lobbyist?

Walker: I think some of the work that we’ve done toward moving ahead with the concept of commercial space. We’re getting to the point where it’s really beginning to sink in. We helped a company called DigitalGlobe from their earliest days. They now have become one of the prime companies providing the government with digital photography from outer space.

Leech: And what had to be changed for them to be able to do that?

Walker: The attitude of government needed to change. The intelligence communities needed to understand that they could get much of what they needed by buying it from a commercial firm rather than flying the satellites themselves. That involved a cultural change inside the government and to a large extent on Capitol Hill.

I’m proud of the work that we did for a number of years in trying to build the idea of utilizing hydrogen more broadly in the economy, ultimately to be used for automobile power. We did a lot of work with that over the years, and it’s something that I had a personal interest in and helped influence the Bush Administration to develop as part of their chief energy initiatives. Sadly, the Obama Administration didn’t follow through, but nevertheless, the whole world effort, largely inspired by what Bush did, is now moving forward at a very rapid pace, and we’re very close to having commercially produced, viable fuel for automobiles, and we were instrumental in that. As a matter of fact, many people give me credit for having convinced President Bush to put the line in the State of the Union message that highlighted what they were doing with the hydrogen program.

Leech: That is a level of access that not very many lobbyists can claim to have, being able to convince the president of something.

Walker: I didn’t talk to him verbally about it. We worked through the Energy Department to do that.

Leech: All right. Well, you are just a stone’s throw away from the White House in this office.

Walker: Yes, and we did have relationships. Jack Howard, who works with us here at the firm, was a very close aide to President Bush for a number of years. So we do have people that we’re in direct communication with. A lot of the folks from that administration are close friends.

Leech: Two more questions, if you have time?

Walker: Sure.

Leech: What’s your least favorite thing about your job?

Walker: Oh, geez, I have a hard time coming up with those because I like what I do. I guess if I had to pick out one thing, it is the role of fundraising. It’s the idea that people do see that as being a sign that lobbying is kind of a dirty profession and that it’s buying access. It’s just not the case, and so you sometimes chafe at the idea that people’s perception of what you do is so totally misconstrued. So if I had to pick something, it would probably be that.

Leech: When you’re hiring a new lobbyist or a new associate here at the firm, what are you looking for? What are you looking for in someone who’s going into this line of work?

Walker: Well, first of all, their background. We like to hire people who have in-depth experience either in the executive branch or in the legislative branch, because we want them to understand the rhythm of government here. If you just bring in somebody off the street, you can train them on the issues but you can’t train them in what the rhythm is that operates on Capitol Hill or inside an agency. So we look for that kind of experience.

We also look to try to make certain that they’re enthusiastic about doing what we do. There is a tendency these days of going to the Hill or going downtown and trying to get your ticket stamped so that you can come out and make real money. Well, we are very well-compensated in these firms, but to have somebody who’s here just collecting a check and is not enthusiastic about the work usually ends up badly. So part of what we look for is whether or not this is somebody who really, really wants to do what we do and can really contribute to the overall cause.

Leech: Do you have any advice—not necessarily for people who are coming here—but just for people who might be interested in pursuing lobbying as a career? What would you say to a young person who said, “Oh, that sounds interesting”?

Walker: Well, get some background that allows you to be conversant on the way in which Congress operates or the way in which the government operates, and then also make certain that it’s what you really want to do. Do you want to be an advocate? For some people that’s very tough to do, and so you better have some of the same qualities that draw people into the business of being a lawyer, because in the end, what you are is an advocate for your clients.