With Daniel Lippman FEC FILERS REJOICE: At their open meeting on Thursday, federal campaign finance watchdogs agreed to a minor — yet long overdue — change that will save PAC registrants some paperwork in the future. The FEC approved a motion from Chair Allen Dickerson to amend the agency’s Form 1 for statements of organization to allow a committee to file as a super PAC or a hybrid PAC within the form. — Since the series of court cases that allowed for the use of super and hybrid PACs early last decade, officially registering the committees with the FEC to receive those designations required filers to submit a separate document declaring that the PAC would be an independent expenditure-only political committee, in the case of super PACs, or a committee with a separate non-contribution account, in the case of hybrid PACs. — Prior to the motion’s unanimous adoption, Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, a Democrat, called it “a small, good thing.” The current process, she added, “I think arose out of something that former Commissioner [Don] McGahn and I scrawled on a napkin in a conference room lo these many years ago.” — It directs agency staff to complete by Feb. 14 an amended Form 1 that essentially will allow filers to check a box to register as a super PAC or hybrid PAC. The commissioners will then review and vote on the new form’s adoption. “I think it is time for the commission to move on in this matter, and formalize the process by which a fairly standard part of the regulated community interacts with the agency,” Dickerson, a Republican, said. — “It’s about a decade late,” said Matthew Sanderson , a co-leader of Caplin and Drysdale’s political law group who specializes in helping clients comply with election and lobbying regulations. “It is a relatively minor change,” he conceded in an interview, but one that “I think really shows how broken the agency has been over the recent past … So hopefully this is a sign of, you know, the agency regaining its capacity to perform basic functions.” — “You have 6,000-plus super PACs that have been formed using a … very cumbersome process, when all that needed to be done was to add a, you know, a box to the form,” he added. Happy Friday and welcome to PI. A quick programming note: Influence will be off Monday for the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. We’ll be back in your inboxes on Tuesday, Jan. 18. Until then, keep those tips coming: coprysko@politico.com. And be sure to follow me on Twitter: @caitlinoprysko. FARA FRIDAY: Here are a couple recent FARA filings that have caught PI’s eye, as part of our semi-regular round up. BGR Group has renewed its contract with the Azerbaijani embassy through the end of 2022, a year after resisting pressure from Armenian-American activists to drop the Azerbaijan government amid fighting with Armenia over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. BGR first signed Azerbaijan at the beginning of 2020 on a $50,000-per-month retainer, but according to a copy filed with the Justice Department this week, the renewed contract drops the retainer fee to $40,000 per month. — Meanwhile, Mercury Public Affairs added Avery Rose Royster, a former aide to Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), to its team representing Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Justice, according to documents filed with the Justice Department a day after anti-government protests broke out in the country. The unrest led the Kazakh government to request support from a Russia-led military alliance — a move Murphy slammed in a series of tweets last week. Around 12,000 people have been arrested, according to the Associated Press, which also reported that the alliance was set to withdraw from Kazakhstan beginning yesterday. PHARMA PREPARES TO TAKE ON CMS OVER ALZHEIMER’S DRUG DECISION: “The pharmaceutical industry is ready to pressure Medicare and demand the agency reverse its restrictive coverage plan for new Alzheimer's treatments like Aduhelm,” Axios’ Bob Herman reports. — “Doctors, researchers and health policy experts praised Medicare's proposal as a way to get more data to prove whether Aduhelm works, but with billions of dollars and many other similar Alzheimer's drugs on the line, the industry is prepared for war. Now that CMS proposed limiting coverage of Aduhelm to patients who enroll in a randomized, controlled clinical trial, the public has 30 days to submit comments.” — The industry is prepping “an all-out lobbying blitz that pushes Medicare to scrap its plan and allow full coverage of the $28,000-per-year drug. Biogen and Eisai, which co-developed Aduhelm, have already signaled strong opposition. ‘I can't believe that the