How Revolving Door Politics Corrupt Food Systems

The revolving door isn’t just something you get stuck in while attempting to enter a hotel. It’s also a political phenomenon that creates all sorts of conflicts of interest throughout the American government. While not illegal, the revolving door is certainly unsavory, and even has  deep impacts on the food we eat.

“Revolving door” refers to a cycle in which individuals alternate between working in the private sector and serving in the government as regulators of that sector; in this context, “regulator” can mean an employee of a regulatory agency, a lawmaker or any public official who plays some role in regulatory policy.

“Whether you are moving from the public sector to industry, or vice versa, there are incentives to look after your future self,” Silvia Secchi, professor and researcher at the University of Iowa’s Public Policy Center,  tells Sentient. “You could be more lenient on the private sector in the way you implement regulations, or the way you assess fines in your regulatory capacity, because you think  that’s going to help you in the future.”

The revolving door is usually a bidirectional, ongoing process, but it can also simply be a one-time switch from one sector to another.

Why Is the Revolving Door a Problem?

The revolving door gives industries an outsized, and sometimes even dominant, role in shaping the laws and  regulations to which they are subject. In the worst-case scenarios, it can lead to something called regulatory capture — when an industry succeeds in fully co-opting the agency that regulates it.

Somebody who worked as a regulator has detailed insider knowledge of how the regulatory process works, loopholes and all. This knowledge is very useful for businesses seeking to avoid regulation, which gives heavily regulated industries a strong incentive to hire former regulators.

Meanwhile, the revolving door incentivizes lawmakers and regulators to implement industry-friendly policies while in government, as this can lead to well-paid jobs in those same industries after leaving government. These same folks might also be hesitant to enact regulations that would significantly disturb those industries, lest they jeopardize their employment prospects after leaving government.

“Basically, you remain friendly to industry,” Secchi says of those who move through the revolving door. “Not necessarily to one specific entity in the industry, but to industry as a whole. Which means that you remain marketable once you leave the administration, or once you leave government writ large.”

Corruption From the Revolving Door Can Be Hard to Trace

In one sense, the revolving door process unfolds transparently; hirings are usually a matter of public record, and are often announced eagerly in press releases. Even when they’re not, it’s easy enough to look at an official’s LinkedIn page and trace their employment history.

In another sense, though, the process is extremely opaque. Hirings may be public record, but the conversations and decisionmaking that results from those hirings are not. They take place behind closed doors, and usually stay that way; regulators generally don’t come out and say, “I’ve implemented weaker chemical regulations than I otherwise would have, because I want to get hired by a chemicals company after I leave government.”

As a result, it can be difficult to trace a precise path of causation from a revolving door hire to a specific public policy. But there are plenty of revolving door situations that, if nothing else, look mighty suspicious.

Revolving Door Case Study #1: School Lunches

Every five years, the USDA and HHS jointly publish updates to the Dietary Guidelines For Americans (DGA), a lengthy document of nutritional recommendations that influences wide swaths of public food policy. One such policy is the national school lunches program; by law, menu offerings in school lunches must adhere to the DGA’s recommendations.

In 2015, when it was time for the DGA to be updated, the committee that drafts the document recommended that the next version take planetary health, as well as personal health, into consideration. This would have been a radical change, and because plant-based foods are almost uniformly better for the environment than animal-based ones, it would almost certainly have resulted in plants comprising a much larger portion of school lunches than they do now.

But before the next version of the DGA could be published,  Congress passed an appropriations bill stating that  the DGA’s recommendations must be “solely nutritional and dietary in nature.” This effectively forbade the USDA and HHS from taking environmental factors into concern when drafting the new DGA, and so they didn’t.

Why did Congress squash the environmentally focused DGA? It’s impossible to know for certain, but it’s also impossible to ignore who was passing through the revolving door as this whole episode was playing out.

In the beginning of 2015, Sen. Pat Roberts hired a load of new staffers to run the Senate Agriculture Committee, which he headed. This committee would go on to draft the appropriations bill that restrained the DGA — and Roberts stacked it with food industry lobbyists.

As chief of staff, Roberts hired Joel Leftwich, a senior lobbyist for PepsiCo who’s passed through the revolving door many, many times. The new head of livestock and food safety issues on the committee was Chelsie Keys, a lobbyist for the National Pork Producers Council. Other new committee staffers included Julian Baer, a longtime food industry lobbyist, and Matt Erickson, formerly a lawyer for the American Farm Bureau.

If the DGA had been updated to include environmental concerns, it would have hurt the bottom lines of both PepsiCo, which has been sued for pollution by multiple state and local governments, and the pork industry, which has a strong presence in school lunches.

We’ll probably never know for certain if the Senate staffers who used to work for Pepsi and Big Pork played a role in killing a policy that would have hurt Pepsi and Big Pork. But they were certainly in a position to do so, and had an incentive to as well. They had, as Sherlock Holmes might put it, both motive and opportunity.

Revolving Door Case Study #2: Tom Vilsack

A classic case of a “revolver,” as the nonprofit information site Open Secrets likes to refer to them, is outgoing USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack.

