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Revolving Door: Google Enjoys Privileged Position within the US Government

Published in Business and Economy .

Revolving Door: Google Enjoys Privileged Position within the US Government

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Putting an end to the revolving door used to be one of the issues presidential candidate Barack Obama appeared to be most passionate about. In December of 2007, then Senator Obama vowed to close the “revolving door … [in other words] the pattern of people going from industry to agency, back to industry,” as soon as he entered the White House. But by 2016, Franklin Center’s Watchdog.org reports, the practice couldn’t get more popular.

GoogleSince 2009, more than 250 people moved between Google and other related firms and the federal government. According to the results produced by Campaign for Accountability’s Google Transparency Project, there have been 258 revolving door instances associated with Google employees and other related firms. In many cases, these individuals were either involved with national political campaigns or with federal government agencies and Congress.

But according to Watchdog.org, one of the most eye-catching discoveries is that “[m]uch of that revolving door activity took place at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where 22 former White House officials went to work for Google and 31 executives from Google and related firms went to work at the White House.”

In many of these cases, the Obama administration appointed these individuals directly.

Many of the Google employees who left the tech giant and its associated firms ended up in the President’s Council on Science and Technology and the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, two boards responsible for regulating programs that directly impact Google as a company.

When the other end of the revolving door is analyzed, we also learn that 25 government officials involved with the intelligence community, the Department of Defense, or national security have joined the Silicon Valley giant in the past few years. And at least 18 former State Department officials embraced new positions with Google as well, while five Google staffers were hired by the State Department, and at least three Google executives switched jobs, moving their desks to the DOD headquarters.

According to the general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, Scott Amey, the number of people moving between the government and Google is high, raising concerns among anti-revolving door activists. Amey says that precisely because information concerning the quantity of people involved in this revolving-door game is hard to find, the actual scope of this mass migration may not be easy to grasp at the moment. Nevertheless, 250 individuals involved in this activity is “a very significant number.”

Amey told Watchdog.org that, if individuals working inside the government “have access to information on competitors and they go to Google … then you have to wonder if Google is getting an unfair advantage over others in their market.” Interestingly enough, Amey’s comment serves as the perfect example of why crony capitalism or, in other words, the marriage of the state and private special interests, is bad.

Without a government setting the rules, winners are only picked by the market, not the privileged few.


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