With Daniel Lippman NIL COLLECTIVES TAP FORMER NIKE LOBBYIST: A newly formed coalition of college sports collectives has retained federal lobbyists for the first time as the nascent cottage industry for paying college athletes looks for a seat at the table to shape federal guardrails for how student athletes are able to benefit off their name, image and likeness. — The Collective Association, which launched over the summer, comprises at least two dozen college donor collectives — entities made legal under the NCAA’s 2021 rules changes to allow athletes to profit off their fame that are often formed as tax-exempt charities to facilitate NIL payments to players. — The coalition in November retained Tidal Basin Advisors’ Jesse McCollum, a former longtime Democratic lobbyist for Nike, to lobby on NIL policy issues and issues related to designating college athletes as employees, according to a disclosure filed late last week. Tidal Basin Advisors retained Yong Choe, a former Rite Aid lobbyist who also served as director of business outreach and member services for the conservative House Republican Study Committee and worked for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, as a subcontractor on the account, separate filings show. — Collectives, which are independent from the schools whose athletes they represent, have doled out millions of dollars to athletes and emerged as a key punching bag in the debate over NIL rights, with critics pointing to their lack of transparency and accusing collectives of facilitating pay-to-play and gender inequities, even as collectives have quickly become ingrained in college athletics, with TCA estimating that collectives account for around 80 percent of of NIL payments to college athletes. — Despite increasingly urgent calls for a federal NIL framework over the past year, collectives had been left out of official forums on NIL legislation until this past fall. After nabbing a meeting on the Hill with Senate Judiciary member Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Walker Jones, the head of the collective representing Ole Miss players and a TCA member, testified at an October hearing by the panel on the future of college sports. — At the hearing, Jones took barbs from fellow witness and NCAA President Charlie Baker (and dished them back out), defending collectives’ activity and painting the industry as having unique insights into the NIL marketplace and eager to collaborate on “well-informed and effective legislation benefiting collegiate student athletes first.” — TCA’s lobbying hire came days before Baker unveiled a new proposal to allow certain schools to enter into NIL deals directly with athletes, potentially undermining the role of collectives. It also comes as members of Congress increasingly agree on the need for federal intervention (even if there’s far less agreement on how that might look). “You’re going to destroy college athletics,” Graham warned in the October hearing about the consequences of inaction. — It also comes as colleges, collegiate athletic conferences and athlete advocates have stepped up their lobbying for federal NIL legislation. The Coalition for the Future of College Athletics launched in November and includes more than 30 different conferences, while the NCAA, which retains Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, tapped a seasoned politician in Baker to lead the organization in its NIL push. Welcome back to PI, and welcome to election year. What’d we miss over the holiday break? Drop me a line: coprysko@politico.com. And be sure to follow me on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter: @caitlinoprysko. ROMNEY AIDE HEADS DOWNTOWN: Brianna Manzelli has left Sen. Mitt Romney’s (R-Utah) office, where she was a senior adviser and communications director, to join the Cargo Airline Association as managing director for legislative policy. Before joining Romney’s office in 2021, Manzelli was a top spokesperson at the FAA and helped lead the agency’s communications and policy strategy, including during the Boeing 737 MAX recertification process and the pandemic. MORE NEW BUSINESS: OpenAI brought on K Street power player Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in November, according to disclosures filed over the break, in the latest sign that the ChatGPT creator is not done ramping up its lobbying operation to shape AI regulations, after registering its first lobbyists last year. — Reggie Babin, one of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s top aides before heading to K Street, will work on the account, along with Democratic lobbyist Ed Pagano and Republican lobbyists Casey Higgins and Hans Rickhoff. — Fellow K Street powerhouse Brownstein, meanwhile, has added Tesla to its roster of clients. Former Debbie Dingell chief of staff Greg Sunstrum and former DOT chief of staff Geoff Burr have been lobbying on autonomous vehicle and AI issues “primarily concerning, but not limited to, transportation and mobility” since November, according to a disclosure filed over the weekend. — And Roku has shuffled its lobbying lineup amid wrangling among industry players and policymakers over potentially taking another look at broadcasting rules for the streaming era. The streamer retained McCollum of Tidal Basin Advisors at the beginning of December to lobby on issues like “competition in the digital