Ex-Democrat Makes Hay in Washington

BY ELIZA COLLINS AND RICHARD RUBIN

As Democrats panic over their diminished power and struggle to curtail President Trump, one of the party’s former senators is finding lucrative opportunities in Republican- controlled Washington.

Since leaving Congress in January, Kyrsten Sinema has launched an array of projects and new jobs focused on cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence and psychedelic research.

She leads an organization that advocates for Arizona business. She is a member of the Coinbase Global Advisory Council, works at a lobbying and law firm and remains a professor at Arizona State University. She chairs an association for companies that work in AI and says the group “played a big role” in shaping some executive orders in the space.

“I worked well with the Trump administration during Trump 1.0. I’m working well with the Trump administration in Trump 2.0,” the former Arizona senator said in an interview. “That is what I’ve always done.”

Her salaries haven’t been disclosed but people aware of her projects estimate she is set to make well over a million dollars this year. Her aide declined to comment on the figure.

It isn’t abnormal for former lawmakers to cash in after leaving Congress. But Sinema’s sheer number of projects is unusual—and so are her relationships with the party she never joined.

She served a single tumultuous Senate term as a Democrat and later an independent, cutting deals on infrastructure and gun control while blocking Democrats’ efforts to raise tax rates on corporations, private- equity managers and high-income households. She cast decisive votes for Democrats’ major fiscal laws in 2021 and 2022 while the party was in the majority.

Washington enigma

But she angered colleagues when she blocked Democrats’ push to end the 60-vote Senate filibuster threshold, limiting the party’s ability to move on immigration and election overhauls. And she did so while flouting fusty Senate conventions, at times wearing neon wigs, sequins and thigh-high boots.

Sinema was an enigma in Washington, with progressives initially celebrating her win as Arizona’s first woman senator and first Democrat to represent the state in decades. But many in the party quickly soured on her over her centrist, pro-business politics. She left the Democratic Party in 2022 and didn’t seek reelection in 2024 after her path to victory shrank.

Since leaving office, the 49year-old has pitched herself as a Republican whisperer, meeting with White House officials and helping clients navigate the Capitol.

When getting major Arizona companies to shell out $250,000 each for the first year of membership in the Arizona Business Roundtable that she leads, Sinema highlighted her friendships in Washington, including with Vice President JD Vance and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.). She told The Wall Street Journal she has a personal relationship with most members of Trump’s cabinet.

The Arizona Business Roundtable takes credit for some tax provisions in the recently enacted “big, beautiful bill” and says it helped prevent clean- energy and healthcare cuts from going deeper.

While the business community has strong relationships with the state’s Democratic senators, the organization needed someone who could navigate the GOP majorities, said Michael Bidwill, president of the NFL’s Arizona Cardinals and chairman of the roundtable.

Because Sinema can’t lobby directly for two years after leaving office, the roundtable hired lobbyists with ties to key GOP lawmakers. “The organization worked with key champions in both the House and Senate to influence the legislative text, to some pretty great success,” Sinema said.

Her group’s goals mirrored the aims of businesses across the country. The group wanted to prevent a corporate tax rate increase, restore lapsed business tax provisions for research and capital investment and p r e s e r v e chunks of renewable- energy tax credits from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that Sinema supported. The group cheered a rural hospital fund and took solace in delayed effective dates for changes to Medicaid.

The final law largely reflected the Arizona business priorities, but it is hard to trace any of that directly to Sinema’s group or her work. Republicans, broadly, favored those tax cuts and a significant group of lawmakers wanted to protect some of the energy tax credits, such as solar, that also especially benefit Arizonans.

The rural hospital fund was a request from several GOP senators—and Republicans will benefit from waiting until after the midterm elections to restrict Medicaid funding. Arizona hospitals are projected to lose $6 billion over six years based on a cut in federal funding that won’t be made up by the hospital fund, said Ann-Marie Alameddin, the head of the Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association.

Rebuffs critics

Critics, including some of the roundtable’s own members, question how much it accomplished. They say Sinema is claiming undue credit for changes to the bill that were also being pursued by other powerful players, according to people familiar with the conversations. “Everyone’s allowed to have their own opinion,” Sinema said of the criticism.

Priya Sundareshan, the Arizona Senate Democratic minority leader, said seeing Sinema celebrate GOP tax victories “makes me feel vindicated for having been disappointed in her when she was an elected Democrat.”

Sinema—who was treated with psychedelics to try to stave off dementia, which runs in her family—has been pitching the Department of Health and Human Services to spend money on psychedelic research. She has had success at the state level, helping to get Arizona to fund $5 million worth of ibogaine research.

Sinema is also a member of Coinbase’s Global Advisory Council, advising the cryptocurrency company on navigating Congress. She has celebrated Trump’s embrace of cryptocurrency and dismissed concerns about his family profiting from the industry.

“Trump is gonna Trump,” she told a Journal reporter during a panel at McCain Institute’s Sedona Forum in May.