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When Loyalty Becomes Currency: The New Architecture of Governance · The Overlap

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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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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.
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Wait, 70 %?
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I'm sure it's just because of their extensive knowledge of the battlefield conditions, nothing to do with their connection.
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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
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weren't technically lobbying.
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were consulting, advising, providing strategic guidance, which is literally the same thing with a different invoice code.
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Yeah, I'm hearing a of air quotes in there.
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I keep thinking about what it means to be a three or four star general.
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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.
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And then you retire and 70 % of you are working for the companies that benefit from those decisions within 12 months.
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And I'm guessing for a higher salary.
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Mostly.
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And here's the thing, and I think people miss this in, you know, these dry, bland statistics.
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It's not that these generals are necessarily corrupt people, right?
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Making terribly horrible, corrupt choices.
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Some of them probably are, I mean, realistically, right?
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But the structural problem, which is the Eisenhower problem, is that the system creates this outcome, whether or not
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the person involved in it actually intends to create this outcome.
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Defense contractors, why wouldn't you want to hire somebody who understands the acquisition process, right?
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Generals understand the acquisition process better than anyone currently alive.
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The market for that knowledge is huge.
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And the law as written doesn't stop it.
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It just slows it down, just regulates the speed of the revolving door, right?
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That's exactly correct.
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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.
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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.
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And that enforcement of the post-employment rules is, to use the technical term, limited.
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limited.
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More air quotes, limited, which in government accountability language means it's not happening.
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The rules exist.
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The enforcement doesn't.
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I have something very similar, you know, personal story about that.
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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
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that candidate put political signs in illegal places.
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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?
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Or somebody just has a field and they'll just go and put a sign on their fence.
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But when you call the election board, they say, we'll take care of it.
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It's illegal.
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If I touch it, it's considered defacement of a election sign.
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And the election board says they'll handle it, but they have no way to enforce that except to call the county sheriff.
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and the county sheriff might or might not get to it.
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And in this case, I called 14 times about signs.
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I finally had to call the school board and superintendent, as well as the principal of a school.
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And they were actually able to just walk out there and remove the sign because it had been placed illegally on public property.
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there's these rules that exist, but there's no enforcement for it in that
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Sure, technically it's, you know, the sheriff dropped the ball in this scenario, but it's not like there's a fine.
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She's not going to get charged $50 per sign or $50 per violation.
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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.
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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.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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wouldn't be able to have a job anymore.
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Right.
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Well, this is where I think we need to say something directly because I think it's easy to get lost in these timelines.
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You know, we're talking about events from the Eisenhower administration to the George W.
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Bush administration, you know, 1961 to 2016.
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It's 55 years.
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And in that time you have a warning, right?
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We have a warning, a law, a scandal, a stricter law, air quotes, another scandal, a slightly stricter law, more air quotes.
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a report that says the slightly stricter law isn't being enforced.
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And in all of that time, this door just keeps on spinning.
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And whoever's greasing that revolving door is doing a really good job.
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Because it keeps moving.
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faster by the day.
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Here's how I think about it from like a systems perspective, right?
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In any well-designed system, you have controls that can actually interrupt bad behavior.
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That might be a circuit breaker or a firewall or something like that, but it's a hard stop.
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What we built instead is a series of speed bumps.
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And speed bumps don't stop traffic.
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They slow it down slightly.
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and then it just keeps going.
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And worse yet, the people designing the speed bumps are often the same people who benefit from the traffic.
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I think that's the part that Eisenhower was actually trying to tell us during this speech, right?
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The system actually selects for people who can navigate it.
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And the people who can navigate it are the people who actually helped to build it.
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And they're not going to build a hard stop into a system that they plan to use when they leave.
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In the computer world, we call this a zero-day exploit, right?
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That means from day one, there was a purposeful back door put into things.
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Maybe sometimes not purposeful, maybe accidental that can't be resolved, that people have been putting those devices out there into the world.
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and Billy Tozan and yes, that's Tozan for those of you not from Louisiana.
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ah That end is uh the same end that goes the end of the word Boudin.
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ah Billy Tozan is about to walk right through that open, what uh did you call it?
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A zero day exploit?
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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.
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It was the system working exactly as designed.
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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.
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Legally.
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He did it legally.
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Yeah, he absolutely did it legally.
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That's the segment.
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Billy Tozan, let's go.
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Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
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He writes the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003.
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And buried inside that legislation, one specific provision.
