Big Tech hires DOJ lawyers as DOJ investigates – the revolving door must end.

Opinion

as if Glenn H. Reynolds

April 3, 2023 | 7:24 p.m

The Department of Justice is investigating Big Tech companies for antitrust violations, and it’s basically a matter for the DOJ and the DOJ.

That’s because firms have stood firm in preparation for something like this—hundreds of lawyers hired away from the DOJ.

Big tech companies — Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and HP — have hired at least 360 lawyers from the Justice Department since 2011, the American Accountability Foundation found.

That’s it. 30 dozen Lawyers.

Civil servants retire early, and often move on to other jobs.

And there is nothing wrong with a person leaving the government at a young age to look for a more lucrative career.

Heck, even judges do it, like Michael Luttig, a federal appeals judge who left the bench to work for Boeing.

But when the supervisors go to work for those they supervise — with big pay raises — it’s even more worrisome.

There are several possible forms of corruption in this revolving-door phenomenon.

One is the threat of government lawyers going soft on the companies they control, hoping to later win big-money deals from them.

Another is that companies regulated by the more complex regulations are pressured to hire only those who understand the regulations.

(And there’s nothing counterintuitive here, because overly complex rules often benefit large, wealthy corporations who can afford to hire ex-bureaucrats for big bucks, at the expense of smaller competitors who can’t.)

It also increases the risk that hiring ex-bureaucrats will push those working for the government to simply leave and one day have a viable job.

It’s a reminder of what could have been every time good old Joe or Jenny from the department came to meet with expensive clothes and a fancy bag.

There is more benefit when the ex-bureaucrats find out where the bodies are buried in their former rooms – and always “bodies”, at least metaphorically.

It’s all textbook political science and administrative law—in fact, it’s in the textbook I use for my administrative-law class.

The classic term is “agency capture,” the ostensibly regulated industry that “captures” the agency it’s supposed to regulate while getting protection from regulation it doesn’t want, and often complicit in the regulation it wants.

But now there is something worse. In modern America, both the Department of Justice and the upper echelons of corporate America—especially in the tech world—are largely prisoners of a vigilante ideology.

The political contributions of bureaucrats and tech executives are overwhelming for Democrats.

Big corporations, like any university, work to silence radical Democrat opponents of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in the media — as Twitter did with this newspaper when it (truthfully) reported what was on Hunter Biden’s laptop — and in fact moving back and forth tirelessly on both fronts to advance an agenda. Working on.

James Madison wrote that the definition of tyranny is the concentration of all power in one body.

He was writing about government power, but nothing like mega-corporations in 1789.

Today’s companies — again, especially Big Tech — often work with governments to coerce or punish political opponents of the government. And the government often steers corporations in the direction it wants.

This is made easier, of course, when you have people on both sides of the regulatory spectrum, as in the case of the DOJ and Big Tech.

So what do we do? I’ve long advocated for a 50% “revolving door surtax” to be paid to the people they oversee if they go to work: 50% (on top of existing liability) of every dollar earned above federal wages in the first five years after they leave government.

why not? We always charge “windfall profits,” and when you work for the Feds, you’re profiting from work that’s supposed to benefit the taxpayers. Taxpayers pick up half.

There should also be strict rules on post-government employment. And more (political) differences in government hiring. But mostly, less revolving-door traffic.

In the year When Barack Obama was running for office in 2008, he promised to “close the revolving door.”

That didn’t happen when he was in power – but that’s no reason why it shouldn’t happen now.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.