The National Security Threat of Resume Padding

by emptywheel

William Arkin wants to change the frame on discussions about the revolving door in Washington.

And I have been uncomfortable with the dominant models for reporting the story: a straight government ethics and kickbacks/influence peddling theme, which offers no broader lessons; a following one individual or set of individuals -- homeland security officials in the Times series, as an example -- eminently worthwhile but an endless Niagara; or with an assumption that this is uniquely a Republican or Bush phenomenon theme, which is dead wrong, and offers the wrong lesson.

I do think to understand the Washington revolving door story, one has to follow the money.  It is the lure of a big payday that even the most ethical public servant can't resist.

The New York Times couldn't say it directly, but "government service," even after 9/11, even in homeland security -- THE MOST IMPORTANT JOB IN THE WORLD to its occupants -- has turned into a ticket.

There's a lot I agree with in Arkin's description. If we just follow the graft of one or another individual, we'll be chasing down a never-ending stream (well, Niagara) of leads. And this problem is not limited to Republicans. And, Arkin's central argument, that the revolving door in Washington has significantly  diminished the central ethic of service that government work used to embody. Our public servants no longer serve our interests, they serve the interests of their future job prospects.

It's a critical point, and one that bears repeating, particularly as we await the vote on net neutrality, basically a defense of free speech and dynamism in the marketplace for which many Senators seem to be unable to muster support.

But there's more, at least two more larger points that chasing the money of individuals doesn't seem to reveal.

First, there is a larger pattern, in which the same methods of defrauding taxpayers or subverting the democratic process are implemented over and over by entire groups of people. And that larger pattern allows for some more insidious goals, goals that we do need to discover. We know where Abramoff's money came from, after all, but I've never seen a tally of where his money went. Which leaves millions available for purposes that this former apartheid sympathizer (or, in Brent Wilkes' case, former Contra funder) hasn't revealed. The scale is so large and the pattern so consistent, we do need to ask whether there is something more going on.

And finally, there's the question of efficacy. Yes, if much of our homeland security or defense service is populated by people distracted by thoughts of future riches, then they're not attending to the problems or threats at hand. But just as importantly, they're likely to make trade-offs that gut the efficacy of our homeland security and defense.There is a direct link between deals made by people--like the Vice President--with one foot in government and the other in someone's board room, and our really atrocious performance in Iraq. The same can be said for Katrina. There are still men and women interested in public service--serving in the military, serving as first responders--who gave their heart and soul to solve the problems in Iraq and the Gulf States. But the culture produced by the revolving door undermines their best efforts at every step.

When the histories of the once-great American empire are written, they will wonder at how a country spending $400 billion on defense (to say nothing of expenditures directly associated with the war) could mismanage a war against Iraq so badly. And they will point to how little of that money went into Iraqi reconstruction, how little of that money went into delivering the troops water, how little of that money went to serve the public good. And how much of it went into the pockets of former government employees making big bucks off their former careers.

Comments

[Mimikatz]

Good post. There are endless examples of payoffs to cronies and foxes in charge of the henhouses, but don't forget the population of the "Coalition Provisional Authority" by youngsters from a Heritage Foundation job advertisement list who had no idea what they were doing, in lieu of recognized experts who had been blackballed by Doug Feith and Dumsfeld, in the crucial first year of the Iraq Occupation.

Here's hoping the revolving door hits every last one of them hard on their way out.

[emptywheel]

Here's hoping the revolving door hits every last one of them hard on their way out.

Amen to that.

[Redshift]

The reason all this profiteering needs to be investigated and shut down is that any defense or government contract that's awarded to someone with connections rather than the best qualified is selling out our country for personal gain. Plain and simple. The country is not getting the best, and anyone who does this is no patriot.

[SaltinWound]

You mention subverting the democratic process, which I've been thinking about a lot lately. There was a time when people in public service considered fair elections important enough that they would defend the process, even if it meant losing. I don't think that's true anymore. I don 't think many politicians look at democracy as an end in itself, with inherent value. This scares the shit out of me.

[dksbook]

Boy, howdy did you nail this scandal! And it is endemic, it is not just national politics, it is everywhere. At the Texas Democratic convention a few weeks ago, a speaker from New Mexico was flown in, given a speaking honorarium to speak at length with maximum visibility, and feted nicely. I was scratching me head, wondering why the top of our own ticket was not given such a good speaking slot. After a talk with a state-wide cadidate, I was enlightened. You see, the current TDP executive director invited the New Mexico politician from whom he was hoping to get a job. He was using TDP money to grease the skids for his own next step up the ladder, and at the same time, screwing our own Texas candidates out of a chance to connect with party activists. Political work has become a career path now, with even very young 3rd stringers cynically playing the system for employment. Screw America, I need that job!

[Meteor Blades]

Excellent points, both by Arkin and you, ew.

As disturbing as the stories of those individual drops in the Niagara are - like this one describing Chief of the Joint Chiefs General Richard Myers' move into an 8-day-a-year, $200,000 job at Northrup-Grumman less than six months after his departure from government service - the corrosive nature of the revolving-door culture dates back to somewhere around Eisenhower's farewell warning of a military-industrial complex. Today, it's the military-industrial-congressional complex and a whole lot of offshoots.

Mister Bush & Cronies have ratcheted up the interconnections and given us throughgoing incompetence and a higher level of corruption than previously, it is true, from DHS to Iraq, from energy to the pharmaceutical industry. But that slap on the butt of their pals by the revolving door will do next to nothing to dig out the roots of this matter.

These days, "revolving door," against which there are weak and scarce protections, hardly describes the reality, which is, in so many arenas, a thoroughgoing merger of business and government. All the checks and balances inscribed into our governance by the Founders have been made increasingly irrelevant as the business and political domains have become less and less distinguisable, interlaced in a Gordian knot of corporatism.

Follow the money? Of course. But it will take an army to do it. I wish we could count on a new Democratic Congress to tackle that job come January 2007.

[margaret]

In regard to the "revolving door,"isn't there supposed to be a definite period of time between leaving office and taking a job in the sector of industry your former agency dealt with?

I remember that it was at least 3 years between "engagements."

[Meteor Blades]

margaret, the law requires that officials in contract-decisive posts wait a year before signing up with a military contractor. Two loopholes: First, they can immediately work for a contractor in a division of supposedly unrelated to their government work. Second, the law doesn't apply to most officials at the highest levels.

[Hostile]

I saw a program on C-SPAN where the head of Northrop-Grumman introduced Negroponte by his first name! The iron triangle has been transmuted into gold.

[Mary]

One thing our era has done is glorify the free market and how it magically supposed to create the best society for all. It encourages the individual to look to their own self-interest to determine the right outcome. But what it really has done is create a meme of winners and losers with the moral authority belonging to the winners and the losers depicted as just a bunch of whiners who deserve what they get. And it is now enshrined in our culture and our government - whatever you can get is your due and if you pull a fast one on someone else, well, good on you. I think this philosophy is the underlying sickness in our society and the reason things are going to hell in a handbasket so fast.

The Democrats signed up for this when they decided to see if they could get some of that good times money, but the Republicans have taken it to a whole new level. It is institutionalized in the Republican way of doing things. Here's Grover Norquist's description of our current model for public service: "Democrats in Congress retire to universities. K Street is where Republicans go to retire." You work in government because you want to rake in the big bucks after making your connections. It's the culture of corruption writ large.

And the worst thing of all? The cynicism of the public is something that works for the Republicans because, after all, government is the problem and they are just proving it to the Americans again and again. Democrats need people to believe that government can work, Republicans use hatred of government as the reason to vote for them. Nice little scam, that.