Mandy Smithberger / The Project on Government Oversight – 2017-02-18 00:23:36

http://www.pogo.org/straus/issues/military-reform/2017/pentagon-leadership-roles-being-filled-with-defense-industry.html

The Defense Industry Is Filling Pentagon Leadership Roles
The revolving door is spinning as fast as ever
Mandy Smithberger / The Project on Government Oversight

(February 8, 2017) — Lockheed Martin is the top recipient of Pentagon contracting dollars. In 2015 alone, the Maryland-headquartered firm received $29.4 billion and served as the prime contractor for the US military’s largest acquisition program, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Increasingly it’s looking like the company will soon have the most influence in top Pentagon posts, as well. Pres. Donald Trump has already named Heather Wilson, a former consultant for a Lockheed subsidiary, as its nominee for Air Force Secretary. Now, according to the The Washington Times, Lockheed Vice President Robert Rangel is a top contender to be the Deputy Secretary of Defense.

Both cases show how Trump’s ethics executive order and current lobbying rules are insufficient to address the scope of financial conflicts of interest for officials who go through the revolving door. Of course, this pattern of filling top posts with former defense contractor officials is not unique to the Trump administration.

Pres. Barack Obama also issued an aggressive ethics executive order only to issue the very first waiver to allow former Raytheon lobbyist William Lynn to be the Deputy Secretary of Defense. In the end, Lynn agreed to recuse himself and not seek waivers to participate in programs he’d previously lobbied on  — but only after significant pressure from Republic Senator for Arizona John McCain.

One of the biggest flaws in Obama’s executive order was relying on the narrow definition of lobbyist to capture the full scope of financial conflicts of interest. This led people to simply avoid registering as lobbyists, while still working as hired guns for companies and industry associations.

This defeated the purpose of the order and at the same time made tracking the influence industry less transparent. During the 2016 election, POGO urged both the Clinton and Trump transition teams to improve upon Obama’s ethics pledge by broadening it to apply to anyone with a financial conflict of interest.

Unfortunately, despite the fact that then-candidate Trump acknowledged this shortfall and promised to expand the definition of lobbyists to include consultants and advisors, the recent ethics executive order only applies to registered lobbyists.

That said, we’re glad it prohibits appointees from working on matters related to former employers or clients for two years, along with issues on which they lobbied previously and that it went farther than the Obama order by restricting appointees from lobbying their former agency for five years.

Continuing to rely on the military-industrial complex to fix the problems it profits from is unlikely to result in the kinds of reforms necessary to rein in wasteful Pentagon spending.

Patrick Malone at the Center for Public Integrity obtained e-mails that show Wilson is precisely the kind of influence-peddler these reforms are meant to stop. Rangel’s own journey from the Pentagon and the House Armed Services Committee to Lockheed also appears to be part of the swampy behavior the public is sick of seeing.

At the moment, in spite of Trump’s executive order and other restrictions, it appears that the revolving door is moving as fast as ever.

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