The “revolving door” practice in the US – considered as shady at best by many critics – involves government officials and execs and employees from corporations, notably Big Tech, “switching” jobs by joining the other sector.
They inevitably take a lot of knowledge about the one they left with them, and now an analysis by the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) is revealing the sheer scale of some of these “revolving door” instances.
When it comes to the Department of Justice (DoJ) alone – and that’s the one that is spearheading legal initiatives around alleged Big Tech antitrust and other unlawful policies – at least 360 of its former employees have found (past and present) roles with Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and HP, and this has been documented to have been going on since 2000.
The analysis, reported Washington Examiner, is based on information found on LinkedIn and public records. It, among other things, shows that only in the time since the Biden administration took over, Google hired 40 ex-DoJ employees, while during the same period, Amazon took in 61 and Microsoft 26 people formerly working for the department.
On the other side of the “door” are at least 41 DoJ employees who used to have notable roles in Big Tech corporations.
AFF President Tom Jones says that while people moving from government agencies to various industries can be completely innocuous and driven by purely professional reasons, the same doesn’t apply when ideology is involved.
And according to Jones, who spoke for the Washington Examiner, Americans have cause to be concerned by this particular revolving door “because it is an ideological relationship where leftists move back and forth between industry and government to implement their liberal agenda.”
Jones, whose organization is conservative-leaning, called the whole scheme insidious and in need of stopping – since, “When the levers of government are not available, they use the levers of Big Tech to push a woke agenda.”
The DoJ example is particularly interesting at this point, since early in the year the department revealed its lawsuit against Google whose goal is to make the behemoth spin off some of its advertising tentacles.
The DoJ is also investigating Apple regarding software policies, while Facebook (Meta), Google, and TikTok are probed over their algorithms.
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