WASHINGTON REPORT: Conflict-With Interest

...Furthermore, 65 percent of NRC's consultants are working both for NRC and private enterprises that are recipients of such licenses and contracts...

...At any rate, Common Cause has now done something extraordinarily good and deserves not merely praise for the effort but serious thought by citizens on the subject...

...You can get the report from Common Cause, 2030 M St., N.W., here, 20036...

...The money for Michelangelo and for Medicare has to come from somewhere...

...The worst is that, like Engine Charlie and General Motors, all these officials and consultants cannot imagine a system or a significant part of a system working in their field of administration or consultancy that does not center on their once and future employers or their clients...

...But again, the improprieties and perhaps felonies are not the worst...

...The Pentagon itself takes a firm marshmallow line with procurement officers caught out by the muckraking press accepting free duck hunts from the people they buy from, but that sort of payoff is so little as to be laughable...

...He really believed that what was good for General Motors was good for the country...

...One of our legendary heroes, Alexander Hamilton, credited with creating the country's credit, did so brilliantly through classical conflict of interest, defrauding the poor, enriching the rich and turning more than the odd penny himself in the transaction...

...The standard practice seems to be that you leave industry as a vice president, sign on as a deputy or undersecretary in procurement or in that gold mine, research and development, for a tour, then return to contracting as a president, or in a larger firm...

...Something has to be done about it, but the people charged with the responsibility of so doing are, of course, the people who benefit from it, the Establishmentarians, now supported and encouraged by the one institution, Common Cause, that ought to be their leading critic...

...That is not necessarily as outrageous an idea as it appears when stated by a GM officer about to become a high government official...

...And it has been and remains true of Sweden while that nation was constructing the most elaborate system of social amelioration in the modern world...

...Again, you have to be simple-minded to believe that all this goes on without a good deal of impropriety to say the least, and some felony to say the most...

...And imagination capable of such a leap is exactly what is required in the new circumstances we are encountering in energy, defense and numerous other fields...

...Well, everybody makes mistakes and if we knew the outcome of our best-intentioned efforts, no doubt no one would do anything, a prospect, in politics, not necessarily all that alarming...

...But all of that is on the surface, not without its comic aspects, comparable to the looting practiced from time immemorial by big city political machines- with the single difference, of course, that the highways and subways erected by the friends of the pols usually did do what they were supposed to do...

...A variation would be that of an officer or civilian employee who sees a procurement need, or at least a procurement item that could be made to seem a need were it available...

...Read it and weep...

...The real rip-offs are not confined to kickbacks in a duck blind on Chesapeake Bay...

...That change and its implications for the future are what make the buddy system of procurement and the conflict of interest system of government regulation not only intolerable in themselves but highly dangerous...

...Conflicts of interest are as old as the Republic...

...The organization has just issued "SERVING TWO MASTERS: A Common Cause Study of Conflicts of Interest in the Executive Branch...

...They do buy, in part, it is not unreasonable to speculate, because they anticipate their own retirement or even an earlier departure and are not averse to having established connections with the defense industry...

...One would have to be Pollyanna Pangloss not to believe that the unvarying march of cost overruns on military equipment and the unvarying record of really astonishingly bad performance in operation, are not intimately connected with the circumstances of defense procurement, the buddy system between the buyer and seller who, in mercantile theory, are supposed to be friendly enemies, not friendly friends...

...And this, the Common Cause report powerfully suggests, is the real problem with conflict of interest as an operating principle of government...

...Go back to Engine Charlie's remarkable revelation...

...When "Engine Charlie" Wilson instructed Congress that what's good For General Motors is good for the country, it wasn't the slip of the tongue his handlers immediately called it, and he wasn't kidding...

...The obvious trouble with this is the endless possibilities it provides for ripping off the government...

...Whatever is, Is...

...The far worse barm we receive from conflict of interest as an operating principle of government is different and deeper...

...WASHINGTON REPORT CONFLICT-WITH INT It is possible, even reasonable, to have reservations about the net effect of some of the activities of Common Cause, the "citizens' lobby" trying to make honesty and constitutionality as attractive to members of Congress as are the interests of "the interests...

...As noted earlier in this report, the Pentagon actually defends these and similar practices on the grounds that only the people making the military widgets know enough about them to order them intelligently, to draw up proper specifications and figure costs with at least some relationship to reality, however distant...

...The Common Cause report concentrates not on Defense, as I do here out of ancient affection, but on the various agencies dealing with energy...

...He resigns, sets up a company to produce the item and brings around samples to bis good old buddies still in the buying end of fee business...

...Similarly, 72 percent of top employees of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have been employed by private energy enterprises and 90 percent of these came from enterprises holding NRC licenses or contracts...

...FRANK GETLEIN...

...In the economics of the Western world, that somewhere has been business, in the eighteenth century a fairly straight, free-enterprise capitalism, today increasingly a state capitalism...

...These people are intellectually all in the position of Herman Kahn, for...

...The Pentagon, hardly surprisingly, sets the record in the report, with no fewer than 1406 officers and civil employees, departing Defense between 1969 and 1973 to take jobs with defense contractors...

...Indeed, most of the earlier political systems to which the Republic offered an alternative, were based, in practice, on conflict of interest raised to a principle of government: the sovereign lord was the bishop or the bishop's brother, the chancellor of the exchequer the capital's leading banker, the commander of the military forces the supplier of military material, and so on through all the variations needed to staff an administration...

...The example of Hamilton, although Tarely referred to, provides the essential justification for conflict of interest as permitted in government...

...That was also true of Florence when that city was creating the Renaissance (and if you're interested in conflict of interest, try reading the history of the Medici sometime...

...In a sense and up to a point, Calvin Coolidge was correct when he said that the business of America is business...

...forever, is precisely the principle this Republic was founded to elude, and is also the inevitable result of the reforms...

...It finds that more than half of the top employees of the Energy Research and Development Administration used to work for private enterprises in the energy field, and 75 percent of these . . . came from ERDA contractors...

...whom the one really unthinkable-and unspeakable-thought was the country's spending less for weapons and for Herman Kahn to think about weapons...

...The campaign financing reforms, for example, so ardently pushed by Common Cause ended up giving the Democratic and Republican parties an officially established status neither has in the Constitution, in our actual political history or in any really desirable political theory...