Former lobbyists currently working on the congressional payroll helping to craft legislation significantly outnumber members of Congress, according to an exhaustive new analysis by the non-partisan group LegiStorm.
In all, 605 current congressional staff - out of about 14,000 total member, committee and leadership staff - have lobbied in the past decade. They are among the nearly 5,400 current and former congressional staffers that LegiStorm has discovered have gone through the lobbying "revolving door" in the past decade alone.
The numbers in the new analysis are far greater than any previous analysis has been able to demonstrate.
"For every person the American people have elected to sponsor legislation of public benefit, special interests have more than one former legislative advocate now working on the inside in Congress," said Jock Friedly, founder and president of LegiStorm. "That represents a large network of people to influence decisions and to provide valuable intelligence."
This conclusion and others come after a comprehensive analysis of hundreds of thousands of records and research into more than 130,000 people who have worked as lobbyists or congressional aides since 2000. The analysis was backed by two years of research into the biographies of tens of thousands of individuals. Daily updates of this revolving door database, as well as biographical information about current and former congressional staffers and much more, are available to subscribers of a new service LegiStorm launched today.
1 comment:
I want the guy who keeps insisting that "the system" is working to come here and explain in what world he is living. This article alone demonstrates that the Senate and the House of Representatives do not, in any way except in name only, represent "we, the people". These elected "representatives" are bought and paid for and do the bidding of the ones who bribe them and pay them off. It is now so blatant and open, the publicity doesn't even make them cringe or offer us some explanantion that only THEY think is perfectly reasonable. Only revolution will fix this problem, because, as so clearly demonstrated every election cycle, it doesn't matter which slimeball says HE is the next saviour who is going to "change things", it never changes, but, in fact, gets worse. So much for the "system". So, where ya at, boy?!!
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