People milling around before a press conference in Santa Barbara, California, in early June might have mistaken Brittany Kelm, a White House staffer, for an oil company representative.
During the tour of oil facilities run by Sable Offshore Corp., a company that owns an offshore pipeline which the Trump administration had recently helped to get oil flowing through, Kelm sported a Sable-branded cap and a Sable-branded shirt with her name embroidered on it, according to a photograph she posted to LinkedIn.
“We’ve unleashed California’s offshore oil production!” Kelm, a senior energy adviser for the White House’s National Energy Dominance Council, wrote in the post.
Less than three months later, Kelm would announce her departure from her job at the council to take over Sable’s Washington policy office. The move, even by Washington’s normally swampy standards, threatens to erode the lines between public officials and the industries they interact with, according to experts and former government ethics officials.
More specifically, it gives rise to questions about how the company’s new lead at its Washington office will represent its interests while abiding by ethics requirements.
The Trump administration as late as June hailed Kelm’s work helping to restart the pipeline system off the California coast owned by Sable, despite the objections of state and local officials. Indeed, both she and the administration made her heavy involvement very publicly clear for months in official statements and social media posts.
Top administration officials even touted her work on behalf of the company on LinkedIn, the professional networking platform that’s become vital to career mobility and advancement in many industries.
“Brittany Kelm never gave up on Sable Offshore Corp.,” Jarrod Agen, executive director of the National Energy Dominance Council, wrote on LinkedIn shortly after the June visit. Her work “unlocked production in California,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who chairs the council, said in a statement last week praising her work at the White House.
At the Santa Barbara event in June, Sable’s CEO Jim Flores thanked the Cabinet members and council for their help, saying that “you don’t get a project like this off the ground without help from everybody, top to bottom.”
“Jarrod and Brittany, thank you for your help working with that,” he said.
Kelm’s work as a government official subjects her to strict ethics laws before and after she took the job with Sable, according to five ethics experts. The rules should have barred her from doing any work related to Sable after starting to negotiate her new job and prohibited her for life from appearing before any federal agency on certain specific matters she worked on at the White House, they said.
While departing government for the private sector is not inherently improper, “the ethics concern arises when that distance between an official’s public responsibilities and the private employment is so exceptionally close together, particularly when the official moves directly to a company whose interests she personally worked on while exercising governmental authority,” said Davina Hurt, director of government ethics at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. “That is what sort of has red flashing lights to me about the ethical implications of that change.”
Kelm and Sable did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.
The White House said Kelm did not work on “official” matters with Sable while negotiating a job with the company — as is prohibited by ethics laws — and Kelm does not plan to work on any “ongoing official matters” between Sable and the administration when she takes on her new role as vice president of policy and commercial. It is unclear when her first day at Sable will be; she left the White House on Aug. 14 and said on LinkedIn that this week was her first in the “private sector.”
In a statement, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said White House employees follow ethics laws.
“As is standard practice in every administration, White House employees coordinate their departures with ethics officials to ensure full compliance with all applicable guidelines and restrictions during offboarding,” Rogers said. “The media’s continued attempts to fabricate conflicts of interest are irresponsible and reinforce the public’s distrust in what they read.”
Before joining the council, Kelm worked for three months as a senior policy adviser in the Interior Department. For the seven years before that, she worked at various oil companies, including Shell.
The council has been particularly keen on wresting jurisdiction over the small oil pipeline off the coast of Santa Barbara, owned by Sable. Production had been idle for years at the offshore platforms following a 2015 oil spill, but the Houston-based company bought the infrastructure in 2024 and has worked to bring the system back online.
‘Let’s go Sable’
The company has faced pushback from California regulators, who are trying to clamp down on oil and gas activity off their coast. But its bid to turn on the spigots dovetailed with Trump’s efforts to challenge blue states’ aims to transition away from fossil fuels.
After Sable sent a letter to council leaders last September asking for assistance, help arrived from the administration, which seized oversight of the pipeline from the state. Agen said in February that his office was “working with Sable,” and the Department of Energy in March ordered a restart of the platforms’ oil production, citing emergency powers.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, has sued the administration over Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s emergency order, joining a set of other legal challenges to the project. Earlier this week, a federal judge assigned to the case ruled that oil can keep flowing in the pipeline.
Kelm heavily touted her work with Sable on LinkedIn, writing “We are bringing more US production online ASAP 🇺🇸🛢️ let’s go Sable Offshore Corp.” In January, she highlighted on LinkedIn the administration’s work ensuring that Sable’s pipeline wouldn’t be stopped by litigation after lawsuits from the state were first filed earlier that fall.
“Thank you Sable Offshore Corp. for trusting the Trump Administration to deliver on regulatory certainty for your operations to provide Americans with affordable and reliable energy,” she wrote.
In a LinkedIn post on June 5, Kelm posted photos of her visit to Sable’s California property along with Burgum, Wright and Rogers, the White House spokesperson.
“The list of energy projects we have permitted and gotten to FID [final investment decisions] is too long for a LinkedIn post,” Kelm wrote in a parting post on Monday, adding that she has been referred to as a “deal closer” and had been the lead official working on oil and gas development issues at the council.
“The revolving door between government and the private sector is nothing new, but it’s troubling how brazenly and frequently it’s been on display of late,” one oil industry executive told POLITICO regarding Kelm’s move from the White House to Sable.
Anthony Martinez, a spokesperson for California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, called the council a “taxpayer-funded lobbying shop for the fossil fuel industry, dressed up to look official while it guts clean air and water protections and tramples on states’ rights.”
“It should surprise no one that a senior official from what is really Big Oil’s personal concierge service inside the White House is now heading straight to the payroll of the company she spent her time at the White House clearing a path for,” Martinez said.
Trump admin cuts ethics guardrails
Presidents since Barack Obama have issued executive orders strengthening revolving door requirements for administration officials both before and after their time in government, which have imposed requirements beyond those required by federal law.
Trump administration officials are bound by the least restrictive ethics requirements of any presidential administration in the last 15 years. While Trump in his first term implemented a similar order, last year he rescinded a Biden-era ethics order but never issued a new one.
But criminal statutes that limit former officials from taking on the same projects they advanced while in government are still in effect.
Former officials are subject to a lifetime ban on attempting to influence the government on specific matters they were “personally and substantially” involved in as an official, such as contracts and grants, according to federal law. They also face a one-year prohibition against communicating with or making official appearances before their former office.
Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at George Washington University Law School, said the statute covering post-government work, as well as another covering preemployment discussions, are both “highly fact-specific, and both carry criminal penalties.”
“The timing question is critical: when did the employment discussions begin, and what Sable matters was she working on at the time?” Tillipman said. “At that point she had three options: recuse from the Sable matters, terminate job discussions, or obtain a waiver.”
Margaret Dylus-Yukins, who served as an attorney-adviser in the U.S. Office of Government Ethics until March, said in an email that in her new position Kelm is barred from engaging with the White House on any government matter for a year. But she can communicate with other agencies on “broad policy or regulatory issues … so long as she is careful to abide by criminal ethics laws,” said Dylus-Yukins, who is now a senior legal counsel for ethics at Campaign Legal Center.
Another key part of Kelm’s work in the White House was opening up Venezuela’s oil sector after the U.S. deposed former President Nicolás Maduro in January. She traveled to the country on the first commercial flight to Caracas in seven years and touted her work crafting policy that will make it easier for energy companies to begin operations there.
“A highlight of our work at NEDC this year has been establishing diplomatic relations with Venezuela and assisting with the bolstering of Venezuela’s natural resources, specifically with oil and gas and critical mineral development,” she wrote on LinkedIn earlier this summer.
On Tuesday, four days after concluding her White House role, Kelm was in Houston at a signing ceremony for oil contracts with Venezuela’s state-run oil company Petróleos de Venezuela, which she told POLITICO had invited her.
“Happy to be included and invited by PDVSA and the Venezuelans to see the deals we started at NEDC signed,” Kelm said.
Noah Baustin contributed to this report.
