>But the agency’s records clearly show that efforts to review the permit were initiated between 1999 and 2003. Then those efforts suddenly stopped, and nothing in the records indicates exactly why.
>Gene Zimmerman, the forest supervisor who was in charge at the time, retired in 2005. He now does paid consulting work for Nestle.
>Zimmerman has said he doesn’t see any conflict in working for Nestle in his retirement.
I wonder if he sees any conflict working for Nestle before retirement.
People often express opinions like yours when talking about any subject that has to do with the government. Where does this inherent distrust come from?
Is it really so weird that a company would hire someone with intimate knowledge of a system in order to help navigate that system? This type of hiring occurs all the time, it literally has a name in the tech community - "acquihire". Do you find acquihires just as distasteful and filled with conflicts of interest?
Why do you doubt Zimmerman due to his current relation to Nestle but not Loe and Earney due to their current relation to the conservation movement? Surely, Zimmerman's position as forest supervisor actually makes him more credible than a biologist and a permit administrator?
To take a slightly different example, when I lived in Canada I was a member of a group trying to remove barriers to FLOSS in the Canadian government. One of the things we often talked about was our concern that people with purchasing authority in IT sometimes took early retirement from the government as soon as they could get full pension. They would then take up various positions in Microsoft in their retirement.
The concern was that there was an implicit agreement that if the people with purchasing authority made sure that Microsoft products were pushed through, they would be able to retire early, draw their pension and also receive a salary from MS. Indeed, Corel once won a lawsuit showing that the Canadian government was making RFPs which specified that the software had to come from MS (which is against Canadian government policy).
Of course it makes considerable sense for companies to hire retired government insiders to help them with strategy and/or lobbying. There is no way to prove that there was any wrong doing while the person was a government employee. There are also no conflict of interest guidelines that can apply since the person is no longer a government employee.
It does, however, raise the question about whether or not the appointment is actually the payment on a bribe for services rendered. While such an allegation requires proof, it is important to stay alert to these kinds of things.
> Of course it makes considerable sense for companies to hire retired government insiders to help them with strategy and/or lobbying. There is no way to prove that there was any wrong doing while the person was a government employee. There are also no conflict of interest guidelines that can apply since the person is no longer a government employee.
Considering there sometimes are in the tech industry clauses in contract that prevent an employee from working in another company active in the same field for X years, could such a clause be applied to government employees ? To prevent that kind of abuse. Could that legally be done (in Canada, eg) and would that be `fair' ?
> Considering there sometimes are in the tech industry clauses in contract that prevent an employee from working in another company active in the same field for X years, could such a clause be applied to government employees ? To prevent that kind of abuse. Could that legally be done (in Canada, eg) and would that be `fair' ?
Especially considering that the pensions can be thought of as a form of "gardening leave"[1]
Let's assume for just one minute that Nestle didn't pay an illegal bribe to Zimmerman (and/or other Gov officials) to forego/suspend the permitting review. Then what you are suggesting is that Nestle hired a former Govermnet employee they directly knew started working on a permitting review (already 15 years overdue on his watch) and continued this review for four years and then simply suspended the review without completion or even documenting why it was suspended. Then the very same company subject to the botched review immediately hires the Government employee they personally knew not only dropped the ball on the review but completely failed to document Why it was stopped...and do not forget the salient fact that the suspended review ultimately benefited the company.
In any other circumstance than funny business, the company would have never hired an employee they personally knew to be so incompetent as to completely stop working on a 4 year old permit review without either completing the review or documenting what happened.
> Is it really so weird that a company would hire someone with intimate knowledge of a system in order to help navigate that system? This type of hiring occurs all the time, it literally has a name in the tech community - "acquihire". Do you find acquihires just as distasteful and filled with conflicts of interest?
I think most people would find an acquihire of public resources into private hands distasteful for obvious reasons. In the tech community the conflict of interest is the point, in the public sector its the problem.
The gist of it is this: we've come up with this notion (right or wrong) that we've created institutions that are somehow for the public good. It thus upsets us when they behave like institutions that operate like those that generate profit. Furthermore, one could argue that since all of government functions on the premise that it exists to serve its population, it gets certain lenience that the profit corporations do not: monopolistic protections and legal protections. That is to say, there are not multiple competing forest agencies, and not just coincidentally, but by design. So of course it is WORSE when the forest agency is "bought out": we don't even have the opportunity to make a competitor to keep it on its toes. In fact, these institutions are often protected from being sued.
contrary to what abduhl wrote in his statement asking where the distrust comes from, I find myself thinking the exact opposite:
where does our inherent trust to government come from? When I work with you I have to prove that I'm trustworthy. That happens either through working together or by you looking at my track record on github, mailing lists or whatever else.