final [coverage decision] will be similar than the draft,’ Biogen CEO Michel Vounatsos told Wall Street yesterday. He also threatened to cut more jobs if the proposal didn't change.” — “A top Biogen executive ‘pledged to flood CMS with comments,’ according to an internal company email obtained by Zach Brennan of Endpoints News. PhRMA — whose board is chaired by David Ricks, CEO of Eli Lilly, which has an Alzheimer's drug in trials — said in a statement that Medicare ‘is writing off an entire class of medicines,’” while patient advocacy groups, “including those with financial ties, also signaled they would participate in the fight.” ZELENSKYY PERSONALLY LOBBIED SENATORS AHEAD OF DOOMED NORD STREAM VOTE: Ahead of yesterday’s defeat in the Senate of Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) effort to reimpose sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, a bipartisan group of senators received a personal appeal from Ukrainian President Volydymr Zelenskyy himself, The New York Times’ Catie Edmondson and Ken Vogel report. — On a video call with the group on Christmas Eve, Zelenskyy “cast Nord Stream 2 as an existential threat to his country, arguing that the pipeline posed as much risk to Ukraine as the Russian troops amassing on its border, according to four people briefed on the call, who described it on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment on it. Mr. Zelensky, they said, expressed frustration that the Biden administration had waived sanctions on the pipeline last year. Since then, Mr. Zelensky has promoted Mr. Cruz’s bill on Twitter.” — Another interesting tidbit from the story: “In a sign of how closely Ukrainian interests were monitoring the legislation, people close to the Ukrainian government privately fumed at the role played by Amos J. Hochstein, one of the State Department officials who has been dispatched to the Hill on multiple occasions to relay the administration’s concerns about Mr. Cruz’s bill. Mr. Hochstein had also served on a supervisory board of [Ukrainian state owned gas company] Naftogaz until he resigned in late 2020, citing concerns about the Ukrainian government’s willingness to combat corruption.” HOW AN OBAMA ALUM GOT CONGRESS TO COME TOGETHER FOR ALS BILL: POLITICO’s Sam Stein has a wonderful piece out today on Brian Wallach, the Obama administration alum who helped spearhead the fight in Congress for investments in ALS research and expanded treatments, culminating in President Joe Biden’s signing of the Accelerating Access to Critical Therapies for ALS — or ACT for ALS — Act last month. — “‘If you testified in Congress and the question was, “Give us a complete rundown of all the progress we’ve made on ALS and other neurodegenerative diseases since Lou Gehrig’s [1939 “luckiest man”] speech,” the testimony would not take long,’ said Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.), one of the members with whom Brian worked most closely on the legislative push. … Brian turned to a kitchen cabinet of unpaid advisers who helped him stand up I AM ALS and connect him with key players across D.C.” — “For the group’s board, he got, among others, Dan Tate, an ALS patient himself and a founding partner of the lobby shop Forbes Tate Partners, which on a pro bono basis helped coordinate I AM ALS’ grassroots and Hill strategy. And he hired a range of officials who worked at the intersection of biomedical research and politics for the day when he himself would be gone.” HOW A SLEEPY EDUCATION TRADE ASSOCIATION UNRAVELED: “Until this fall, the National School Boards Association was a noncontroversial, bipartisan lobby group. Then its leaders wrote President Biden a letter. It alleged that the threatening and aggressive acts against school board members across the country might be a form of ‘domestic terrorism’ and asked for federal law enforcement intervention. Now, the association is at risk of total collapse,” The Washington Post’s Laura Meckler reports. — “In between, conservative think tanks, media, intellectuals, lawmakers, researchers and activists turned what might have been a forgotten mistake into a potentially fatal blow to a group that has for eight decades been a national advocate for public education.” — “Nineteen mostly GOP-led states have withdrawn from the association or promised to when this year’s membership expires, and six members of what was a 19-person board have left. Several states are discussing forming an alternative association for school boards. A new executive director of the National School Boards Association (NSBA) is working to save the organization, lobbying individual states to reconsider, but so far he has not persuaded any of them to change their minds.” | 