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Medicare cannot negotiate drug prices directly
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with pharmaceutical companies.
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Cannot prohibited by law a law that he wrote.
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law put forward by Billy Tozan, proposed by Billy Tozan, congressman, who then leaves congress.
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And then he leaves Congress and becomes the president and CEO of Pharma.
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It's not even a joke.
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The company is called PHRMA, literally big pharma.
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The pharmaceutical industry's top lobbying organization for approximately $2 million annual salary.
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annual that's every year.
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I want to sit with that number for a second.
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Two million dollars a year.
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That's not a salary, that's a receipt.
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It is a receipt for services rendered while in office.
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And here's the kicker.
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I think people miss this, right?
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Pharma doesn't spend $2 million a year just on Tozan's compensation, right?
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In 2009, during the Affordable Care Act negotiations, Pharma spent over $116 million lobbying total in one year.
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And Tozan was the man holding the phone
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on that lobbying effort.
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So the very prohibition on Medicare drug price negotiation that he wrote in 2003 became the thing Pharma was paying to protect in 2009.
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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.
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Anyway, he built the wall, right?
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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
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Every cooling off period, every post-employment restriction, every speed bump that we've described so far, Tauzin navigated all of it.
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Because the rules were written by people who understood exactly how to make rules that look like rules without functioning as rules.
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I can't help but envision Jack Nicholson when we talk about him building the wall and then guarding it.
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You you want me on that wall.
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You need me on that wall.
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We didn't need Orwaad Billy Tozer on that wall.
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There is a philosophical term for this, though.
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It's called performative compliance.
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The appearance of constraint that actually ratifies the behavior it pretends to prohibit.
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That's a generous way to describe it.
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In the tech world, we call that security theater.
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But it's what I would call fraud with paperwork.
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That's the philosopher in me trying to be precise.
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Yes, I'm an infrastructure guy.
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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.
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It's a drama on TBS.
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It's a blinking light on a server room door that's already open.
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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.
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Yeah, so Andrew Wheeler was a lobbyist for Murray Energy, one of the largest coal companies in the United States.
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Clean coal.
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His firm, Fager Baker Daniels, sorry, Fager, Fagrey, Fagrey, F-A-E-G-R-E, Fager, okay, Fager.
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That's fine with me.
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Fager Baker Daniels.
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No, right, I was like, man, Fagrey me.
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But...
24:56
uh
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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?
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So then Trump actually makes him deputy administrator of the EPA.
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Then administrator of the EPA.
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The Environmental Protection Agency for those of you who are not key, those of you
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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
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Protection Agency.
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Sounds like he was spending all of his time already dealing with the office.
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mean, the very man who's lobbying against the environmental regulation becomes the man who administers the environmental regulation.
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So in case anything slipped through the cracks and got passed anyway, we can take the teeth out of it.
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Exactly.
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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.
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Then he proceeded.
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Exactly.
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He then proceeded to roll back more than 80 environmental regulations.
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80.
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Now that's not a policy disagreement.
26:07
That's a client list becoming a to-do list.
26:10
Honey-doo, honey-doo.
26:11
Well said, and here's what I our listeners to understand because this is the moment where it stops being abstract.
26:16
When Mr.
26:17
Wheeler rolled back those regulations, it was not just a political event.
26:20
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
26:30
lawyers or lobbyists or $2 million compensation packages to fight this.
26:34
Yeah, the externalized cost always lands somewhere.
26:38
It never disappears.
26:40
It just moves from the people who can pay it to avoid it to the people who can't.
26:45
Like I said before, that's almost never the people who are actually responsible for it and almost always bared by the public.
26:52
Right.
26:53
And this is why the revolving door isn't just yet another corruption story.
26:56
It's a distribution story.
26:58
It determines who bears the cost of every decision made inside those agencies.
27:02
Now I wanna go to something that happened on January 20th, 2025, right?
27:06
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.
27:13
But the door was doing so well.
27:16
right.
27:16
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
27:28
for like two years gone immediately.
27:30
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.
27:37
It was a policy mandate pulled directly from blueprints.
27:41
like Project 2025, which explicitly aims to dismantle what its proponents call the unaccountable federal bureaucracy.
27:50
Let's call it what it is structurally.
27:52
When we talk about the revolving door as a bipartisan problem, right?
27:54
It is.
27:55
got Tozan who's a Republican.
27:57
We got Holder, a Democrat.
