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On January 20th, 2025, first day back, Donald Trump sits down and signs an executive
order.

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And look, he signs a lot of executive orders, so it's easy for this one to get kind of
lost in the noise.

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But this one matters in a way that most people haven't fully clocked yet.

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The order rescinds the Biden-era ethics pledges, the ones that required appointees to
recuse themselves.

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or excuse themselves from matters involving their former employers for two years.

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Gone.

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Deleted.

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Day one.

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Before the moving boxes had even been unpacked inside the White House.

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And here's what I want you to sit with for just a second.

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That two-year buffer, imperfect though it was, was the one thing standing behind between a
coal lobbyist and the agency that regulates coal, between a pharmaceutical insider and the

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office setting drug policy, between a Wall Street attorney and the department deciding
whether to prosecute a Wall Street firm.

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Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington flagged it immediately.

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They saw exactly what it was.

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This isn't deregulation in the abstract, right?

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This was the government handing out keys to the building to the people who used to pay to
get inside, right?

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Right, and the thing is, and this is what keeps me up at night, it's not like the door was
locked before.

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It was barely latched.

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It was kind of like a screen door in a hurricane.

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and they went and took off the hinges.

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So here's the question we're gonna spin today answering.

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If the revolving door has always been spinning, what happens when someone removes the
friction entirely?

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What happens when loyalty to power becomes the only credential that actually matters?

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And what does Pam Bondi's exit tell us about everyone still standing?

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Stay with us.

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Hello everyone and welcome back to The Overlap.

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I am Joshua.

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And I'm Will, and if you're new here, genuinely welcome.

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Welcome to the Madhouse.

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We're glad you found us.

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Stick around because we do not let you leave without learning something that will make you
slightly angrier and hopefully significantly more informed than you were 45 minutes ago.

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Which is honestly the best that we can promise anybody, at least today.

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which is why it's our mission statement.

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It's the whole thing.

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Yeah, so.

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So Joshua, how are you?

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Because you have that voice.

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You have the voice you get when you've been reading for 72 hours straight and you're
simultaneously furious and delighted that you found what you found.

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I have been doing some research in the mines, if you will.

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I have uh been deep in research mines, pulled up something that I think our listeners need
to understand before we get into kind of the mechanics of it, like always, because the

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mechanics are really annoying, no doubt, but the architecture, the intentional,
structural, documented architecture of this thing, that's what actually got me.

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Why you tee it up for our listeners.

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Sure.

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So the topic today is kind of the revolving door.

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We've said it before.

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The movement of people between government power and private industry.

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And I know that sounds like a civics class problem.

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Like something you file under things that are technically bad, but they've always kind of
been this way.

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And dear listener, if that's where you are right now, I understand.

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I was there too.

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But here's what changed, right?

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On January 20th, 2025, the first thing, one of the very first things this administration
did was sign an executive order completely eliminating the ethics recusal requirements for

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incoming appointees.

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That two year buffer that said, you cannot walk directly from your old boss's office into
the regulatory agency that oversees your old boss, gone.

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And we can talk about what that means in practice.

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In fact, let's make it a real example because I was a former employee of the judiciary.

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I served as a clerk for a federal judge.

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And that judge had a policy of not hearing argument or not allowing cases involving his
recently former clerks or recently uh departed clerks who would join private practice.

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He wouldn't hear any arguments from them for a period of at least two years.

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so that it kept the preserve the sense of objectivity that you're supposed to get when you
walk into a courtroom, right?

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The scales of justice are balanced, not tipped in favor of the private sector.

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So when you make that, take that out of the legal context, which is big enough and make it
about the medication that's keeping your family safe or you or your family safe, if that's

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been paid for by the company that makes your medication, they bought and sold the person
who's handling the decisions about whether to allow that medication to be sold in the US.

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Or the person setting environmental enforcement policy may have spent the last decade
lobbying against environmental enforcement.

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There's now no waiting period.

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Those people can slide right into public office as appointed members of the administration
with no cooling off.

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Not even a pretense of, we're making things fair here for everyone.

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Yeah, that's exactly right.

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So the revolving door has really always been spinning.

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So today we're going to show you exactly kind of how fast, exactly who greased that wheel,
and exactly what it costs when the people writing the rules used to sell access to them.

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And we're going to talk about what Pam Bondi's story tells us because it kind of tells us
everything about what this moment actually is.

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Yeah, so let's go on January 17th, 1961, because we always start with the history in this
episode, right?

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Or in this podcast.

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Dwight Eisenhower is three days from leaving office.

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He's about to walk out, right?

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He has commanded the allied forces in World War II.

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He's been president of the United States for eight years.

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He is not a man that is thriving in drama, right?

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He sits down in front of a camera and delivers what, if you read it carefully, is a
warning very specific and very dire.

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So dire that it should have stopped the country cold.

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But it didn't.

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But it didn't.

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So here's what I want you to understand about that speech, because everyone quotes the
phrase military industrial complex, right?

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It's on bumper stickers.

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It's in freshman poly-sci syllabus.

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But the actual sentence, right?

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The full sentence is, quote, in the councils of government, we must guard against the
acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought.

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by the military industrial complex." quote.

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Sought or unsought, he wasn't just describing corruption, he was describing gravity.

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He was describing a structural pull that would happen whether anyone intended it or not.

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And Eisenhower was someone who'd seen it from the inside, right?

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That's the part that gets me.

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This isn't a senator from some small state who never actually touched the inner workings
of the machine.

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This is the man who ran the machine.

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Exactly.

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He was the operator and what he was naming in 1961 with that kind of precision was the
revolving door before anybody called it that right the movement of people the transfer of

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access the way a general retires on Friday and starts advising a defense contractor on
Monday and the contractor gets the contract and the general gets the salary and nobody has

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technically done anything wrong.

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Nobody goes to jail.

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And nobody ever goes to jail.

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That's the architecture.

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That's the point.

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So that's what I mean when I say it is the architecture, right?

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That's not a bug.

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It's a feature.

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It's the load bearing structure of the thing.

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And Eisenhower saw it in 1961 and said it out loud and we filed it under famous speech and
kept going.

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Yeah, it wasn't until 17 years later, 17 years, before Jimmy Carter comes along and
actually tries to do something about it.

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And we see how that worked out for him.

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Yeah, that was 1978.

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He created the Ethics in Government Act.

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This is the first time in American history that there are actual post-employment
restrictions on senior federal officials.

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If you leave a regulatory agency, you cannot immediately go and lobby that agency.

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There's a one-year cooling-off period.

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one year.

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Only one year, which sounds like something.

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mean, it sounds like something until you think about what a year actually is in the
context of a career.

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You spend a decade building relationships.

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know, every deputy assistant secretary by their first name, you know, which conference
room they take their lunch in, you know, the internal calendar and the law says, 12

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months.

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Then you can just walk right back in.

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It's like telling someone they can't use the key they just copied for a year.

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That's exactly what it is.

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The copy exists, the relationships exist, the knowledge exists, the clock runs out and the
door is wide open.

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But this is where it gets worse because 1978 is the setup.

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1989 is where you see what happens when the door spins too fast and nobody's watching.

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the savings and loan scandal.

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Yes, as we all know it by such a familiar name, the savings and loan scandal.

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Dear listener, I hear you.

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I want to be specific here because the numbers are really big, right?

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And they become abstract and I refuse to let them be abstract for the purpose of this
podcast.

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The total cost to American taxpayers was $124 billion.

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That's the number.

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$124 billion because former regulators moved into industry positions and then used their
knowledge of the regulatory architecture that they had built to help to dismantle it.

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Let's go ahead and give one of those former regulators a name, shall we?

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How about Charles Keating?

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Charles Keating.

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actually ran Lincoln Savings and Loan, who epitomized exactly what happens when the people
who are supposed to be watching the system have already decided the system works better

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without watchers.

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And also Edwin Gray, who was actually the regulator trying to stop it.

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And he was steamrolled by the political connections that Keating had actually made prior,
connections that

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were built precisely because former officials knew exactly which doors to knock on.

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And the people who lost money in those savings and loans were not Wall Street traders.

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They were retirees.

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They were the greatest generation.

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They were people who had done everything right.

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Saved their money, put it somewhere safe, trusted the system.

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And then $124 billion gone.

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And the response, right, the government office of, sorry, the office of government ethics
issues stricter regulations.

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Stricter.

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Not different.

