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While I was out of town on business, I got a call from my dad who told me my husband Woody had been found hanging—dead at age 37. Woody wasn’t depressed and he hadn’t had a history of depression nor any other mental illness. His doctor had prescribed the antidepressant Zoloft to take the edge off. In the following weeks, I started to investigate, to try and understand why my perfectly normal husband had decided to end his life. The only thing that made sense ... Zoloft. Figuring out Zoloft’s dangers completely altered my life’s trajectory, absorbing years of my time. Today, I sit on one of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory committees that reviews new drugs coming to market. I initially thought that what I was learning about Zoloft was just an isolated issue with antidepressants. But I soon realized it was part of a much bigger, systemic problem with our nation’s drug safety system. The pharmaceutical industry is driven by commercial interests, not public health, and this problem is compounded by a lack of transparency, conflicts of interests, manipulation of clinical trials, and undue corporate influence across the government. Marketing companies ghostwrite pharmaceutical studies for academics who sometimes barely read the papers that get submitted to medical journals, and drug makers then cite these ghostwritten studies as peer-reviewed proof of their products’ safety and efficacy. The revolving door between Big Pharma and the FDA spins faster than the one between the Pentagon and the defense industry.
Note: This guest essay is written by Kim Witczak, a globally renowned advocate for pharmaceutical drug safety and FDA reform. Antidepressants have been found to increase the risk of suicide in some patients. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on health and Big Pharma corruption from reliable major media sources.
More than a quarter of the Food and Drug Administration employees who approved cancer and hematology drugs from 2001 through 2010 left the agency and now work or consult for pharmaceutical companies, according to research published by a prominent medical journal. [Dr. Vinay] Prasad and his colleague Dr. Jeffrey Bien ... tracked 55 FDA reviewers in the hematology-oncology field from 2001 through 2010, using LinkedIn, PubMed and other publicly available job data. The researchers found that of the 26 reviewers who left the FDA during this period, 15 of them, or 57 percent, later worked or consulted for the biopharmaceutical industry. Put another way, about 27 percent of the total number of reviewers left their federal oversight posts to work for the industry they previously regulated. Prasad and Bien published their findings as a research letter in The BMJ, formerly The British Medical Journal. "If you know in the back of your mind that your career goal may be to someday work on the other side of the table, I wonder whether that changes the way you regulate," Prasad said. "There's a lot of room for interpretation in deciding whether or not a cancer drug should be approved," he said, because so many studies of cancer drugs rely on what's called a "surrogate endpoint." But ... there isn't always evidence that surrogate endpoints are linked to better health outcomes for patients, suggesting that some approved drugs aren't as beneficial as they appear.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in the pharmaceutical industry from reliable major media sources.
A new study found the amount of pesticides used on farms was strongly associated with the incidence of many cancers — not only for farmers and their families, but for entire communities. The just-released analysis showed that “agricultural pesticides can increase your risk for some cancers just as much as smoking,” says co-author Isain Zapata. Living in places with high pesticide use increased the risk of colon and pancreatic cancers by more than 80 percent. Pesticides are currently an integral part of the country’s industrialized agricultural system. About a million pounds of pesticides are used each year, across nearly every state in the country. These chemicals make their way through the food system: a pesticide linked to infertility, for example, is widely found in household staples like Cheerios. When a pesticide is first registered with federal regulators, the vast majority of the information available about it is science conducted by the company who made it. “The presumption in the U.S. is in favor of the safety of the chemical,” Burd says. Elsewhere, like the European Union, “chemicals are not presumed safe, they adopt a much more precautionary approach.” There’s also a revolving door between the [Environmental Protection Agency] and the industry it regulates. Alexandra Dunn, the former assistant administrator for the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, for example, is now running CropLife America, the pesticide industry’s leading lobbying group. She’s only the latest; since 1974, all of the office’s directors went on to work for pesticide companies.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on toxic chemicals and food system corruption from reliable major media sources.
