Career builder

While nothing new for the inside-the-Beltway crowd, it may be noteworthy to the great consuming masses just how incestuously intertwined telecom policy-making and lobbying have become in the nation’s capital.
The little agency that could-the Federal Communications Comm-ission-ranks only behind the White House and House of Representatives in training public servants for future lobbying careers, according to The Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan watchdog group.
The CRP counts more than 100 former FCC employees who have gone on to the private sector, with at least half of them returning to their old digs to proselytize their former colleagues-perhaps to argue against the very regulations they wrote once upon a time in the name of the public interest.
The CRP quotes Mark Obbie, a Syracuse University journalism professor with media law expertise, as observing, “The danger is you have people who are conflicted as they think about policy and how to shape it. They’re affecting their own pocketbook if they take the wrong stand. That can be poisonous. It naturally skews policy toward corporate interests. That’s where you’re going to make your money once you leave government.”
Indeed, so prolific and common is the revolving door throughout government that the CRP has created a database tracking the profitable progression from federal agency to powerhouse lobbying shop-and back again.
But, as the CRP points out, the FCC wouldn’t be such a fertile training ground for tomorrow’s lobbyists if there wasn’t such a demand in the marketplace.
“You’d have a much better FCC if there was a revolving door between civically minded think tanks and the FCC, as opposed to private-sector, pro-corporate lobbyists and the FCC,” Michael Stamm, a University of Minnesota assistant professor, told the CRP. “This is the stuff of the American culture and democracy. Look at the industry [the FCC] is regulating. Not steel. Not widgets. It’s regulating culture and the flow of information.”
On the other hand, it’s hard to figure where else an FCC ex-patriot goes but into the telecom industry. FCC skillsets might be less than useful in a Ben & Jerry’s franchise.