Yet, when it comes to government officials no such thing applies. We trust them based on the fact that they supposedly work for government and therefore are supposedly trustworthy. But their track record generally shows the exact opposite.
And yet when I come home in a perfectly safe, good area of London, if I want something from my neighbour, I have to wait for her to open her 10 locks and open a tiny bit of the door to hear her ask what I want from her.
The only reason I see that speaks for them is the appeal to authority. We trust them, because we trust that an authority that has more power than we do is more trustworthy than us and by extension anyone appointed by them is as well.
Yet, when it comes to government officials no such thing applies.
No. Government positions are subject to various oversights. Much of the role of democratic forms of government are precisely that oversight. Though yes, it's quite often very imperfect.
Elections, FOIA requests, investigative journalism, lawsuits, review by other branches (e.g., state of county/municipal, federal of state/local), accounting/accountability offices (GAO for the US federal government), etc.
People realize that oversight is a public aspect of most government activity, but they also see that the rules of oversight are created by government and that those who make the rules tend to occupy privileged positions and receive large donations from powerful parties who have an interest in influencing those rules. So while the ideal government is self-governing, there's a perceived lack of that quality.
In the US I think things are a bit different. The orthodox philosophy is that the government exists to serve the people, consists solely of the people it serves, and is only the embodiment of the collective ability of those people to act.
The UK, on the other hand, seems to have a very ingrained (and, perhaps, inbred) centralization around authority. For a long period, it was even believed that the hereditary power structure was divinely appointed (maybe some still believe this?). So, there is this long history of accepting external authority over you and this has likely permeated the culture over the many centuries it has been developing.
I don't know enough about UK legal theories to know if the government is still actually structured as an external entity, but I sometimes get the impression that people feel that it is, based on their phraseology.
In the US, there is still a sense that the people make up the government and it can be changed as desired (though there is little consensus on desires), but I do hear people even in the US that speak of government like that (I may have done it on occasion myself).
Where does your inherent trust in Government come from?
It has nothing to do with the Government, but the sequence:
1- Company needs gatekeeper approval for a deal with some entity.
2- Gatekeeper approves deal on suspiciously very good terms for the company, bad terms for the entity, like paying 500 dollars fee for something they make millions.
3- The gatekeeper ends making millions on the company check.
...is part of corruption 101. While it happens all the time it is corruption. I have seen it myself too many times. I have seen people decide invading a country with huge benefits for some industry, then this industry hiring the guy on luxury terms.
I think the phrase or meme goes like this, "you had one job." The fact that this occurs "all the time" means that either corruption and payoffs are the norm or incompetent people are allowed to keep their jobs and are never penalized for being incompetent. I find the former more probable than the latter. YMMV
I know that in accounting there are some very clear rules about being hired by a company you were previously meant to help oversee. According to [this](http://pcaobus.org/Standards/EI/Documents/ISB3.pdf) (I don't have personal experience as to how things work in the real world) if an accountant is hired by a company they had audited in the past year their work has to be reviewed by a group of auditors unconnected with the work that had been done. The auditor is also legally required to publicly disclose any employment conversations they've had with someone they've audited and for any financial ties linking the audit company with the new company to be broken.
The point is that this is a concern whenever you're moving from a place of privilege and trust to the person you were meant to be regulating (okay, it's not exactly regulating with audit). This is doubly so for government because of the extent of their power and potential for abuse. What are the laws regarding conflict of interest here? What's the waiting period for switching jobs? What reviews are done to ensure everything is above board? Because the article makes it sound as if there was no review and if there was, they'd have shown some fishy coincidences.
> Is it really so weird that a company would hire someone with intimate knowledge of a system in order to help navigate that system? This type of hiring occurs all the time, it literally has a name in the tech community - "acquihire".
Hmm, no it's not. Because when Google, Microsoft or another acquihire a smaller fish they don't bribe one of the XO for years before (plus, the public administration don't disappear like the smaller fish does in an acquihire).
> Do you find acquihires just as distasteful and filled with conflicts of interest?
Aaaaand here comes the lauded question based on a suspicious analogy.
> Is it really so weird that a company would hire someone with intimate knowledge of a system in order to help navigate that system?
I would say it's one thing if people perform their duties adequately and in the name of public service and then go on to use the skills they've gained in the private sector.