The Securities and Exchange Act of 1934 banned insider trading but left it up to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the courts to define it. Which they have -- in recent decades so broadly that confidential information [is now Wall Street's] "coin of the realm." If a CEO tells his golf buddy that his company is being taken over, and his buddy makes a killing on that information, no problem. If his buddy leaks the information to a hedge fund manager and doesn't say where it came from, the hedge fund manager can also use the information to make a bundle. CEOs and other top executives ... routinely use their own inside knowledge of when their companies will buy back large numbers of shares from the public -- thereby pumping up share prices -- in order to time their own personal stock transactions. That didn't used to be legal. Until 1981, the Securities and Exchange Commission required companies to publicly disclose the amount and timing of their buybacks. But Ronald Reagan's SEC removed those restrictions. Then, George W. Bush's SEC allowed top executives, even though technically company "insiders" ... to quietly cash in their stock options without public disclosure. Now it's normal practice. Many CEOs are making vast fortunes not because they're good at managing their corporations but because they're good at using insider information.
Note: Is the trend to relax the rules on insider trading related to the revolving door between big banks and government? For more along these lines, see these concise summaries of deeply revealing articles about widespread corruption in government and banking and finance.
Californias Proposition 37, which would require that genetically modified (G.M.) foods carry a label, has the potential ... to change the politics of food not just in California but nationally too. Genetically modified foods dont offer the eater any benefits whatsoever only a potential, as yet undetermined risk. Monsanto and its allies have fought the labeling of genetically modified food ... vigorously since 1992, when the industry managed to persuade the [F.D.A.] over the objection of its own scientists that the new crops were substantially equivalent to the old and so did not need to be labeled, much less regulated. The F.D.A. policy was co-written by a lawyer whose former firm worked for Monsanto. More than 60 other countries have seen fit to label genetically modified food, including those in the European Union, Japan, Russia and China. Monsanto and DuPont, the two leading merchants of genetically modified seed, have invested more than $12 million to defeat Prop 37. Americans have been eating genetically engineered food for 18 years, and as supporters of the technology are quick to point out, we dont seem to be dropping like flies. But they miss the point. The fight over labeling G.M. food is not foremost about food safety or environmental harm, legitimate though these questions are. The fight is about the power of Big Food. Monsanto has become the symbol of everything people dislike about industrial agriculture: corporate control of the regulatory process; lack of transparency (for consumers) and lack of choice (for farmers); an intensifying rain of pesticides; and the monopolization of seeds, which is to say, of the genetic resources on which all of humanity depends.
Note: To learn more about the revolving door between Monsanto and the FDA, click here. To read about many suppressed scientific studies which showed the GM foods were often harmful and sometimes even lethal to a variety of lab animals, click here. To watch a powerful video showing clearly how Monsanto has attacked those who will not use their GM seeds, click here.
The Department of Defense has used taxpayer money to send elite military officers to work for some of the Pentagon’s top private contractors. From 1995 to 2021, more than 315 military officers with elite ranks as high as colonel and rear admiral have been placed at top weapons manufacturers such as Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin, as well as other companies with billion-dollar government contracts. The arrangement has also coincided with a dramatic rise in Defense Department spending on private contractors valued in the trillions of dollars. The arrangement, called the Secretary of Defense Executive Fellows (SDEF) program, sends officers with promising military careers to work for top corporations in the defense, tech, finance, and other industries for one year. These fellows then report on how the Defense Department could incorporate some of these companies’ business practices and policies. The program has helped place corporate interests at the very heart of US military strategy. [A] report from Quincy Institute, a nonprofit think tank, is the first detailed examination of the SDEF program. The report casts doubt on the integrity of the fellowship program, calling it a “de facto lobbying tool” for private companies and a “taxpayer-funded revolving door” where more than 40 percent of the fellows have gone on to work for government contractors at some point in their postmilitary careers.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in the military and in the corporate world from reliable major media sources.