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Not structural.

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Stricter.

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As if the problem was the rules weren't worded firmly enough.

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This is a pattern that we see consistently in that

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The people who end up losing aren't the people who are causing the problems, it's always
just the rest of us.

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All right, and it is the pattern.

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Let's sit with that for a second.

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I mean, this is the pattern that we're gonna walk you through for this entire episode.

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First, something catastrophic happens.

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Congress holds hearings.

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Regulations get tightened.

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Can't see the air quotes there because this is not a video podcast.

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They're there.

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Regulations get, quote unquote, tightened.

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The door keeps spinning.

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We found that under reform happened and we move on.

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And then lo and behold, it happens again.

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Yeah, I'm actually really happy this is not a video podcast because you guys probably
wouldn't want to see me the way that I normally record this podcast.

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Typically just a t-shirt and a wall of guitars.

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But anyway, fast forward to 2006, right?

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We're not talking about a regulatory failure.

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We're talking about a criminal enterprise that operated in plain sight.

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Much similar to what we're seeing today.

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But in 2006, Jack Abramoff, and if you know the name, you probably know it from...

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movie or the headlines, but let me tell you what actually happened because the details are
a little bit more disturbing than the summary.

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Summer's already pretty disturbing.

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Yeah, Abramov was a lobbyist, one of the most connected lobbyists in Washington.

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And the reason he was connected is the reason the revolving door exists.

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He had hired the right people, former congressional staffers, former officials, people who
knew the system because they had worked in the system.

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And he used that access to defraud his own clients, which in this case was Native American
tribal governments.

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as if they haven't been subjected to enough, of $85 million.

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At the same time, bribing the officials who were supposed to be overseeing the industries
those tribes actually operated in.

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And we're talking Tom DeLay, Bob Nay.

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I mean, these are not anonymous bureaucrats.

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they do rhyme.

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Tom DeLay, exactly, it makes it harder when you're having to read them off of a note
sheet.

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Tom DeLay was the the house majority leader, Bob Ney was a sitting congressman.

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And the mechanism, right, the actual mechanism of the fraud

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was the revolving door.

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It was the fact that Abramov could pick up the phone and reach people because those people
used to work for him or used to work with him or were planning to work for him after they

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left the government.

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The access was the product.

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The access was what he was selling.

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And this time it's to the tune of $85 million.

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And Bob Ney goes to prison.

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Abramov pleads guilty.

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And what changes?

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Yeah, the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act 2007.

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George W.

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Bush signs this, Sorry.

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It's funny because at the time I was a big Bush fan.

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I'm now realizing all of my mistakes those multiple years ago.

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But like, I think all of us would be a little better off under a Bush presidency than we
currently are.

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So it's hard for me to read these and be like, ah, the evil Bushes.

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Um, when it would be not just marginally better than we're currently seeing it.

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But anyway, W.

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Bush signed it W.

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Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, they actually push it through.

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So this is, this is a bipartisan effort, right?

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They worked together.

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Yes.

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And it extends this cooling off period.

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I don't remember.

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It extends this cooling off period from one year to two years for senior officials.

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So two years before you can go and lobby.

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your former agency.

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So we're up to two years.

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two years, which again, sounds like something, right?

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I mean, two years, that's like my average tenure at a company.

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Until you look at what the Boston Globe found in 2010, right?

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So 2010, the Boston Globe did an investigation.

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And this was like a real one, like with names and numbers.

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00:14:42,676 --> 00:14:54,716
And they found that more than 70 % of retiring three and four star military officers went
to work for defense contractors or consultants within one year of leaving service.

225
00:14:54,717 --> 00:14:55,887
Wait, 70 %?

226
00:14:55,887 --> 00:15:02,095
I'm sure it's just because of their extensive knowledge of the battlefield conditions,
nothing to do with their connection.

227
00:15:02,096 --> 00:15:12,031
Of course not within one year, which means this two year, you know, cooling off period for
lobbying their former agencies was for most of them, not the constraint because they

228
00:15:12,031 --> 00:15:14,293
weren't technically lobbying.

229
00:15:14,293 --> 00:15:23,163
were consulting, advising, providing strategic guidance, which is literally the same thing
with a different invoice code.

230
00:15:23,164 --> 00:15:25,858
Yeah, I'm hearing a of air quotes in there.

231
00:15:25,858 --> 00:15:28,832
I keep thinking about what it means to be a three or four star general.

232
00:15:28,832 --> 00:15:37,533
Think about the relationships you've built to reach that echelon of military service, the
classified briefings you sat in, the procurement decisions you've influenced.

233
00:15:37,533 --> 00:15:42,428
And then you retire and 70 % of you are working for the companies that benefit from those
decisions within 12 months.

234
00:15:42,428 --> 00:15:44,540
And I'm guessing for a higher salary.

235
00:15:44,791 --> 00:15:45,661
Mostly.

236
00:15:45,661 --> 00:15:51,655
And here's the thing, and I think people miss this in, you know, these dry, bland
statistics.

237
00:15:51,655 --> 00:15:56,136
It's not that these generals are necessarily corrupt people, right?

238
00:15:56,136 --> 00:15:58,888
Making terribly horrible, corrupt choices.

239
00:15:58,888 --> 00:16:02,720
Some of them probably are, I mean, realistically, right?

240
00:16:02,720 --> 00:16:10,834
But the structural problem, which is the Eisenhower problem, is that the system creates
this outcome, whether or not

241
00:16:10,834 --> 00:16:16,038
the person involved in it actually intends to create this outcome.

242
00:16:16,038 --> 00:16:21,883
Defense contractors, why wouldn't you want to hire somebody who understands the
acquisition process, right?

243
00:16:21,883 --> 00:16:27,596
Generals understand the acquisition process better than anyone currently alive.

244
00:16:27,596 --> 00:16:30,248
The market for that knowledge is huge.

245
00:16:30,248 --> 00:16:33,399
And the law as written doesn't stop it.

246
00:16:33,650 --> 00:16:37,583
It just slows it down, just regulates the speed of the revolving door, right?

247
00:16:37,835 --> 00:16:39,487
That's exactly correct.

248
00:16:39,487 --> 00:16:50,495
by 2016, the GAO, we've talked about them before, the Government Accountability Office,
which is a nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, publishes a report.

249
00:16:50,495 --> 00:17:03,312
And what they find is the FDA, the SEC, and other major regulatory agencies have
significant numbers of former employees working for the industries they used to regulate.

250
00:17:03,312 --> 00:17:09,920
And that enforcement of the post-employment rules is, to use the technical term, limited.

251
00:17:10,171 --> 00:17:11,161
limited.

252
00:17:11,412 --> 00:17:16,716
More air quotes, limited, which in government accountability language means it's not
happening.

253
00:17:16,716 --> 00:17:17,908
The rules exist.

254
00:17:17,908 --> 00:17:19,009
The enforcement doesn't.

255
00:17:19,009 --> 00:17:22,762
I have something very similar, you know, personal story about that.

256
00:17:22,762 --> 00:17:31,600
We have an election board where I live, just like you have an election board and
candidates and one particular candidate in this case, who I happen to be opposed to, but

257
00:17:31,600 --> 00:17:35,473
that candidate put political signs in illegal places.

258
00:17:35,473 --> 00:17:44,409
illegal places in front of churches, in front of city property, in front of public
property, in front of all kinds of like abandoned yards, right?

259
00:17:44,409 --> 00:17:48,204
Or somebody just has a field and they'll just go and put a sign on their fence.

260
00:17:48,204 --> 00:17:50,797
But when you call the election board, they say, we'll take care of it.

261
00:17:50,797 --> 00:17:51,578
It's illegal.

262
00:17:51,578 --> 00:17:55,784
If I touch it, it's considered defacement of a election sign.

263
00:17:55,784 --> 00:18:01,268
And the election board says they'll handle it, but they have no way to enforce that except
to call the county sheriff.

264
00:18:01,268 --> 00:18:03,889
and the county sheriff might or might not get to it.

265
00:18:03,889 --> 00:18:07,121
And in this case, I called 14 times about signs.

266
00:18:07,121 --> 00:18:13,547
I finally had to call the school board and superintendent, as well as the principal of a
school.

267
00:18:13,547 --> 00:18:20,732
And they were actually able to just walk out there and remove the sign because it had been
placed illegally on public property.

