Having begun the process on Feb. 22, the U.S. House and Senate have moved through a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package within just three weeks. This puts us on track to spend roughly $5 trillion on stimulus and COVID efforts in 12 months since the CARES Act passed in March 2020.

After each election, lobbyists in Washington, D.C., like myself, work with clients to plan their legislative and regulatory agendas based on the outcomes in November. This year, not only did we have to await the results of two Senate runoff elections in Georgia, but the winners on January 5 realigned power in Washington and with it upended the agendas of businesses across the country.

We begin a new column in 2021 from The Franklin Partnership, which is a lobbying and strategic consulting firm in Washington, D.C. The following Q&A with Omar Nashashibi provides an introduction.

Things are coming together, as they say. This column was published around Election Day 2020 and completes 48 consecutive years of my writing it. Over this time, seven out of 10 reader responses have been kind and positive.

More and more citizens’ life happenings are outside of their control, arranged by bureaucracies. That is an important thought to consider as we look at a continuously declining public education system that has degraded over the last 50 years. And what is the result to the national industrial base and citizens’ collective future?

We are approaching another election of consequence, but aren’t they all. Regardless of who is elected, our next president and other elected officials have a big job ahead of them.

I often say my lifelong job has been to “watch government(s) and report how they screw things up.” Abraham Lincoln said, “We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the Courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who would pervert the Constitution.”

It was mid-1963 that I met John, who was working at the CIA, and we became friends. He was doing security inspections at embassies worldwide when we discussed the rising threats of audio surveillance and a need to curtail it, especially when telephones were used for eavesdropping.

My family settled in “the valley” (Shenandoah) in the 1640s. Later, the “war” devastated the entire area, to the extent that it took 90 years (1960) for the local population in northern Virginia to return to pre-war levels.