The center of the U.S. military-industrial complex has been shifting over the past decade from the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area to Northern California—a shift that is accelerating with the rise of artificial intelligence-based systems, according to a report published Wednesday. "Although much of the Pentagon's $886 billion budget is spent on conventional weapon systems and goes to well-established defense giants such as Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Boeing, and BAE Systems, a new political economy is emerging, driven by the imperatives of big tech companies, venture capital (VC), and private equity firms," [report author Roberto J.] González wrote. "Defense Department officials have ... awarded large multibillion-dollar contracts to Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Oracle." González found that the five largest military contracts to major tech firms between 2018 and 2022 "had contract ceilings totaling at least $53 billion combined." There's also the danger of a "revolving door" between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon as many senior government officials "are now gravitating towards defense-related VC or private equity firms as executives or advisers after they retire from public service." "Members of the armed services and civilians are in danger of being harmed by inadequately tested—or algorithmically flawed—AI-enabled technologies. By nature, VC firms seek rapid returns on investment by quickly bringing a product to market, and then 'cashing out' by either selling the startup or going public. This means that VC-funded defense tech companies are under pressure to produce prototypes quickly and then move to production before adequate testing has occurred."
Note: Learn more about emerging warfare technology in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.
During his final three years at the US Food and Drug Administration the physician scientist Doran Fink’s work focused on reviewing covid-19 vaccines. But a decade after joining the agency Fink had accepted a job with Moderna, the covid vaccine manufacturer. As he left for the private sector, the FDA’s ethics programme staff emailed him guidelines on post-employment restrictions, “tailored to your situation.” The email, obtained by The BMJ under a freedom of information request, explained that, although US law prohibits a variety of types of lobbying contact, “they do not prohibit the former employee from other activities, including working ‘behind the scenes.’” The legal ability to work “behind the scenes” is enshrined in federal regulations and highlights a “critical, critical loophole” in US revolving door policy. Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist for the organisation Public Citizen, told The BMJ that the rules forbid various forms of direct lobbying contact but permit lobbying activity that is indirect. “So, people will leave government service and can immediately start doing influence peddling and lobbying,” Holman explained. “They can even run a lobbying campaign, as long as they don’t actually pick up the telephone and make the contact with their former officials.” A majority of former FDA reviewers take up jobs in industry. Since 2000 every FDA commissioner, the agency’s highest position, has gone on to work for industry.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in Big Pharma from reliable major media sources.
What happens when government leaders leave Washington for cushy jobs on corporate boards? Former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Scott Gottlieb is just the latest administration official to go through the revolving door after his second tour at the FDA. Gottlieb recently resigned from his spot as the top federal drug regulator to take on a role at Pfizer—the top drug producer in the United States. But Gottlieb’s hiring is just the latest in a long line of moves to fortify the industry’s influence in Washington. Big Pharma spending on lobbying eclipses every other industry according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Current Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar - Gottlieb’s former boss - used to be president of Lilly USA, the U.S. branch of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. Trump lauded his appointment by calling Azar a “star for better healthcare and lower drug prices,” but during his time there the company raised the brand’s insulin prices threefold creating a crisis and drawing public outrage. A study last year found more than 160 former lobbyists serving in the Trump administration - and those industry ties point to an administration that puts the priorities of large corporations over those of the American people. Corporate executives and industry lobbyists cannot be effective regulators of the industries that have made them millions. The revolving door is an age-old problem in Washington but the scope and volume of the conflicts in the current administration ... is unprecedented.
Note: For lots more on the revolving door between government and big Pharma, see the “Revolving Door Project” and read this revealing article. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and Big Pharma profiteering from reliable major media sources.
The global insulin market is dominated by three companies: Eli Lilly, the French company Sanofi and the Danish firm Novo Nordisk. All three have raised list prices to similar levels. According to IBM Watson Health data, Sanofis popular insulin brand Lantus was $35 a vial when it was introduced in 2001; its now $270. Novo Nordisks Novolog was priced at $40 in 2001, and as of July 2018, its $289. The companies appear to have increased [prices] in lockstep over a number of years, prompting allegations of price fixing. All three companies denied these charges. (In 2010, Mexico fined Eli Lilly and three Mexican companies for price collusion on insulin, an allegation Eli Lilly also denied.) In the United States, a federal prosecutor and at least five state attorneys general are currently investigating the companies pricing practices. There is also another, less known corporate entity in the mix: pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), which include Express Scripts, OptumRx and CVS Health; all are now named in lawsuits on high insulin prices. These corporate entities are powerful special interests. In 2017, the pharmaceutical and health product industry ... spent nearly $280 million on lobbying, the biggest spender by far of 20 top industries, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The industry also has a revolving door to government. Alex Azar, the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, was the president of Eli Lillys U.S. division until 2017.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on pharmaceutical industry corruption from reliable major media sources.
