Perspective: Dizzy from the revolving door

TALLAHASSEE -- In Joseph Heller's satirical classic, Catch-22, some U.S. servicemen form a black-market company to work both sides of the war. They contract with the Allies to bomb a bridge and with the Germans to defend it.

There are people who believe that government actually works that way. It doesn't, but if we're not careful -- as you'll see below -- real life may catch up with Heller's art before much longer.

The revolving door, as critics call the eternal osmosis between government employment and the private sector, is beginning to spin faster. The traditional civil service, where people spend entire careers, may not be an endangered species just yet, but it is beginning to qualify as a threatened one.

This is especially true in Florida, where Gov. Jeb Bush is pressuring agencies to pare their work forces by 25 percent over the ensuing five years.

State workers are nervous. Small wonder.

Hoping to reassure those who work for him, David B. Struhs, secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection, dispatched a three-page memorandum a month ago promising that through "normal attrition and retirements," and through other means, "personal disruptions and inconveniences will be kept to a minimum."

But the "invigorating and ultimately empowering" brave new world that Struhs envisioned is more than a little frightening to some environmentalists who have seen the memorandum.

Speaking of government in general, Struhs wrote:

". . . No longer will we employ individuals with the intent of keeping them for a quarter-century in place. In the future, we are going to migrate far more readily and confidently between the public and private sectors, and back again, all the while acquiring new skill sets, providing greater value, and commanding performance-based compensation."

The phrase "revolving door" would hardly do justice to that. "Merry-go-round" sounds more like it.

Florida's safeguards are too weak for that.

"It looks like a step backward to me," says Bonnie Williams, executive director of the Florida Commission on Ethics.

To environmentalists, it's deja vu. They recall Stephen MacNamara, a Florida State University professor, keeping Anderson-Columbia's cement subsidiary as a law client upon becoming the House speaker's chief of staff. MacNamara helped to persuade Struhs to approve a controversial cement plant near the Ichetuknee River. Florida needs less such migration, not more.

I e-mailed some questions to Struhs. He called, we talked for a long time. He said he was describing the world as he thinks it will be rather than as he or anyone else might prefer it.

"This is what's happening whether we like it or not," he said. College graduates in the sciences upon which the DEP depends are "really not looking to spend the rest of their lives here." Not so many people want to be career civil servants, as his own father was. Keeping them is hard enough already, and with retirements mounting, he worries that institutional memory will suffer.

Struhs acknowledged the potential danger in depending even more on people who move back and forth between government and private industry.

"I detect in your question a healthy skepticism," he said. "Particularly for regulatory functions, you don't want a situation where people are essentially using the mobility of their employment to advance some particular regulatory agenda. That's clearly something none of us would subscribe to."

Clearly not. Most of us wouldn't want developers taking leave of their companies just long enough to approve their development permits. But neither can we count on the law, in its present state, to prevent it, or on the Legislature to change the law in time.

Florida's conflict-of-interest laws say basically this:

An official normally can't buy things from his or her own company.

After leaving public office -- which includes most management positions -- you're barred for two years from representing a new employer before your old agency.

You can't go into private business to administer a contract you helped issue, ever. You have to wait two years to work on any contract that you had anything else to do with while on the public payroll.

But note the fairly glaring gaps. These rules have mostly to do with purchasing -- highway contracts and so forth -- rather than with regulation. You can write pollution regulations today and work for a polluter tomorrow, provided someone else handles the appeals.

"I can tell you we certainly should not relax the laws," Struhs said. "I'm not familiar enough with them to know if they should be strengthened."

He'd better get familiar real soon.

"I see a lot of potential problems," says Ben Wilcox, executive director of Florida Common Cause. "I think that memorandum opens up lots of possibilities for abuse."

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