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revolving door
Senate Democrats' Bill Would Block Trump Fossil Fuel 'Cartel' From Running Key Agencies
"Big Oil executives and fossil fuel lobbyists shouldn't be able to turn public agencies into private profit machines for fossil fuel shareholders," argued Sen. Ed Markey.
Jan 16, 2025
Faced with the imminent White House return of Republican President-elect Donald Trump and an administration stacked with fossil fuel industry veterans, a pair of progressive U.S. Senate Democrats on Thursday introduced legislation that would ban former oil, gas, and coal executives or lobbyists from leading numerous energy-related federal agencies for 10 years after leaving their private sector jobs.
The Banning In Government Oil Industry Lobbyists (BIG OIL) from the Cabinet Act—put forth by Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.)—would apply to prospective secretaries of agriculture, defense, energy, the interior, state, and transportation; as well as key posts including administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; White House chief of staff; and directors of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Office of Management and Budget.
"Let's pass this bill and get fossil fuel executives and their ill-gotten bucks out of our government."
"Donald Trump isn't building a Cabinet, he's installing a cartel. Big Oil executives and fossil fuel lobbyists shouldn't be able to turn public agencies into private profit machines for fossil fuel shareholders," said Markey. "This is a clear ethical line—their work polluting our environment, destroying our climate, and prioritizing corporate profits over democracy must not be rewarded with even more power over the very safeguards set to protect American households from their influence."
"Especially in the wake of the Los Angeles wildfires and more frequent and dangerous disasters fueled by climate change, we can't afford to have a fossil fuel CEO like Chris Wright help the industry capture our federal agencies further for oil profits," Markey added, referring to the fracking services company chief executive nominated by Trump to head the Department of Energy. "We must have government agencies helmed by responsible, qualified executives without blatant conflicts of interest."
Merkley said: "Climate chaos fueled by dirty energy is humanity's greatest challenge, and Trump wants to make sure we fail that challenge by handing our government over to Big Oil. Let's pass this bill and get fossil fuel executives and their ill-gotten bucks out of our government."
Scores of climate, environmental justice, government transparency, and other groups have endorsed the bill.
"The fossil fuel revolving door has dominated American energy policy for decades and could poison our environment for centuries to come," Food & Water Watch policy adviser Drew Guillory said in a statement Thursday. "Oil and gas companies cannot be allowed to regulate themselves and use the government to guarantee their profits. The BIG OIL from the Cabinet Act is a crucial step in returning control of our climate to the American people."
Kelsey Crane, senior policy advocate at Earthworks, said: "The fossil fuel industry is notorious for spending millions of dollars to delay climate action and undermine progress on environmental justice. This bill ensures big polluters are not granted positions of power where it is guaranteed they would degrade environmental protections and block investments in a clean energy future."
Sunrise Movement executive director Aru Shiney-Ajay noted that "Los Angeles is on fire. Asheville is just starting to rebuild."
"The climate crisis is here and it's happening because oil and gas CEOs disregarded science and chose to keep burning fossil fuels," Shiney-Ajay added. "They chose to sacrifice millions of homes and lives so they could keep profiting. Those same people should not be in charge of creating energy policy."
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Palantir’s Latest Hire Is a Particularly Egregious Turn of the Revolving Door
China hawk and former Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) is now the company’s head of defense business; if he had his way, odds of an unnecessary and devastating conflict with China could increase considerably.
Aug 29, 2024
Former Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin has embraced his new role as head of defense business at the controversial Silicon Valley tech firm Palantir with relish, promising to use his connections in government to make it easier for emerging military tech firms to thrive, in large part by securing more of your tax dollars.
Senior government officials passing through the revolving door to cash in on lucrative jobs in the arms industry is not a new phenomenon. In a study I did last fall, we found that 80% of the three and four star generals who left government service in the past five years went to work in the arms sector in one way or another. And a 2023 report by the office of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) found that at least 700 former senior Pentagon and other government officials now work for one of the top 20 weapons contractors.
At the time of the report’s release, Warren argued that “[w]hen government officials cash in on their public service by lobbying, advising, or serving as board members and executives for the companies they used to regulate, it undermines public officials’ integrity and casts doubt on the fairness of government contracting. This problem is especially concerning and pronounced in the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and the United States’ defense industry.”
The prospect of automated warfare fueled by Palantir’s products could lead to a world in which our ability to curb conflict and prevent large-scale slaughter is even more difficult than it is now.
Powerful members of Congress also regularly go through the revolving door, including most notably former House Armed Services Committee Chair Buck McKeon, whose lobbying shop has represented both arms contractors like Lockheed Martin and arms buyers like Saudi Arabia.
But Gallagher’s case is particularly egregious, given the central role he will play in his new firm’s business and lobbying strategies. Palantir’s ambitions go well beyond the kind of favor seeking in government weapons buying that Sen. Warren has described. Its goal is to shape the overarching U.S. national security policy that may determine what military technology the U.S. invests in for the next generation. The Gallagher hire fits perfectly with that plan.
Judging from his record as the preeminent China hawk on Capitol Hill during his tenure in Congress, and as chair of the China-bashing House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, Gallagher’s views are remarkably close to those of his new employers.
For example, Palantir CEO Alex Karp has said the United States will “likely” go to war with China and that the best policy is to “scare the crap out of your enemy”—no doubt in part by wielding systems built by Palantir.
Palantir’s bread and butter is the supply of advanced computing and data management, which it has employed to help the Army share data across the service, from bases in the U.S. to commanders on the battlefield. The firm also does research for the Army on future uses of AI, and on targeting, in a project known as Tactical Intelligence Target Access Node (TITAN).
Palantir’s products are also front and center in the two most prominent conflicts of the moment. The company’s Artificial Intelligence Platform, described by Bloomberg as "an intelligence and decision-making system that can analyze enemy targets and propose battle plans," is currently in use in Ukraine. And in January of this year, Karp and Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir, traveled to Israel where they forged an agreement with the Israeli government “to harness Palantir’s advanced technology in support of war-related missions.” This reportedly includes using Palantir’s AI-based systems to select targets in Gaza.
Karp’s views about how to intimidate adversaries like China may be good for his company’s bottom line, but they are an extremely reckless guide to U.S. policy toward China. The most likely result of his counsel would be a staggeringly costly arms race which would make a U.S.-China war more likely. And even if such a war did not escalate to the nuclear level, it would be a strategic, economic, and humanitarian disaster for all concerned. The point is to prevent a war with China, not predict and profit from it.
Karp and Gallagher are virtually brothers in arms with respect to their views on China. Gallagher co-authored a recent article in Foreign Affairs entitled “No Substitute for Victory: America’s Competition With China Must Be Won, Not Managed.” In it, Gallagher and his co-author Matthew Pottinger assert that the United States needs to “put in place a better policy: one that rearms the U.S. military, reduces China’s economic leverage, and recruits a broader coalition to confront China.”
In service of this goal, they advocate ratcheting up Pentagon spending to as much as 5% of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product, which would push the Pentagon’s base budget to over $1.2 trillion. Gallagher and Pottinger give no clue as to how this enormous sum would be spent, or why a rapid military buildup would somehow bring Beijing to heel rather than stimulating an equally furious buildup by China. They wrongly analogize the current situation between the U.S. and China to the one facing former U.S. President Ronald Reagan vis-a-vis the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War. But China has a much more vibrant, technologically sophisticated society and a much larger place in the global economy than the USSR did at the end of its reign.