268
00:18:20,732 --> 00:18:24,345
there's these rules that exist, but there's no enforcement for it in that

269
00:18:24,345 --> 00:18:30,376
Sure, technically it's, you know, the sheriff dropped the ball in this scenario, but it's
not like there's a fine.

270
00:18:30,376 --> 00:18:34,907
She's not going to get charged $50 per sign or $50 per violation.

271
00:18:34,907 --> 00:18:42,826
It's a rule and people generally hold to them, but if they don't hold to them, there's no
mechanism to actually fix it.

272
00:18:42,827 --> 00:18:49,444
Whereas I bet if you wouldn't remove those signs, like you said, you'd be subject to the
penalties that are ascribed for that, or subject to civil action.

273
00:18:49,444 --> 00:18:50,575
Yeah.

274
00:18:51,149 --> 00:18:51,614
Yeah.

275
00:18:51,614 --> 00:18:53,157
wouldn't be able to have a job anymore.

276
00:18:53,157 --> 00:18:54,277
Right.

277
00:18:54,278 --> 00:18:58,938
Well, this is where I think we need to say something directly because I think it's easy to
get lost in these timelines.

278
00:18:58,938 --> 00:19:02,078
You know, we're talking about events from the Eisenhower administration to the George W.

279
00:19:02,078 --> 00:19:05,500
Bush administration, you know, 1961 to 2016.

280
00:19:05,500 --> 00:19:06,931
It's 55 years.

281
00:19:06,931 --> 00:19:09,742
And in that time you have a warning, right?

282
00:19:09,742 --> 00:19:17,237
We have a warning, a law, a scandal, a stricter law, air quotes, another scandal, a
slightly stricter law, more air quotes.

283
00:19:17,237 --> 00:19:19,890
a report that says the slightly stricter law isn't being enforced.

284
00:19:19,890 --> 00:19:22,572
And in all of that time, this door just keeps on spinning.

285
00:19:22,572 --> 00:19:25,244
And whoever's greasing that revolving door is doing a really good job.

286
00:19:25,244 --> 00:19:28,130
Because it keeps moving.

287
00:19:28,130 --> 00:19:29,402
faster by the day.

288
00:19:29,402 --> 00:19:34,136
Here's how I think about it from like a systems perspective, right?

289
00:19:34,136 --> 00:19:40,122
In any well-designed system, you have controls that can actually interrupt bad behavior.

290
00:19:40,122 --> 00:19:44,956
That might be a circuit breaker or a firewall or something like that, but it's a hard
stop.

291
00:19:44,956 --> 00:19:48,209
What we built instead is a series of speed bumps.

292
00:19:48,209 --> 00:19:50,661
And speed bumps don't stop traffic.

293
00:19:50,661 --> 00:19:52,413
They slow it down slightly.

294
00:19:52,413 --> 00:19:53,996
and then it just keeps going.

295
00:19:54,247 --> 00:19:58,748
And worse yet, the people designing the speed bumps are often the same people who benefit
from the traffic.

296
00:19:58,999 --> 00:20:03,543
I think that's the part that Eisenhower was actually trying to tell us during this speech,
right?

297
00:20:03,543 --> 00:20:07,457
The system actually selects for people who can navigate it.

298
00:20:07,457 --> 00:20:11,872
And the people who can navigate it are the people who actually helped to build it.

299
00:20:11,872 --> 00:20:17,187
And they're not going to build a hard stop into a system that they plan to use when they
leave.

300
00:20:17,187 --> 00:20:20,840
In the computer world, we call this a zero-day exploit, right?

301
00:20:20,840 --> 00:20:26,294
That means from day one, there was a purposeful back door put into things.

302
00:20:26,326 --> 00:20:33,464
Maybe sometimes not purposeful, maybe accidental that can't be resolved, that people have
been putting those devices out there into the world.

303
00:20:33,715 --> 00:20:38,298
and Billy Tozan and yes, that's Tozan for those of you not from Louisiana.

304
00:20:38,298 --> 00:20:43,021
ah That end is uh the same end that goes the end of the word Boudin.

305
00:20:43,021 --> 00:20:49,085
ah Billy Tozan is about to walk right through that open, what uh did you call it?

306
00:20:49,085 --> 00:20:50,646
A zero day exploit?

307
00:20:52,147 --> 00:20:59,402
Yeah, so when we get to Billy Tozan now listeners, I need you to have all of this stuff in
your head, all the background we've just set up because what he did was not an aberration.

308
00:20:59,402 --> 00:21:02,234
It was the system working exactly as designed.

309
00:21:02,485 --> 00:21:15,491
Every speed bump we just described, right, every reform, every hearing, every strongly
worded regulation, Billy Tozant drove right over all of them at $2 million a year.

310
00:21:15,492 --> 00:21:16,147
Legally.

311
00:21:16,147 --> 00:21:17,933
He did it legally.

312
00:21:17,934 --> 00:21:21,017
Yeah, he absolutely did it legally.

313
00:21:21,017 --> 00:21:22,148
That's the segment.

314
00:21:22,148 --> 00:21:23,669
Billy Tozan, let's go.

315
00:21:23,669 --> 00:21:26,842
Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

316
00:21:26,842 --> 00:21:33,237
He writes the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003.

317
00:21:33,237 --> 00:21:37,522
And buried inside that legislation, one specific provision.

318
00:21:37,522 --> 00:21:42,027
Medicare cannot negotiate drug prices directly

319
00:21:42,027 --> 00:21:43,579
with pharmaceutical companies.

320
00:21:43,579 --> 00:21:48,547
Cannot prohibited by law a law that he wrote.

321
00:21:48,798 --> 00:21:54,456
law put forward by Billy Tozan, proposed by Billy Tozan, congressman, who then leaves
congress.

322
00:21:54,707 --> 00:22:00,492
And then he leaves Congress and becomes the president and CEO of Pharma.

323
00:22:00,492 --> 00:22:02,414
It's not even a joke.

324
00:22:02,414 --> 00:22:06,918
The company is called PHRMA, literally big pharma.

325
00:22:06,918 --> 00:22:15,224
The pharmaceutical industry's top lobbying organization for approximately $2 million
annual salary.

326
00:22:15,475 --> 00:22:16,728
annual that's every year.

327
00:22:16,728 --> 00:22:18,495
I want to sit with that number for a second.

328
00:22:18,495 --> 00:22:20,669
Two million dollars a year.

329
00:22:20,669 --> 00:22:23,293
That's not a salary, that's a receipt.

330
00:22:23,544 --> 00:22:26,497
It is a receipt for services rendered while in office.

331
00:22:26,497 --> 00:22:27,497
And here's the kicker.

332
00:22:27,497 --> 00:22:29,099
I think people miss this, right?

333
00:22:29,099 --> 00:22:35,754
Pharma doesn't spend $2 million a year just on Tozan's compensation, right?

334
00:22:35,754 --> 00:22:46,656
In 2009, during the Affordable Care Act negotiations, Pharma spent over $116 million
lobbying total in one year.

335
00:22:46,656 --> 00:22:49,339
And Tozan was the man holding the phone

336
00:22:49,339 --> 00:22:50,957
on that lobbying effort.

337
00:22:51,208 --> 00:23:00,268
So the very prohibition on Medicare drug price negotiation that he wrote in 2003 became
the thing Pharma was paying to protect in 2009.

338
00:23:00,519 --> 00:23:09,394
Absolutely, and I do want to say it's so hard to be in the 2020s and then see numbers like
2003 and I think 20 ought 320 three It's difficult.

339
00:23:09,394 --> 00:23:11,516
Anyway, he built the wall, right?

340
00:23:11,516 --> 00:23:22,312
He he then like they paid him to guard the wall That is the revolving door at its most
geometrically perfect and It was completely legal

341
00:23:22,312 --> 00:23:30,852
Every cooling off period, every post-employment restriction, every speed bump that we've
described so far, Tauzin navigated all of it.

342
00:23:30,852 --> 00:23:39,192
Because the rules were written by people who understood exactly how to make rules that
look like rules without functioning as rules.

343
00:23:39,443 --> 00:23:43,258
I can't help but envision Jack Nicholson when we talk about him building the wall and then
guarding it.

344
00:23:43,258 --> 00:23:44,509
You you want me on that wall.

345
00:23:44,509 --> 00:23:45,772
You need me on that wall.

346
00:23:45,772 --> 00:23:47,946
We didn't need Orwaad Billy Tozer on that wall.

