Revolving Door as a Career Path

Should you be able to become the representative of a business, which you were tasked to legislate and regulate in your previous job?

The question became popular again when Politico reported the following news:

On February 1, Adam Farkas, executive director of the European Banking Authority (EBA), an EU agency based in Paris responsible for tasks such as conducting stress tests on European lenders, is set to become CEO of the Association of Financial Markets in Europe (AFME), which represents top investment banks. AFME spends upward of €5 million a year lobbying EU institutions on regulatory and capital markets issues, according to the EU Transparency Register.

Making a career shift from defending the public interests to private interests is not easy to justify – professionally and ethically. Nevertheless, it happens quite often and at higher levels of organizations. In lobbying terms, it is called revolving door: a legislator or regulator moves to the industries affected by his or her previous work. Quite often, the movers assumes the role of a lobbyist, capitalizing on the connections that they forged while in public service. 

A report by the Intercept shows that there were 252 job moves between the US Federal Government and Google companies until 2016.

It is such a controversial topic that non-governmental organizations such as Transparency International and Open Secrets have created revolving door databases to profile the government officials. The European Parliament has also adopted a resolution on January 16, which calls the European Commission “to review the rules for employees leaving the public sector, including the length of cooling-off periods for senior officials, and asks the Commission to consider creating an independent ethics body to oversee conflict-of-interest cases.”

Is it an effective lobbying strategy? It depends. When a public servant moves to an industry, it does not mean that his or her connections will remain the same and will be as effective to solve business issues. Given the heightened awareness about the potentially corruptive effects of revolving door, it may even backfire.

However, it seems to work well for lobbyists. Jack Abramoff - a lobbyist who was sentenced to six years in federal prison for mail fraud, conspiracy to bribe public officials, and tax evasion in January 2006 – explains how he used revolving door as a bait to seduce government officials an get his job one on the Hill (the whole interview is worth watching, but the part about revolving door beings at 3:20):

"When we become friendly with an office that was important to us, and the chief of staff was a competent person, I would say or my staff would say to him or her at some point, you know when you’re done working on the Hill, we would very much like you to consider to come and work for us. The moment I said to them, that was it. We owned them."

Revolving door is certainly a method that public should pay more attention to hold governments and companies accountable. While it is hardly possible to ban job moves between government and industry completely, there is certainly need for better regulation and oversight.