China isn’t going anywhere, and the idea that arms racing and trade wars will change that basic reality is wildly unrealistic.
While Washington and Beijing don’t need to be best friends, they do need to set parameters around their relationship to prevent a catastrophic war. They also need to find ways to cooperate, despite their differences, on addressing existential global challenges like climate change and pandemics. And while it is important to help Taiwan build up its defenses, it is even more important to engage in diplomacy and reassurance to avoid a U.S.-China military confrontation over the island.
The path advocated by Gallagher and Pottinger would destroy any possibility of reaching such common ground, and would likely lead to a dangerous state of permanent antagonism.
Gallagher is just the latest addition to Palantir’s growing web of influence. As the world now knows, Thiel was both a mentor and a donor to Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance. In 2017, before Vance entered politics, Thiel hired him to work at his global investment firm, and then donated $15 million to Vance’s 2022 run for the Senate.
Meanwhile, Palantir CEO Alex Karp has reached out to the other side of the aisle, albeit on a smaller scale, telling The New York Times that he gave $360,000 to Biden’s campaign before the president announced that he would not be running for reelection.
It would be one thing if Palantir were the nimble, cost effective producer of indispensable next generation technology it purports to be, but its bulked up political machine and hawkish rhetoric suggest that it is far more than that.
And as for its technological prowess, it remains to be seen whether all the emerging technologies championed by Thiel and his cohorts will work as advertised, and if so whether they will make future conflicts more or less likely. But one thing is clear: If operatives like Gallagher and Karp have their way, the odds of an unnecessary and devastating conflict with China could increase considerably.
Last but certainly not least, the prospect of automated warfare fueled by Palantir’s products could lead to a world in which our ability to curb conflict and prevent large-scale slaughter is even more difficult than it is now. All the more reason to take their claims to be new age patriots, poised to restore American global dominance through the wonders of technology, with an enormous grain of salt.
Regardless of who wins in November, the last thing we need is a Palantir-inspired foreign policy.
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World-Ending Investments? Inside the $2 Trillion Nuclear Weapon Upgrade Scheme
Considering the rising tide of nuclear escalation globally, is it really the right time for this country to invest a fortune of taxpayer dollars in a new generation of devastating “use them or lose them” weapons?
Aug 07, 2024
The Pentagon is in the midst of a massive $2 trillion multiyear plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers, and submarines. A large chunk of that funding will go to major nuclear weapons contractors like Bechtel, General Dynamics, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. And they will do everything in their power to keep that money flowing.
This January, a review of the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program under the Nunn-McCurdy Act — a congressional provision designed to rein in cost overruns of Pentagon weapons programs — found that the missile, the crown jewel of the nuclear overhaul plan involving 450 missile-holding silos spread across five states, is already 81% over its original budget. It is now estimated that it will cost a total of nearly $141 billion to develop and purchase, a figure only likely to rise in the future.
That Pentagon review had the option of canceling the Sentinel program because of such a staggering cost increase. Instead, it doubled down on the program, asserting that it would be an essential element of any future nuclear deterrent and must continue, even if the funding for other defense programs has to be cut to make way for it. In justifying the decision, Deputy Defense Secretary William LaPlante stated: “We are fully aware of the costs, but we are also aware of the risks of not modernizing our nuclear forces and not addressing the very real threats we confront.”
Cost is indeed one significant issue, but the biggest risk to the rest of us comes from continuing to build and deploy ICBMs, rather than delaying or shelving the Sentinel program. As former Secretary of Defense William Perry has noted, ICBMs are “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world” because they “could trigger an accidental nuclear war.” As he explained, a president warned (accurately or not) of an enemy nuclear attack would have only minutes to decide whether to launch such ICBMs and conceivably devastate the planet.
Cost is indeed one significant issue, but the biggest risk to the rest of us comes from continuing to build and deploy ICBMs, rather than delaying or shelving the Sentinel program.
Possessing such potentially world-ending systems only increases the possibility of an unintended nuclear conflict prompted by a false alarm. And as Norman Solomon and the late Daniel Ellsberg once wrote, “If reducing the dangers of nuclear war is a goal, the top priority should be to remove the triad’s ground-based leg — not modernize it.”
This is no small matter. It is believed that a large-scale nuclear exchange could result in more than five billion of us humans dying, once the possibility of a “nuclear winter” and the potential destruction of agriculture across much of the planet is taken into account, according to an analysis by International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.
In short, the need to reduce nuclear risks by eliminating such ICBMs could not be more urgent. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ “Doomsday Clock” — an estimate of how close the world may be at any moment to a nuclear conflict — is now set at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s been since that tracker was first created in 1947. And just this June, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a mutual defense agreement with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, a potential first step toward a drive by Moscow to help Pyongyang expand its nuclear arsenal further. And of the nine countries now possessing nuclear weapons, it’s hardly the only one other than the U.S. in an expansionist phase.
Considering the rising tide of nuclear escalation globally, is it really the right time for this country to invest a fortune of taxpayer dollars in a new generation of devastating “use them or lose them” weapons? The American public has long said no, according to a 2020 poll by the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation, which showed that 61% of us actually support phasing out ICBM systems like the Sentinel.
The Pentagon’s misguided plan to keep such ICBMs in the U.S arsenal for decades to come is only reinforced by the political power of members of Congress and the companies that benefit financially from the current buildup.
Who Decides? The Role of the ICBM Lobby
A prime example of the power of the nuclear weapons lobby is the Senate ICBM Coalition. That group is composed of senators from four states — Montana, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming — that either house major ICBM bases or host significant work on the Sentinel. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the members of that coalition have received more than $3 million in donations from firms involved in the production of the Sentinel over the past four election cycles. Nor were they alone. ICBM contractors made contributions to 92 of the 100 senators and 413 of the 435 house members in 2024. Some received hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The nuclear lobby paid special attention to members of the armed services committees in the House and Senate. For example, Mike Turner, a House Republican from Ohio, has been a relentless advocate of “modernizing” the nuclear arsenal. In a June 2024 talk at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which itself has received well over a million dollars in funding from nuclear weapons producers, he called for systematically upgrading the nuclear arsenal for decades to come, while chiding any of his congressional colleagues not taking such an aggressive stance on the subject.
Although Turner vigorously touts the need for a costly nuclear buildup, he fails to mention that, with $305,000 in donations, he’s been the fourth-highest recipient of funding from the ICBM lobby over the four elections between 2018 and 2024. Little wonder that he pushes for new nuclear weapons and staunchly opposes extending the New START arms reduction treaty.
In another example of contractor influence, veteran Texas representative Kay Granger secured the largest total of contributions from the ICBM lobby of any House member. With $675,000 in missile contractor contributions in hand, Granger went to bat for the lobby, lending a feminist veneer to nuclear “modernization” by giving a speech on her experience as a woman in politics at Northrop Grumman’s Women’s conference. And we’re sure you won’t be surprised that Granger has anything but a strong track record when it comes to keeping the Pentagon and arms makers accountable for waste, fraud, and abuse in weapons programs. Her X account is, in fact, littered with posts heaping praise on Lockheed Martin and its overpriced, underperforming F-35 combat aircraft.
