Revolving Door

Getting Tough on the Corporations Behind the Opioid Crisis

The withdrawal of Tom Marino’s nomination as national drug czar is a reminder of the power of whistle-blowing and aggressive investigative reporting, while the fact that he was named in the first place is a reminder of the hollowness of the Trump’s Administration’s commitments to draining the swamp and to seriously addressing the opioid epidemic.

Yet there is much more to be done beyond denying a high-profile job to the Congressman who did the pharmaceutical industry’s bidding in weakening the Drug Enforcement Administration’s ability to thwart illicit distribution of prescription painkillers.

The first step, of course, is for Congress to undo the damage caused by Marino’s bill, which Democrats and Republicans alike allowed to be enacted with little scrutiny. Also needed are reforms to the revolving door system, which the excellent reporting by the Washington Post and 60 Minutes and the revelations of DEA whistle-blower Joseph Rannazzisi (photo) showed to play a key role in the story as former DEA officials working for the drug industry or its law firms helped to draft and promote the legislation.

If the scourge of opioids is to end, there will have to be much stronger enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), the law that forms the basis of U.S. drug control policy. For a long time, it appeared the problem was that the CSA was being enforced too strictly, at least when it was applied to drug users and low-level drug sellers.

Starting about a decade ago, federal officials and prosecutors began to pay attention to the pernicious role played by the supposedly legitimate drug industry. In 2007, Purdue Pharma’s Purdue Frederick Inc. unit and several of its executives pleaded guilty to criminal charges of misleading the public about the addictive nature of its OxyContin pain medication and paid more than $634 million in penalties. That case was brought by the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Virginia in cooperation with the Food and Drug Administration, not the DEA.

During the following years, the DEA began to bring its own enforcement actions under the CSA or referred cases to the Justice Department for prosecution. According to data I have collected for Violation Tracker (some of which has not yet been posted on the site), there have been about 80 CSA actions against drug companies, distributors or healthcare providers since 2008.

The penalties collected in the cases total about $605 million. The biggest amounts were imposed on the distributor McKesson ($176 million in three cases); CVS ($130 million in nine cases); Walgreens ($80 million); and a second big distributor, Cardinal Health ($68 million in three cases).

It’s notable that the penalties in these 80 cases combined amount to less than that imposed on Purdue alone. Moreover, all of the cases were brought as civil rather than criminal actions. I found one corporate CSA criminal cases but it was not brought against a healthcare company or retailer but rather against United Parcel Service, in connection with its role in delivering shipments from illegal online pharmacies. And in that case UPS was offered a non-prosecution agreement that essentially nullified the criminal charge.

Given the size of the industry and the profitability of the companies involved, all these cases amounted to little more than a slap on the wrist. The gravity of the opioid crisis requires stronger action against the companies involved, as well as their executives and, in cases like the Sackler Family behind Purdue Pharma, their individual owners.

The Tainted Reverse Revolving Door

Given his own string of business controversies, it perhaps should come as no surprise that Donald Trump does not seem to worry much about the accountability track record of the companies from which he has recruited key members of his administration.

It’s well known that he chose as his Secretary of State the chief executive of environmental culprit Exxon Mobil, that he brought in a slew of people from controversial investment house Goldman Sachs, that his Treasury Secretary had operated a bank notorious for foreclosures, and that his first pick for Labor Secretary had run a fast-food company with numerous wage and hour violations.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that those were not anomalies. Research being carried out in collaboration with independent investigator Don Wiener shows that the administration also has a tendency in its second-tier White House and subcabinet appointees to select people associated with companies that have a checkered reputation.

When we initially embarked on this effort we expected to have to look into hundreds of names, primarily by checking their affiliated companies in our Violation Tracker. So far, whether by design or disorganization, the Trump Administration has announced nominees for only a few dozen of the hundreds of positions in the various departments and agencies, though things have been moving somewhat faster for White House staffers who do not require Senate confirmation. Within both of these groups there have been some questionable choices. Here are some initial examples; more will come in later posts.

Kenneth Juster and Bridgepoint Education. In February Trump chose Kenneth Juster, a partner at the private equity firm Warburg Pincus, to be Deputy Assistant to the President for International Economic Policy. Prior to his appointment Juster was a member of the board of directors of Bridgepoint Education, an operator of for-profit colleges. He was a board representative for Warburg, which was an early backer of the company and which controls one-third of the firm’s shares.

As shown in Violation Tracker, in 2016 the Consumer Financial Protection Board alleged that Bridgepoint deceived students into taking out private loans that cost more than advertised. The agency fined the company $8 million and ordered it to provide $23.5 million in relief and refunds to clients.

Michael Brown and Chesapeake Energy. Brown, an executive assistant to Energy Secretary Rick Perry, previously worked for Chesapeake Energy, the controversial fracking company based in Oklahoma. In 2013 the Environmental Protection Agency announced that a subsidiary of the company was being fined $3.2 million and would spend $6.5 million on site restoration to settle allegations that it violated the Clean Water Act through improper discharges into streams and wetlands.

Drew Maloney and Hess Corporation. Maloney, chosen to be the Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs at the Treasury Department, previously worked at the oil company Hess. In 2012 the EPA announced that Hess would pay a penalty of $850,000 and spend more than $45 million on pollution control equipment to settle Clean Air Act allegations at its refinery in New Jersey.

These are but a few examples of the what might be called the tainted reverse revolving door. The term “revolving door” is used to refer to the movement of government officials into lobbying and other private sector jobs where they exploit connections made in their public positions. The reverse revolving door is the process by which private sector people take government posts in which they are likely to promote the priorities of their previous (and likely future) employers.

