News Journal:‘Worthwhile’ government service no longer enough

I was having dinner with an old friend who had a long career in government and was now teaching at a major university. Many of his students asked for his advice about getting government jobs, he told me, but I was puzzled that he seemed unhappy about it.
“What’s wrong with that?” I asked. “You don’t understand,” he said. “A lot of them aren’t asking me for the best fit for their talents or where they could do some good. They want to know what positions or agencies I would suggest where they could best ‘monetize their government service’ when they left and got high-paying jobs as lobbyists.”
That’s not a concept I remember anyone thinking about when I went to work 40 years ago on the staff of the brand new United States senator from Delaware, Joseph R. Biden Jr. It was a temporary job I was thrilled and honored to take on. I had a year’s leave of absence from my job at DuPont, and after I helped set up his senate office, I fully intended to go back to it.
It didn’t work out that way. I stayed on Sen. Biden’s staff for 22 years and have been one of his advisers ever since.
In those days, most young people went to work for organizations thinking that’s where they would spend their entire careers. That was true at DuPont, and I found it was true of the talented and dedicated senior congressional staffers I came to know. Congressional pay was somewhat lower than comparable jobs in the private sector, but the difference wasn’t that great, and the idea that we were doing important and worthwhile work more than made up for the difference.
Of course there were people back then who moved between government service and the private sector, but the norm seemed to be the government taking advantage of private-sector management experience. When top executives of major corporations or law firms took cabinet jobs or became heads of government agencies, we all had a sense they were doing so out of a sense of service to the country. I’m sure there were exceptions, but it is hard for me to recall an obvious example of someone purposely “monetizing their government service.”
Am I just another old guy lamenting “the good old days?” I don’t think so, because the difference between now and then is stark – and disturbing. Since the 1970s, the pay gap between the private sector and congressional staffers has become wider and wider.
People I thought would never leave government before they retired looked at the cost of sending three or four kids to college and decided they could no longer resist making four or five times as much as lobbyists on K Street. No one ever claimed that government employees are completely altruistic, and the financial temptations have become much harder to resist.
Perhaps the poster child for “monetizing government service” is former Congressman Bill Tauzin of Louisiana. As chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, he shepherded through Congress the 2005 Medicare prescription drug bill, which included the provision that the government could not bargain with the drug companies on prices. The month the president signed the bill, he resigned from Congress and became the leading lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry. Within a year, most of his congressional staff had left to lobby for one or another of the big drug companies.
Tauzin and his merry crew were particularly blatant, but congressional members of both parties and senior staff members now routinely end up lobbying the committees they once sat on. I don’t think they are necessarily corrupt, but I do suggest it is difficult to write legislation in the public interest when you are hoping eventually to lobby for an industry with its own agenda.
The problem is definitely not limited to Congress. The abuse of the revolving door may be even worse in the executive branch. Look at the people who have left the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission in the past couple of years after very undistinguished records of criminally prosecuting the Wall Street executives whose companies their new law firms represent.
The present Lobbying Disclosure law is so full of loopholes it is a standing joke in Washington. We need comprehensive new legislation to eliminate the conflicts of interest that have grown much worse over the past couple of decades. We can’t allow our government to be run by people who are looking forward to monetizing their service.
Read all of former U.S. Sen. Ted Kaufman’s columns at tedkaufman.com.