The Revolving Door

How Big Tech Bought the Government — and the Government Bought Big Tech Robin Williams — God rest his soul — said it best. Politicians, he said, should be required to wear sponsor jackets like NASCAR drivers, so that everybody knows who owns them.

He said it as a joke. He meant it as a diagnosis.

I have spent years at the intersection of technology and politics — first as a startup founder trying to understand why government contracts went to connected incumbents rather than innovative competitors, then as an Amazon Web Services employee watching the relationship between Silicon Valley and Washington up close, then as an advocate trying to understand why every attempt to regulate the companies causing the most harm seemed to dissolve before it became law. What I learned in all of those years is that Robin Williams was not exaggerating. The system is not broken. It is working exactly as designed — designed by and for the people who are profiting from it.

The mechanism that makes this possible has two components. The first is the revolving door. The second is Citizens United. Together, they have produced a political economy in which the companies causing the most harm are the most insulated from accountability, and the representatives who are supposed to hold them accountable are instead funded by them.

The Revolving Door

On the website BigTechSellsWars.com, you can find the names and profiles of technology executives, lobbyists, and government officials who have moved between Silicon Valley companies and government agencies — in both directions — in ways that give new meaning to the word "conflict of interest."

The pattern is consistent across administrations, across parties, and across decades. A senior official at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — DARPA, the agency that funded the original internet — leaves government and joins the board of a technology company that then wins DARPA contracts. A former senior intelligence official joins Palantir's advisory structure and then advocates in Washington for expanding the intelligence community's use of Palantir's platforms. A Department of Defense procurement officer retires and joins a defense contractor, where their primary value is the relationships they built while authorized to spend public money on that contractor's competitors.

This is not illegal. That is the most disturbing part. The revolving door is not a corruption scandal that gets prosecuted. It is a feature of the system, operating openly and legally, producing outcomes that any person with functioning moral senses can recognize as corrupt even when no law has technically been broken.

The technology companies benefiting most from this revolving door are the ones with the largest government contracts: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Palantir, Oracle. These are not companies that have government contracts because they offer the best products at the best prices. They have government contracts because they have invested in the relationships, the lobbying

infrastructure, and the former officials who know where the procurement budgets are and how the contracting decisions are made.

Palantir is the clearest example. Founded with CIA venture capital money in 2003, Palantir spent its first decade building relationships inside the intelligence community so deep that by the time it began competing for large government contracts, the people evaluating its bids were often people who had spent their careers inside the agencies Palantir was pitching to. The company did not win those contracts by accident. It won them by design — by engineering the relationships that would produce the decisions it needed.

Citizens United and the Purchase of Policy

The revolving door moves people. Citizens United moves money. And in the United States' political system, money is the more decisive variable.

In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that corporations have the same First Amendment rights as individuals and cannot be prohibited from spending unlimited amounts of money on political advertising. The practical effect of this ruling was to remove the last meaningful limit on the ability of corporations to shape the political environment in which their regulatory oversight is determined.

Before Citizens United, a corporation that wanted to influence an election could donate limited amounts to candidates through a Political Action Committee, subject to disclosure requirements. After Citizens United, that same corporation could create or fund a nonprofit — structured so as to avoid full disclosure requirements — and spend unlimited amounts on advertising, issue advocacy, and political messaging.

The technology companies that are the subject of this book have used this architecture aggressively. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, and their affiliated interests have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying, on political advertising, and on the SuperPACs and dark money nonprofits that Citizens United made possible. They have funded candidates from both parties. They have funded think tanks that produce policy papers justifying the regulatory environment they want. They have funded academic chairs at universities that produce research supporting their positions on antitrust, privacy, and AI governance.

The result is a political system in which the companies most in need of regulation are the most capable of preventing it. The bills that would hold them accountable die in committee. The regulations that would constrain their data practices get watered down before implementation. The antitrust cases that would break up their monopolies take a decade to litigate while the monopolies grow stronger.

