![]() One suggestion: “The government could also help connect critical technology and resource suppliers to private sector capital.” That seems similar to what the Office of Strategic Capital has set out to do. In 2019, Flournoy co-authored an article about how the US could maintain its tech superiority. ![]() This has also been a key policy area that Michèle Flournoy, an Obama Pentagon official who co-founded WestExec Advisors with Antony Blinken in 2017, has researched extensively. ![]() That’s been called the “ valley of death,” and over the last two decades, a variety of new divisions have been designed to overcome the hurdles startups face in getting into the Pentagon. ![]() But since Pentagon contracts can take years, it means that startups often struggle to break into the federal bureaucracy. The biggest consumers of many new military technologies are, of course, often the government. In December, the Department of Defense launched the Office of Strategic Capital to broaden private investment in technologies critical to national security. When the government seeks the private sector’s help While OSC says there is only one other employee hired as a special government employee, the increase of these appointees in substantive roles across the government could pose similar issues.Īs more and more government offices are established to grease connections to the private sector, and as former policymakers continue to use the revolving door into corporate consulting when they leave government, this issue is likely to keep occurring. The core question is whether Lourie’s dual-hatted roles are unique or representative of how the government works today. More broadly, the gray area in which she’s operating connects to the larger questions of what it means to marry private corporations to government, and whether it’s the American people or the corporations that benefit. “DOD ethics officials provide special government employees with clear guidelines on the ethics rules and specifically how to avoid conflicts of interest.”īut government ethics experts say it will be hard to verify no conflicts arose in those policy discussions: Hiring people as “special government employees,” as Lourie is, requires fewer disclosures for the public. “These employees are hired to contribute to broad policy discussions that relate to DoD’s role of informing and encouraging private sector investment in our nation’s critical technologies,” a Pentagon spokesperson said in a statement. The Pentagon reiterated that principle and said Lourie wouldn’t be working on specific investment decisions. (Requests for comment from Lourie and WestExec Advisors were not returned.) “My work for the different organizations cover different issues, and although I don’t expect any conflicts of interest, I will be very cautious to ensure that it doesn’t occur,” Lourie posted in response to Shaub’s reply on LinkedIn. “Outsourcing defense to a corporate adviser doesn’t seem like an ideal way to put the public’s interests first,” Walter Shaub, a top ethics official in the Obama administration, told me. The career shift for Lourie appears messy, but it is not illegal. Now, she would be working in the private and public sectors at the same time. The work of the Office of Strategic Capital is remarkably similar to the services that WestExec provides. What stood out, however, is that she would maintain her private-sector job at WestExec Advisors, the ultra-connected Washington consultancy that works with tech and defense companies. She posted on LinkedIn how excited she was to “attract and scale private capital for emerging and frontier technologies in support of national security.” This week, lawyer Linda Lourie announced that she was joining the Pentagon’s newly established Office of Strategic Capital, which is designed to connect military-tech companies with private investors, as a part-time consultant. And a recent career move illustrates those stakes. Several military services and intelligence agencies have launched venture capital offices, and the CHIPS Act that President Joe Biden’s team is implementing is premised on public-private partnerships to advance the US’s high-tech manufacturing sector.Īll these efforts can pose a set of ethical quandaries given the blurry line between the public interest and corporate interests. An array of new federal intelligence and military offices have been launched in recent years with one overriding goal: to connect the slow-moving federal bureaucracy to private, venture capital-backed companies doing cutting-edge work.
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