The New York Times’s Eric Lipton had a terrific front-page report yesterday on the stunning revolving-door policies that allow several dozen top officials from the [tag]Department of Homeland Security[/tag] or the White House Office of [tag]Homeland Security[/tag] to cash in by moving to the private sector that lobbies for domestic security [tag]contracts[/tag]. While the lucrative exodus is disturbing enough, it’s also worth noting the legal [tag]loophole[/tag]s that make it possible.
Dozens of members of the [tag]Bush[/tag] [tag]administration[/tag]’s domestic security team, assembled after the 2001 terrorist attacks, are now collecting bigger paychecks in different roles: working on behalf of companies that sell domestic security products, many directly to the federal agencies the officials once helped run.
At least 90 officials at the Department of Homeland Security or the White House Office of Homeland Security — including the department’s former secretary, Tom Ridge; the former deputy secretary, Adm. James M. Loy; and the former under secretary, Asa Hutchinson — are executives, consultants or lobbyists for companies that collectively do billions of dollars’ worth of domestic security business.
More than two-thirds of the department’s most senior executives in its first years have moved through the revolving door.
As a matter of public policy, this is more than a little discouraging. As Justin Rood explained, a huge chunk of the administration’s domestic security team is no longer in government. “That means the men and women who were once charged with protecting you (and you can see how well that’s worked out) are now facilitating the transfer of billions of dollars to private pockets,” Rood said.
Now, if you’re like me, the first question on your mind is how this is even possible. For years, federal laws have prohibited officials who leave their posts from lobbying their former department or agency for at least a year. So how is it that two-thirds of DHS’s top executives immediately cashed in and began lobbying their former colleagues? Because of an interesting loophole the Bush administration created for itself.
Perhaps the biggest loophole was created in late 2004 at the request of senior department officials, when the first big wave of departures began. The Office of Government Ethics approved a request by the department to split it into seven components for the purposes of the ethics rules. Once in the private sector, most former department officials were prohibited for one year from lobbying the same component where they once worked.
As Joshua Kucera explained, [tag]DHS[/tag] is now divided into seven internal departments. For [tag]lobbying[/tag] purposes, a senior official can leave the agency and become a well-paid [tag]lobbyist[/tag] the next day, but he or she can only lobby the other six departments he or she didn’t work for. It’s a loophole, the NYT noted, that department executives drew up themselves in order to “facilitate their entry into the business world.”
It’s quite a racket these guys are running.