Vilsack served two terms as Iowa governor, briefly worked as a lobbyist, and was then appointed by President Obama to head the USDA. After eight years as Secretary of Agriculture, Vilsack left government to work for the dairy industry, becoming vice president of Dairy Management, Inc (DMI) and CEO of the U.S. Dairy Export Council, one of DMI’s subsidiaries.

These are just two of many interrelated trade organizations that exist to bolster the U.S. dairy industry and promote the interests of American dairy farmers. In his dual positions as vice president and CEO, Vilsack earned a salary of nearly $1 million, according to public records — more than four times what he made as a public official.

In 2021, Vilsack returned to the public sector, serving as Secretary of Agriculture under President Biden.

What sorts of policies were impacted by Vilsack’s movement through the revolving door? Secchi tells Sentient that it’s not a matter of “a specific policy that will favor one specific industry,” but rather, the fact that Vilsack “has always been incredibly friendly to Big Ag, of which Big Dairy is a manifestation.”

But Secchi does point out that, when the time came for the USDA to distribute Inflation Reduction Act funds to “climate-smart” initiatives, Vilsack opted to send much of the money to powerful, well-established organizations in the agriculture sector.

“He gave money to Tyson, he gave money to the National Pork Board, he gave money to Land O’ Lakes,” Secchi says. “If you look at the beneficiaries of that money, they are largely conventional, large scale entities.”

So, after making millions working for Big Ag in the private sector, Vilsack returned to the federal government and gave millions to Big Ag. He did so under the auspices of the USDA’s climate-smart program; the fact that beef, pork and butter production are nowhere near “climate-smart” is the icing on the cake.

Revolving Door Case Study #3: Pesticide Regulation at the EPA

The EPA’s pesticide division offers another helpful, if discouraging, example of the revolving door at work.

Jim Jones (no relationship to the cult leader) is a former pesticide regulator. He worked at the EPA for 20 years in a number of capacities, including Director of the Office of Pesticide Programs (OPP) and Deputy Assistant Administrator for the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention (OCSPP).

During his tenure, a chemical company called Vive Crop Protection requested EPA approval for an insecticide containing bifenthrin, a Class C carcinogen. Normally, such approval would require extensive inhalation testing; however, the OPP waived that requirement, according to a report in the Intercept, and approved the insecticide.

After leaving the EPA, Jones joined the board of directors at Vive Crop Protection. In 2017, he became executive vice president of the Household and Commercial Products Association; while there, he boasted of the organization’s “strong and mutually respectful relationship with the EPA [which] continues to give members direct access to officials at every pertinent level of the agency,” according to the Intercept.

In 2023, Jones returned to the public sector to serve as Deputy Commissioner for Human Foods at the FDA, where he remains to this day.

Jones is not an anomaly. Since 1974, the OPP has had nine directors; two went into retirement immediately after departing the EPA, but the other seven all went on to work for the pesticide industry after leaving their positions as regulators. Other EPA officials have gone on to work for Monsanto, Scotts Miracle-Gro and DuPont.

As of 2019, 72 pesticides that had been banned in the European Union were still legal in America.

The Revolving Door Leads to Consolidation and Deregulation

The revolving door does more than just influence individual policies here and there, Secchi says. It’s also created a culture in government in which regulators are encouraged not to crack down too hard on the industries they’re regulating.

“It’s not necessarily a direct, simple connection between one individual, one industry and one job,” Secchi tells Sentient. “It’s more like a whole culture of, you know, patting ourselves on the back, and not enacting policies that may question the primacy and the overall approach of conventional agriculture.”

The revolving door also intersects with a trend in the agriculture industry known as consolidation. This is when larger producers and conglomerates buy smaller companies or put them out of business en masse, resulting in less competition, fewer farms, and more power and money in the hands of the richest agricultural producers.

“In the 1950s, there was still a sizable population that was engaged in agriculture,” Secchi explains. “The number of farms was much larger, the number of farmers was much larger. But now there are very, very few farmers.”

Consolidation both reduces the total number of people working in agriculture and ensures that the largest agribusinesses increasingly dominate the sector. As a result, when people like Vilsack implement policies that benefit “the agriculture sector,” they’re really implementing policies that benefit a tiny minority of wealthy Americans.

“[Agriculture policy] has become more and more separated from the realities of the majority of American people, and the issues that are relevant to American people,” Secchi says. “And so I would say it’s become a much bigger problem, because the rent-seeking industry has become much more potent, and much less representative of social values and interests.”

The Bottom Line

There’s no clear solution to the revolving door problem. Sure, lawmakers could pass laws to crack down on it — but lawmakers are among those who benefit from revolving door politics, so why would they? It’s not a surprise that legislative efforts to close the revolving door have all gone absolutely nowhere.

“I think it’s a real problem for this country that there is this bipartisan support for an obviously rent-seeking minority, very wealthy and very well connected, and through things like the revolving door door process, very capable of influencing the public decision making process,” Secchi says. “Big Ag now represents the interests of a very, very, very small minority of people, and causes a lot of problems for the rest of us.”