This is different, his actions/inactions in his public service directly affected his future employer in a beneficial way. Is it so weird that people would be distrustful in a situation like this? If there was no issue do you really think anybody would doubt he doesn't have a conflict of interest?
It's not a conflict that he works at Nestle now. It would be a conflict if he treated them differently while holding his old position... especially if the preferential treatment was quid pro quo for a consulting gig post-retirement.
"The agency, however, has reassessed some other water permits in the national forest. In the mid-2000s, for instance, the Forest Service went through the permits of hundreds of cabins and reexamined their use of water from creeks. In Barton Flats, dozens of cabin owners were told they could no longer draw water from a creek and instead would have to use wells or install tanks and truck in water. Cabin owners spent thousands of dollars putting in tanks."
Sorry, maybe my post isn't clear. My question is why is the distrust only applied towards the big business side?
Notice how Zimmerman's integrity and past ethical performance of his job is called into question due to his current relationship to Nestle while Loe and Earney's integrity and past ethical performance of their jobs is not also questioned. How do we not know that Loe and Earney didn't attempt to sabotage Nestle's legal extraction of groundwater as quid pro quo for a post-retirement gig as an activist?
>How do we not know that Loe and Earney didn't attempt to sabotage Nestle's legal extraction of groundwater as quid pro quo for a post-retirement gig as an activist?
P(quid pro quo | quid∧quo)
>
P(quid pro quo | ¬quid∨¬quo)
Where in this case, "quo" is, "we'll pay you for 'consulting' after you retire" and "quid" is "I'll stop working on your permit review." The reason for the distrust has to be obvious, so maybe there's some other question you're trying to get at with your comments?
As to your question about who might be paying Loe and Earney, well, we don't know. We don't know that they're being paid at all, and there isn't anything anomalous about a biologist calling for environmental review. Conversely, we know Zimmerman is being paid, and we know that there were anomalies in the permit review process. So that objection basically boils down to, "If we suspect foul play in this one situation, why don't we suspect it in this completely different situation where the facts are not analogous." Well . . .
Go on, find an example of someone becoming a paid activist after retiring from a government gatekeeping position. Note that "activist" often means "unpaid".
> People often express opinions like yours when talking about any subject that has to do with the government. Where does this inherent distrust come from?
It comes from the fact that until two years before he was hired this permit review, by his department, of Nestle's resource-extraction operation was kept in a state of suspended animation. That's where the distrust comes from.
> This type of hiring occurs all the time, it literally has a name in the tech community - "acquihire". Do you find acquihires just as distasteful and filled with conflicts of interest?
Honestly? Yes.
Acquihiring itself seems like a reasonable approach to hiring, just as hiring someone who knows a particular domain through their service in public office. But both also create perverse incentives. Politicians often try to gain favours with their potential future employer while still in office, thus serving two masters with conflicting interests. And more and more startups are created with the goal and expectation of being acquihired - which means that their product is a lie. As a customer I don't want (and will refuse to give my money to) a company to bullshit me about how "their users are important to them" and how "their service is a product of love", only to shut it down at a moment's notice as planned from day one (and to add insult to injury, sending an e-mail about how "we founders want to thank you for being with us" while having drinks at a beach, because "this is a success of all of us, we couldn't do that without you").
I think you're confused. "Acquire" is a process where a company buys another, usually much smaller company, and hires that company's employees as part of the acquisition.
That is totally different than what is happening here, where a government employee gives preferential treatment to a business entity that he or she is supposed to regulate and keep in check in the hopes that he or she will be hired by them after they leave their government post. It's a clear conflict of interest.
I think the fact that the company didn't get the same treatment as others under his watch is pretty much the textbook definition of evidence of preferential treatment.
We don't yet know that other companies weren't treated with similar incompetence.
While I'm skeptical of Zimmerman's actions here, and am inclined to believe that there is apparent corruption, that does not mitigate that corruption has not been shown to be apparent... yet.
It's neither impossible nor unlikely that there are dozens of other companies working with similarly expired licenses, or under similar states of neglect.
(Note, this is speculative. I don't honestly even know if the forest service has any others extracting water from them, so I could be totally off-base, but as bad as this looks, it's worth reserving judgement for something less circumstantial.)
I wanted to say "Are you serious?" but that would not help you understand. So I will try to explain using different examples.
1) Surely it is not a big deal if a retired army general is hired by the Chinese military to advise on warfare and machinery.
2) Surely it is not a big deal if the CIO at Google is hired by the Russian, or Senegalese (to be fair) government to consult on information architecture for their systems.