America talks about recidivism as if it were a mystery. It isn’t. It is a predictable outcome of how we run prisons. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics has tracked what happens after release for decades. In a 10-year follow-up of people released from state prison, about two-thirds were arrested again within three years, and more than eight in ten within 10 years. A newer national analysis still showed roughly six in ten rearrested within three years. That is not just a series of bad individual choices — rather, it is a system producing a revolving door. Other countries have demonstrated a different way to operate secure prisons — one that changes outcomes without weakening accountability or surrendering public control. Over the past year, I have toured facilities and spoken directly with leaders connected to the only nonprofit prison systems operating at scale internationally. They share one defining feature: rehabilitation is treated as a core operational mission, not a secondary program. The question is not government prisons versus private prisons. It is whether correctional systems are designed to reward safety, stability and successful reentry, or whether they default to capacity management and crisis response. Nonprofit operators differ fundamentally from both traditional government bureaucracy and for-profit incarceration. There are no shareholders, no pressure to pay dividends, no incentives to keep beds full. Success is measured by what happens after release.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption and inspiring articles on prison system reform.
Department of Defense spending is increasingly going to large tech companies including Microsoft, Google parent company Alphabet, Oracle, and IBM. Open AI recently brought on former U.S. Army general and National Security Agency Director Paul M. Nakasone to its Board of Directors. The U.S. military discreetly, yet frequently, collaborated with prominent tech companies through thousands of subcontractors through much of the 2010s, obfuscating the extent of the two sectors’ partnership from tech employees and the public alike. The long-term, deep-rooted relationship between the institutions, spurred by massive Cold War defense and research spending and bound ever tighter by the sectors’ revolving door, ensures that advances in the commercial tech sector benefit the defense industry’s bottom line. Military, tech spending has manifested myriad landmark inventions. The internet, for example, began as an Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, now known as Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA) research project called ARPANET, the first network of computers. Decades later, graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page received funding from DARPA, the National Science Foundation, and U.S. intelligence community-launched development program Massive Digital Data Systems to create what would become Google. Other prominent DARPA-funded inventions include transit satellites, a precursor to GPS, and the iPhone Siri app, which, instead of being picked up by the military, was ultimately adapted to consumer ends by Apple.
Note: Watch our latest video on the militarization of Big Tech. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI, warfare technology, and Big Tech.
A 2022 investigation by the journal The BMJ declared that FDA oversight of clinical trials, including those for Pfizer and Moderna's mRNA Covid-19 vaccines, was "grossly inadequate," from not conducting enough inspections to failing to alert scientific journals or the public when violations were flagged. But the issues here are not confined to behind the pharmacy counter. Dr. John Abramson, author of the recent book "Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It," traces the roots of issue back decades. "In 1992, when what turned out to be effective HIV drugs were stuck in the bottleneck of the FDA, they didn't have enough staff to get them through quickly enough. Many people were dying, and it was a real crisis," he explains. "The solution was that the Prescription Drug User Fee Agreement was passed. The drug companies started to pay a user fee with that was due upon application for new drug approval. And now roughly 65% of the FDA budget for overseeing human products comes from the drug and device companies. This comes with rigid timelines, and as I see from the outside, some degree of influence and obligation to the drug companies that derives from this agreement." The numbers here vary — Forbes puts that budget figure as high as 75%. Another similar conflict of interest that concerns Abramson is what he calls "the revolving door that goes between FDA and the drug industry."
Note: Read about Brook Jackson, a researcher for the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine trials, who discovered patient safety concerns, data integrity issues, and other significant issues at her site. When she reported it to the FDA, she was fired the same day. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and health from reliable major media sources.