347
00:23:47,946 --> 00:23:49,858
There is a philosophical term for this, though.

348
00:23:49,858 --> 00:23:52,021
It's called performative compliance.

349
00:23:52,021 --> 00:23:56,176
The appearance of constraint that actually ratifies the behavior it pretends to prohibit.

350
00:23:56,427 --> 00:23:58,580
That's a generous way to describe it.

351
00:23:58,580 --> 00:24:01,555
In the tech world, we call that security theater.

352
00:24:01,555 --> 00:24:04,570
But it's what I would call fraud with paperwork.

353
00:24:04,571 --> 00:24:06,948
That's the philosopher in me trying to be precise.

354
00:24:06,949 --> 00:24:08,561
Yes, I'm an infrastructure guy.

355
00:24:08,561 --> 00:24:16,000
And I'm telling you, if a security system can be bypassed by everyone who knows how it
works, it's not a security system.

356
00:24:16,000 --> 00:24:17,732
It's a drama on TBS.

357
00:24:17,732 --> 00:24:22,106
It's a blinking light on a server room door that's already open.

358
00:24:22,357 --> 00:24:30,681
Alright, well let's talk about Andrew Wheeler now, because Wheeler is Tozan with the
volume turned all the way up to 11, and the subtlety completely turned off.

359
00:24:30,932 --> 00:24:37,558
Yeah, so Andrew Wheeler was a lobbyist for Murray Energy, one of the largest coal
companies in the United States.

360
00:24:37,558 --> 00:24:38,590
Clean coal.

361
00:24:38,590 --> 00:24:48,789
His firm, Fager Baker Daniels, sorry, Fager, Fagrey, Fagrey, F-A-E-G-R-E, Fager, okay,
Fager.

362
00:24:48,789 --> 00:24:50,210
That's fine with me.

363
00:24:50,210 --> 00:24:52,272
Fager Baker Daniels.

364
00:24:52,993 --> 00:24:55,654
No, right, I was like, man, Fagrey me.

365
00:24:56,196 --> 00:24:56,576
But...

366
00:24:56,576 --> 00:24:57,356
uh

367
00:24:57,357 --> 00:25:11,234
Fager Baker Daniels was pulling in fees while Murray Energy was spending almost $280,000
in registered lobbying expenditures during the years Wheeler was their guy, right?

368
00:25:11,234 --> 00:25:15,216
So then Trump actually makes him deputy administrator of the EPA.

369
00:25:15,216 --> 00:25:18,019
Then administrator of the EPA.

370
00:25:18,019 --> 00:25:23,282
The Environmental Protection Agency for those of you who are not key, those of you

371
00:25:23,282 --> 00:25:35,671
those of you who are not keeping up with the acronyms, they take a coal company CEO and
turn them into the deputy administrator and then the administrator of the Environmental

372
00:25:35,671 --> 00:25:37,313
Protection Agency.

373
00:25:37,564 --> 00:25:40,176
Sounds like he was spending all of his time already dealing with the office.

374
00:25:40,176 --> 00:25:46,850
mean, the very man who's lobbying against the environmental regulation becomes the man who
administers the environmental regulation.

375
00:25:46,850 --> 00:25:51,953
So in case anything slipped through the cracks and got passed anyway, we can take the
teeth out of it.

376
00:25:51,954 --> 00:25:52,585
Exactly.

377
00:25:52,585 --> 00:25:57,649
In the amount of time it took for him to take the call, he also answered the call on the
other end of the phone.

378
00:25:57,650 --> 00:25:59,773
Then he proceeded.

379
00:25:59,773 --> 00:26:00,673
Exactly.

380
00:26:00,673 --> 00:26:05,070
He then proceeded to roll back more than 80 environmental regulations.

381
00:26:05,070 --> 00:26:05,875
80.

382
00:26:05,875 --> 00:26:07,716
Now that's not a policy disagreement.

383
00:26:07,716 --> 00:26:10,409
That's a client list becoming a to-do list.

384
00:26:10,409 --> 00:26:11,761
Honey-doo, honey-doo.

385
00:26:11,761 --> 00:26:16,704
Well said, and here's what I our listeners to understand because this is the moment where
it stops being abstract.

386
00:26:16,704 --> 00:26:17,254
When Mr.

387
00:26:17,254 --> 00:26:20,836
Wheeler rolled back those regulations, it was not just a political event.

388
00:26:20,836 --> 00:26:30,655
It was a transfer of risk from Murray Energy's balance sheet onto yours, American
citizens, onto your lungs, onto your water table, onto the communities that didn't have

389
00:26:30,655 --> 00:26:34,587
lawyers or lobbyists or $2 million compensation packages to fight this.

390
00:26:34,838 --> 00:26:38,292
Yeah, the externalized cost always lands somewhere.

391
00:26:38,292 --> 00:26:40,064
It never disappears.

392
00:26:40,064 --> 00:26:45,139
It just moves from the people who can pay it to avoid it to the people who can't.

393
00:26:45,139 --> 00:26:52,747
Like I said before, that's almost never the people who are actually responsible for it and
almost always bared by the public.

394
00:26:52,748 --> 00:26:53,209
Right.

395
00:26:53,209 --> 00:26:56,641
And this is why the revolving door isn't just yet another corruption story.

396
00:26:56,641 --> 00:26:58,213
It's a distribution story.

397
00:26:58,213 --> 00:27:02,306
It determines who bears the cost of every decision made inside those agencies.

398
00:27:02,557 --> 00:27:06,850
Now I wanna go to something that happened on January 20th, 2025, right?

399
00:27:06,850 --> 00:27:13,107
Because this is where the modern machine doesn't just spin the door, it just rips the door
off and it's like, all right, we're open for business.

400
00:27:13,107 --> 00:27:14,913
But the door was doing so well.

401
00:27:16,381 --> 00:27:16,782
right.

402
00:27:16,782 --> 00:27:28,087
Day one, Trump signs an executive order, rescinding Biden era ethics pledges, like the
ones that required appointees to recuse themselves from matters involving former employers

403
00:27:28,087 --> 00:27:30,630
for like two years gone immediately.

404
00:27:30,630 --> 00:27:37,883
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington had flagged it within hours because
they knew it was not just like a random thing that he did.

405
00:27:37,883 --> 00:27:41,684
It was a policy mandate pulled directly from blueprints.

406
00:27:41,684 --> 00:27:50,135
like Project 2025, which explicitly aims to dismantle what its proponents call the
unaccountable federal bureaucracy.

407
00:27:50,386 --> 00:27:52,217
Let's call it what it is structurally.

408
00:27:52,217 --> 00:27:54,979
When we talk about the revolving door as a bipartisan problem, right?

409
00:27:54,979 --> 00:27:55,559
It is.

410
00:27:55,559 --> 00:27:57,070
got Tozan who's a Republican.

411
00:27:57,070 --> 00:27:58,571
We got Holder, a Democrat.

412
00:27:58,571 --> 00:28:00,623
It's not like anybody's not partaking.

413
00:28:00,623 --> 00:28:05,528
The profit motive transcends their their party fealty or loyalty, right?

414
00:28:05,528 --> 00:28:13,575
But the elimination of that two-year buffer combined with the new political atmosphere,
where it's already every man for himself, transforms the door into an accelerator.

415
00:28:13,575 --> 00:28:17,117
So now the currency isn't just experience, it's bold fealty.

416
00:28:17,368 --> 00:28:18,069
Exactly.

417
00:28:18,069 --> 00:28:19,860
And this is crucial, right?

418
00:28:19,860 --> 00:28:23,093
This is exactly where the quid pro quo comes in.

419
00:28:23,093 --> 00:28:33,673
If you bring in an industry professional like Andrew Wheeler with the explicit mandate to
gut the agency they now lead, you're asking them to destroy their institutional home.

420
00:28:33,673 --> 00:28:34,325
Bold.

421
00:28:34,325 --> 00:28:34,956
Bold.

422
00:28:34,956 --> 00:28:37,789
You can't just expect them to do that for free, right?

423
00:28:37,789 --> 00:28:41,925
The payment, the true quid pro quo is the expedited

424
00:28:41,925 --> 00:28:45,318
highly lucrative exit back to the private sector.

425
00:28:45,318 --> 00:28:54,824
They're now compensated by the speed and scale of their next revolving door opportunity,
which is now completely unsecured by ethics rules.