Other recipients of ICBM contractor funding, like Alabama Congressman Mike Rogers, have lamented the might of the “far-left disarmament community,” and the undue influence of “anti-nuclear zealots” on our politics. Missing from the statements his office puts together and the speeches his staffers write for him, however, is any mention of the $471,000 in funding he’s received so far from ICBM producers. You won’t be surprised, we’re sure, to discover that Rogers has pledged to seek a provision in the forthcoming National Defense Authorization Act to support the Pentagon’s plan to continue the Sentinel program.
Lobbying Dollars and the Revolving Door
The flood of campaign contributions from ICBM contractors is reinforced by their staggering investments in lobbying. In any given year, the arms industry as a whole employs between 800 and 1,000 lobbyists, well more than one for every member of Congress. Most of those lobbyists hired by ICBM contractors come through the “revolving door” from careers in the Pentagon, Congress, or the Executive Branch. That means they come with the necessary tools for success in Washington: an understanding of the appropriations cycle and close relations with decision-makers on the Hill.
During the last four election cycles, ICBM contractors spent upwards of $226 million on 275 extremely well-paid lobbyists. For example, Bud Cramer, a former Democratic congressman from Alabama who once sat on the defense subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, netted $640,000 in fees from Northrop Grumman over a span of six years. He was also a cofounder of the Blue Dog Democrats, an influential conservative faction within the Democratic Party. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that Cramer’s former chief of staff, Jefferies Murray, also lobbies for Northrop Grumman.
While some lobbyists work for one contractor, others have shared allegiances. For example, during his tenure as a lobbyist, former Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Trent Lott received more than $600,000 for his efforts for Raytheon, Textron Inc., and United Technologies (before United Technologies and Raytheon merged to form RX Technologies). Former Virginia Congressman Jim Moran similarly received $640,000 from Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics.
Playing the Jobs Card
The argument of last resort for the Sentinel and similar questionable weapons programs is that they create well-paying jobs in key states and districts. Northrop Grumman has played the jobs card effectively with respect to the Sentinel, claiming it will create 10,000 jobs in its development phase alone, including about 2,250 in the state of Utah, where the hub for the program is located.
As a start, however, those 10,000 jobs will help a miniscule fraction of the 167-million-member American workforce. Moreover, Northrop Grumman claims facilities tied to the program will be set up in 32 states. If 2,250 of those jobs end up in Utah, that leaves 7,750 more jobs spread across 31 states — an average of about 250 jobs per state, essentially a rounding error compared to total employment in most localities.
Nor has Northrop Grumman provided any documentation for the number of jobs the Sentinel program will allegedly create. Journalist Taylor Barnes of ReThink Media was rebuffed in her efforts to get a copy of the agreement between Northrop Grumman and the state of Utah that reportedly indicates how many Sentinel-related jobs the company needs to create to get the full subsidy offered to put its primary facility in Utah.
Choosing to fund those ICBMs instead is, in fact, a job killer, not a job creator.
A statement by a Utah official justifying that lack of transparency suggested Northrop Grumman was operating in “a competitive defense industry” and that revealing details of the agreement might somehow harm the company. But any modest financial harm Northrop Grumman might suffer, were those details revealed, pales in comparison with the immense risks and costs of the Sentinel program itself.
There are two major flaws in the jobs argument with respect to the future production of nuclear weapons. First, military spending should be based on security considerations, not pork-barrel politics. Second, as Heidi Peltier of the Costs of War Project has effectively demonstrated, virtually any other expenditure of funds currently devoted to Pentagon programs would create between 9% and 250% more jobs than weapons spending does. If Congress were instead to put such funds into addressing climate change, dealing with future disease epidemics, poverty, or homelessness — all serious threats to public safety — the American economy would gain hundreds of thousands of jobs. Choosing to fund those ICBMs instead is, in fact, a job killer, not a job creator.
Unwarranted Influence in the Nuclear Age
Advocates for eliminating ICBMs from the American arsenal make a strong case. (If only they were better heard!) For example, former Representative John Tierney of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation offered this blunt indictment of ICBMs:
“Not only are intercontinental ballistic missiles redundant, but they are prone to a high risk of accidental use…They do not make us any safer. Their only value is to the defense contractors who line their fat pockets with large cost overruns at the expense of our taxpayers. It has got to stop.”
The late Daniel Ellsberg made a similar point in a February 2018 interview with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
“You would not have these arsenals, in the U.S. or elsewhere, if it were not the case that it was highly profitable to the military-industrial complex, to the aerospace industry, to the electronics industry, and to the weapons design labs to keep modernizing these weapons, improving accuracy, improving launch time, all that. The military-industrial complex that Eisenhower talked about is a very powerful influence. We’ve talked about unwarranted influence. We’ve had that for more than half a century.”
Given how the politics of Pentagon spending normally work, that nuclear weapons policy is being so heavily influenced by individuals and organizations profiting from an ongoing arms race should be anything but surprising. Still, in the case of such weaponry, the stakes are so high that critical decisions shouldn’t be determined by parochial politics. The influence of such special interest groups and corporate weapons-makers over life-and-death issues should be considered both a moral outrage and perhaps the ultimate security risk.
Isn’t it finally time for the executive branch and Congress to start assessing the need for ICBMs on their merits, rather than on contractor lobbying, weapons company funding, and the sort of strategic thinking that was already outmoded by the end of the 1950s? For that to happen, our representatives would need to hear from their constituents loud and clear.
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A Navy Admiral’s Bribery Charges Are Just Part of a System of Corrupt Dealings
It’s great that our legal system is seeking to hold law breakers to account, but when will members of Congress who place shilling for special interests above crafting an effective defense policy face the music?
Jun 09, 2024
The indictment of four-star Navy Admiral Robert Burke on bribery charges late last month raised eyebrows about the extent of corruption in the Navy and beyond. The scheme was simple. Burke allegedly steered a $355,000 Pentagon contract to a small workforce training firm—described unhelpfully in the Justice Department’s description as “Company A." Less than a year later he took a job at Company A in exchange for a $500,000 annual salary and 100,000 stock options.
The Burke indictment comes on the heels of Washington Post writer Craig Whitlock’s illuminating book on the Fat Leonard Scandal, the biggest, most embarrassing corruption scheme in the history of the U.S. Navy. In the words of his publisher, Simon Schuster, Whitlock’s book reveals “how a charismatic Malaysian defense contractor bribed scores of high-ranking military officers, defrauded the U.S. Navy of tens of millions of dollars, and jeopardized our nation’s security.”
Obviously, the Navy needs to clean up its act, and, if found guilty, Burke should face consequences for his participation in a blatant case of old school corruption.
If skipping a serious conversation on the future nuclear policy of the United States to engage in pork barrel politics isn’t a case of blatant corruption and dereliction of duty, what is?
But this is just part of a pernicious system of corrupt dealings and profiteering in Pentagon procurement practices, and much of it is completely legal. It involves campaign contributions from major weapons contractors to key members of Congress with the most power to determine the size and shape of the Pentagon budget, and job blackmail, in which companies place facilities in as many congressional districts as possible and then stand ready to accuse members of cutting local jobs if they vote against a weapons program, no matter how misguided or dysfunctional it may be.
It also involves the revolving door, in which arms industry executives often do stints in top national security posts, even serving as secretary of defense, or, on the other side of the revolving door, when high ranking Pentagon and military officials go to work for weapons makers when they leave government service.
In fact, this is, by far, the most common path for retired senior military officers. As a Quincy Institute analysis found, over 80% of four-star generals and admirals that have retired in the last five years (26 of 32) went on to work in the arms sector. In short, most retiring four-stars, like Burke, go on to lucrative positions in the arms industry. Unlike Burke, they follow the rules, so this is all perfectly legal corruption.