A former Goldman Sachs banker suspected of taking confidential documents from a source inside the government has agreed to plead guilty, a rare criminal action on Wall Street, where Goldman itself is facing an array of regulatory penalties over the leak. The banker and his source, who at the time of the leak was an employee at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, one of Goldmans regulators, will accept a plea deal from federal prosecutors that could send them to prison for up to a year. Under a tentative deal ... Goldman would pay a fine of $50 million. For Goldman and the New York Fed, the case is likely to give new life to an embarrassing episode that illustrated the blurred lines between their institutions. Perhaps more than any other bank, Goldman swaps employees with the government, earning it the nickname Government Sachs. While the so-called revolving door is common on Wall Street, the investigation [affirms] the publics concerns that regulators and bankers, when intermingled, occasionally form unholy alliances. The Goldman banker, Rohit Bansal, previously spent seven years as a regulator at the New York Fed.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about corruption in government and in the financial industry.
Washington has long been notorious for its revolving doors. Politicians, regulators and other officials spin out of one capital building only to return at another as highly paid lobbyists. Leading the pack of former White House staff [now] accepting the corporate shilling is Jay Carney, President Obamas former White House press secretary, who this week joined Amazon as its head of global corporate affairs. Carney follows David Plouffe, Obamas former campaign manager and senior White House adviser, who quit the White House in 2013 and joined Uber. Others to have left the Obama administration for the serious cash of the corporate world include Samuel Maruca, who was director of transfer pricing (multinational company taxation) at the Internal Revenue Service, [and] Shara Aranoff, [former] chair of the US International Trade Commission. Bill Allison, senior fellow of the Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit that campaigns for open government, said the number of senior government officials switching to lobbying roles in big companies poses a huge problem for transparency". Obama was very clear he didnt want people to switch between lobbying and the government, but thats what is happening. When he took office, Obama signed an order that the White House said: closes the revolving door that allows government officials to move to and from private sector jobs in ways that give that sector undue influence over government.
Note: For more on this, see Glenn Greenwald's excellent article.
The middle class can't be saved unless Wall Street is tamed. Yet most presidential aspirants don't want to talk about taming the Street because Wall Street is one of their largest sources of campaign money. Six years ago ... the financial collapse crippled the middle class and poor, consuming the savings of millions of average Americans and causing 23 million to lose their jobs, 9.3 million to lose their health insurance and some 1 million to lose their homes. A repeat performance is not unlikely. Wall Street's biggest banks are much larger now than they were then. Five of them hold about 45 percent of America's banking assets. In 2000, they held 25 percent. Meanwhile, the Street's lobbyists have gotten Congress to repeal a provision of Dodd-Frank curbing excessive speculation by the big banks. The language was drafted by Citigroup and personally pushed by Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase. It's nice that presidential aspirants are talking about rebuilding America's middle class. But to be credible, the candidates have to [propose] to limit the size of the biggest Wall Street banks, to resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act (which used to separate investment banking from commercial banking), to define insider trading the way most other countries do (using information any reasonable person would know is unavailable to most investors), and to close the revolving door between the Street and the U.S. Treasury. It also means not depending on the Street to finance their campaigns.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about corruption in government and the financial industry.
A cycle of overhyped terror plots involving government agency entrapment feeds a multimillion-dollar surveillance industry. The news stories ... quickly surface, long enough to cause scary headlines, then vanish before people can learn how often the cases are thrown out. These are stories about "bumbling fantasists", hapless druggies, the aimless, even the virtually homeless and mentally ill, and other marginal characters with not the strongest grip on reality, who have been lured into discourses about violence against America only after assiduous courting, and in some cases outright payment, by undercover FBI or police informants. But the tales of entrapment and terror hype continue apace ten years after 9/11. Now we have another "underwear bomber" declared by the Pentagon to have been about to launch a major attack via a US-bound plane, but who appears, reportedly, to have been a CIA-run double agent. What is the evidence that the "device", which is supposedly so sophisticated that there is doubt as to whether existing surveillance technologies in US airports would have caught it, actually exists? It is important to note that we can no longer assume that the FBI and the CIA and the NSA work ... for the safety of the American people; they [now] represent a revolving door of government officials who become security industry lobbyists and manufacturers, which, in turn, get the multimillion-dollar contracts for tackling the very problems these stories [hype].