426
00:28:55,075 --> 00:28:56,156
And brakes are off.

427
00:28:56,156 --> 00:29:02,220
So the goal isn't necessarily to shutter the EPA or the CFPB, the Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau.

428
00:29:02,220 --> 00:29:04,472
The goal is not a quick death.

429
00:29:04,472 --> 00:29:06,644
It's a slow, debilitating failure.

430
00:29:06,644 --> 00:29:08,296
You bring in political loyalists.

431
00:29:08,296 --> 00:29:11,908
You strip civil service protections using mechanisms like Schedule F.

432
00:29:11,908 --> 00:29:13,687
Remember all those federal jobs that were lost?

433
00:29:13,687 --> 00:29:22,787
You create an exodus of institutional experts, the people who really know the science
behind these things and the reality of it, the economics, and you leave behind people who

434
00:29:22,787 --> 00:29:26,662
are blindly loyal to the new mandate, not the agency's mission.

435
00:29:26,663 --> 00:29:28,334
You don't take the building down with explosives.

436
00:29:28,334 --> 00:29:33,609
You hollow out the load bearing walls and align the cards so that the whole thing
collapses painfully over time.

437
00:29:33,860 --> 00:29:38,044
And this is where Pam Bondi's story becomes sort quintessential, right?

438
00:29:38,044 --> 00:29:46,102
The loyalty test is the gatekeeper for this accelerated, dismantling-based quid pro quo.

439
00:29:46,353 --> 00:29:53,042
That's Bondi, our now ex-attorney general, a long-time personal lawyer and ally to the
person in power.

440
00:29:53,043 --> 00:29:59,381
Her history confirms that she was already operating in the political legal ecosystem,
which allows for massive post-government payout.

441
00:29:59,632 --> 00:30:06,925
Yeah, and her trajectory and especially her most recent exit is a cautionary tale to every
single appointee.

442
00:30:06,925 --> 00:30:08,176
It's a warning, right?

443
00:30:08,176 --> 00:30:11,919
The revolving door hasn't stopped being transactional.

444
00:30:11,919 --> 00:30:14,160
It just added a loyalty variable, right?

445
00:30:14,160 --> 00:30:22,196
The ultimate lucrative private sector job is now contingent upon passing the audition
while in office.

446
00:30:22,196 --> 00:30:24,198
Ross Story article put it,

447
00:30:24,198 --> 00:30:27,372
that MAGA doesn't have allies, it has auditions.

448
00:30:27,372 --> 00:30:34,970
And Bondi, despite her deep loyalty and her willingness to use the Justice Department to
pursue political rivals, still found herself out.

449
00:30:35,221 --> 00:30:37,232
So Her Exit isn't just political drama.

450
00:30:37,232 --> 00:30:40,432
I mean, it defines the terms of the contract for everyone still in the room.

451
00:30:40,433 --> 00:30:41,524
Yeah, it does.

452
00:30:41,524 --> 00:30:45,606
If you fail the audition, right, the door spins you out with no reward.

453
00:30:45,606 --> 00:30:46,446
Don't pass go.

454
00:30:46,446 --> 00:30:47,594
Do not collect $200.

455
00:30:47,594 --> 00:30:59,913
If you stay, you've demonstrated your willingness to do anything, including maximally
serving the corporate allies of your patron, including redacting the name of the president

456
00:30:59,913 --> 00:31:02,895
from the Epstein files ad nauseum.

457
00:31:02,896 --> 00:31:07,509
Because your post government compensation depends entirely

458
00:31:07,509 --> 00:31:09,952
upon your right now compliance.

459
00:31:09,952 --> 00:31:18,700
This means the people inside the agencies are captured not just by industry, but by the
politics that secures their future industry job.

460
00:31:18,700 --> 00:31:23,342
They are downstream of a loyalty test you can't appeal.

461
00:31:23,593 --> 00:31:30,566
That brings us back to the classic revolving door cases, but now viewed through this new
loyalty framework, because we need to look back at the people who passed the test.

462
00:31:30,566 --> 00:31:32,728
Let's start with Eric Holder.

463
00:31:32,728 --> 00:31:36,720
This one is harder in some ways because Eric Holder is someone a lot of people wanted to
believe in.

464
00:31:36,720 --> 00:31:39,192
He was the first black attorney general of the United States.

465
00:31:39,192 --> 00:31:42,164
He came into office after the 2008 financial crisis.

466
00:31:42,164 --> 00:31:49,738
And the question that hung over his entire tenure, the question that The Intercept
investigated and that The New York Times has covered that legal scholars wrote about, was

467
00:31:49,738 --> 00:31:50,459
why no

468
00:31:50,459 --> 00:31:55,939
senior Wall Street executives were criminally prosecuted for the conduct that crashed the
global economy.

469
00:31:55,939 --> 00:32:00,319
I'm going to repeat that real quick, one time in case you missed it, in case you were born
late.

470
00:32:00,320 --> 00:32:07,180
No senior Wall Street executives were criminally prosecuted for the conduct that crashed
the global economy in 2008.

471
00:32:07,431 --> 00:32:12,476
The answer that people kept arriving at was, was Covington and Burling, right?

472
00:32:12,476 --> 00:32:16,169
Holder had been a partner there before becoming attorney general.

473
00:32:16,169 --> 00:32:23,566
So Covington and Burling represented JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, major Wall Street
institutions.

474
00:32:23,566 --> 00:32:28,991
And when Holder left the justice department in 2015, he went right back to working for
them.

475
00:32:28,991 --> 00:32:30,852
Back to Covington and Burling, that is.

476
00:32:30,852 --> 00:32:35,439
Back to the firm, back to the clients, no legal violation under existing rules.

477
00:32:35,439 --> 00:32:45,589
The men who made decisions that cost millions of Americans their homes, their 401ks, their
economic future, those men were not prosecuted.

478
00:32:45,589 --> 00:32:52,755
And the man who chose not to prosecute them returned to the law firm that still is
representing those people.

479
00:32:52,755 --> 00:32:58,619
And that is all completely illegal, fully structurally legal.

480
00:32:58,870 --> 00:33:03,982
to borrow some words from Reba, this is not a backwoods country lawyer, right?

481
00:33:03,982 --> 00:33:09,576
I this is a massive firm with its ties and connections to the entire global economy.

482
00:33:09,576 --> 00:33:12,697
I keep thinking about what it means to live through 2008 as a working person.

483
00:33:12,697 --> 00:33:19,276
I mean, I remember the fear that I thought when I first heard what had happened with the
subprime crisis and all the stuff that started to come to light.

484
00:33:19,276 --> 00:33:21,171
mean, you're wondering, this the end?

485
00:33:21,171 --> 00:33:23,102
You watch your 401k evaporate.

486
00:33:23,102 --> 00:33:25,734
You lose a house you spent 20 years paying into and then...

487
00:33:25,734 --> 00:33:27,191
to watch that play out.

488
00:33:27,442 --> 00:33:30,893
Yeah, I remember 2008 very, very succinctly.

489
00:33:30,893 --> 00:33:34,555
was laid off for the longest period I've ever been laid off in my whole life, four months.

490
00:33:34,555 --> 00:33:39,839
and that was, that was a big struggle when you're making such a small amount of money,
I'll tell you.

491
00:33:39,839 --> 00:33:42,350
And there's a, there's a particular cruelty in it, right?

492
00:33:42,350 --> 00:33:51,144
Because the system, the system told those people, look, we have a justice department, we
have an attorney general, we have laws, we're the party of law and order.

493
00:33:51,144 --> 00:33:53,477
And then the attorney general went back.

494
00:33:53,477 --> 00:33:55,180
to the same firm.

495
00:33:55,180 --> 00:33:59,678
No one went to prison and the people who lost their homes, well, they lost their home.

496
00:33:59,929 --> 00:34:07,818
Like if you're part of the Jesse James gang and then you join the government during the
time when the prosecution's on and then you go back and join the gang right after.

497
00:34:07,818 --> 00:34:09,109
Let's talk about the next one, Joshua.

498
00:34:09,109 --> 00:34:10,710
Tell me about Mick Mulvaney.

499
00:34:10,711 --> 00:34:15,791
Yeah, so Mulvaney is the one who said the quiet part into a microphone at a banking
conference.

500
00:34:15,791 --> 00:34:27,831
If you guys remember this in 2018, he told a room full of bankers and I'm reading from the
New York Times report because I want to be exact that when he was a congressman lobbyists

501
00:34:27,831 --> 00:34:31,782
who gave money to his campaign got meetings.