The revolving door from the Pentagon is also spinning feverishly to foreign governments. A Washington Post investigation found that more than 500 former Pentagon personnel, including many high-ranking generals and admirals, have gone on to work for foreign governments known for political repression and human rights abuses, like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Last, but certainly not least, there are the lobbyists. Last year alone, Pentagon contractors spent nearly $138 million on lobbying and had 905 lobbyists working on their behalf, according to OpenSecrets. That’s almost two lobbyists for every member of Congress, and more than 600 of them had gone through the revolving door—previously working at the Pentagon, Congress, or the Executive branch.
All of the above is about money and jobs, not crafting an effective defense strategy or buying weapons systems that are appropriate for carrying out that strategy. A case in point was a hearing last October to review a report on America’s strategic (meaning nuclear) posture from a congressional commission, almost all the members of which have financial ties to the arms industry.
First off, the commission co-chair who testified at the hearing was former Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, a lifelong opponent of nuclear arms control who also did a stint as a lobbyist for Northrop Grumman, which makes nuclear bombers and land-based nuclear missiles. Surprise, surprise, Kyl recommended that Congress pony up more for nuclear weapons on top of the Pentagon’s current $2 trillion, three decades long nuclear weapons “modernization” program.
But surely the gathered members of the Senate Armed Services Committee would ask some tough questions before accepting the commission’s proposals for an accelerated nuclear buildup. Think again. The bulk of the questioners essentially touted nuclear-related missiles or facilities in their states and asked a variation on the penetrating question, “Shouldn’t we spend more on this wonderful weapon [or facility] in my state?”
What wasn’t mentioned at the hearing was the fact that defense contractors—including Northrop Grumman, which makes the nuclear weapons in question—are some of the top campaign contributors to members of the committee, according to OpenSecrets.
It fell to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to bring the discussion down to Earth by asking how much the commission’s ambitious plan would cost. With a straight face, Kyl said that the commission hadn’t calculated a cost, since the investments proposed were so urgently needed. This seems highly unlikely given that the United States already deploys over 1,700 nuclear warheads that can hit targets thousands of miles away, with thousands more in reserve.
But Kyl’s statement went largely unchallenged in the rush by members to flak for their local weapons of choice.
If skipping a serious conversation on the future nuclear policy of the United States to engage in pork barrel politics isn’t a case of blatant corruption and dereliction of duty, what is? If even a conversation that touches on the future of the planet can’t rouse money-conscious senators to engage in an actual debate, what will? And isn’t this dereliction of duty ultimately more dangerous than trading cash or a cushy job for doing the bidding of a weapons contractor?
It’s great that our legal system is seeking to hold participants in illegal schemes to account. But when will members of Congress who place shilling for special interests above crafting an effective defense policy face the music? If not soon, we can expect much of the tens or hundreds of billions of new money likely to be thrown at the Pentagon in the next few years to go to waste. If that’s not a scandal of the highest order, we don’t know what is.
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Report Sounds Alarm Over Growing Role of Big Tech in US Military-Industrial Complex
The paper's author found that the five largest military contracts to major tech firms between 2018 and 2022 "had contract ceilings totaling at least $53 billion combined."
Apr 17, 2024
The center of the U.S. military-industrial complex has been shifting over the past decade from the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area to Northern California—a shift that is accelerating with the rise of artificial intelligence-based systems, according to a report published Wednesday.
The report—entitled How Big Tech and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex—was authored by Roberto J. González, a professor of cultural anthropology at San José State University, for the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs.
The new paper comes amid the contentious rise of AI-powered lethal autonomous weapons systems, or killer robots; increasing reliance upon AI on battlefields from Gaza to Ukraine; and growing backlash from tech workers opposed to their companies' products and services being used to commit or enable war crimes.
"Although much of the Pentagon's $886 billion budget is spent on conventional weapon systems and goes to well-established
defense giants such as Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Boeing, and BAE Systems, a new political economy is emerging, driven by the imperatives of big tech companies, venture capital (VC), and private equity firms," González wrote.
"As Defense Department officials have sought to adopt AI-enabled systems and secure cloud computing services, they have awarded large multibillion-dollar contracts to Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Oracle," he added. "At the same time, the Pentagon has increased funding for smaller defense tech startups seeking to 'disrupt' existing markets and 'move fast and break things.'"
The report highlights the rise of a new class of billion-dollar military contractors, "a combination of gargantuan tech firms like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, and hundreds of smaller, pre-IPO startup companies supported by VC firms."
"The use of drones and AI-enabled weapons systems in Ukraine and Gaza, and a feared AI arms race with China, have fueled the
Pentagon's heavy investment in advanced digital tech," González wrote.
A lack of transparency is obscuring the true value of some of the largest military contracts to tech companies.
"One estimate indicates that U.S. military and intelligence agencies awarded at least $28 billion to Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet (Google's parent company) between 2018 and 2022," the report states. "The actual value of these contracts is likely much higher, because many of the largest known contracts with U.S. tech companies are classified and withheld from public procurement databases."
González found that the five largest military contracts to major tech firms between 2018 and 2022 "had contract ceilings totaling at least $53 billion combined."
"Major tech firms are also awarded large subcontracts from relatively obscure intermediaries or 'passthrough' companies that are granted primary contracts from the Pentagon—evading scrutiny and analysis," the paper adds.
González said that multi-year software-as-a-service contracts "could make the Pentagon and CIA more dependent than ever on the expertise of technical experts from the private sector."
The risk of conflicts of interest increases as military-dependent tech companies go public.
"As just one example, since going public, more than half of Palantir Technologies' revenue has come from the federal government," the report states. "Recent Palantir contracts with the U.S. Army Special Operations Command and the Air Force are worth more than $900 million. Palantir stock rose more than 170% in 2023."
There's also the danger of a "revolving door" between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon as many senior government officials "are now gravitating towards defense-related VC or private equity firms as executives or advisers after they retire from public service."
"The traditional 'revolving door' meant that a former defense official might accept an executive position with traditional weapons manufacturers; there are more lucrative options now," González wrote. "At least 50 former defense officials are working in VC and private equity, leveraging their connections with current officials or members of Congress to advance beneficial legislation for defense tech firms in their firms' investment portfolios."
"The implications are significant: The new 'revolving door' will accelerate military and intelligence agency funding for early-stage defense tech startups," the report states.
González details how "overblown, inaccurate, ideological talking points are driving defense funding for Big Tech," including "grandiose claims about the effectiveness of artificial intelligence; the overestimation of China's military and technological capabilities; the idea that America has the ability and duty to protect the world's democratic societies; and a steadfast belief that the best way to preserve U.S. dominance is through a free market that prioritizes corporate needs."
"These perspectives boost demand for military AI, and are promoted by a network of tech executives, venture capitalists, think tank analysts, academic researchers, journalists, and Pentagon leaders," he wrote.
Finally, the report warns that "aggressive Big Tech business models" can rush the development of weapons, endangering both combatants and civilians.
"Members of the armed services and civilians are in danger of being harmed by inadequately tested—or algorithmically flawed—AI-enabled technologies," the paper states. "By nature, VC firms seek rapid returns on investment by quickly bringing a product to market, and then 'cashing out' by either selling the startup or going public. This means that VC-funded defense tech companies are under pressure to produce prototypes quickly and then move to production before adequate testing has occurred."