Not only is Trump filling his administration with people with a business background, but he’s selecting people from some of the worst companies the private sector has to offer.

Coal Ash Taints a Would-Be Corporate Paradise

DanRiverAshPipe It took a spill of tens of millions of gallons of water contaminated with toxic coal ash into a river used as a source of drinking water to put a halt to what was starting to look like a corporate coup in North Carolina. Duke Energy, the owner of the retired Dan River power plant in the town of Eden where the accident took place in early February, is now under siege, as is the governor who was doing its bidding.

North Carolina’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) cited Duke Energy for “deficiencies” at the site of the spill and later charged the company with regulatory violations at other coal ash storage locations. DENR officials accused Duke, for instance, of deliberately pumping 61 million gallons of toxic slurry into the Cape Fear River several weeks after the Dan River accident. A federal criminal investigation that also covers DENR practices is also reported to be underway.

The actions were long overdue. Based in Charlotte, Duke is one of the largest utilities in the country, and it has long intimidated state regulators. The Charlotte Observer looked into the matter and found that over the past decade the company has been fined only four times during the past decade, paying less than $4,000.

Duke gained even more sway over the agency last year after Pat McCrory took office as governor. McCrory was Duke’s guy — not just in the sense that the company supported him — but because McCrory was a manager at Duke for three decades, including the 14 years he was also serving as the mayor of Charlotte. McCrory is one of the most egregious examples of the reverse revolving door: the movement of someone from the private sector into government.

McCrory brought his corporate sensibilities with him to the governor’s job and set out to make state government even more friendly to companies such as his long-time employer. One of the areas in which this was most pronounced was in environmental policy. With the support of far-right legislators, McCrory appointed businessman John Skvarla to head DENR with the apparent intention of defanging the agency. Agency staffers were told to focus on expediting permits rather than enforcement. As the New York Times has put it:

Current and former state regulators said the watchdog agency, once among the most aggressive in the Southeast, has been transformed under Gov. Pat McCrory into a weak sentry that plays down science, has abandoned its regulatory role and suffers from politicized decision-making.

McCrory’s apparent use of public office to advance the interests of Duke goes back more than 15 years. In 1997, while mayor of Charlotte, he testified before a Congressional committee in opposition to tougher air-quality standards that would have required Duke to install costly new emission controls at its coal-burning plants. Then he flew home on Duke’s corporate jet. The North Carolina Supreme Court once raised ethical questions about McCrory’s actions in connection with a decision by Charlotte to condemn a tract of land to help Duke Power obtain an easement.

Throughout his political career, McCrory has insisted that there was no conflict of interest between his position as a manager at a major corporation and his role as a public official. The recent coal ash controversies are stretching that dubious contention to the limit. The governor has been forced to take a more positive stance toward regulation while insisting that he has not had direct communications with his former employer about its coal ash problems. The new image took a hit when it came out that the lawyer hired by DENR to represent it in the federal criminal investigation once represented Duke. Echoing McCrory’s frequent refrain about himself, an agency spokesperson insisted that this was absolutely no conflict of interest.

The coal ash spills have created a serious health problem for the people of North Carolina, but they have also served the useful purpose of debunking the corporate paradise that McCrory and his allies have tried to create. Along with the remarkable Moral Monday protests against the retrograde policies adopted by the state legislature, the new awareness of environmental carelessness on the part of companies like Duke is making it more difficult for business interest to masquerade as the public interest.

Where the Revolving Door Spins Fastest

The movement of federal officials through the revolving door into lucrative private-sector positions is a well-known story, but a new report by the Government Accountability Office provides some quantification of the phenomenon and names companies that are most frequently involved.

GAO focused its research on the Defense Department, which seems hell-bent on outsourcing as many of its functions as possible, thereby intensifying the desire of contractors to hire ex-officials with the right contacts. The agency found that in 2006, 52 major contractors were employing a total of 86,181 individuals who had left military or civilian positions with DOD since 2001.

Special attention was paid to those individuals whose former positions made them subject to the limited restrictions on post-government activity that exist in federal law. GAO found that, as of 2006, the 52 companies employed “2,435 former DOD senior and acquisition officials who had previously served as generals, admirals, senior executives, program managers, contracting officers, or in other acquisition positions” to which the rules apply.

Not surprisingly, GAO found that the companies employing the largest number of former DOD senior and acquisition officials are the top military contractors, especially the following seven:

– Science Applications Intl. Corp. (263 former key officials employed)
– Northrop Grumman (260)
– Booz Allen Hamilton (243)
– L-3 Communications (241)
– Lockheed Martin (221)
– General Dynamics (207)
– Raytheon (146)

(Booz Allen has announced it is selling its federal business.)

Together, these seven employed 1,581 former key DOD officials, or 65 percent of the total found by GAO. The report notes that the numbers reported to GAO by the contractors themselves substantially understated the former DOD officials on their payrolls. GAO got more accurate figures by checking confidential Internal Revenue Service data.

GAO also helpfully notes that the seven top employers of former officials received DOD contract awards worth some $61 billion in fiscal year 2005. With that amount of money at stake, it is no wonder that the companies like to invest in the revolving door.

For an overview of revolving-door issues, see the 2005 report of the Revolving Door Working Group (in which yours truly wrote the section on the reverse revolving door—the movement of lobbyists and corporate executives from the private sector to public positions). Also see the revolving-door section of the Open Secrets database.