Consulting After a Government Career
A new sanctions law went on the books on September 18 and I found out about it from a law firm's client alert. Not a State Department cable or a call from anyone in the building, just a random email I get from various policy and think tank NGO’s to keep abreast of current events.
Just standing in my kitchen getting ready for my day, I read a quick overview of the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act - secondary sanctions on foreign banks that keep doing significant business with Russian financial institutions.
For a long stretch of my career, particularly while at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, this was the work. I mean the paragraph, and then the sentence inside the paragraph, and then the single word inside the sentence that somebody's capital couldn't live with, and the brackets that stayed around that word for weeks while five of us hunted for another one that meant almost the same thing. I helped put together the first designation criteria the Security Council ever wrote for ivory trafficking. I worked on targeted sanctions on a former head of state. The days ended around eleven at night and started again at seven, and you'd walk into the chamber on the morning of a vote genuinely not knowing whether four months of your life was going to hold.
So I know what the work looks like, inside out, and that’s what clients now pay me for. Last Thursday for example I took a call from an overseas client just to chat about my thoughts on Russia and NATO, someone paying for my read from a former insider who might have some perspective on how things can play out. And that's a small part of what I do now.
What did they buy in that call? It isn't access. I don't have any. No cable traffic, no classified anything, nobody left in the building who owes me a favor and would pick up on a bad day. Everything I said on that call, a careful person could have assembled from public sources over a long weekend, and I'd have told them so if they'd asked.
What I sold was twenty years of having watched this kind of thing move. Knowing that the press release and the implementing regulation are two different animals and the second one is where the money actually is. Knowing which deadlines slip. Knowing, when a government calls something unacceptable, whether that's a position or a performance — a distinction you only learn by being in the room.
Which brings me to the thing I think about a lot lately. Pattern recognition has a shelf life and I don't know what mine is. The building changes. The people I'd have called change jobs, or leave, or stop returning emails from someone who can't do anything for them anymore. Every month I'm out, my read is a month older. And the day it quietly stops being judgment and starts being nostalgia, nobody is going to send me a notice. I'll just stop getting asked.
There are a lot of us out here now, too. The last couple of years have pushed an enormous number of experienced people out of the federal government, and a good many of them are doing exactly what I'm doing, with a website and a rate and a LinkedIn profile that says senior advisor. I am not the only former diplomat with a view on Russia. Some of them walked out of that building last spring, which makes their read newer than mine.
So what am I selling? I've been at this long enough now to give you the sales answer, and the sales answer is judgment. Twenty years of it, on the specific question of how governments actually behave when they're cornered. That answer happens to be true. It's also exactly the answer I'd give whether or not it were true, which is what makes it hard to fully trust coming out of my own mouth.
What I can actually verify is a good deal smaller than that. Somebody paid for an hour last Thursday. They'll tell me if they want another one.
I write about the year after leaving an institution, and the parts nobody warns you about, in the Next Chapter Field Guide. It's free. → Get the Field Guide
—Cynthia