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Docs on Supreme Court Justices' Travel Fuel Reform Demands
The head of Fix the Court noted that "the two justices whose comings and goings are probably of the most interest to the general public appear to be shielding some of that travel."
Feb 22, 2024
More than 4,000 pages of federal records turned over to Fix the Court and released by FTC on Thursday sparked fresh concerns about U.S. Supreme Court members' travel—particularly that of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas.
FTC, which advocates for reforming the high court, submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the U.S. Marshals Service for former and current members' activities covered by the USMS—which typically takes over security from Supreme Court Police when a justice leaves the Washington, D.C. area—from January 1, 2018 to September 30, 2022.
"From SCOTUSMap, press reports, our research, and USMS documents, the justices appear to have taken part in 644 activities during the nearly five years covered by the FOIA," the nonprofit noted. Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor's "name appears most often in the USMS documents, as the years of FTC's request coincided with a book tour that took her to a dozen states and several foreign countries."
"There remain a ton of justices' activities that the public does not know about or only learns about years after the fact. What are they trying to hide?"
The group put together a 38-page document detailing justices' activities, which included: "A trip to Bohemian Grove. A birthday party at Lincoln Center. Religious services at a Brooklyn theater. Annual vacations to Colorado. Dialing in to oral argument from Florida. 'Business meetings.' A meeting with a congressman."
While the total figure includes over 200 activities new to FTC, the group highlighted that it is "most definitely an undercount given the lack of USMS coverage for two of them—one of whom travels to Maine each summer and the other we're certain took several up-until-recently-unreported trips."
"Not one of the public or private engagements, vacations, or layovers described in the documents was a Justice Thomas event. None were Chief Justice Roberts events either," FTC explained. "It is unclear if the two justices' security details are being wholly provided by the exempt-from-FOIA Supreme Court Police... if they're employing private security; or if there's some combination thereof."
Courthouse News Service reported that "the Supreme Court's public information office did not respond to questions about Roberts' and Thomas' use of alternative security services."
Meanwhile, FTC executive director Gabe Roth sounded the alarm about the lack of information on the pair of conservatives.
"The two justices whose comings and goings are probably of the most interest to the general public appear to be shielding some of that travel by solely availing themselves of security resources not subject to open records requests," he said. "Maybe there's an innocuous explanation for this. But given the opacity we've seen from the court, especially when it comes to travel, maybe there's not."
Reporting in the past several months has shown how justices have benefited from rich friends. For example, last June, ProPublica exposed right-wing Justice Samuel Alito's undisclosed private jet flight to Alaska in 2008 with billionaire Paul Singer.
ProPublica also revealed in August that over the past few decades, Thomas has enjoyed at least "38 destination vacations, including a previously unreported voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas; 26 private jet flights, plus an additional eight by helicopter; a dozen VIP passes to professional and college sporting events, typically perched in the skybox; two stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica; and one standing invitation to an uber-exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast."
Recent exposés about the potential influence of wealthy individuals invested in the justices' decisions as well as low public trust in the high court—which has six right-wingers and three liberals—led to the creation of a voluntary Code of Conduct that critics called a "toothless PR stunt" and discussions of legislative reforms unlikely to advance in the divided Congress.
FTC advocates for "fixes" including "greater media and public access, Supreme Court term limits, new and robust ethics rules, stronger recusal rules, comprehensive online disclosures, and public appearance notifications."
As Roth said Thursday: "There remain a ton of justices' activities that the public does not know about or only learns about years after the fact. What are they trying to hide?"
"Some of them, like vacations or visiting family—have fun," he continued. "But when a justice is holding, per the marshals, an 'official event' or has seven consecutive protected nights of private 'dinner events,' it's understandable that the public would want more information."
"The pretense that we have a Supreme Court made up of nine above-reproach people doing their best free of corruption is utterly unsustainable."
Responding to the FOIA revelations in a Thursday statement, Revolving Door Project executive director Jeff Hauser and senior researcher Vishal Shankar also stressed the need for reforms at the nation's highest court.
"These bombshell findings from Fix the Court underscore an increasingly undeniable fact: The Supreme Court's right-wing justices have compromised the integrity of a critical public institution by accepting expensive handouts to enjoy secretive, luxurious lifestyles," said Shankar. "These revelations come as the court is hearing radical arguments attacking a functioning administrative state in a series of cases backed by the justices' billionaire benefactors, including Charles Koch."
"We cannot sit and wait for Justice Thomas and others to yet again gut the regulatory state in order to enrich their powerful friends," he added. "Any justice who has accepted luxury gifts or travel from these oligarchs must recuse from every case in which a party or amicus brief filer is connected to one or more of these oligarchs."
Hauser asserted that "the pretense that we have a Supreme Court made up of nine above-reproach people doing their best free of corruption is utterly unsustainable," and called for action by U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.).
"If right-wing members of Congress will block serious unpacking of the courts or even ethics reform, then the least we can expect of Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Durbin is that his committee belatedly issued last fall to Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo," Hauser said, referring to men with ties to Thomas.
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Next Stop for Most Retired US 4-Star Military Officers? Arms Industry C-Suites
"The revolving door is a problem because it creates the appearance—and in some cases the reality—of conflicts of interest in the making of defense policy and in the shaping of the size and composition of the Pentagon budget."
Oct 04, 2023
A report published Wednesday revealed that the vast majority of four-star U.S. military officers who have retired over the past five years went to work for the arms industry, a revolving door that drives soaring profits and near-record military spending.
The report—entitled March of the Four–Stars: The Role of Retired Generals and Admirals in the Arms Industry—was published by William D. Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and intern Dillon Fisher. They found that 26 of 32 four-star generals and admirals who retired between June 2018 and July 2023 "went to work for the arms industry as board members, advisers, executives, consultants, lobbyists, or members of financial institutions that invest in the defense sector."
"Too often when it comes to military spending and policy, special interests override the public interest."
Fifteen of the retired officers were hired as board members or advisers for small and medium–sized weapons contractors, while five took similar jobs at one of the top 10 arms companies. Five retired four–star officers became arms industry consultants, five were hired as lobbyists for weapons companies, and four joined financial firms that invest in the arms sector.
"Employing well-connected ex-military officers can give weapons makers enormous, unwarranted influence over the process of determining the size and shape of the Pentagon budget, to the detriment of our national security," Hartung said in a statement. "Too often when it comes to military spending and policy, special interests override the public interest. The revolving door is a major contributor to this process."
According to the report:
Among the most prominent four–stars who have gone through the revolving door are former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford, who joined the board of Lockheed Martin five months after leaving the military; Gen. Mike Murray, former head of the U.S. Army Futures Command, who went on the boards of three defense tech firms—Capewell, Hypori, and Vita Inclinata; Gen. Terrence O'Shaugnessy, former head of the U.S. Northern Command, who is now a senior adviser to Elon Musk at SpaceX...; Gen. Richard D. Clarke, former commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, who joined the boards of General Dynamics, defense tech firm Shift5, and drone maker General Atomics; and Gen. John W. Raymond, former head of the U.S. Space Command, who went on to be a managing partner at Cerberus Capital Management.
