Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Government employees retire and go to work for companies that the government is supposed to regulate and hire and such. This is a revolving door. Is it bad?

This story from the past week discusses how Telcos hired retired government employees to help them influence how the FCC (current government employees) regulates the Telcos. This is but one story that is repeated often. Government employees retire from government “service” (the government’s term, not mine) and then work for companies that work with and around their former agency.

I am in this group. I retired from government about two years ago and now work for a company that tries to do business in the general area I worked for 28 years as a government employee. This is all legal and it is ethical as well. There are plenty of regulations about what and when former government employees can do, and we adhere to them. The stakes are too high to try to cheat the system.

Guess what? The retired government employees are more knowledgeable  and competent than the current government employees. The retired employees know more simply because they have done the work longer. They retired employees are more competent because if they weren’t competent, a company would not have hired them. Again, simple years on the job create the situation. Why would a company hire incompetent retired government employees?

So, in this example, telecommunications companies have employees who know more and know better than the government agencies who are supposed to regulate the companies. There are exceptions, but this is the rule.

I suppose we, government employees, could stay with the government to balance the expertise between the agencies and the companies. That, however, carries a large economic penalty. For us old guys under the Civil Service system, this means you go to work for half pay. If you retire, you receive about half your pay for staying home. If you don’t retire, you receive all your pay for going to work. Hence, going to work only brings half your pay – a 50% cut.

There is greed in the picture. There are people in the picture, so we have to assume there is greed, malice, envy, dishonesty, and the like. There are people in the picture, so we also have to assume that there are plenty of good qualities from plenty of good people as well. We are all taxpayers, so we want neither government waste nor regulations that cost taxpayers.

Is this a bad situation? It has some bad in it. It also has good in it. Remember that Congress passes the laws, the Courts interpret the laws, and the Federal agencies attempt to execute them. There are checks and balances carrying plenty of praise and blame to share.