and streaming marketplaces,” according to newly filed disclosures. Roku retains just one other outside firm, the Petrizzo Group, after parting ways with Tiber Creek Group at the beginning of Q4, disclosures show. — Outside of Silicon Valley, a coalition of PBMs launched to push for new transparency requirements for pharmaceutical middlemen, Transparency-Rx, has tapped ArentFox Schiff to spearhead that push on the Hill. Daniel Sjostedt will work on the account for the coalition, which bills itself as representing “transparent” PBMs who support congressional efforts to target the industry, unlike “larger competitors opposing reforms.” FIGHT OVER AI DRAGS EA TO D.C.: “In a city notorious for its cynicism, few things are quite as unsettling as an interest group that truly believes they’re the good guys,” our Brendan Bordelon writes. But “as Washington grapples with the rise of artificial intelligence, a small army of adherents to ‘effective altruism’ has descended on the nation’s capital and is dominating how the White House, Congress and think tanks approach the technology.” — “The Silicon Valley-based movement is backed by tech billionaires and began as a rationalist approach to solving human suffering. But some observers say it has morphed into a cult obsessed with the coming AI doomsday.” — “The prophets of the AI apocalypse are boosted by an avalanche of tech dollars, with much of it flowing through Open Philanthropy — a major funder of effective altruist causes, founded and financed by billionaire Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna, that has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into influential think tanks and programs that place staffers in key congressional offices and at federal agencies.” — But some researchers interacting with the AI doomsayers “claim that EA’s billionaire backers — who often possess close personal and financial ties to companies like OpenAI and Anthropic — are trying to distract Washington from examining AI’s real-world impact, including its tendency to promote racial or gender bias, undermine privacy and weaken copyright protections” or otherwise “acting in their self-interest, working to wall off leading AI firms from competition by promoting rules that, in the name of ‘AI safety,’ lock down access to the technology.” CREDIT UNIONS TAP NEW LEADERSHIP: America’s Credit Unions, the new trade group formed by the finalized merger of the Credit Union National Association and the National Association of Federally-Insured Credit Unions, announced its new leadership slate: Jill Tomalin will be executive vice president, Carrie Hunt will be chief advocacy officer, Anthony Demangone will be chief membership and engagement officer, Eddie Rivera will be COO and CFO, Meghan Burris Small will be chief communications and marketing officer, and Todd Spiczenski will be chief association services officer. ANNALS OF CAMPAIGN FINANCE: The holiday break featured several campaign finance developments, including at the end of last week the revelation that federal prosecutors don’t plan to pursue a second trial — that potentially could have featured campaign finance charges — against disgraced former crypto executive and megadonor Sam Bankman-Fried. — Also last week, a federal appeals court “overturned the conviction of former Nebraska lawmaker Jeff Fortenberry for lying to authorities investigating illegal contributions to his 2016 reelection campaign, saying his trial was held in the wrong place,” per Reuters’ Jonathan Stempel. — Florida Democratic Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick did not come off so lucky over the break, our Kimberly Leonard reports, with the House Ethics Committee announcing that it is probing allegations that Cherfilus-McCormick may have violated campaign finance laws and proper hiring practices and failed to submit required disclosures. — “The Ethics Committee voted unanimously to investigate the allegations after getting a referral from the Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent agency that investigates misconduct complaints. It hasn’t yet been determined whether Cherfilus-McCormick did anything wrong, and the precise details of the allegations may never become public.” ICYMI — CLOSING TIME FOR U.S.-RUSSIA BIZ GROUP: The U.S.-Russia Business Council, which has served for three decades as the leading trade association promoting commerce between the two countries, is in the process of shutting down, two people familiar with the matter told Daniel. — The closure comes nearly two years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine decimated business ties between the U.S. and Russia. The council, whose members once included such top companies as Boeing, Exxon Mobil, Ford and Apple, helped its U.S. member firms with the complicated process of winding down their Russian operations as the war continued and Western powers moved to isolate President Vladimir Putin’s regime. — Now the council’s website has gone offline, marking an imminent end for the trade group founded in 1992 by the late Robert Strauss, the first U.S. ambassador to the Russian Federation, to encourage the development of an internationally integrated market economy following the breakup of the Soviet Union. Daniel Russell, the president and CEO of the council, declined to comment.
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