502
00:34:31,782 --> 00:34:34,993
People who did not give money did not get meetings.

503
00:34:34,993 --> 00:34:36,373
He said that out loud, right?

504
00:34:36,373 --> 00:34:39,133
Like to the people who give money.

505
00:34:39,384 --> 00:34:44,137
This is just to be clear in case you didn't realize by the fact that you paid $20,000 to
play to be here.

506
00:34:44,137 --> 00:34:46,349
It's pay to play, ladies and gentlemen.

507
00:34:46,349 --> 00:34:50,222
That is either breathtaking honesty or breathtaking arrogance or both.

508
00:34:50,222 --> 00:34:51,114
I can't decide.

509
00:34:51,114 --> 00:34:51,956
Yeah, it's both.

510
00:34:51,956 --> 00:34:55,398
And here's why it matters beyond the audacity of it, right?

511
00:34:55,398 --> 00:35:08,606
Mulvaney was in that moment, the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau, an agency created specifically to protect consumers from the financial industry.

512
00:35:08,606 --> 00:35:13,531
And he spent his entire tenure there dropping investigations into payday lenders.

513
00:35:13,531 --> 00:35:18,653
rolling back enforcement actions, and restructuring the entire agency from the inside.

514
00:35:18,653 --> 00:35:28,204
He had received $31,700 in campaign contributions from payday lenders as a congressman.

515
00:35:28,455 --> 00:35:33,327
$31,000 to dismantle an agency that was protecting people from $31,000 problems.

516
00:35:33,578 --> 00:35:38,769
The return on investment for that $31,000 is immeasurable, really.

517
00:35:38,769 --> 00:35:41,729
That's the math that never makes it into the headline.

518
00:35:41,729 --> 00:35:43,249
That's the boring stuff, right?

519
00:35:43,249 --> 00:35:46,160
That's the stuff that only the overlap talks about.

520
00:35:46,160 --> 00:35:58,182
And those people, the ones paying 400 % interest, and now I've even read as much as 13 to
1600 % interest, they didn't get a meeting with that congressman.

521
00:35:58,184 --> 00:35:59,507
No meeting for them.

522
00:35:59,758 --> 00:36:02,940
And every one of these cases is legal, like every single one of them.

523
00:36:02,940 --> 00:36:11,567
Not one of these people broke the law as it is currently written, which means the law as
written is the problem.

524
00:36:11,567 --> 00:36:15,860
And the people paying the price for that problem have names that we'll never know.

525
00:36:15,860 --> 00:36:21,313
Standing at pharmacy counters, breathing air that someone decided wasn't worth protecting,
right?

526
00:36:21,313 --> 00:36:26,536
Living in houses they didn't lose or did lose and never got an explanation for why.

527
00:36:26,787 --> 00:36:30,906
We, and by we I mean the royal we, owe them more than an explanation.

528
00:36:30,906 --> 00:36:32,638
But we can start there.

529
00:36:32,889 --> 00:36:34,720
So here's what we know, right?

530
00:36:34,720 --> 00:36:37,912
We know the revolving door is not a metaphor.

531
00:36:37,912 --> 00:36:39,544
It's literally a mechanism.

532
00:36:39,544 --> 00:36:41,785
It has a documented architecture.

533
00:36:41,785 --> 00:36:49,700
It has a paper trail, lobbying disclosures, Senate confirmation records, regulatory
rollback tallies, campaign finance filings.

534
00:36:49,700 --> 00:36:55,035
We spend an hour walking through the evidence and the evidence is not ambiguous.

535
00:36:55,035 --> 00:36:58,416
People who were paid to fight real regulations

536
00:36:58,417 --> 00:37:02,609
became the people in charge of enforcing those exact same regulations.

537
00:37:02,610 --> 00:37:04,142
And the enforcement changed.

538
00:37:04,142 --> 00:37:14,212
80 regulations, hundreds of millions of dollars in deferred penalties, communities that
lost the only institutional advocate they were ever going to have.

539
00:37:14,463 --> 00:37:15,874
And here's the thing I keep coming back to.

540
00:37:15,874 --> 00:37:17,957
I none of it required a conspiracy.

541
00:37:17,957 --> 00:37:22,591
No meetings in dark areas of parking garages or anything like that.

542
00:37:22,591 --> 00:37:26,907
The system was designed with enough legal space that you could drive a coal train through
it.

543
00:37:26,907 --> 00:37:28,198
This is not an accident.

544
00:37:28,198 --> 00:37:34,314
This is decades of careful, patient, well-funded work to make sure the exits stayed open
for the right people.

545
00:37:34,565 --> 00:37:35,306
That's exactly right.

546
00:37:35,306 --> 00:37:38,588
This isn't an Alex Jones episode.

547
00:37:38,588 --> 00:37:40,830
We're not turning the frogs gay, right?

548
00:37:41,451 --> 00:37:45,534
So this kind of naturally brings us right back to Pam Bondi.

549
00:37:45,534 --> 00:37:52,633
Because I really wanted to use her as a frame for a second before we get to what you can
actually do.

550
00:37:52,633 --> 00:37:54,256
Bondi just left.

551
00:37:54,256 --> 00:37:56,838
And the coverage is focused on the drama, right?

552
00:37:56,838 --> 00:37:59,511
The tension, the timing, the optics.

553
00:37:59,511 --> 00:38:00,663
But what her exit...

554
00:38:00,663 --> 00:38:03,556
actually tells you is something far more useful.

555
00:38:03,556 --> 00:38:09,102
It tells you that in this particular political ecosystem there are no allies.

556
00:38:09,102 --> 00:38:10,354
There are auditions.

557
00:38:10,354 --> 00:38:16,400
Everyone inside that circle is performing loyalty until the moment they're not useful.

558
00:38:16,400 --> 00:38:22,476
And when the door opens, not for them, but behind them, MAGA doesn't build coalitions.

559
00:38:22,476 --> 00:38:25,059
They build hierarchies of expendability

560
00:38:25,059 --> 00:38:28,673
And Bondi's exit is a clean illustration of just that.

561
00:38:28,673 --> 00:38:30,825
You go in as a loyalist, right?

562
00:38:30,825 --> 00:38:32,547
You come out as a cautionary tale.

563
00:38:32,547 --> 00:38:35,429
The raw story piece on this is definitely worth reading.

564
00:38:35,429 --> 00:38:45,201
It's at rawstory.com because what it actually maps is a pattern of people who believed
they had earned something and discovered that the currency that they were paid in is kind

565
00:38:45,201 --> 00:38:48,575
of worthless the moment it wasn't convenient anymore.

566
00:38:48,826 --> 00:38:54,599
And the reason that matters for this conversation for the revolving door specifically is
that it tells us something about durability.

567
00:38:54,599 --> 00:38:56,271
These arrangements are not durable.

568
00:38:56,271 --> 00:39:00,283
The personal relationships that grease the revolving door are contingent on power.

569
00:39:00,283 --> 00:39:09,166
When the power shifts, the door stops spinning in your favor, which is exactly why I
believe so strongly that the most durable change is structural, legal, legislative.

570
00:39:09,166 --> 00:39:13,877
Don't rely on the whims and fate of politics as usual.

571
00:39:13,877 --> 00:39:15,189
I you've got to make it a law.

572
00:39:15,189 --> 00:39:17,460
You can't beat a mechanism by finding better people.

573
00:39:17,460 --> 00:39:19,195
You beat it by changing the rules.

574
00:39:19,446 --> 00:39:23,060
And this is a time where I actually am going to have to agree with Will here.

575
00:39:23,060 --> 00:39:26,123
I don't normally, but here's what I would do first.

576
00:39:26,123 --> 00:39:31,327
If you're listening to this and you want to do something today, not this year, but today,
go to OpenSecrets.

577
00:39:31,327 --> 00:39:33,138
The URL is opensecrets.org.

578
00:39:33,138 --> 00:39:34,240
It's not difficult.

579
00:39:34,240 --> 00:39:35,412
Create a free account.

580
00:39:35,412 --> 00:39:42,248
Look up the lobbying history of any current cabinet official or agency head that you care
about or affects you the most.

581
00:39:42,248 --> 00:39:44,120
And find the disclosure records.

582
00:39:44,120 --> 00:39:45,742
You will find the clients.

