The revolving door is an unofficial but very real institution whereby legislators or regulators cash out after their government service to become lobbyists or consultants. With every spin, the rule of law gets thinner and the swamp, deeper.
It is nefarious but not shameful. Bureaucrats don’t try to hide what they are doing. In fact, they advertise it, because in Washington, D.C., everyone eventually leverages their public service for personal gain. For an ugly but all too common example, consider an otherwise inoffensive fellow named Paul Argyropoulos.
He was a senior policy adviser at the Environmental Protection Agency, a post he held for a dozen years and where he focused specifically on fuels.
He is the president of an outfit called Policy Nexus Advisors, a consulting firm he started last May after quitting the EPA, “to provide expert advice on federal fuel and transportation program policies and the interface between the environmental, energy and agricultural related sector business interests.”
He will soon be a keynote speaker at the 2019 Iowa Renewable Fuels Summit, hosted by the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association, one of he biggest ethanol special interest groups in the country.
“From current concerns over small-refinery exemptions, to the future of the RFS beyond 2022, the answers to many questions in our industry today depend greatly upon the actions taken by the EPA,” Iowa Renewable Fuels Association Managing Director Lucy Norton said in a press release.
“For those of us trying to read the tea leaves and grow the biofuels industry, Paul’s address to Summit attendees will be a can’t-miss event,” Norton continued. “He will provide an insider’s perspective on the EPA’s oversight of the RFS and insight into what we could expect for the future.”
And that is pretty much how it all works. A regulator gains special knowledge of the regulatory agency he works at, then turns around and helps the industry he regulated dodge regulation.