The report's recommendations include:
- Barring four–star officers from going to work for firms that receive $1 billion or more in Pentagon contracts per year;
- Extending "cooling off" periods before retired Pentagon officials and military officers can go to work on behalf of the arms industry; and
- Increasing transparency for post–government employment and activities on the part of retired Pentagon and military officials working on behalf of arms contractors, including reporting on their interactions with Congress and the Executive Branch.
"The revolving door is a problem because it creates the appearance—and in some cases the reality—of conflicts of interest in the making of defense policy and in the shaping of the size and composition of the Pentagon budget," Hartung and Fisher wrote. "The role of top military officials is particularly troubling, given their greater clout in the military and the government more broadly than most other revolving door hires. Their influence over policy and budget issues can tilt the scales towards a more militarized foreign policy."
The new report comes amid soaring profits for weapons-makers, near-record levels of U.S. military spending, and increasing American domination of global arms exports.
As one arms industry executive said at last month's Defense and Security Equipment International trade show in London, "War is good for business."
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'Web of Deception': Syngenta Docs Show Company Tried to Hide Pesticide's Link to Parkinson's
"It looks like the paraquat maker has adopted nearly every strategy we outlined in our book about bending science," said one author and former EPA legal adviser.
Jun 02, 2023
Internal documents published Friday by The Guardian and The New Lede shed new light on how multinational chemical giant Syngenta worked to conceal the link between its popular pesticide paraquat and Parkinson's disease.
According to the internal documents, Syngenta sought to "create an international scientific consensus against the hypothesis that paraquat is a risk factor for Parkinson's disease," in part by launching what company officials called a "SWAT team" to counter research that could threaten the corporation's "freedom to sell" the pesticide.
"It looks like the paraquat maker has adopted nearly every strategy we outlined in our book about bending science," Thomas McGarity, a former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency legal adviser and co-author of the 2008 book Bending Science: How Special Interests Corrupt Public Health Research, told The Guardian.
"Science matters. We have to be able to depend on science," McGarity added. "When it is perverted, when it is manipulated, then we get bad results. And one result is that pesticides that cause terrible things like Parkinson's remain on the market."
While a 2006 study found that rats administered paraquat exhibited neural degeneration similar to Parkinson's, a definitive link between paraquat and Parkinson's disease was discovered in 2011, when National Institutes of Health researchers concluded that the brain disorder is "positively associated" with the pesticide. A 2013 paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Neurology found that exposure to paraquat roughly doubled the risk of developing Parkinson's. In 2020, four of the world's leading neurologists published a book citing paraquat as a cause of Parkinson's.
More than 50 countries have banned paraquat, including Brazil, China, and the United Kingdom. The European Union has also banned the pesticide.
Syngenta argues that the evidence showing paraquat causes Parkinson's is "fragmentary and insufficient to establish" a link between the pesticide and the brain disorder.
"Recent thorough reviews performed by the most advanced and science-based regulatory authorities, including the United States and Australia, continue to support the view that paraquat is safe," the company told The Guardian for an October 2022 article showing internal Syngenta documents confirmed that corporate officials worried about the pesticide's link to Parkinson's.
However, as The Guardian reports in the new article:
The scientific record [Syngenta points] to as proof of paraquat's safety is the same one that Syngenta officials, scientists, and lawyers in the U.S. and the U.K. have worked over decades to create and at times, covertly manipulate...
The files reveal an array of tactics, including enlisting a prominent U.K. scientist and other outside researchers who authored scientific literature that did not disclose any involvement with Syngenta; misleading regulators about the existence of unfavorable research conducted by its own scientists; and engaging lawyers to review and suggest edits for scientific reports in ways that downplayed worrisome findings.
McGarity also said that when he worked at the EPA, pesticide lobbyists were known as "hall crawlers" for their incessant efforts to influence government officials.
Additionally, a revolving door between the chemical industry and government at all levels, from EPA bureaucrats all the way up to the Supreme Court—Justice Clarence Thomas is a former Monsanto attorney who refused to recuse himself from a case involving his former employer—helps corporations conceal the harms caused by their products.
In 2021, a coalition of groups sued the EPA over its decision to renew its approval of paraquat.
The new documents were published amid a raft of over 2,000 product liability lawsuits filed by farmers and others against Syngenta and Chevron, paraquat's former distributor. The first federal bellwether paraquat trial is set to begin in October.
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Reader Beware: Not Every “Former Antitrust Official” Is a Neutral Expert
Former regulators are often given large media platforms to sound the alarm on potential regulation of Big Tech monopolies, despite having (undisclosed) financial interests in those matters.
May 09, 2023
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and DOJ Antitrust Division have long served as an essential stop for antitrust experts looking to maximize opportunities, influence, and compensation at BigLaw firms and monopolistic corporations. By spending some time learning the ins and outs of government investigations and enforcement efforts, revolvers are seen by potential corporate employers to be better equipped to assist corporations in antitrust lawsuits against their former government employers.
This well-trodden path of revolvers has weakened enforcement at the agencies, creating a crisis of incentives for officials who want to build up their credentials while in public service but don’t want to do too effective of a job for fear of upsetting potential future corporate employers. But the stakes have changed now that Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter are at the helm of the FTC and Antitrust Division. The agencies are attempting to reverse a 40 year trend of ineffectual antitrust enforcement and rooting out officials who settled into an enforcement complacency that benefited corporations on merger sprees. Big moneyed interests are not pleased with their loosened hold on the antitrust enforcers, and they're doing everything they can to undermine the credibility of these agencies and their leadership.
To this end, the revolvers are speaking loudly in service of their employers’ interests—and corporate media eats it up. Media organizations love to bring on former government officials as expert opinions—especially when those supposed experts served under Democratic administrations and are now attacking progressive antitrust measures. This tactic has become commonplace as the agencies are fulfilling a mandate that has “no more tolerance for abusive actions by monopolies, [or] bad mergers that lead to mass layoffs, higher prices [and] fewer options for workers and consumers alike.” This is the type of antitrust enforcement that Biden has called for and that the American people need and want, but corporations–and the revolvers they employ–do not.
Media organizations love to bring on former government officials as expert opinions—especially when those supposed experts served under Democratic administrations and are now attacking progressive antitrust measures.
These former regulators are rarely described as anything other than ex-officials. The oft-undisclosed truth is that they have glaring conflicts of interest that may account for their aversion to breaking up monopolies, preventing corporate mergers, or implementation of new rules that protect workers and consumers.
Doug Melamed’s Ties To Monopolistic Corporations Are Stronger Than His Public Service Record
Take Douglas Melamed, for instance. Once dubbed by a former colleague the “Michael Jordan of the legal profession”. From Straight Arrow News, to CNBC, to The Seattle Times, to The New York Times, Melamed is regularly quoted in the media as an expert on all things antitrust. In doing so, reporters tend to reference his past experiences as the acting assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division during the high-profile 1990s Microsoft trial, or his current position as a Stanford Law School professor. However, what usually goes unmentioned is Melamed’s long career as a corporate lawyer, assisting would-be monopolies navigate antitrust law in order to secure mergers and acquisitions.
Prior to joining the DOJ in 1996, Melamed spent 25 years at BigLaw firm WilmerHale (f.k.a. Wilmer, Cutler, & Pickering). In his first stint with the firm, Melamed defended corporate clients in cases against regulatory agencies. Melamed represented media conglomerate Capital Cities, which owned ESPN and ABC, in a 1990s lawsuit against the FTC. He and his colleagues managed to convince the FTC that the College Football Association, which was marketing college football games to television networks for millions of dollars, was outside the FTC’s jurisdiction because it was nominally a non-profit entity. As if college football programs are not avid profit-seekers engaged in high-profile and highly remunerative commerce! In other words, Melamed was talented at convincing people to accept absurd arguments on behalf of the powerful.
