Another Trump administration staffer at the Department of the Interior has begun working for a gas and oil company after leaving the government agency.
Joe Balash, who was the department’s assistant secretary for land and minerals management before he resigned two weeks ago, now works for Oil Search, an oil and gas development company, the Washington Post reported.. While he was working for the Interior, Balash pushed for oil drilling on federal lands.
Balash’s new career move follows a similar pattern to that of other former Trump officials who have left the administration for the private sector.
Vincent DeVito, who served as counselor to the secretary for energy policy, is now the executive vice president and general counsel of Cox Oil.
And embattled ex-EPA chief Scott Pruitt became a lobbyist for Sunrise Coal after his ouster from the Interior in 2018.
I’d resign too.
Looks like even right wingers with next to no ethics are bailing on trump.
After reading the 1619 collection of articles on our institutional inheritance, it may be wishful thinking that we could get to some sort of normal cooling off period as officials move across the public-private-sector barrier. We know how much a fresh official out of a department regulating your company is worth, and we know roughly the rate at which that decays. The danger of such moves is that the private company can elicit compromised behavior while the official is in public office and then simply give out a salaried post as a plum for sabotaging the public instution’s enforcement mechanisms or rule-making.
Don’t worry, all of that is a crime. People do go to prison over it - - probably the most famous one was the woman who steered a massive contract to Boeing, then went to work for them.
And then went to prison.
He may be safe now, but only until the Trump Administration is over.
This is going to take a looong time to clean up. And yes, I’m being optimistic.