Note: For more on this bizarre news, see the CBS report at this link. Isn't it amazing how many terrorist groups have undercover FBI and CIA agents involved in actually pushing plots forward? One has to wonder how far the plots would go without prompting by intelligence insiders. For a powerful BBC documentary suggesting that terrorism is pushed and sold by politicians for a deeper agenda, click here.
In an exchange this week on “All-In Podcast,” Alex Karp was on the defensive. The Palantir CEO used the appearance to downplay and deny the notion that his company would engage in rights-violating in surveillance work. “We are the single worst technology to use to abuse civil liberties, which is by the way the reason why we could never get the NSA or the FBI to actually buy our product,” Karp said. What he didn’t mention was the fact that a tranche of classified documents revealed by [whistleblower and former NSA contractor] Edward Snowden and The Intercept in 2017 showed how Palantir software helped the National Security Agency and its allies spy on the entire planet. Palantir software was used in conjunction with a signals intelligence tool codenamed XKEYSCORE, one of the most explosive revelations from the NSA whistleblower’s 2013 disclosures. XKEYSCORE provided the NSA and its foreign partners with a means of easily searching through immense troves of data and metadata covertly siphoned across the entire global internet, from emails and Facebook messages to webcam footage and web browsing. A 2008 NSA presentation describes how XKEYSCORE could be used to detect “Someone whose language is out of place for the region they are in,” “Someone who is using encryption,” or “Someone searching the web for suspicious stuff.” In May, the New York Times reported Palantir would play a central role in a White House plan to boost data sharing between federal agencies, “raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.”
Note: Read about Palantir's revolving door with the US government. As former NSA intelligence official and whistleblower William Binney articulated, "The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control." For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.
The high-stakes world of Pentagon lobbying is being altered by the rise of defense technology startups. Retiring generals and departing top Pentagon officials once migrated regularly to the big established weapons makers like Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Now they are increasingly flocking to venture capital firms that have collectively pumped billions of dollars into Silicon Valley-style startups offering the Pentagon new war-fighting tools like autonomous killer drones, hypersonic jets and space surveillance equipment. The New York Times has identified at least 50 former Pentagon and national security officials, most of whom left the federal government in the last five years, who are now working in defense-related venture capital or private equity as executives or advisers. In many cases, The Times confirmed that they continued to interact regularly with Pentagon officials or members of Congress to push for policy changes or increases in military spending that could benefit firms they have invested in. Pentagon procurement officials confirmed that they had repeatedly met with former Defense Department officials who are now venture capitalists. They said recommendations pushed by the venture capitalists had played a role in changes they are making in the way they acquire technology. In the last four years, at least $125 billion of venture capital has flooded into startups that build defense technology ... compared with $43 billion in the prior four years.
Note: If you can't access the above article, here's an alternate link. Learn more about arms industry corruption in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.
More than 80 percent of four-star officers retiring from the U.S. armed forces go on to work in the defense industry, a new study has found, underscoring the close relationship between top U.S. brass and government-contracted companies. Twenty-six of 32 four-star admirals and generals who retired from June 2018 to July 2023 were later employed in roles including executive, adviser, board member or lobbyist for companies with significant defense business, according to the analysis from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think tank that advocates restraining the military’s role in U.S. foreign policy. “The revolving door between the U.S. government and the arms industry, which involves hundreds of senior Pentagon officials and military officers every year, generates the appearance — and in some cases the reality — of conflicts of interest in the making of defense policy and in the shaping of the size and composition of the Pentagon budget,” authors William Hartung and Dillon Fisher wrote. The findings shed new light on a phenomenon examined in a 2021 report from the Government Accountability Office, which found that 14 major defense contractors ... employed 1,700 former senior officials or acquisition officials in 2019. The GAO concluded that while defense contractors benefit from the practice, it could “affect public confidence in the government” by creating a perception that military officials may favor a company they see as a future employer.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in the military and in the corporate world from reliable major media sources.
