Public service doesn't come with a private windfall.
- No lobbying for any private interest, ever.
- No drawing income from any business where federal contracts exceed 5% of revenue.
- The ban applies to elected officials and senior federal appointees.
The system.
The revolving door is the quietest of the four problems and probably the most consequential. Nobody has to be bribed. A procurement officer, a committee staffer, or a member on the armed services committee simply knows that a particular set of firms is where careers go next, and behaves accordingly for twenty years before ever taking the job. The influence is priced into the résumé.
The incentives.
This is sharpest in the military-industrial complex, where the buyer, the seller, and the regulator draw from the same small pool of people. A cooling-off period of one or two years does essentially nothing against a career that spans decades — it delays the payday, it does not remove the expectation of one. If the future job is the real compensation, the rule has to reach the future job.
The constraints.
The five-percent revenue threshold is the mechanism that keeps this from becoming an unemployment sentence: it targets the firms whose business is the government, not every employer in the country. And it is deliberately harsher than anything an officeholder would write for themselves, which is a feature — the people who most dislike this rule are the ones it is about.
Where I'm still wrong.
I am choosing a lifetime ban because a cooling-off period of one or two years only delays the payday; the expectation of the eventual job is itself the compensation. The five-percent revenue line will invite creative corporate structuring the day it passes. I would like help pressure-testing it. Where would you route around this rule if you were trying to?
The strongest objection.
A lifetime ban is a talent filter, and it cuts both ways. The people best qualified to regulate defense procurement are often people who have worked in defense — and if serving in government permanently forecloses the industry you understand, some of the most capable candidates will simply never run or never take the appointment. That is a real cost and I do not want to wave it away. My view is that the cost is smaller than it looks, because it runs in only one direction: nothing here prevents an industry expert from entering government. It prevents government from being a paid audition for industry. If the job is worth doing, it should be worth doing as the last job rather than the second-to-last one.
Tell me where this is wrong.
No account needed. One short spam check, then your comment is public. Argue with the mechanism, not the person — that is the only house rule.
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