3) Surely after Obama retires, it is not a big deal for him to consult for Iran, and North Korea on how to develop a better relationship with the West.
When you have taken a role in office, you simply cannot go work for the type of companies you were regulating in the first place. You could be the most honest person on earth, but we just have your word for it.
The principal–agent problem (also known as agency dilemma or theory of agency) occurs when one person or entity (the "agent") is able to make decisions on behalf of, or that impact, another person or entity: the "principal". The dilemma exists because sometimes the agent is motivated to act in his own best interests rather than those of the principal. The agent-principal relationship is a useful analytic tool in political science and economics, but may also apply to other areas.
I know you are talking about a bigger proposition at this point. But in this instance as a Gov employee Zimmerman literally:
1. Didn't perform a mandatory permit review for 15 years;
2. Started 15 year old over due review and worked on it for 4 years and just simply stopped without documenting why the review was stop;
3. Thereafter almost immediately took a job with the company who benefited from this incompetence (apparently under the guise Zimmerman rather than being totally incompetent is an expert); and
4. When finally questioned about why the delay, why the lack of documentation...simply answers I was busy fighting forest fires.
In short, You are goddamn right I want "rules" for accountability.
You are making the rather large assumption here that doing this review was actually a good use of his time. I don't see where that has been demonstrated. The article does mention that the USFS has limited resources to direct towards these reviews, so it's pretty possible that ignoring a review he didn't think was a big deal was reasonable.
I'm not making an assumption (large or small) that the review was a good use of his time...it was his fucking job.
You may say I am making a large assumption about that as well, except it is evidenced by the fact he began the review (15 years late) and worked on it for 4 years.
I further guess what you are saying is Government employees despite having job responsibilities and duties should have complete and total independent discretion as to what their time is best spent doing...makes sense they are the experts after all.
Of course it was part of his job, but I'm not going to take 6 paragraphs from some reporter and assume that I have a crystal clear picture of the entire story.
So you think there is no possible middle-ground? That it is fundamentally impossible to determine whether someone is exploiting their position for personal gain or simply being rewarded for their expertise on incidental matters?
>do you not want experts to ever work for government?
Do you think the government can't offer anything? Give someone a free education and pay them well. It doesn't matter if they can't work in the industry afterward; let them retire and live off their retirement.
This is just one option among many. Corruption is a hard problem, but it doesn't do any good at all to pretend it can't be effectively mitigated.
OK. That's how I interpreted your sentence: "It doesn't matter if they can't work in the industry afterward; let them retire and live off their retirement."
Which raises all kinds of practical concerns. What if you study and love a particular field, start working for the government, but can't stand working for the government once you get there? What if the government downsizes and eliminates your position? What if you want to move someplace for family or other personal reasons and can't take your gov't job with you? What if you get fired?
That would all depend on the nature of the agreement, obviously. If the goal is to prevent corruption, you only have to prevent future employment by those who are serviced by your governmental position. Nothing about that necessitates blanket removal from working in a field.
This really sounds like you're trying to engage in an ungenerous argument. Don't try to nitpick everything I didn't say as though you don't have enough brains to think it through yourself. Instead of trying to win an argument, you should focus on addressing the problem.
Because, again, saying that we should just accept corruption as unavoidable is about the most abhorrent political position one could take.
Not trying to win an argument, as I fully concede that I don't have a solution to this fundamentally difficult problem.
I specifically want experts working in government, not lifetime bureaucrats. IMO, that demands a rotation of experts into and out of government service, because in many fields your expertise and relevance will atrophy meaningfully in just a handful of years. I want the White House CTO to have genuine, relevant (read: recent) industry expertise. I want the head of the FDA to have genuine scientific background and credentials. I want the head of the SEC to have Wall St/other finance/trading expertise.
I think we end up with more problems having career politicians and all the associated perturbed incentives that that brings than we have from the frequent appearance (and occasional reality) of corruption as players cycle from industry/business to government posts and back.
I further believe that most of us get the highest performance from on-going focus in a relatively narrow field and applying oneself in the same field (especially if you have interest and passion) is good for the person and good for society.
I genuinely read your original comment to be suggesting a lifetime of work in government with no possibility to return to the private sector in an industry position related to your government post. My apologies if you meant something else than what I inferred, but my reading and reaction was genuine. I'm sorry you felt nitpicked over it.
(I also believe that, given the need for relevant expertise in government that some amount of corruption is an inevitable byproduct, more than offset by the benefits we get from not having career book-learners (or worse, politically favored know-nothings) in positions of such power. We need to deal with that corruption as we find it, and create large disincentives for proven corruption, but some amount is unavoidable in a system that employs tens of millions of flawed humans in positions of power.)