27:58
It's not like anybody's not partaking.
28:00
The profit motive transcends their their party fealty or loyalty, right?
28:05
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.
28:13
So now the currency isn't just experience, it's bold fealty.
28:17
Exactly.
28:18
And this is crucial, right?
28:19
This is exactly where the quid pro quo comes in.
28:23
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.
28:33
Bold.
28:34
Bold.
28:34
You can't just expect them to do that for free, right?
28:37
The payment, the true quid pro quo is the expedited
28:41
highly lucrative exit back to the private sector.
28:45
They're now compensated by the speed and scale of their next revolving door opportunity, which is now completely unsecured by ethics rules.
28:55
And brakes are off.
28:56
So the goal isn't necessarily to shutter the EPA or the CFPB, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
29:02
The goal is not a quick death.
29:04
It's a slow, debilitating failure.
29:06
You bring in political loyalists.
29:08
You strip civil service protections using mechanisms like Schedule F.
29:11
Remember all those federal jobs that were lost?
29:13
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
29:22
are blindly loyal to the new mandate, not the agency's mission.
29:26
You don't take the building down with explosives.
29:28
You hollow out the load bearing walls and align the cards so that the whole thing collapses painfully over time.
29:33
And this is where Pam Bondi's story becomes sort quintessential, right?
29:38
The loyalty test is the gatekeeper for this accelerated, dismantling-based quid pro quo.
29:46
That's Bondi, our now ex-attorney general, a long-time personal lawyer and ally to the person in power.
29:53
Her history confirms that she was already operating in the political legal ecosystem, which allows for massive post-government payout.
29:59
Yeah, and her trajectory and especially her most recent exit is a cautionary tale to every single appointee.
30:06
It's a warning, right?
30:08
The revolving door hasn't stopped being transactional.
30:11
It just added a loyalty variable, right?
30:14
The ultimate lucrative private sector job is now contingent upon passing the audition while in office.
30:22
Ross Story article put it,
30:24
that MAGA doesn't have allies, it has auditions.
30:27
And Bondi, despite her deep loyalty and her willingness to use the Justice Department to pursue political rivals, still found herself out.
30:35
So Her Exit isn't just political drama.
30:37
I mean, it defines the terms of the contract for everyone still in the room.
30:40
Yeah, it does.
30:41
If you fail the audition, right, the door spins you out with no reward.
30:45
Don't pass go.
30:46
Do not collect $200.
30:47
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
30:59
from the Epstein files ad nauseum.
31:02
Because your post government compensation depends entirely
31:07
upon your right now compliance.
31:09
This means the people inside the agencies are captured not just by industry, but by the politics that secures their future industry job.
31:18
They are downstream of a loyalty test you can't appeal.
31:23
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.
31:30
Let's start with Eric Holder.
31:32
This one is harder in some ways because Eric Holder is someone a lot of people wanted to believe in.
31:36
He was the first black attorney general of the United States.
31:39
He came into office after the 2008 financial crisis.
31:42
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
31:49
why no
31:50
senior Wall Street executives were criminally prosecuted for the conduct that crashed the global economy.
31:55
I'm going to repeat that real quick, one time in case you missed it, in case you were born late.
32:00
No senior Wall Street executives were criminally prosecuted for the conduct that crashed the global economy in 2008.
32:07
The answer that people kept arriving at was, was Covington and Burling, right?
32:12
Holder had been a partner there before becoming attorney general.
32:16
So Covington and Burling represented JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, major Wall Street institutions.
32:23
And when Holder left the justice department in 2015, he went right back to working for them.
32:28
Back to Covington and Burling, that is.
32:30
Back to the firm, back to the clients, no legal violation under existing rules.
32:35
The men who made decisions that cost millions of Americans their homes, their 401ks, their economic future, those men were not prosecuted.
32:45
And the man who chose not to prosecute them returned to the law firm that still is representing those people.
32:52
And that is all completely illegal, fully structurally legal.
32:58
to borrow some words from Reba, this is not a backwoods country lawyer, right?
33:03
I this is a massive firm with its ties and connections to the entire global economy.
33:09
I keep thinking about what it means to live through 2008 as a working person.
33:12
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.
33:19
mean, you're wondering, this the end?
33:21
You watch your 401k evaporate.
33:23
You lose a house you spent 20 years paying into and then...
33:25
to watch that play out.
33:27
Yeah, I remember 2008 very, very succinctly.
