BUSINESS GROUP TAPS BRADY FOR TAX FIGHTS: Former House Ways and Means Chair Kevin Brady — one of the chief architects of the 2017 GOP tax overhaul — is wading into corporate America’s fight to save large swaths of that bill from expiration next year. — The Texas Republican has joined the Alliance for Competitive Taxation as a senior adviser and chief spokesperson for the coalition, whose members are tax directors for top U.S. companies like Boeing, General Electric, Google, Cisco, Procter & Gamble and Walmart. Brady won’t be registering to lobby, but will shape debate around the talks to extend key individual and business tax breaks he helped usher in. — Brady told PI he’ll also work on international tax policy, in particular the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s 15 percent global minimum tax on large multinational corporations. “The world's changed in the last six years,” he said, noting the coming fiscal cliff provides a “rare opportunity” to assess further tweaks to the tax code. — While the 2017 tax bill didn’t receive a single Democratic vote, Brady said he sees reason to believe next year’s tax fight will be more bipartisan, pointing to the tax proposal currently languishing in the Senate and bipartisan support for portions of the 2017 bill, like the 20 percent deduction for pass-through businesses, increasing the standard deduction and indexing it, and enhancing the child tax credit. — There will be areas of contention between the parties, he conceded. “Without knowing exactly how the elections will go, I do think lawmakers are going to seek those bipartisan areas as top priorities,” Brady said. — The tax fight will also have to contend with the growing influence of populism and antagonism of the business community in both parties on the Hill since 2017. Even though ACT’s members are some of the biggest companies in the world, their fortunes are intertwined with tens of thousands of small- and medium-sized suppliers, Brady noted. — “I think one big truth that everyone understands, that I think will help drive lawmakers and both parties to a solution, is the simple fact of: If they don't act, you know, families, workers, small businesses will all see a crushing $4 trillion tax hike,” he argued. FIRST IN PI — NARRATIVE ADDS 3: Public affairs firm Narrative Strategies has added three new staffers, including a longtime finance reporter and a former Hill GOP spokesperson. Tory Newmyer will join Narrative as a senior director after seven years at The Washington Post, where his beat included financial services and economic policy and the intersection between business and politics. — The firm also hired Isabella Victorio as a senior associate and Katie Kinsella as director of human resources compliance. Victorio joins Narrative after a yearlong stint on the Hill working for Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.), most recently as his communications director. Before that, she worked for Targeted Victory, the RNC and the Trump 2020 reelect. CHAMBER, ROUNDTABLE SUE OVER NON-COMPETES RULE: Washington’s top business groups “filed a lawsuit Wednesday seeking to block the Federal Trade Commission’s recently announced ban on non-compete agreements and similar restrictions on workers,” our Nick Niedzwiadek reports. — The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the Texas Association of Business and a local Chamber affiliate said in a complaint that the new rule, released Tuesday, would subject companies to “substantial legal costs as they are forced to resort to other tools to attempt to protect their investments.” — It would also cost workers “important training opportunities and … diminished bargaining power when negotiating their compensation. And the economy as a whole will suffer as start-ups and small businesses are unable to prevent dominant firms from hiring their best employees and gaining access to their confidential information,” the groups added, arguing the rule oversteps the FTC’s authorities. — It was the second legal challenge to the rule in less than 24 hours, following a suit from tax prep company Ryan, LLC, which Nick reports “sued the FTC on Tuesday along similar grounds, calling the expansive ban a ‘brazen power grab’ by the agency. The lawyers representing the company include former Trump Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia.” GOOGLE RESHUFFLES D.C. OFFICE: Google has added a new role on its government affairs and public policy team, naming Anne Wall head of U.S. federal government affairs and public policy and bringing together Google’s federal, congressional and external affairs efforts. — Wall will lead the company’s engagement with the White House, federal agencies, Congress and other stakeholders such as tech policy think tanks and trade associations. She was previously head of external affairs and strategy at the search giant.
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