Maybe "can't work in the industry" could mean only to avoid work where there was a direct relationship previous to the retirement?
For example, let's say a Nestle competitor that doesn't have any stakes in that particular area of influence of said gov. official, then there's no issue.
I know this would be hard to put in practice, but then again, the benefits should be enough right?
It would be tons more dangerous to hire an unqualified person, not to mention probably easier to bribe and fool them as well as they aren't experienced in the political dirty tricks governments and large companies engage in.
I'd rather have a "stooge" as HN and reddit called Tom Wheeler for a very long time at the FCC, than some random idiot who, say, watches Fox News all day or reads HuffPost all day and completely lacks any sophistication in how government works.
The very same people who want outsiders also don't understand why third party candidates they often support end up being racists or fascists or communists. There's real value in the mainstream - that's why its the mainstream. I wish more young people understood that.
Zimmerman's position gave him regulatory authority over Nestle. He had the power and opportunity to correct lapses in oversight but under his supervision the lapses were ignored, forgotten, or deprioritized. Then he retires and the organization that benefited from this lapse hires him.
I have no problem with skilled government employees taking jobs at a private company as long as the company they're working for could not have benefited from regulations they administrated.
I don't think the acquihire analogy is relevant is this situation.
You don't acquihire federal auditors or commissioners, you acquihire competitors' knowledge workers and market differentiators.
His position means he was in a place of authority to effect actions on behalf of the government that would have direct financial consequence for a company he now consults for.
Trust but verify.
In the verification process it is identified that justification for abandoning two separate permit reviews was never provided. That's weird, so speculation ensues.
Companies are governed by market forces. The whole point of a forest supervisor is to protect the public good against, among other things, market forces. That's why it's a conflict of interest when people in government positions of power later get a cozy job in the same industry. It's thinly veiled corruption. The only difference is that the payment is delayed.
To call this an acquihire is far stretched. Revolving door politics is a better name. Revolving door hires might be usual in the US and to some extent in the UK. But in most other countries it is frowned upon. And I count myself lucky that I live in such a country (De/CH).
> hire someone with intimate knowledge of a system
The term for that would be 'hacking into the system through hiring'. 'Acquihire' would be Nestle acquiring the entire government (or at least that division of govt), which cannot happen.
When I was with Sony Ericsson in 2010 our CEO broadcast an email to all hands to point out that he had just fired two employees over their conflicts of interest.
The forest employees did reject demands for expansion multiple times. They care about their forest (of course).
These people love and protect the environment. If Nestlé was destroying it, they wouldn't let it happen.
If it was easy to re-evaluate a license in a proper way, they would do it (they did for smaller installations). They seem to lack the resources to do a proper licensence evaluation at that scale.
Maybe Nestlé is hiring people with life-long experience protecting the nature because they are good at it ?
Some people do things others consider bad not explicitly to be evil or for personal gain but because they "don't see the problem so why not?" or because they are focused on other priorities and are either simply unaware or consider the problem(s) being caused elsewhere to be worth a movement toward some "greater good" by there assessment of good.
It happens in politics all the time: things like "we'll never get X to agree to Y so we'll have to let that slip even though we are vehemently against it, but if we do let that slip (despite the resulting anger back home) we'll probably get them to agree to Z which otherwise they never would and that is a big bonus". That is a very active and large scale example, but people make similar rationalisations on a smaller scale day-in-day-out, sometimes almost completely subconsciously.
I took the post I replied to as insinuating his actions prior to retirement (and subsequent employment) were a self serving attempt to gain fruitful activity in retirement at the expense of doing the right thing. I was suggesting that the actions seen could be interpreted another, less actively negative, way.
Not evil, but focused.
Nestlé as a company is focused on profits,
whereas forest employees are (or should be) focused on the forest environment.
These different focuses may conflict with oneanother.
On a different topic, if the water licensing does not provide enough resources for a proper re-evaluate, then there is something fundamentally wrong
In the case of Nestlé, you don't have to assume. They have a long history of evilness, Google it. Their CEO has openly expressed his opinion that having clean drinking water as a basic human right is an "extremist position".
>Gene Zimmerman, the forest supervisor who was in charge at the time, retired in 2005. He now does paid consulting work for Nestle.
>Zimmerman has said he doesn’t see any conflict in working for Nestle in his retirement.
I wonder if he sees any conflict working for Nestle before retirement.