This is not a failure of democracy. It is democracy operating as it was redesigned by Citizens United: a system in which the size of your wallet determines the volume of your voice, and the companies with the largest wallets have the loudest voices in every room where the rules are written.

Both Parties. Every Administration.

I want to be clear about something that sometimes gets lost in this discussion. The revolving door and the corruption it enables are not a Republican problem or a Democratic problem. They are a systemic problem that has operated continuously across administrations of both parties.

The Obama administration's relationship with Silicon Valley was intimate and admiring. The Trump administration — both the first and the second — celebrated a different set of technology billionaires while delivering the same regulatory permissiveness to the same companies. The Biden administration prosecuted some antitrust cases but oversaw the period in which Project Nimbus was extended and the companies providing military AI infrastructure faced no accountability for it.

The people who have worked both sides of this revolving door include Democrats and Republicans, Obama appointees and Trump appointees, career civil servants and political appointees. The common denominator is not ideology. It is the financial relationship between the company and the official — the job offer waiting, the advisory board seat available, the speaking engagement on offer.

As documented in my documentary Forever Peace Now and on the website BigTechSellsWars.com, U.S. tech companies and their government partners have been spending over $44 billion since 2004 on contracts with companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others — contracts that build the surveillance infrastructure, the drone targeting systems, and the data processing platforms that enable the wars I document in this book. That number has grown dramatically since. The contracts are bipartisan. The beneficiaries are bipartisan. The civilian death tolls are not.

Canada's Lesson for Washington

Canada's recent break from U.S. military procurement dependence — Prime Minister Mark Carney's declaration that "the days of Canada's military sending 70 cents of every dollar to the United States are over" — is not just a trade story. It is a revolving door story.

The reason 70 cents of every Canadian defense dollar went to the United States is the same reason that American companies dominate European cloud infrastructure, the same reason that Palantir won the NHS contract in the UK, the same reason that no-bid contracts keep going to the same companies. Relationships built over decades between defense officials, procurement officers, and the contractors they favor — relationships that survive administration changes because the contractors funded both sides.

Canada's pivot is possible in part because Carney's government came in without the same web of incumbent contractor relationships that Washington operates through. They looked at the numbers — 70 cents on every dollar going south — and asked the question that every government with the political will to ask it can answer honestly: is this sovereignty, or is this dependency?

The answer was dependency. And they changed course.

What This Means for Everything Else in This Book

The revolving door and Citizens United are the explanation for why everything else in this book has been allowed to happen.

Why does Amazon have a $1.2 billion cloud contract with the Israeli military? Because the people who award government contracts move between Amazon and the agencies that award them, and the people who might legislate against it are funded by Amazon's political spending.

Why does Palantir have a $30 million no-bid contract with ICE? Because its founders and executives have spent years cultivating the relationships inside the intelligence and law enforcement communities that produce those awards.

Why has no technology executive been prosecuted? Because prosecution requires political will, and political will requires politicians who are not financially dependent on the companies they would need to prosecute.

This is the circle. It does not break from the inside. It breaks when external accountability — legal, criminal, international — creates consequences that the political system cannot absorb or redirect.

That is why the petition to Spain matters. That is why criminal prosecution, not regulatory fines, is the instrument that actually changes the calculus.

The sponsors on the jacket are visible to anyone who knows how to read a campaign finance disclosure or a lobbying registration form. The question is not whether we can see them. The question is whether we are willing to act on what we see.

--- The revolving door explains who gets protected. Chapter Eight explains who pays the price. The workers at the bottom of Big Tech's supply chain — the content moderators in Nairobi watching footage of people having sex through Meta's smart glasses, the warehouse workers in New Jersey sustaining injuries at 2.6 times the industry average while Amazon posts record profits, the small business owners whose margins have been consumed by a platform that now competes with the sellers whose fees funded its growth — these are the people the revolving door was designed to forget.