583
00:39:45,742 --> 00:39:47,355
You will find the dollar amounts.

584
00:39:47,355 --> 00:39:51,532
And then you will have something specific to say when you contact your representatives.

585
00:39:51,532 --> 00:39:53,175
Not a vague concern.

586
00:39:53,175 --> 00:39:56,710
A name, a date, a dollar, and a question.

587
00:39:56,710 --> 00:40:00,684
Why is this person making decisions about the industry that paid them?

588
00:40:00,935 --> 00:40:04,928
And I don't know why Josh was so disappointed to agree with me, but I think there was a
little tongue in cheekness there.

589
00:40:04,928 --> 00:40:05,598
I hope so anyway.

590
00:40:05,598 --> 00:40:06,929
We'll talk about it after the podcast.

591
00:40:06,929 --> 00:40:09,620
But that's right.

592
00:40:09,620 --> 00:40:10,140
I forgot.

593
00:40:10,140 --> 00:40:10,851
How could I forget?

594
00:40:10,851 --> 00:40:11,562
How could I forget?

595
00:40:11,562 --> 00:40:17,868
But you know, when we agree on something, it's important that you can take to the bank
when you're complaining about their lobbying efforts.

596
00:40:17,868 --> 00:40:20,820
But when you contact your representative, please be specific.

597
00:40:20,820 --> 00:40:25,412
Right now, the most concrete legislative vehicle for closing the revolving door is the
Ethics Act.

598
00:40:25,412 --> 00:40:27,124
And that's a long acronym that

599
00:40:27,124 --> 00:40:29,065
Congress loves to put in their ethics is all caps.

600
00:40:29,065 --> 00:40:29,846
Go look it up.

601
00:40:29,846 --> 00:40:33,499
It has been introduced in multiple sessions and keeps dying in committee.

602
00:40:33,499 --> 00:40:34,320
Shocking.

603
00:40:34,320 --> 00:40:41,404
The organization that tracks it most closely though and runs direct constituent pressure
campaigns around it is the Project on Government Oversight.

604
00:40:41,404 --> 00:40:44,037
Sorry, I jumped to the acronym on that one, POGO.

605
00:40:44,037 --> 00:40:45,758
The Project on Government Oversight.

606
00:40:45,758 --> 00:40:48,230
Their URL is pogo.org.

607
00:40:48,230 --> 00:40:49,771
That's P-O-G-O.org.

608
00:40:49,771 --> 00:40:52,473
They have a congressional contact tool that's actually pretty good.

609
00:40:52,473 --> 00:40:55,568
It pulls your specific representatives and gives you a template you can customize.

610
00:40:55,568 --> 00:40:56,109
I've used it.

611
00:40:56,109 --> 00:40:57,861
It takes about eight minutes.

612
00:40:58,112 --> 00:41:04,898
Yeah, for the longer game, and this one is the one that I care about most, I want people
to know about the revolving door project.

613
00:41:04,898 --> 00:41:10,933
That's the revolving door project.org all spelled out the revolving door project.org.

614
00:41:10,933 --> 00:41:17,109
These are researchers who do nothing but track the personnel pipeline between industry and
government.

615
00:41:17,109 --> 00:41:19,041
They publish detailed profiles.

616
00:41:19,041 --> 00:41:21,844
They flag nominations before confirmation hearings.

617
00:41:21,844 --> 00:41:26,889
So if you want to understand who is walking through the door before the door closes, this
is where you go.

618
00:41:26,889 --> 00:41:36,179
They also take tips, so if you work in or adjacent to a federal agency and you see
something, now you can say something because they have a secure submission process that

619
00:41:36,179 --> 00:41:38,441
keeps you protected.

620
00:41:38,442 --> 00:41:41,685
And those are information tips, not tips like you'd leave for a waiter, just so know.

621
00:41:41,685 --> 00:41:44,607
But if you do want to support them monetarily, please feel free to do that.

622
00:41:44,607 --> 00:41:46,708
Keep these organizations going.

623
00:41:47,001 --> 00:41:55,236
Yeah, if you want to connect with people who are already organized around this specific
environmental dimensions, excuse me, of everything we talked about today, Wheeler, the

624
00:41:55,236 --> 00:42:01,891
EPA, Clean Air, Water Rollbacks, all that stuff, Earth Justice is actively litigating
several of the regulatory reversals we mentioned.

625
00:42:01,891 --> 00:42:12,577
They're fighting for basically these agencies to do what they were intended to do, what
the lawmakers who went before all these crooks basically put them in place to do.

626
00:42:12,577 --> 00:42:13,447
They're dealing with that.

627
00:42:13,447 --> 00:42:14,157
They're litigating that.

628
00:42:14,157 --> 00:42:17,518
They're fighting for these organizations to fulfill their missions.

629
00:42:17,518 --> 00:42:19,880
And their URL is earthjustice.org.

630
00:42:19,880 --> 00:42:21,280
They don't need your legal expertise.

631
00:42:21,280 --> 00:42:22,041
They've got it.

632
00:42:22,041 --> 00:42:27,074
What they need is people who understand that litigation is a form of collective action and
the funding it matters now.

633
00:42:27,074 --> 00:42:32,365
And what we mean by that is that these cases are often litigated on the courthouse steps
or before the public.

634
00:42:32,365 --> 00:42:37,236
And then people are held, they know they'll be held accountable for their decisions.

635
00:42:37,487 --> 00:42:42,368
So they have a specific campaign against, defending the Clean Air Act that's active right
now.

636
00:42:42,368 --> 00:42:45,168
And I encourage you to take a look at that and participate in it if you can.

637
00:42:45,419 --> 00:42:52,266
Yeah, also this week, the thing I'll ask is that you go and read one lobbying disclosure.

638
00:42:52,266 --> 00:42:57,181
It's a dry read, I'm not gonna lie, they're really rough, but just pick one.

639
00:42:57,181 --> 00:43:06,700
Someone in the current administration, go to opensecrets.org, read what you find, because
the distance between knowing this is happening in the abstract and seeing a specific

640
00:43:06,700 --> 00:43:11,446
number attached to a specific name, attached to a specific policy decision.

641
00:43:11,446 --> 00:43:15,890
That distance is where this cynicism that you feel for me all the time lives.

642
00:43:15,890 --> 00:43:21,246
Like once you close it, you can't go back to not knowing that these things are happening
every day.

643
00:43:21,246 --> 00:43:28,911
Right, once you translate dollars into lives, you may land at the same place that Joshua
and I have landed, which is, the mechanism is complicated, right?

644
00:43:28,911 --> 00:43:34,984
This stuff is very, as Joshua said, it's somewhat dry and it's very complicated and you
try and follow the thread.

645
00:43:34,984 --> 00:43:39,055
But as complicated as the mechanism is, the lives that it impacts are not.

646
00:43:39,055 --> 00:43:41,976
It's very simple, the impact that this has had on human lives.

647
00:43:42,227 --> 00:43:45,219
Yeah, the people outside the door have names, right?

648
00:43:45,219 --> 00:43:48,150
We just don't know them yet, but they're there.

649
00:43:48,150 --> 00:43:51,593
Okay, so before we go, we always do this so you know what's coming.

650
00:43:51,593 --> 00:43:58,996
One thing, one thing from this episode that got me, mine is sort of Billy Tozant because I
knew the broad shape of it.

651
00:43:58,996 --> 00:44:03,359
uh Congressman writes a law that forbids Medicare from negotiating drug prices.

652
00:44:03,359 --> 00:44:07,371
Congressman takes a $2 million a year job running the pharmaceutical lobby.

653
00:44:07,371 --> 00:44:08,252
We know the story.

654
00:44:08,252 --> 00:44:19,629
But what I didn't know was what I had to sort of sit with it for a second is that the
pharma, P-H-R-M-A, spent over $116 million during the Affordable Care Act negotiations

655
00:44:19,629 --> 00:44:20,922
alone in one year.

656
00:44:20,922 --> 00:44:28,957
And after the law was already written to benefit them, they still just kept throwing money
at it to make it more beneficial for them.

657
00:44:28,957 --> 00:44:31,008
because the door doesn't always spin once.

658
00:44:31,008 --> 00:44:36,085
Like it just keeps spinning and every revolution costs someone something they can't
afford.

659
00:44:36,085 --> 00:44:42,342
And so I really wanted to start this sort of as a segment of what we found from our
episodes, right?

