The revolving door is not a metaphor. It is a documented, systemic pipeline where government regulators leave public service and immediately take lucrative positions at the very industries they were charged with overseeing -- and where industry executives rotate into the agencies that regulate their former employers. The conflict of interest is structural. It is not a bug. It is a feature. FDA to Pharma The revolving door between the Food and Drug Administration and the pharmaceutical industry is one of the most documented and consequential examples. A 2023 Harvard study was the first to count the precise number of US healthcare regulators who leave for private industry. The findings were stark. A quick search of STAT's running list of senior FDA officials who have left the agency yields new roles at Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Merck, Roche, and other major pharmaceutical companies. Scott Gottlieb served as FDA Commissioner from 2017 to 2019. After leaving the agency, he joined the board of directors of Pfizer and Illumina (a biotech company), and became a senior adviser at the venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates. During his tenure at the FDA, he pushed policies that streamlined drug approvals -- exactly what the pharmaceutical industry had been lobbying for. According to a 2016 NPR investigation, a job reviewing drug applications at the FDA can serve as a springboard for a career in the pharmaceutical industry. The knowledge, relationships, and regulatory expertise gained at the agency are valuable precisely because they give former officials the ability to navigate -- and influence -- the regulatory process from the other side. Nearly 340 former congressional staffers have gone to work for pharmaceutical companies or their lobbying firms, according to a 2018 analysis by Kaiser Health News and STAT. FCC to Telecom Ajit Pai served as Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 2017 to 2021. Before his tenure at the FCC, Pai had worked as Associate General Counsel at Verizon. During his chairmanship, he led the effort to repeal net neutrality -- a policy that Verizon and other telecom companies had opposed for years. After leaving the FCC in 2021, Pai became a partner at Searchlight Capital Partners, a private equity firm with significant telecom investments. In April 2025, he became President and CEO of CTIA -- the Wireless Association, the top lobbying organization for the wireless industry. The man who regulated telecom now lobbies for telecom. Pai's trajectory is not unusual. The Revolving Door Project documented that multiple FCC commissioners have moved between the agency and the industry it regulates, creating a regulatory culture where the perspectives of telecom companies are overrepresented and the perspectives of consumers are underrepresented. Pentagon to Defense Contractors The revolving door between the Department of Defense and defense contractors operates at the highest levels. Lloyd Austin served as Secretary of Defense from 2021 to 2025. Before his appointment, he sat on the board of Raytheon Technologies, one of the largest defense contractors in the world, for which he received $1.4 million in total compensation. He also held a stake in Pine Island Capital Partners, a private equity firm focused on defense investments. When Biden nominated Austin, he required a congressional waiver because Austin had been retired from the military for less than the seven years required by law. The waiver was granted. Austin committed to recusing himself from Raytheon-related decisions for four years. But the structural problem remained: the person overseeing the Pentagon's procurement decisions had personal financial ties to a company that receives billions in Pentagon contracts. A 2023 report by Senator Elizabeth Warren found that the top 14 defense contractors hired 2,445 former government officials over a five-year period. Raytheon alone hired 64, including three board members and 60 registered lobbyists. SEC to Wall Street The Securities and Exchange Commission has its own revolving door. Former SEC officials routinely take positions at the Wall Street firms they formerly regulated, including positions as legal counsel, compliance officers, and lobbyists. The expertise gained in government service becomes a marketable asset -- and the expectation of future employment shapes regulatory behavior while still in office. The DEA and Big Pharma The Drug Enforcement Administration has its own revolving door with the pharmaceutical industry. At the height of the opioid crisis, which killed over 500,000 Americans between 1999 and 2023, the DEA's enforcement actions against pharmaceutical distributors were repeatedly weakened. The Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act of 2016, heavily lobbied for by the pharmaceutical industry, raised the standard of proof required for the DEA to suspend suspicious drug shipments. The bill's chief congressional advocate had a former pharmaceutical lobbyist as his health policy staffer. A 2017 investigation by The Washington Post and "60 Minutes" revealed that the DEA's enforcement division had been systematically undermined by industry pressure and by former DEA officials who had gone to work for the companies they once regulated. The chief architect of the 2016 law, a former DEA attorney named Jim Geldhof, had retired from the agency and went on to consult for the pharmaceutical industry. The Structural Problem The revolving door is not primarily about individual corruption. It is about institutional capture. When regulators know that their future employers will be the companies they regulate, two things happen: Pre-emptive compliance: Regulators moderate their enforcement actions because they understand that aggressive regulation will limit their future career prospects Cultural capture: Agencies become populated by people who share the industry's worldview, because people who oppose that worldview self-select out of the career path Federal ethics rules require a one-year cooling-off period for senior officials before they can lobby their former agencies. One year. For a career that spans decades, one year of restrictions is not a barrier -- it is a brief inconvenience. The system works exactly as designed. The question is who designed it, and for whose benefit. They didn't ask if we wanted regulators who answer to the public instead of their future employers. The revolving door keeps spinning. _- The Department_