President Donald Trump announced some $200 billion in potential arms sales to Saudi Arabia and Qatar a week ago — this is huge potential business for major U.S. defense contractors like RTX, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and General Atomics, all of which deploy armies of lobbyists in Washington each year to influence such contracts.
A new bipartisan bill dropping this week will impose some of the strictest bans to date to make sure former government officials aren’t lobbying on behalf of those big companies or foreign countries to get their share of this massive federal pie. In fact, the legislation will make it a crime to do so.
House Foreign Affairs Committee colleagues Reps. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) and Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) are planning to introduce the No Revolving Doors in Foreign Military Sales (FMS) Act, which aims to tackle a space that has been growing exponentially due in part to major current conflicts in Israel and Ukraine and the desire of partner countries to arm up and enhance “deterrence.”
In 2023, the U.S. government sold a record $81 billion worth of weapons — the vast majority via U.S. defense contractors — to foreign governments through the FMS program. That number jumped to $117 billion in 2024.
The Davidson/Jacobs bill will impose a three-year moratorium or “cooling off period” on any lobbying by former Pentagon or State Department officials associated with FMS during their time in government on behalf of new employers in the defense industry and/or foreign actors who have contracts or are seeking contracts for foreign military sales.
“We must keep these deals free from conflicts of interest — they are too critical in protecting our national security. By enforcing a three-year lobbying ban, we close the door on undue influence within this critical process,” Davidson said in a statement.
The DoD currently has a blanket one-year cooling off period for lobbyists (two years for highest ranking officers) but critics have long complained that the rules are inconsistently enforced across departments and there are persistent loopholes that are easily exploited.
“Unfortunately, the loopholes that keep the revolving door spinning allow former civil servants who were involved in foreign military sales to immediately work for the defense industry or foreign actors once they leave the executive branch,” said Jacobs. For example, the definition of “lobbying” is fungible, with former officials instead hired as “consultants” who can do everything to influence their former employer without triggering official lobbying rules.
But the new bill makes it a penalty for former government officials to engage “knowingly” with “any communication or appearance before any officer or employee of any Federal department or agency or Congress to influence such foreign military sales.”
Davidson — who also wants to compel the Pentagon to pass a financial audit — told RS that the new lobbying measure stems from the House Foreign Affairs Committee's foreign arms sales task force and that there's momentum to pass it, whether as a stand alone provision or as part of a bigger bill like the NDAA.
"This is a time where some of this kind of legislation can actually have a chance to move," he said. "You have people that work for the government, do the sales, and then right after they do the sales they wind up working for defense contractors. And you could see an obvious conflict of interest there."
To say the revolving door is a problem is an understatement, especially with the major contractors that stand to benefit the most from these major deals. The aforementioned Trump deal includes $1 billion worth of drones from RTX (formerly Raytheon) for Qatar. Meanwhile General Atomics stands to make $2 billion from selling Qatar its advanced MQ-9B aircraft.
Meanwhile, most of the nearly 2,000 former DoD employees (both civilian and military) who went to work in the defense industry from 2014 to 2019 went to major prime contractors and mostly in those companies’ weapons divisions. According to the GAO in 2021, the most, 315, went to work for RTX.
Over 80 percent of retired generals after 2018 went to work for the arms industry as board members, advisers, executives, consultants, lobbyists, or members of financial institutions that invest in the defense sector, according to a more recent report by the Quincy Institute. Since 2019, defense contractors have spent over $216 million directly lobbying the federal government, according to OpenSecrets.
These dynamics produce two major conflicts of interest: weapons companies have an edge paying former Pentagon and State Department officials big bucks because they know they can influence their former colleagues making decisions in the highly competitive foreign sales space. Second, officials still on the job at these agencies can feather their post-retirement nests with prospective defense companies by helping them game the system while they still have direct influence over government contracts.
While he wasn’t working for a weapons company, Adm. Robert Burke was convicted just the other day of bribery for accepting a job with a $500,000 salary and stock options while he was still working for the Navy. He did this in exchange for help to steer contracts to Next Jump, a technology services company that did work with the military.
Bill Hartung, who wrote the Quincy study, said the Davidson/Jacobs bill was a good start.
“It doesn't address the loopholes that apply to the huge numbers of folks who leave DoD to go to industry each year — over 1,700 in one recent year, according to GAO. But it addresses a critical issue and could serve as a model for strengthening revolving door strictures on other officials leaving DoD to work or industry,” he noted.
A third potential risk that the bill hopes to address is undue influence from foreign countries that hire former government employees as lobbyists and consultants, creating a situation where countries that shouldn’t be getting our weapons because obtaining them may not be in the U.S. national security interest, have a Washington conduit that makes it happen anyway.
“It should go without saying,” said Jacobs, “U.S. arms sales should be made to promote U.S. national security, not to get ahead professionally or cash in.”
