Revolving Door

Poppy Gustafsson resigned as UK Minister of State for Investment on September 5, 2025, the same day as Deputy PM Angela Rayner. Official reason cited was family-work balance conflicts, though speculation suggested frustration with slow government decision-making pace.

Bloomberg reported that more than a dozen people with ties to Peter Thiel and Founders Fund were placed in the Trump administration in 2025. These include Founders Fund partner Trae Stephens (considered for Deputy Secretary of Defense), Anduril executive Colin Carroll (Chief of Staff at DoD), Palantir engineer Clark Minor (CIO at HHS), and David Sacks (White House AI and Crypto Czar). ProPublica reported that GSA fast-tracked a contract process favoring Ramp, a Founders Fund portfolio company invested in across seven rounds. The revolving door between Founders Fund's network and the administration raises conflicts of interest as portfolio companies stand to benefit from government contracts influenced by these appointees.

Meta spent a record $24.4 million on lobbying in 2024, a 27% increase from 2023 and the most the company has spent since it began federal lobbying in 2009. The effort was powered by 65 lobbyists — one for every eight members of Congress. Combined, Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft spent nearly $69 million lobbying the federal government in 2022 alone.

In 2023, Palantir was awarded a seven-year £330M contract with NHS England to build a Federated Data Platform, centralizing patient data from up to 240 NHS trusts and integrated care systems. Critics raised concerns about a surveillance-focused company managing sensitive health data, including mental health records, cancer screening, and STI vaccination data. The Department of Health data showed over 300 different purposes for processing information had been created. A former NHS AI lab director who had pledged to close the COVID datastore later left to join Palantir, raising revolving-door concerns.

In 2023, ahead of its landmark DOJ antitrust trial, Google increased federal lobbying spending to a record $17.4 million. Analysis by OpenSecrets found that 87% of Google's registered lobbyists were former government employees, creating extensive revolving-door connections between the tech giant and the agencies regulating it. Google's lobbying army included former officials from DOJ, FTC, FCC, and congressional staff.

From mid-2023 through 2024, Mistral AI conducted an aggressive lobbying campaign against EU AI Act provisions. The campaign was led by co-founder Cédric O, France's former Secretary of State for Digital Affairs, who joined Mistral in spring 2023 and immediately began lobbying his former government colleagues. O's initial €176 investment grew to approximately €23 million while he lobbied for exemptions that would directly benefit the company - a conflict he did not publicly disclose. Meanwhile, Mistral argued that strict regulation would force European companies to partner with US tech giants, while secretly negotiating a deal with Microsoft that was announced in February 2024. The campaign succeeded: the final AI Act gave broad exemptions to open-source models and general-purpose AI, with only minimal transparency obligations. Fundamental rights checks were removed, and foundation model requirements were significantly weakened.

Analysis by Issue One and Public Citizen found that 85% of Meta's registered federal lobbyists were former government employees as the company faced FTC antitrust litigation. Meta's D.C. lobbying operation expanded significantly during 2023-2024, hiring former officials from DOJ, FTC, and congressional staff. This pattern of revolving-door hiring was part of a broader tech industry trend where 75% of FTC officials had corporate conflicts of interest.

Tech Transparency Project documented that Google hired 197 former US government officials since 2005, including from the FTC, FCC, and State Department. During the Obama administration alone, there were 23 revolving door moves between Google and the State Department. Google or its main law firms hired several people from the FTC, an agency that conducted investigations into Google's privacy and antitrust conduct. Two-thirds of FTC commissioners over the past two decades had revolving door conflicts with Big Tech.

NHS Digital chief Juliet Bauer praised Kry in a newspaper article before publicly announcing she had accepted a job at the company. MP Meg Hillier raised concerns about transparency and potential conflicts of interest regarding the timing of the praise and subsequent employment announcement.

Rebellion Defense was founded in 2019 by Chris Lynch, Nicole Camarillo, and Oliver Lewis. Co-founder Nicole Camarillo co-founded Rebellion while still working at the Pentagon, with a pitch deck touting her 'present leadership role in U.S. Army Cyber Command.' Board member Eric Schmidt chaired the National Security Commission on AI (2016-2021) while personally investing over $2 billion in AI startups. Two Rebellion officials served on Biden's transition team, and the company hired White House tech director David Recordon as CTO. Ethics fellow Walter Shaub called Schmidt's dual role 'absolutely a conflict of interest.'

In October 2018, Meta (then Facebook) hired Nick Clegg, who served as UK Deputy Prime Minister from 2010-2015, as VP of Global Affairs and Communications. He was promoted to President of Global Affairs in 2022, earning a reported £2.7 million annual salary. Clegg departed in late 2024 ahead of Trump's inauguration, replaced by prominent Republican Joel Kaplan, reflecting Meta's strategic approach to regulatory and political relationships.