The Department of Defense told the watchdog Project on Government Oversight Thursday that it won't let the public see a congressionally mandated revolving-door database of Pentagon employees.
POGO wonders what the harm is in seeing a list of former government officials who are now working for defense contractors. We have campaign finance and lobbying disclosure – why not expose those circulating between the public and private sectors who might be a driving force behind government decisions and policies?
"Public access to the revolving door database represents the kind of open government that the public wants and deserves. If this Administration is serious about open government, it needs to provide public access to the database about the well-oiled DoD revolving door," said POGO's General Counsel, Scott Amey.
Indeed. But exposing bits of the interlocking directorate of the military-industrial complex can be, at the very least, embarrassing to the uniformed powers-that-be.
In a Wednesday story that Thomas Ricks says should get a Pulitzer, Tom Vanden Brook, Ken Dilanian and Ray Locker of USA Today reported:
Six months after Marine Lt. Gen. Gary McKissock retired in 2002, he did what many other ex-military leaders do: He joined the board of directors of a defense contractor, a company doing business with his former service.
McKissock also had a second job. The Marines brought him back as an adviser, at double the rate of pay he made on active duty. Since 2005, the Marines have awarded McKissock contracts worth $1.2 million, in addition to his military pension of about $119,000 a year.
McKissock is one of at least 158 retired admirals and generals the Pentagon has hired to offer advice under an unusual arrangement. Most of the retired officers, one to four stars in rank, have been paid hundreds of dollars an hour by the military even as they worked for companies seeking Defense Department contracts, a USA TODAY investigation found. That's in addition to pensions of $100,000 to $200,000 a year for officers with 30 or more years of service. ...
Of the 158 retired generals and admirals identified as having worked for the military as senior mentors, 80% had financial ties to defense contractors, including 29 who were full-time executives of defense companies. Those with industry ties have earned salaries, fees or stock options as consultants, board members or full-time employees of defense firms.
Nothing illegal in any of that. And good arguments can be made for its beneficial effects.
Those benefits are outweighed by the steep downside, however. Bad enough when retired officers now working for defense contractors show up to lobby among their previous subordinates - men and women who took orders from them not so long ago. It's no easy matter to break the entrenched habit of saying "yessir." This revolving-door practice has been going on since before Dwight Eisenhower delivered his farewell address nearly half a century ago.
But when the Pentagon and a contractor are both paying these former officers, the line becomes even more blurred.
In some cases, mentors also work for weapons-makers who have an interest in the military planning the mentors are assisting. A Marines exercise last year, which explored how to launch operations from ships, employed mentors who also had financial relationships with companies that sell products designed to aid those operations.
"This setup invites abuse," says Janine Wedel, a George Mason University public policy professor and author of a forthcoming book on government contracting. "Everyone in this story is fat and happy. Everyone, of course, except the public, which has virtually no way of knowing what's going on, much less holding these guys to account."
If retired generals advising the Pentagon also are "being paid by somebody who wants to make money off the government, I think it's important the public know that," says Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who chairs the subcommittee on contracting oversight. "The reason ... is so the people have confidence that the decisions are being made based on merit, and not based on inside baseball."
That ought to qualify for the understatement of the year. At its least damaging outcome, seeking to please former commanders who now hold jobs with defense companies is bound to be on the minds of those officers who someday hope to retire and bring in the big bucks from those companies themselves.
Far worse is the effect such "mentoring" may have not merely on weapons and software acquisitions but also on the shaping of war planning itself. Combine that with retired generals and admirals being specially briefed by the Pentagon for their appearances on Foxaganda and other media masquerading as "independent experts" and you've got a noxious brew.
Despite the shrieks of alarm that will emanate from the armchair patriots over any call for monitoring, much less ending, these relationships, a reform injecting a smidgen of accountability and transparency would amount to barely a baby-step toward curtailing the military-industrial complex. But at least it might demonstrate to the still unaware just how deeply rooted the MIC has become.
The South Carolina House Judiciary Committee is convening next week to hear arguments on whether whether Gov. Mark Sanford needs to take a permanent hike from the Governor's office:
