One of the many reasons the Department of Homeland Security has had such a difficult time establishing itself and becoming efficient is a problem that’s plagued Washington, D.C., for decades: the “revolving door” phenomenon, in which executives and employees of federal agencies are lured from government into private-sector positions at the very companies they dealt with while working for the government. While the problem is endemic to Washington, it is especially serious at DHS.
Since its formation in 2003, hordes of DHS employees have fled to the private sector, including many of its most experienced and senior executives – notably the original secretary, Tom Ridge, and the infamous Michael Brown, former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Both now have ties to companies doing homeland security work. Overall, some two-thirds of DHS’s original senior executives and administrators have left the department for private-sector jobs - the highest rate of revolving-door turnover in any area of government.
General concerns about the effects of the revolving-door phenomenon - that it saps the effectiveness of government departments and creates opportunities for conflicts of interest that can lead to waste, fraud and abuse – are heightened in the case of DHS. First, it is a new agency, struggling to consolidate and streamline security efforts formerly carried out by 22 federal entities. Second, the massive growth of the overall homeland security sector of the economy has created a huge demand for executives with inside knowledge of the department. “The private sector is inviting them and paying them a lot more than they can make in the public sector,” said DHS Inspector General Richard L. Skinner.
To understand the current situation, it’s necessary to comprehend the legislative background of governmental ethics regulations, the particular problems at DHS, the ineffective way that the ethics laws are applied, and the way that former officials’ conduct is – and isn’t – monitored in practice.
The first attempt to limit what federal employees can do after leaving government was made in 1962 during the Kennedy administration when Congress amended the federal conflict of interest and bribery laws to include a section called “the revolving door statute.” Since then, Congress has passed at least five major pieces of legislation, most recently in 1996. Former officials are also subject to state legislation, White House Executive Orders, and agency regulations. Today, the basic rules preclude former government employees from making direct contact with the agency where they worked either permanently or for differing periods of time. These “cooling-off” periods” range from one to two years.
Rewriting the Rules at DHS
Ethics and revolving-door questions got short shrift when DHS was created in 2003. Robert E. Coyle, the designated agency ethics officer, said that for the first 10 months he was the sole official handling the nearly two dozen agencies that had been brought together to form the new department. Even today, said Coyle, “We are facing a real challenge. It’s just very difficult to try to integrate so many agencies.” (Today, Coyle has a staff of five at DHS headquarters and 20 full-time ethics officers elsewhere in the department.)
In 2004, Coyle initiated a controversial change in the ethics rules for DHS that effectively loosened the revolving-door rules for the department’s ex-employees: He asked the Office of Government Ethics to split DHS into seven different components for lobbying purposes. It did, agreeing to three directorates (Emergency Preparedness & Response, Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection, and Science & Technology), two main operating components (the Coast Guard and the Secret Service) and two others (the Transportation and Security Administration and the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center).
Coyle said this change – which means former employees can immediately get jobs that involve lobbying the DHS, so long as they don’t lobby within the single component that employed them – was justified because the resulting seven entities are really separate, and thus a former employee who worked for Science & Technology, for example, wouldn’t be aware of what was going on in Emergency Preparedness & Response, and thus should be free to lobby there.
But critics of the agency, including advocacy groups such as the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), claim that it doesn’t make sense to combine 22 different agencies into a single department, and then break it apart for lobbying purposes. Said Jennifer Porter Gore, director of communications at POGO: “Typically, high-level employees are courted by private industry because of their knowledge of the entire agency. It’s a fallacy to argue that these people aren't aware of the other directorates.”
What Does “Lobbying” Really Mean?
The maze of lobbying legislation and regulation, combined with the segmented arrangement at DHS, make it very difficult for outsiders – and even for investigatory agencies and lawmakers – to know whether former DHS officials who move to the private sector have conflicts of interests. The current situation lacks what policy experts call “transparency.” Says James A. Thurber, Director of the Center for Presidential and Congressional Studies at American University: “I define transparency as making sure that the American public knows exactly where the people came from, what are they doing in the agency, what they’re doing afterwards, who their clients are, and how much money is being spent to influence the Department of Homeland Security,” said Thurber.
