In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned that the influence of the military-industrial complex could “endanger our liberties or democratic processes.” The revolving door of Pentagon officials and senior military leaders seeking lucrative post-government jobs does exactly that. It often confuses what is in the best financial interests of defense contractors—excessively large Pentagon budgets, endless wars, and overpriced weapon systems—with what is in the best interest of military effectiveness and protecting citizens.



The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) has consistently found federal ethics laws to be a tangled mess and insufficient to prevent conflicts of interest. Our first in-depth look into those laws, The Politics of Contracting, revealed how the revolving door leads to trends of agency capture and large defense contractors gathering more monopoly power. While those trends may benefit defense industry executives and their stockholders, they undermine competition and performance, lead to higher prices for the military and taxpayers, and can diminish military effectiveness. While there have been some improvements to the laws since we published our first report on the revolving door in 2004, our investigation found the tangled mess remains.

The leadership of the Senate Armed Services Committee expressed concerns in 2017 that the Department was too close to and depended too much on its largest contractors. “90 percent of the spending of the taxpayers’ dollars comes out of five different corporations. That’s not what our Founding Fathers had in mind,” then-Senate Armed Services Committee Chair John McCain (R-AZ) noted at a confirmation hearing for Patrick Shanahan, a former Boeing executive nominated to be Deputy Secretary of Defense. "If you’re drawing from one sector alone, you get this group-think possibility, which could be dangerous," Ranking Member Jack Reed (D-RI) told reporters. Despite those concerns, the Senate confirmed Shanahan.

Following World War II, several five-star generals chose not to go through the revolving door. General George Marshall led the Red Cross. Before becoming president, General Dwight Eisenhower became president of Columbia University. “[A]n officer who has had procurement duties going with any company which does business with the Government presents a problem to the government, to the company with which he goes, and to himself,” General Omar Bradley told the House Armed Services Special investigations subcommittee in 1959. “[N]o former member of the Government should take advantage of his previous position to bring any influence on members of the Defense Department, or any department of Government, to grant contracts to the company with which he is now affiliated.” A number of contemporary retired officers have also found lucrative positions in the private sector that do not create a conflict of interest. Admiral Mike Mullen (USN Ret.), the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, joined the board of Sprint. Vice Admiral William Burke, formerly the deputy chief of naval operations for warfare systems, became the chief maritime officer for the Carnival cruise company. Lieutenant General Thomas P. Bostick, the 53rd Army Chief of Engineers, became an executive at Intrexon, a biotechnology company. “I have committed to myself to never do business with the US Army Corps of Engineers. I do not want to use my past position to do business with [the US Army Corps of Engineers] either for myself or as a consultant for anyone else,” Bostick told POGO.