Melamed spent the bulk of his career helping powerful corporations get even more powerful—i.e., helping Goliaths fend off Davids.
Following his stint at the DOJ, Melamed took his connections and knowledge of government back to WilmerHale to serve as chair of their antitrust practice, where he defended corporations from accusations of anti-competitive practices. For example, Melamed served as lead counsel for Rambus Incorporated in a case seeking to overturn the FTC’s finding that Rambus had engaged in anti-competitive practices. He represented Verizon in its acquisition of MCI and Bayer in its acquisition of Aventis. In short, Melamed spent the bulk of his career helping powerful corporations get even more powerful—i.e., helping Goliaths fend off Davids.
Melamed then left WilmerHale to serve as in-house counsel for tech giant Intel shortly after the company was fined $1.45 billion by the European Commission for anti-competitive practices. Under Melamed’s leadership as Senior Vice President of Intel’s legal department, the company was sued by the FTC for “abusing its market dominance to stifle competition.” Melamed called the suit “misguided and unwarranted” — despite Intel commanding an astounding 81% of the computer chip market. Such a quote is unsurprising from the counsel defending a corporation, but it certainly does raise questions about his efficacy as an antitrust expert in the media today.
The Revolving Door Leads To Big Tech Dollars
Melamed may be the go-to revolver for corporate media, but he’s not the only former antitrust official that has cashed out on his government credentials. Former regulators are often given op-eds to sound the alarm on potential regulation of Big Tech monopolies, despite having (undisclosed) financial interests in those matters.
In 2019, Fiona Scott Morton, former deputy assistant attorney general in the Antitrust Division, penned an op-ed in the Bezos-owned Washington Post titled, “Why ‘breaking Up’ Big Tech Probably Won’t Work.” As The American Prospect pointed out, Scott Morton failed to disclose that she was a consultant for Apple at the time. Scott Morton feigned ignorance, claiming the piece did not warrant a disclosure. Not only is Apple obviously a Big Tech giant, and the break up of one tech giant could lead to industry-wide scrutiny, but Scott Morton also defends Apple in the article, stating, “[...] Apple owned the tablet market in 2011. If a product gets a big share because it is good and popular — but its maker has not behaved anti-competitively toward its rivals — it has not violated our antitrust laws.” Obviously, Scott Morton wasn’t going to mention Apple’s slew of anti-competitive practices in various areas—music streaming, app store rules, Apple Pay—but denying a conflict of interest is absurd on its face. Scott Morton has since gone on to also consult for Amazon, so it’s no wonder that she opposed any break up of Big Tech monopolies.
More recently, former FTC Chair Jon Leibowitz authored an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled “How Congress Can Protect Your Data.” Leibowitz’s bio under the piece only lists his experience as an FTC chair and commissioner, saying nothing of his work with the broadband provider trade group 21st Century Privacy Coalition that includes data collectors Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon. The group opposed privacy laws that were rolled back under Trump’s FCC, a move that led to widespread outrage among advocates and consumer groups.
At the time, Leibowitz spoke to CNN about the roll back and said consumer fears were misplaced. CNN did not initially disclose Leibowitz’s financial interest in the matter, before later including a mention of his work with the trade group. In the WSJ article, Leibowitz does ultimately favor increased data protection, but warns that the FTC will “go farther” than Congress if it fails to act and “[FTC] regulation isn’t an optimal approach.” Leibowitz’s undisclosed conflicts of interests leave one to wonder whether he truly thinks legislation (which Big Tech would inevitably lobby Congress to make weaker) is the best approach, or is merely worried that an FTC rule will impact him financially.
Attacks On Progressive Antitrust Are Not Credible
Given what we know about their work history, it comes as no surprise that these revolvers use their media appearances to attack progressive antitrust enforcement. For example, the FTC recently lost its challenge of Meta’s acquisition of Within, the virtual reality company behind a popular fitness app. But Khan said the challenge itself sends a message that enforcers think there is a problem in the market and believes that a loss is still valuable, as it sends a message to Congress that stronger legislation is needed. As Matt Stoller observed following the judge’s ruling, the loss might be a “Pyrrhic victory for big tech and dominant firms […] it’ll be the kind of stinging opinion that a lot of enforcers will cite going forward.”
Melamed, however, called Khan’s train of thought “kind of nutty.” Melamed’s former employer Intel partnered with Meta to use their Wi-fi cards in Meta’s virtual reality headset, but this conflict of interest goes unmentioned. In 2020, when the DOJ was preparing its antitrust lawsuit against Google, Melamed defended the tech giant, stating that Google’s acquisitions were likely lawful and that forcing divestitures should be approached “with great care.” Did he disclose that Intel and Google are partnered on cloud infrastructure and work together on a variety of products? Nope.
Even when regulators don’t get mainstream media appearances, they still find other venues to undermine antitrust leadership in service of their current jobs as corporate lawyers.
Even when regulators don’t get mainstream media appearances, they still find other venues to undermine antitrust leadership in service of their current jobs as corporate lawyers. The legal trade publication Law360 gave a platform to David Gelfand, the deputy assistant attorney general in the Antitrust Division under Obama. Gelfand, who has spent the majority of his career as a BigLaw attorney helping corporations complete mergers, used his op-ed to lambast Kanter’s Antitrust Division for blocking too many mergers.
Law360 also published an article that quoted Debbie Feinstein, former director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, after her comments at Tulane Law School’s Corporate Law Institute Conference. Feinstein expressed concern that the DOJ is bringing lawsuits to prevent mergers, when previous administrations would have cleared the deals. To its credit, Law360 did mention that Feinstein is a lawyer at Arnold & Porter. However, Law360 does not mention that Arnold & Porter itself has been sued by a different DOJ division, nor that Feinstein was lead counsel for Arnold & Porter’s antitrust team when it worked with O’Melveny & Myers to represent Penguin Random House against the DOJ. Of course Feinstein isn’t in favor of the DOJ’s new direction—it blocked her client’s $2.2 billion deal!
These former Democratic regulators are not alone in their critiques of progressive antitrust enforcement— they’re joined by their Republican counterparts who share an affinity for both monopolies and revolving to the private sector.
Deborah Garza, former Antitrust Division assistant attorney general under George Bush, baselessly called the new antitrust direction an “unholy alliance” between MAGA and progressives. This is absurd on its face, but even more so considering that Trump’s own FTC appointees Chistine Wilson and Noah Phillips relentlessly criticized Khan’s leadership. Wilson, who recently resigned, spent the last of her four year tenure complaining about FTC Chair Lina Khan’s pivot away from the consumer welfare standard. Former FTC Chair Timothy Muris, who previously joined Melamed in Verizon’s legal defense during its MCI acquisition, regularly criticizes Khan’s leadership. It turns out that if you spend your career revolving between representing corporations and regulating corporations, you tend to favor a lax regulatory framework that allows corporate power to flourish.
Conclusion
Many former Democratic regulators have spent their careers practicing a form of antitrust law enforcement that benefits corporations. It is pro-industry and pro-consolidation, so long as firms pinky promise not to raise prices for consumers. This is just one approach to antitrust enforcement — an interpretation that is, in fact, at odds with the Biden administration’s stated goals of expansive antitrust enforcement.