To get an idea of how the ethics laws play out in practice, consider the case of C. Suzanne Mencer, who served as head of DHS’s Office of Domestic Preparedness from October, 2003 to January, 2005, when she resigned to join Brownstein, Hyatt & Farber, a Denver-based lobbying firm with offices in Washington. Three months after leaving DHS, she was helping the firm's clients “navigate successfully at local, state and Federal levels of government decision-making,” according to the firm's website.
Among her clients was Integrated Decision Engineering Analysis (IDEA), a Denver software company that had acquired a license to sell DHS software for emergency preparedness while Mencer was still at DHS. According to IDEA CEO Duane A. Habeck, she provided the company with strategic advice to sell their product. “We learned how DHS works, how it is structured and who are the key department heads in different parts of the organization,” Habeck said.
Although Mencer registered as a lobbyist for IDEA in August, 2005, to “pursue Homeland Security grants and projects within the United States and each state as determined,” according to her registration form, she did not, by all accounts, lobby DHS – and thus didn’t violate the revolving-door rules. In fact, according to Habeck, she advised IDEA to pursue state and city contracts where it would be more competitive. Mencer declined several opportunities to comment for this article. Bruce A. James, CEO and managing partner at Brownstein, Hyatt & Farber said that the firm routinely follows an “open book” policy of registering new members of its government-relations group as lobbyists. But, he said: “There is a big difference between the act of registration and the actual lobbying.”
Critics say it may not be a big difference at all. Thurber, of American University, said former officials can wield as much influence by providing strategic advice as they can by lobbying directly. “They follow the rules but they give advice behind the scenes,” he said. “Consulting firms, management firms, two layers of organizations, consulting firm to consulting firm – they all sit in a room talking but they don’t actually go out and talk with the people at DHS that they used to work for. They have people that do it for them.”
Who’s in Charge?
Ethics advocacy groups also say the current system lacks accountability. When officials leave a federal department or agency for the private sector, they are briefed by an ethics officer – Coyle, in the case of the DHS – about what they can or can’t do but, once they’re gone, no government agency monitors their subsequent activities.
The Inspector General’s office and the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section share responsibility for investigating revolving door complaints from government agencies, private sector companies, whistleblowers and the general public. So far, there have been fewer than 12 allegations of impropriety. Two cases have been resolved with no finding of illegal lobbying, according to the Inspector General’s office; the others are still under investigation. If evidence of potential illegal lobbying were detected, the case could be referred to the U.S. Attorney’s office in the locality where the conduct took place.
The burden of monitoring potential revolving-door problems thus falls mainly on private-sector companies that hire former officials. Most large companies have adopted formal policies to protect themselves from potential violations - and potential criticism. At General Dynamics, for example, a major government contractor in defense and homeland security, spokesman Robert Doolittle said that the company's office of human resources, its legal department and its ethics unit all work together to comply with the revolving-door statutes. “The former government employee fills out a questionnaire where they indicate what kinds of job they had and whether or not the job at government gave them any authority in which they influenced any business in which General Dynamics was involved in,” he said.
Companies ramped up these compliance efforts after a scandal involving Darleen Druyun, who left her job as a senior Air Force procurement officer in late 2002 and went to work for Boeing a few months later. In April, 2004, Druyun pleaded guilty to giving Boeing preferential treatment while in government, and went to prison for nine months. Later that year, Boeing former Chief Financial Officer Michael M. Sears pleaded guilty to illegally negotiating Druyun's job, and was sentenced to four months in prison.
Other than the prospect of more instances of criminal sanctions like those in the Boeing case, it seem unlikely that anything will happen to change the way government officials and private companies view the revolving door. Attempts to enact tougher laws have consistently failed – partly because many former congressmen become lobbyists and would be subject to the same rules. What does seem likely is that – given the loose, seven-segmented arrangement that the DHS has adopted, the fast growth of homeland security spending, and the high demand for homeland security experts – the revolving door at the DHS will be spinning rapidly for years to come.
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