Exclusive: Key Trump health official spends millions on GOP-connected consultants

By ADAM CANCRYN and DAN DIAMOND03/29/2019 05:03 AM EDTThe Trump appointee who oversees Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare quietly directed millions of taxpayer dollars in contracts to Republican communications consultants during her tenure atop the agency — including hiring one well-connected GOP media adviser to bolster her public profile.The communications subcontracts approved by CMS Administrator Seema Verma — routed through a larger federal contract and described to POLITICO by three individuals with firsthand knowledge of the agreements — represent a sharp break from precedent at the agency. In an interview with POLITICO, Verma’s newly installed communications director Corry couldn’t specify how much CMS had spent on GOP communications consultants, but stressed that he planned to cut them back now that the agency had personnel in place — after a slow start early in the Trump administration.“Now that we’re fully staffed up, contractor resources are going to be used less than they were,” said Corry, who ran a health care consulting firm before joining CMS on March 4 to head its 200-person communications office. For instance, public spending records describe the Porter Novelli contract simply as “strategic communications.”But some career CMS staff have voiced their concerns to political appointees within the agency about routing taxpayer dollars to GOP consultants and helping a federal official like Verma improve her personal brand, said two individuals aware of those conversations. The cover profile in this month’s AARP bulletin, which went to more than 24 million people, included a sidebar on Verma’s husband’s experience in the health system.Before the Trump administration, communications consultants were used mostly for sweeping agency priorities, like raising awareness of Medicare open enrollment or encouraging sign-ups for the Affordable Care Act, five current and former officials said.CMS’ current use of communications contractors has gone well beyond the norm, those five sources said, and comes at a time when Verma has made cuts elsewhere, such as reducing advertising for Obamacare enrollment by tens of millions of dollars. When Barlow left Nahigian Strategies in August 2018 to return to his own consulting firm, he continued to work for CMS under a separate subcontract that remains in effect, according to two individuals with knowledge of the arrangement.Barlow helped write some of Verma’s most high-profile speeches, including a November 2017 address in which she signaled the Trump administration’s plan to require some Medicaid enrollees to work to keep their coverage for the first time — a controversial policy that a federal judge blocked for the second time on Wednesday.“Believing that community engagement requirements do not support or promote the objectives of Medicaid is a tragic example of the soft bigotry of low expectations consistently espoused by the prior administration,” Verma said in the speech that Barlow helped write.