The Revolving Door

Richard Posner, in an exchange with Gary Becker, on the revolving door:

Articles by Eric Lipton in the June 18 and 19 issues of the New York Times discussed the "revolving door" phenomenon with specific reference to the Department of Homeland Security. According to Lipton, although the Department is only three and a half years old, already more than two-thirds of its senior executives have quit for jobs in the private sector, mostly working for companies that have or seek contracts with the Department, which has an annual budget of some $40 billion. These executives, some of whom had come to the Department from the private sector for brief stints in government sservice, are paid multiples of their government salaries when they leave to join or rejoin the private sector. Although departing government employees are forbidden to lobby their former government employer for a year, the prohibition is particularly porous in the case of the Department of Homeland Security because a former employee is permitted to lobby from the start any unit in the Department for which he did not work. The Department is a conglomerate of 22 formerly separate agencies, with overlapping responsibilities, and there are subunits with each of the agencies.