33:30
was laid off for the longest period I've ever been laid off in my whole life, four months.
33:34
and that was, that was a big struggle when you're making such a small amount of money, I'll tell you.
33:39
And there's a, there's a particular cruelty in it, right?
33:42
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.
33:51
And then the attorney general went back.
33:53
to the same firm.
33:55
No one went to prison and the people who lost their homes, well, they lost their home.
33:59
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.
34:07
Let's talk about the next one, Joshua.
34:09
Tell me about Mick Mulvaney.
34:10
Yeah, so Mulvaney is the one who said the quiet part into a microphone at a banking conference.
34:15
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
34:27
who gave money to his campaign got meetings.
34:31
People who did not give money did not get meetings.
34:34
He said that out loud, right?
34:36
Like to the people who give money.
34:39
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.
34:44
It's pay to play, ladies and gentlemen.
34:46
That is either breathtaking honesty or breathtaking arrogance or both.
34:50
I can't decide.
34:51
Yeah, it's both.
34:51
And here's why it matters beyond the audacity of it, right?
34:55
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.
35:08
And he spent his entire tenure there dropping investigations into payday lenders.
35:13
rolling back enforcement actions, and restructuring the entire agency from the inside.
35:18
He had received $31,700 in campaign contributions from payday lenders as a congressman.
35:28
$31,000 to dismantle an agency that was protecting people from $31,000 problems.
35:33
The return on investment for that $31,000 is immeasurable, really.
35:38
That's the math that never makes it into the headline.
35:41
That's the boring stuff, right?
35:43
That's the stuff that only the overlap talks about.
35:46
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.
35:58
No meeting for them.
35:59
And every one of these cases is legal, like every single one of them.
36:02
Not one of these people broke the law as it is currently written, which means the law as written is the problem.
36:11
And the people paying the price for that problem have names that we'll never know.
36:15
Standing at pharmacy counters, breathing air that someone decided wasn't worth protecting, right?
36:21
Living in houses they didn't lose or did lose and never got an explanation for why.
36:26
We, and by we I mean the royal we, owe them more than an explanation.
36:30
But we can start there.
36:32
So here's what we know, right?
36:34
We know the revolving door is not a metaphor.
36:37
It's literally a mechanism.
36:39
It has a documented architecture.
36:41
It has a paper trail, lobbying disclosures, Senate confirmation records, regulatory rollback tallies, campaign finance filings.
36:49
We spend an hour walking through the evidence and the evidence is not ambiguous.
36:55
People who were paid to fight real regulations
36:58
became the people in charge of enforcing those exact same regulations.
37:02
And the enforcement changed.
37:04
80 regulations, hundreds of millions of dollars in deferred penalties, communities that lost the only institutional advocate they were ever going to have.
37:14
And here's the thing I keep coming back to.
37:15
I none of it required a conspiracy.
37:17
No meetings in dark areas of parking garages or anything like that.
37:22
The system was designed with enough legal space that you could drive a coal train through it.
37:26
This is not an accident.
37:28
This is decades of careful, patient, well-funded work to make sure the exits stayed open for the right people.
37:34
That's exactly right.
37:35
This isn't an Alex Jones episode.
37:38
We're not turning the frogs gay, right?
37:41
So this kind of naturally brings us right back to Pam Bondi.
37:45
Because I really wanted to use her as a frame for a second before we get to what you can actually do.
37:52
Bondi just left.
37:54
And the coverage is focused on the drama, right?
37:56
The tension, the timing, the optics.
37:59
But what her exit...
38:00
actually tells you is something far more useful.
38:03
It tells you that in this particular political ecosystem there are no allies.
38:09
There are auditions.
38:10
Everyone inside that circle is performing loyalty until the moment they're not useful.
38:16
And when the door opens, not for them, but behind them, MAGA doesn't build coalitions.
38:22
They build hierarchies of expendability
38:25
And Bondi's exit is a clean illustration of just that.
38:28
You go in as a loyalist, right?
38:30
You come out as a cautionary tale.
38:32
The raw story piece on this is definitely worth reading.
38:35
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
38:45
of worthless the moment it wasn't convenient anymore.
38:48
And the reason that matters for this conversation for the revolving door specifically is that it tells us something about durability.
38:54
These arrangements are not durable.
38:56
The personal relationships that grease the revolving door are contingent on power.
39:00
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.
39:09
Don't rely on the whims and fate of politics as usual.
