Pacific Views

Defense Contractors on Ethics

Looks like our nation's patriotic defense contractors have a bit of a beef with a reporting requirement proposed by the Senate. I knew there was a reason I kind of liked the Senate:

... One of the provisions that prompted criticism would require companies holding Pentagon contracts worth more than $10 million to submit reports to the secretary of Defense each year, naming any former Defense employees who took a job with them less than two years after leaving the department. The report would include the employees' current titles and lists of each "major defense system" they had worked on, both in their last two years of employment at the Pentagon and on behalf of the contractor.

Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group, said the requirement would make the Defense procurement system more transparent. "Currently, there's no system to find or locate people who have gone from the government to the private sector," he said.

But, the industry groups wrote, the reporting requirement is "unnecessary" and "would subject former Defense Department employees to post-government employment restrictions that are different from those imposed on former employees of other federal agencies, which might hinder Defense's efforts to recruit talented individuals." ...

When the public graft runs in the billions of dollars, I think an industry has earned itself a little extra-special scrutiny.