Frank Kendall ran the Air Force under former President Joe Biden. Last week, the Pentagon yanked his security clearance, accusing him of telling a reporter that the Qatari-donated jumbo jet now serving as Air Force One lacks some of the defensive gear the old plane carried. Kendall says he is completely mystified. Maybe he is. I don’t know what he said or didn’t say, and neither does anyone reading this.
What I do know, after three decades around classified programs, campaigns, and courtrooms, is that we have built a system in which a man can leave government and still walk around for years holding a badge that says, “Trust me.” That badge is the real scandal, and it has nothing to do with which party is swinging the hammer this week.
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Here is my thesis, plain and simple: once you leave the office, the clearance should be left behind. Not eventually. Not after some administrative review board gets around to it. Immediately. Loyalty in a republic belongs to the position, not to the person who used to occupy it. We do not let a retired police chief keep a squad car in the driveway just in case. We should not let former Cabinet secretaries, generals, and intelligence chiefs keep a set of keys to the nation’s secrets on the theory that they might need to consult on something someday.
Consider the incentive we have built instead. A three- or four-star general spends 30 years building relationships, learning weapons programs, and sitting in on the briefings that matter. He retires on a Friday, and by Monday, he is a senior adviser to a defense contractor, still carrying an active clearance that lets him walk the halls he used to command. That is not public service anymore. That is the revolving door, and it is how the military-industrial complex President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about in 1961 actually gets built, one consulting contract at a time. Eisenhower did not invent the phrase to sound clever. He watched it happen from the Oval Office and tried to warn the rest of us on his way out the door.
Then there is the political weaponization angle, and here both parties deserve a hard look in the mirror. In 2020, 51 former intelligence officials, private citizens at the time, signed a letter suggesting the Hunter Biden laptop story had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation. They were trading on institutional credibility they no longer held, and it worked. That letter shaped a presidential debate and swung an election. According to their own later admissions by signatories such as former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, some said they would sign it again, even knowing what we know now. Whatever you think of the current administration’s decision to strip those clearances, ask yourself why 51 retirees still had standing to speak with the authority of active officials in the first place.
Now flip it around. If clearances expired the day someone left federal service, the Kendall mess would look different, too. Either he is a private citizen with no more access to classified programs than you or I, subject to the same laws against retaining or disclosing national defense information everyone else faces under 18 U.S.C. Section 793, or he is not, and the whole unauthorized disclosure framing collapses because there was nothing left to authorize him for. Right now, we have the worst of both worlds. Former officials get treated as insiders for consulting fees and speaking gigs, then treated as outsiders the moment a disclosure embarrasses the administration in charge. Pick a lane.
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To be fair, some retired officials genuinely need periodic access. Retired flag officers on advisory boards, for instance, or contractors under a specific, renewable, project-based clearance tied to an actual current role with actual oversight. That is fine. What is not fine is a default assumption that senior status earns permanent access, regardless of whether you are doing the job today. A renewable, need-based clearance tied to a defined current function is a completely different animal than a lifetime pass that survives retirement, book deals, and cable news contracts.
My family has spent time in several branches of service, long before I ever sat across a deposition table as an expert witness, and one lesson never left me: the uniform, the badge, and the clearance all belong to the office, not to the man wearing them that day. When we let people keep the trappings of power after the power is gone, we should not be surprised when they use those trappings, real or perceived, and we should not be surprised when the next administration decides to use the on-off switch as a political weapon, too. End the lifetime access model. Tie clearances to current duty, full stop. Let the badge come off when the job does, for everyone, in every administration, no exceptions, no matter whose name is on the door.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a Bachelor of Science in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.