39:13
I you've got to make it a law.
39:15
You can't beat a mechanism by finding better people.
39:17
You beat it by changing the rules.
39:19
And this is a time where I actually am going to have to agree with Will here.
39:23
I don't normally, but here's what I would do first.
39:26
If you're listening to this and you want to do something today, not this year, but today, go to OpenSecrets.
39:31
The URL is opensecrets.org.
39:33
It's not difficult.
39:34
Create a free account.
39:35
Look up the lobbying history of any current cabinet official or agency head that you care about or affects you the most.
39:42
And find the disclosure records.
39:44
You will find the clients.
39:45
You will find the dollar amounts.
39:47
And then you will have something specific to say when you contact your representatives.
39:51
Not a vague concern.
39:53
A name, a date, a dollar, and a question.
39:56
Why is this person making decisions about the industry that paid them?
40:00
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.
40:04
I hope so anyway.
40:05
We'll talk about it after the podcast.
40:06
But that's right.
40:09
I forgot.
40:10
How could I forget?
40:10
How could I forget?
40:11
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.
40:17
But when you contact your representative, please be specific.
40:20
Right now, the most concrete legislative vehicle for closing the revolving door is the Ethics Act.
40:25
And that's a long acronym that
40:27
Congress loves to put in their ethics is all caps.
40:29
Go look it up.
40:29
It has been introduced in multiple sessions and keeps dying in committee.
40:33
Shocking.
40:34
The organization that tracks it most closely though and runs direct constituent pressure campaigns around it is the Project on Government Oversight.
40:41
Sorry, I jumped to the acronym on that one, POGO.
40:44
The Project on Government Oversight.
40:45
Their URL is pogo.org.
40:48
That's P-O-G-O.org.
40:49
They have a congressional contact tool that's actually pretty good.
40:52
It pulls your specific representatives and gives you a template you can customize.
40:55
I've used it.
40:56
It takes about eight minutes.
40:58
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.
41:04
That's the revolving door project.org all spelled out the revolving door project.org.
41:10
These are researchers who do nothing but track the personnel pipeline between industry and government.
41:17
They publish detailed profiles.
41:19
They flag nominations before confirmation hearings.
41:21
So if you want to understand who is walking through the door before the door closes, this is where you go.
41:26
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
41:36
keeps you protected.
41:38
And those are information tips, not tips like you'd leave for a waiter, just so know.
41:41
But if you do want to support them monetarily, please feel free to do that.
41:44
Keep these organizations going.
41:47
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
41:55
EPA, Clean Air, Water Rollbacks, all that stuff, Earth Justice is actively litigating several of the regulatory reversals we mentioned.
42:01
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.
42:12
They're dealing with that.
42:13
They're litigating that.
42:14
They're fighting for these organizations to fulfill their missions.
42:17
And their URL is earthjustice.org.
42:19
They don't need your legal expertise.
42:21
They've got it.
42:22
What they need is people who understand that litigation is a form of collective action and the funding it matters now.
42:27
And what we mean by that is that these cases are often litigated on the courthouse steps or before the public.
42:32
And then people are held, they know they'll be held accountable for their decisions.
42:37
So they have a specific campaign against, defending the Clean Air Act that's active right now.
42:42
And I encourage you to take a look at that and participate in it if you can.
42:45
Yeah, also this week, the thing I'll ask is that you go and read one lobbying disclosure.
42:52
It's a dry read, I'm not gonna lie, they're really rough, but just pick one.
42:57
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
43:06
number attached to a specific name, attached to a specific policy decision.
43:11
That distance is where this cynicism that you feel for me all the time lives.
43:15
Like once you close it, you can't go back to not knowing that these things are happening every day.
43:21
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?
43:28
This stuff is very, as Joshua said, it's somewhat dry and it's very complicated and you try and follow the thread.
43:34
But as complicated as the mechanism is, the lives that it impacts are not.
43:39
It's very simple, the impact that this has had on human lives.
43:42
Yeah, the people outside the door have names, right?
43:45
We just don't know them yet, but they're there.
43:48
Okay, so before we go, we always do this so you know what's coming.
43:51
One thing, one thing from this episode that got me, mine is sort of Billy Tozant because I knew the broad shape of it.
43:58
uh Congressman writes a law that forbids Medicare from negotiating drug prices.
44:03
Congressman takes a $2 million a year job running the pharmaceutical lobby.
