Kamala Harris quietly taps Wall Street, tech CEOs for advice on policy

Vice President Kamala Harris has increasingly turned to corporate executives from Wall Street and Silicon Valley to serve as informal advisers, policy allies and political boosters as she grapples with a sprawling and at times intractable policy portfolio.

 

Microsoft President Brad Smith, Cisco Systems Chief Executive Officer Chuck Robbins and Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser are among the leaders whom Harris has sought out in telephone conversations, video conferences and strategy meetings.

 

Discussions with one group of corporate leaders cleared the way for what Harris calls one of her biggest first-year triumphs: $1.2 billion in corporate commitments to help address the surge of migration from Central America. Talks with Wall Street executives also resulted in a successful push to get banks to distribute more pandemic funds to small and minority-owned businesses.

 

And corporate leaders say the vice president is continuing to engage them on other challenges, from the resurgence of the coronavirus to supply chain constraints and semiconductor shortages. It’s a strategy that carries some risk.

 

Close ties to the leaders of the nation’s biggest corporations could alienate the Democratic voters already unhappy with her over her career as a prosecutor before being elected to the Senate in 2016.  The talks also haven’t yet yielded tangible progress on other key issues. While Harris has repeatedly asked corporate leaders to help her push for a federal voting rights law, the legislation remains mired on Capitol Hill.