A Trump Executive Order and the Iron Triangle
One of the orders that President Trump signed when he first took office (which he revoked on his way out the door) required “executive branch appointees to sign a pledge that they would never work as registered foreign lobbyists, and it banned them from lobbying the federal agencies where they worked for five years after leaving the government.” I got the info from the Washington Post article linked below.
Why is this executive order important? It’s related to something I learned about in my entry-level college politics course called the iron triangle. The iron triangle is the connections that tend to form between interest groups for an industry, the congressional committees that write laws regulating the industry, and the bureaucrats who implement those laws. Bureaucrats and congressional staffers who become lobbyists have a questionable advantage in their new position because they have insider knowledge of people and systems in government that can help the groups they represent achieve their goals.
The iron triangle is an example of the “swamp” that Trump promised to drain, so it’s significant that he issued this executive order at the start of his presidency and then revoked it at the end. Everyone will make of it what they will, I suppose.
Resources
Kollman, Ken. The American Political System. 3rd ed., W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2017.