44:07
We know the story.
44:08
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
44:19
alone in one year.
44:20
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.
44:28
because the door doesn't always spin once.
44:31
Like it just keeps spinning and every revolution costs someone something they can't afford.
44:36
And so I really wanted to start this sort of as a segment of what we found from our episodes, right?
44:42
Like something that I didn't know that I uh really sort of surprised me.
44:46
Will, do you have one?
44:47
Yeah, mine and believe me, I feel the pain of the betrayal from a fellow South Louisiana native.
44:53
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
45:04
contractors or consultants within a year of leading service, within a year.
45:08
And I mean, the problem is, again, we're talking about not that these people are bad people.
45:11
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?
45:20
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
45:28
should buy this one because you look at our cool logo.
45:30
It's not hard to see what's happening in these meetings, but these are the people being sucked into this system.
45:36
Are the very people who in their final months of service are sitting in procurement meetings, advising on contracts, shaping military strategy.
45:43
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.
45:49
Before they can file their, you know, get their honorary discharge.
45:51
It's like we're, we're getting checks from the other side.
45:54
And the worst part about this all, the worst part is it's perfectly legal.
45:58
I mean, that, that number of 70 % just stopped me cold because we talk about the revolving door, like it's an exception.
46:03
70 % is not an exception.
46:05
70 % is the plan.
46:07
Yeah.
46:08
All right.
46:09
So three things you can do right now.
46:11
We talked about it earlier.
46:12
First, you can sign the petition supporting the Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act, ACPIA.
46:19
Now, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reintroduced this in February of 2024.
46:25
It would impose a lifetime ban on senior officials lobbying their former agencies, which is a lifetime ban.
46:31
The bill does exist.
46:32
It has existed now for
46:34
over two years.
46:34
So you can go and sign that petition too.
46:36
You can find it.
46:37
The co-sponsors exist, the text exists.
46:40
What it needs is being the squeaky wheel.
46:42
So you can find it, add your name to it through Elizabeth Warren's Senate site at warren.senate.gov.
46:49
Second, you can follow the POGO project on government oversight, pogo.org.
46:55
They've been doing investigative work on conflicts of interest, Inspector General Independence.
46:59
and government ethics since 1981.
47:01
They were flagging the revolving door before most of us knew what to call it.
47:04
They publish a newsletter.
47:06
You can subscribe to it, read it when it lands.
47:08
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
47:18
whistleblower submission system through the Government Accountability Project.
47:22
That is whistleblower.org, W-H-I-S-T-L-E-B-L-O-W-E-R.org.
47:27
They provide legal support.
47:28
So that's not just an anonymous form you can fill out.
47:31
They actually do provide active legal support if necessary.
47:35
They have handled cases across defense, in the environment, public health.
47:39
That door spins both ways.
47:41
Sometimes information gets out too.
47:43
As always, you can find us at fof.foundation.
47:47
Subscribe to us on Castapod, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.
47:50
Tell one person about this podcast if you think it would be of particular interest to them.
47:55
That is all we ask.
47:56
So here's where I land in all of this.
47:58
Pam Bondi is gone and the people that watch her exit aren't really grieving, right?
48:03
They're auditioning.
48:04
That's what MAGA is.
48:05
It's not a coalition.
48:06
It's not a movement with allies.
48:08
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.
48:15
The revolving door is not just about industry and government anymore.
48:18
It's about loyalty as currency.
48:20
in a system that devalues the second you spend it.
48:24
The bar is on fire and we've been in it this whole time.
48:27
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.
48:35
But this has been, uh, you know, not necessarily the, the, the wettest, most juicy, uh, podcast we've had.
48:43
So I appreciate you staying and thanks for listening to us today.
48:48
Will.
48:48
And I appreciate you Joshua.
48:49
all I can say ladies and gentlemen is lock the door, lock the revolving door and hope they don't have blasters.
48:55
Blasters a door blaster
48:57
It's Star Wars.
48:58
You're a Trekkie.
48:59
We'll talk about it
49:00
Yeah.
49:01
I'm more space communism, not space trailer park.
49:04
Anyway, thanks guys so much for being here.
49:06
Thank you Will for being here with me.
49:07
I appreciate your time as always.
49:10
And listener, I appreciate you too.
49:11
Make sure to give us a rating on Apple podcasts or Spotify.
49:15
Bye.
49:16
Bye, thanks everyone.
49:46
That's the overlap.