| Here's your next installment of "Meet the Lobbyists."
Beth Johnson is a lobbyist for the other NRA - the National Restaurant Association. She began her career with much more benign jobs, as a nutritionist for the food labeling division of the FDA and as a registered dietitian at the USDA's Agricultural Research Service.
Apparently that was a little too wholesome for her, so she left government to become associate director for food policy at the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. Then she went back into government, this time for the Senate Agriculture Committee, as a senior professional staff member coordinating policy for nutrition, farm credit, and livestock. She left the Senate in 1998 to serve as vice president of PR firm Fleishman-Hillard, Inc. There, she worked with food and agricultural clients, until 2002.
In 2002, she returned to the USDA. She worked for six years as a senior advisor to the Secretary on food and health-related programs. In 2008, Secretary Mike Johanns named her Chief Assistant to Deputy Secretary Chuck Conner and Deputy Chief of Staff at the USDA. When Obama came into office, she left and went to lobby for the National Restaurant Association. (Mike Johanns, by the way, is now the junior senator from Nebraska and he sits on the Senate Agriculture Committee, where Johnson once worked... amazing how these things all come full circle, huh?) |