660
00:44:42,342 --> 00:44:46,537
Like something that I didn't know that I uh really sort of surprised me.

661
00:44:46,537 --> 00:44:47,788
Will, do you have one?

662
00:44:47,789 --> 00:44:53,769
Yeah, mine and believe me, I feel the pain of the betrayal from a fellow South Louisiana
native.

663
00:44:53,770 --> 00:45:04,470
But mine is the Boston Globe finding from 2010, which is that more than 70%, that's zero
percent of retiring three and four star military officers went to work for defense

664
00:45:04,470 --> 00:45:08,532
contractors or consultants within a year of leading service, within a year.

665
00:45:08,532 --> 00:45:11,823
And I mean, the problem is, again, we're talking about not that these people are bad
people.

666
00:45:11,823 --> 00:45:20,181
But once your job is to make sure that they buy your missile or your high-tech defense
platform, it's hard to be objective, right?

667
00:45:20,181 --> 00:45:28,118
mean, you're not gonna go into a meeting and say, sure, ours are gonna cost $20 million
more than theirs, and ours doesn't perform as well on most of the tests, but you really

668
00:45:28,118 --> 00:45:30,471
should buy this one because you look at our cool logo.

669
00:45:30,471 --> 00:45:36,747
It's not hard to see what's happening in these meetings, but these are the people being
sucked into this system.

670
00:45:36,747 --> 00:45:43,033
Are the very people who in their final months of service are sitting in procurement
meetings, advising on contracts, shaping military strategy.

671
00:45:43,033 --> 00:45:49,209
And then like they wake up the next day and find themselves on the other side of the table
before the ink is even dry on their retirement papers.

672
00:45:49,209 --> 00:45:51,751
Before they can file their, you know, get their honorary discharge.

673
00:45:51,751 --> 00:45:54,544
It's like we're, we're getting checks from the other side.

674
00:45:54,544 --> 00:45:58,567
And the worst part about this all, the worst part is it's perfectly legal.

675
00:45:58,568 --> 00:46:03,603
I mean, that, that number of 70 % just stopped me cold because we talk about the revolving
door, like it's an exception.

676
00:46:03,603 --> 00:46:05,634
70 % is not an exception.

677
00:46:05,634 --> 00:46:07,434
70 % is the plan.

678
00:46:07,685 --> 00:46:08,376
Yeah.

679
00:46:08,376 --> 00:46:09,107
All right.

680
00:46:09,107 --> 00:46:11,667
So three things you can do right now.

681
00:46:11,668 --> 00:46:12,868
We talked about it earlier.

682
00:46:12,868 --> 00:46:19,150
First, you can sign the petition supporting the Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act,
ACPIA.

683
00:46:19,150 --> 00:46:25,621
Now, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reintroduced this in February of 2024.

684
00:46:25,621 --> 00:46:31,272
It would impose a lifetime ban on senior officials lobbying their former agencies, which
is a lifetime ban.

685
00:46:31,272 --> 00:46:32,252
The bill does exist.

686
00:46:32,252 --> 00:46:34,239
It has existed now for

687
00:46:34,239 --> 00:46:34,990
over two years.

688
00:46:34,990 --> 00:46:36,932
So you can go and sign that petition too.

689
00:46:36,932 --> 00:46:37,853
You can find it.

690
00:46:37,853 --> 00:46:40,335
The co-sponsors exist, the text exists.

691
00:46:40,335 --> 00:46:42,836
What it needs is being the squeaky wheel.

692
00:46:42,836 --> 00:46:49,472
So you can find it, add your name to it through Elizabeth Warren's Senate site at
warren.senate.gov.

693
00:46:49,472 --> 00:46:55,348
Second, you can follow the POGO project on government oversight, pogo.org.

694
00:46:55,348 --> 00:46:59,372
They've been doing investigative work on conflicts of interest, Inspector General
Independence.

695
00:46:59,372 --> 00:47:01,653
and government ethics since 1981.

696
00:47:01,653 --> 00:47:04,955
They were flagging the revolving door before most of us knew what to call it.

697
00:47:04,955 --> 00:47:06,276
They publish a newsletter.

698
00:47:06,276 --> 00:47:08,448
You can subscribe to it, read it when it lands.

699
00:47:08,448 --> 00:47:18,024
Third, if you are a federal employee, a contractor, someone adjacent to a federal agency
who has seen something that looks like what we described today, there is a secure

700
00:47:18,024 --> 00:47:22,198
whistleblower submission system through the Government Accountability Project.

701
00:47:22,198 --> 00:47:27,493
That is whistleblower.org, W-H-I-S-T-L-E-B-L-O-W-E-R.org.

702
00:47:27,493 --> 00:47:28,994
They provide legal support.

703
00:47:28,994 --> 00:47:31,585
So that's not just an anonymous form you can fill out.

704
00:47:31,585 --> 00:47:35,467
They actually do provide active legal support if necessary.

705
00:47:35,467 --> 00:47:39,872
They have handled cases across defense, in the environment, public health.

706
00:47:39,872 --> 00:47:41,333
That door spins both ways.

707
00:47:41,333 --> 00:47:43,605
Sometimes information gets out too.

708
00:47:43,605 --> 00:47:47,158
As always, you can find us at fof.foundation.

709
00:47:47,158 --> 00:47:50,570
Subscribe to us on Castapod, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

710
00:47:50,570 --> 00:47:55,424
Tell one person about this podcast if you think it would be of particular interest to
them.

711
00:47:55,424 --> 00:47:56,836
That is all we ask.

712
00:47:56,836 --> 00:47:58,807
So here's where I land in all of this.

713
00:47:58,807 --> 00:48:03,440
Pam Bondi is gone and the people that watch her exit aren't really grieving, right?

714
00:48:03,440 --> 00:48:04,311
They're auditioning.

715
00:48:04,311 --> 00:48:05,212
That's what MAGA is.

716
00:48:05,212 --> 00:48:06,152
It's not a coalition.

717
00:48:06,152 --> 00:48:08,004
It's not a movement with allies.

718
00:48:08,004 --> 00:48:15,028
It's an ongoing audition where everyone is one bad performance away from being replaced by
someone willing to go further like Mark Wayne Mullen.

719
00:48:15,028 --> 00:48:18,869
The revolving door is not just about industry and government anymore.

720
00:48:18,869 --> 00:48:20,821
It's about loyalty as currency.

721
00:48:20,821 --> 00:48:24,021
in a system that devalues the second you spend it.

722
00:48:24,021 --> 00:48:27,612
The bar is on fire and we've been in it this whole time.

723
00:48:27,612 --> 00:48:35,503
Um, you can see it in Pete Hegseth every time he gets up and talks about the field tee to
Donald Trump and how amazing Donald Trump is.

724
00:48:35,503 --> 00:48:43,063
But this has been, uh, you know, not necessarily the, the, the wettest, most juicy, uh,
podcast we've had.

725
00:48:43,063 --> 00:48:48,314
So I appreciate you staying and thanks for listening to us today.

726
00:48:48,314 --> 00:48:48,585
Will.

727
00:48:48,585 --> 00:48:49,918
And I appreciate you Joshua.

728
00:48:49,918 --> 00:48:55,588
all I can say ladies and gentlemen is lock the door, lock the revolving door and hope they
don't have blasters.

729
00:48:55,839 --> 00:48:57,310
Blasters a door blaster

730
00:48:57,310 --> 00:48:58,525
It's Star Wars.

731
00:48:58,525 --> 00:48:59,057
You're a Trekkie.

732
00:48:59,057 --> 00:49:00,738
We'll talk about it

733
00:49:00,738 --> 00:49:01,327
Yeah.

734
00:49:01,327 --> 00:49:04,443
I'm more space communism, not space trailer park.

735
00:49:04,443 --> 00:49:06,596
Anyway, thanks guys so much for being here.

736
00:49:06,596 --> 00:49:07,967
Thank you Will for being here with me.

737
00:49:07,967 --> 00:49:10,071
I appreciate your time as always.

738
00:49:10,071 --> 00:49:11,833
And listener, I appreciate you too.

739
00:49:11,833 --> 00:49:15,569
Make sure to give us a rating on Apple podcasts or Spotify.

740
00:49:15,569 --> 00:49:16,080
Bye.

741
00:49:16,080 --> 00:49:16,939
Bye, thanks everyone.

742
00:49:46,511 --> 00:49:47,319
That's the overlap.