Antiterror officials find big opportunities in private sector

Jun 30, 2006 10:40 AM

           

Dozens of members of the Bush administration's domestic security team, assembled after the 2001 terrorist attacks, are now collecting bigger paychecks in different roles: working on behalf of companies that sell domestic security products, many directly to the federal agencies the officials once helped run.
According to a New York Times report, at least 90 officials at the Department of Homeland Security or the White House Office of Homeland Security -- including the department's former secretary, Tom Ridge; the former deputy secretary, Adm. James M. Loy; and the former under secretary, Asa Hutchinson -- are executives, consultants or lobbyists for companies that collectively do billions of dollars' worth of domestic security business.
"People have a right to make a living," said Clark Kent Ervin, the former inspector general of the department, who now works at the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan public policy research center. "But working virtually immediately for a company that is bidding for work in an area where you were just setting the policy -- that is too close. It is almost incestuous."
Federal law prohibits senior executive branch officials from lobbying former government colleagues or subordinates for at least a year after leaving public service. But by exploiting loopholes in the law -- including one provision drawn up by department executives to facilitate their entry into the business world -- it is often easy for former officials to do just that, the Times reports.
Michael J. Petrucelli, who the Times names as an example, who was once acting director of citizenship and immigration services, and moved within months of leaving his post in July 2005 to a job in which he lobbied the Coast Guard, another unit of the department, to test a power-supply device made by his new employer, GridPoint.
Victor X. Cerda, within a few months of his 2005 departure as acting director of the agency that handles the detention of illegal immigrants, was hired by a company that is a top contractor for that agency, the Times reports. With Cerda's help, the company is now seeking millions of dollars in new agency business.
According to the Times, in their new roles, former department officials often command salaries that dwarf their government paychecks. Carol A. DiBattiste, who made $155,000 in 2004 as deputy administrator at the Transportation Security Administration, earned more than $934,000 last year from ChoicePoint, a Homeland Security Department contractor she joined in April 2005, the same month she left the agency.
Ridge, the former secretary, stands to profit handsomely now that Savi Technology, a maker of RFID equipment that the department pushed while he was secretary, is being bought by Lockheed Martin. He was appointed to the Savi board three months after resigning from the department and has been compensated with an undisclosed number of stock options that Lockheed will presumably need to buy back.
For two years, Hutchinson, a onetime U.S. congressman and a current candidate for Arkansas governor, served as under secretary for border and transportation security, supervising the 110,000 employees charged with guarding the nation's borders, ports and airports.
On March 2, 2005, the day after he officially left the department, Hutchinson began work at Venable LLP, a Washington law and lobbying firm that represents major domestic security contractors like Lockheed Martin.
Given the demands of running for office, Hutchinson chose not to renew a one-year contract with Venable in March.
Hutchinson told the Times that in one year he earned more than he ever did in one year as under secretary at the Homeland Security Department, but he declined to give an estimate of his earnings.

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