FEMA official Timothy Cannon showered Gallup Organization millions in taxpayer-funded contracts, and then Gallup soon offered him a job. When that was scuttled for obvious ethics reasons, Cannon struck out on his own and tried to get Gallup as a client.

Gallup’s CEO at that point wrote in an email about him: “This is a guy that was our sponsor at FEMA… he is so Gallup-gung ho… when he was applying we broke some of the rules of the US Gov on the ‘how’ we do it… so we had to let him go…”

Scott McCabe on our crime page has the story.

There’s a lot in this story, but here’s the lesson for me:

This is the real danger of the revolving door. The problem is not that industry people enter government or government people enter industry. The problem is that our public servants have incentive to use public resources to serve special interests — instead of the public interest — in order to enrich themselves.