Summary for Congressional bill S 1779 (114th):

• Employers are not allowed to giver their employee a bonus to leave and work for the government. #GoldenParachute
• Increase prohibition on ex-government employees lobbying from 1 to 2 years.
• Increase prohibition on examiners & supervisors accepting employment from financial institutions they oversaw from 1 to 2 years. #RevolvingDoor
• Requires financial regulators to remove themselves from any actions that directly benefit a former employer or client.

Vote Yes if you believe:

• The financial industry and government are working too closely together.
• Increasing from 1 to 2 years, reduces the influence of lobbyists. #Lobbyists #RevolvingDoor
• The ones regulating should not be rewarded by those they are regulating. #RevolvingDoor
• This would reduce income inequality. #IncomeInequality

Vote No if you believe:

• We need to stop the revolving door in other industries like healthcare and energy, not just financial services. #RevolvingDoor
• This prevents the best employees from working for the government. #RevolvingDoor
• There are benefits to industry and government working closely together.
• This act assumes that official are unethical to begin with.

Congress.gov link to S 1779

(This is the 1st draft of the summary for a bill in Polinav. Summary & In-Depth is non-partisan & Vote yes/no reasons are fact-checked. if you think something is wrong, should be added or deleted, comment below!)

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This seems like common sense legislation. We don’t want those regulating the industry to receive any kind of benefit from that industry (whether before or after). This would obviously incentivize them to act favorably toward that industry, especially since they can make significantly more money in the private sector than with the government.

With that said, what I’m fearful of is this causing a brain drain for our government. Will people want to work for the government when they can make so much more money in the private sector? At the same time, do we want to make the incentive for people to switch to government work to be for the benefit of their previous or future employer?

Though I usually tend to believe in the goodness of people, Carmen Segarra’s story about her time in the Federal Reserve was pretty eye-opening (link to the This American Life podcast on this story). Though I tend to believe in people, this shattered it for me. It’s not that people are bad, but that the deck is just stacked so heavily against them, especially within finance.

I would want my representatives to vote YES on this bill!