It turns out that if you spend your career revolving between representing corporations and regulating corporations, you tend to favor a lax regulatory framework that allows corporate power to flourish.
Because these former officials are ostensibly Democrats, the media attempts to frame these viewpoints as that of a level-headed expert attempting to rein in his own party’s excesses. As we pointed out in The American Prospect, certain media types love to harp on “friendly fire” from Democratic revolvers, despite their allegiances to corporations over the Democratic party and its goals. It’s clear that Melamed and company are more interested in running cover for corporations with monopolistic intentions than helping Democrats pursue the type of antitrust regulations that Americans want. Those that fail to acknowledge this point when quoting former regulators — especially when contrasting their opinions with those of more progressive antitrust enforcers like Lina Khan — run the risk of losing credibility and laundering conservative legal thought under the guise of neutral “expertise.”
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'Brass for Gold': Warren Report Details Revolving Door Between Capitol Hill and War Profiteers
"When government officials cash in on their public service by lobbying, advising, or serving as board members and executives for the companies they used to regulate, it undermines public officials' integrity."
Apr 27, 2023
Nearly 700 former Pentagon officials, congressional lawmakers and staffers, and other federal employees now work for major military contractors, primarily as lobbyists, confirming that the revolving door between the U.S. government and the weapons industry is "still spinning rapidly" and must be closed through "legislative and regulatory overhauls."
That's according to Pentagon Alchemy: How Defense Officials Pass Through the Revolving Door and Peddle Brass for Gold, a report published Wednesday by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), chair of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel.
"The abuse of the revolving door between government service and the private sector can corrupt government decision-making," says the report. "When government officials cash in on their public service by lobbying, advising, or serving as board members and executives for the companies they used to regulate, it undermines public officials' integrity and casts doubt on the fairness of government contracting. This problem is incredibly concerning and pronounced in the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and the United States' defense industry."
Warren's analysis found "672 cases in 2022 in which the top 20 defense contractors had former government officials, military officers, members of Congress, and senior legislative staff working for them as lobbyists, board members, or senior executives. In 91% of these cases, the individuals that went through the revolving door became registered lobbyists for big defense contractors."
"The sheer size of America's military budget provides ample and lucrative opportunities for former government officials," the report notes. "Last year Congress gave the DOD over $851 billion in total funding. The DOD is also the largest federal contracting agency: Of the total $692.3 billion in contracts awarded by the federal government in FY 2021, 61% were awarded by DOD amounting to $386.9 billion."
That almost 40% of Pentagon contracts were awarded to just 10 corporations is "unsurprising" given the consolidation of the arms-making business, states the report. "After waves of mergers and acquisitions, competition has decreased significantly—from over 50 firms to just five large rivals—decreasing DOD's ability to choose from a broad range of competitors."
It goes without saying that injecting more competition into the contracting process would not necessarily address the more fundamental problem of escalating military spending, which is what private companies—big and small alike—are feasting on.
The largest war profiteers, however, often hire the most revolving-door lobbyists and put the most ex-government officials on their boards, the analysis points out, increasing their chances of appropriating more public money.
According to the report, Boeing, Raytheon, and General Electric (GE) employed the most former government officials as of last year. Boeing has hired 85, including six high-ranking executives, two board members, and 77 registered lobbyists. Raytheon has hired 64, including one executive, three board members, and 60 registered lobbyists. GE, for its part, has hired 60 revolving-door lobbyists.
Those three corporations are far from alone. Pentagon contractors in general are hiring hundreds of former military and civilian officials from both major parties and across administrations into executive roles, board positions, and lobbyist jobs.
As the report makes clear, "This practice is widespread in the defense industry, giving, at minimum, the appearance of corruption and favoritism, and potentially increasing the chance that DOD spending results in ineffective weapons and programs, bad deals, and waste of taxpayer dollars."
Notably, the Pentagon recently failed its fifth consecutive annual audit while nearly 40 million people in the U.S. languish in poverty.
According to the report:
Current federal ethics laws that are supposed to regulate the revolving door are overly complex and often insufficient to prevent conflicts of interest. Indeed, even though the DOD has improved certain practices, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that DOD could further enhance its compliance efforts by amending regulations to require contractors to demonstrate their employees' compliance with post-government employment lobbying restrictions established in the National Defense Authorization Act. Post-government employment restrictions remain an impossibly confusing "tangled mess" that hinders effective implementation and compliance—and keeps the revolving door spinning.
The revolving door swings both ways. For instance, before U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was nominated by President Joe Biden to lead the Pentagon, the retired Army general was a member of Raytheon's board of directors.
During a Wednesday hearing of her Senate Armed Services subcommittee, Warren questioned Pentagon staff and ethics experts about revolving-door hiring, new revelations about former U.S. government officials working for foreign governments, and the problems posed by current executive branch personnel owning stock in companies affected by their decisions.
The lawmaker reiterated her demand for far-reaching ethics reforms at the Pentagon and across the federal government.
While Warren's Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act aims to increase transparency and combat conflicts of interest throughout Washington, her Department of Defense Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act, introduced in 2019 and again in 2022, is tailored to cleaning up issues at the Pentagon.
As the report explains:
This legislation would impose a four-year ban on giant contractors from hiring DOD officials and prevent them from hiring former DOD employees who managed their contracts. The act would also require defense contractors to submit detailed annual reports to DOD regarding former senior DOD officials who are subsequently employed by contractors. The act also bans senior DOD officials from owning any stock in a major defense contractor and bans all DOD employees from owning any stock in contractors if the employee can use their official position to influence the stock's value. Lastly, the act raises the recusal standard for DOD employees by prohibiting them from participating in any matter that affects the financial interests of their former employer for four years.
"These safeguards would slow the revolving door, improving government ethics and bolstering the integrity of the DOD contracting process—actions that, as this investigation demonstrates, are desperately needed," the report concludes.
Last year, the Institute for Policy Studies' National Priorities Project published a report showing that the U.S. has spent more than $21 trillion on militarization since September 11, 2001.
Citing that analysis, Jacobin's Luke Savage argued at the time that the nation's military spending—now even higher than it was at the height of the Cold War—is not only wasteful but also inherently anti-democratic:
Military spending allocated for 2022 considerably exceeds the cost of five separate Green New Deal bills. For a miniscule fraction of what America spent on the two-decade-long "war on terror," it could have fully decarbonized its electricity grid, eradicated student debt, offered free preschool, and funded the wildly popular and effective Covid-era's anti-poverty child tax credit for at least a decade. Spending public funds so lavishly on war inevitably means not spending them elsewhere, and it's incredible to imagine what even a fraction of the money sucked up every year by America's bloated military-industrial complex could accomplish if invested differently.
Fundamentally, however, the case against the Pentagon's ever-expanding budget is a democratic one. Every year, the government of the world's most powerful country now allocates more than half of its discretionary funds to what is laughably called "defense spending"—regardless, it turns out, of whether the nation is at risk of attack or officially at war.
"Corporate capture of Congress is a problem in most major policy areas," wrote Savage, "but defense contractors and other military concerns have a stranglehold that is arguably unmatched."
Approximately 55% of all Pentagon spending went to private sector military contractors from FY 2002 to FY 2021, according to Stephen Semler of the Security Policy Reform Institute. If that privatization of funds rate continues this year, weapons dealers can expect to rake in well over $400 billion of the current $858 billion military budget.
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