From Staffer to Contractor: Stopping the Pentagon’s Revolving Door

by Sen. Bernie Sanders and William D. Hartung
As Congress prepares to consider the annual Department of Defense authorization bill and other military spending legislation totaling more than $700 billion, the need for more aggressive scrutiny is abundantly clear. At a time when we have a $9.3 trillion national debt and large unmet social needs, oversight of these enormous and ever-increasing sums has failed to keep up.

The Pentagon’s procurement and budgeting processes are rife with problems. For example, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has identified $295 billion in cost overruns on 72 major weapons systems, even as the Pentagon can’t balance its books or keep track of its vast inventory. These problems can lead to bizarre results, such as the fact that the Pentagon has hundreds of millions of dollars in spare parts now on order that are already marked for disposal. Despite huge cost overruns, major contractors have received $8 billion in performance bonuses that have been paid out regardless of the results of their work. These abuses of the public trust — and the public purse — are simply unacceptable.

These are complex problems that will require multi-faceted solutions. A good place to start would be by slowing down the “revolving door” that allows high level Pentagon bureaucrats and military officers to go to work for major defense contractors.

The problems with the revolving door are two-fold. First, officials looking forward to employment in the arms industry may favor certain companies in hopes of getting lucrative job offers after leaving government service. Second, once they have moved into the private sector, these former government employees can use their specialized knowledge and inside contacts to give an unfair advantage to their new employer.

These are far from abstract problems. In one high profile case, Darleen Druyun, a senior Air Force contracting official, secured jobs with the Boeing Corporation for herself, her daughter, and her son-in-law at the same time that she was in charge of negotiating a $20 billion lease deal with the company. Both Ms. Druyun and Boeing’s Chief Financial Officer pled guilty to fraud charges and served jail time as a result.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/06/25/9876/