By Kristi Eaton for The Daily Yonder.
Broadcast version by Eric Tegethoff for Big Sky Connection for the Public News Service/Daily Yonder Collaboration

The U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) recently announced a dozen grants for rural communities, and strategists within the Democratic Party say it’s one way the Biden-Harris Administration is getting out a message to rural voters. 

The grants were announced in a press release just before Christmas. The release touted how the 12 projects would improve and expand transportation infrastructure in rural communities across the United States. 

“Infrastructure investments haven’t always reached rural America, leaving far too many roads, bridges, and other parts of the transportation system across our country in disrepair,” said U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg in the release. “Today’s announcement is one of many ways this administration is delivering the investments that rural communities have gone without for far too long, modernizing transportation, creating economic opportunity, and making life better for millions of people.”

The release said that due to decades of disinvestment, around 13% of rural roads and 10% of off-system bridges, most of which are in rural areas, are in poor condition. The fatality rate on rural roads is also two times greater than on urban roads.

One of the projects is a Bureau of Indian Affairs Route 7 Regional Improvement Project in Todd County, South Dakota. In Todd County — which is completely within the borders of the Rosebud Indian Reservation – USDOT is investing $26.2 million in the reconstruction of approximately 24 miles of roadway stretching from US Route 18 to US Route 83.

The project aims to provide improved access for Tribal residents to the town of Rosebud and the essential services located there, including healthcare centers, employment opportunities, and educational facilities.

Another one is the West Reserve Drive Improvements Project in Kalispell, Montana. In the city of Kalispell, Montana – a gateway to Glacier National Park – USDOT is investing $25 million in pedestrian and road safety and economic mobility.

The project will make needed improvements along West Reserve Drive including the addition of a center turn lane, new landscaped boulevards with a shared-use path and sidewalks to separate pedestrians and cyclists from motor vehicle traffic, and a redesign of the Hutton Ranch Road and Whitefish Stage Road intersections that will reduce congestion and improve access to nearby educational facilities, job opportunities, retail shops, and recreation areas for local residents.

Democratic strategists say the announcement helps Democrats get their message out to rural individuals and families that transportation infrastructure is important. 

“In Montana, they drive for a long distance for basketball games, football games between the Bobcats and Grizzlies,” Bob Lombardi, who has worked for Senators Max Baucus and Jon Tester, both from Montana, told the Daily Yonder. “So people know how important it is, especially in rural areas. And just when we had a … cold snap, it was hugely important to make sure those roads were open not only for Montanans to shop but also for utility workers.”

It’s important for the Biden Administration to let people know what’s going on in their communities, he added.

“And these are good paying jobs that are coming to your community,” Lombardi said. 

Teresa Purcell, who was senior advisor for Rural Engagement for the Democratic Party during the recent midterm elections, told the Daily Yonder that it’s important for the Biden-Harris Administration to showcase the “transformational investments in rural America” taking place.

“I think it’s important, and also very necessary for these departments to be talking about these grants,” she said. “It’s also very important for folks to make sure that we’re getting those resources to the ground.”

She added it’s important to have local people telling the story and amplifying the work being done. 

In some cases, she said, elected officials may not be applying for the grants, so it’s important to showcase the grants in order for people to know they are available, awarded and being utilized. 

“It’s not just as simple as the Department of Transportation announcing these grants, which is a great thing,” she said. “But it’s also, ‘How are we making sure that those grants are hitting the ground?’ How are we making sure that, frankly, the county commissioners and elected officials who are choosing not to apply for those grants are held accountable to turning away money that will actually help their communities thrive? How are we making sure that after they do everything they can to keep those resources from coming into the community? They’re not at the ribbon cutting, taking credit.”

It’s important to listen to the communities, she added. For example, mass transit might be a hot topic, but in some areas, getting gravel on the ground is more important than talking about mass transit options, she said. 

“We need to make sure that people are really listening to the needs of the community because that is often missing.”

The future looks promising for green energy and manufacturing in Appalachia, and states like West Virginia are slated to receive around $1 billion in federal investment since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, according to experts at ReImagine Appalachia's virtual strategy summit held earlier this week.

A Reimagine Appalachia report has found West Virginia and other Appalachian states are home to a higher-than-average share of manufacturing employment.

Jacob Hannah, CEO of Huntington-based nonprofit Coalfield Development, explained large manufacturing facilities are moving into the state, bringing new local jobs along with them.

"They're focused on localizing energy production at their sites," Hannah pointed out. "Because they consume a lot of energy and they're focused on workforce development because they need to hire a lot of folks and train a lot of folks."

Last year the Biden administration announced $475 million for projects in West Virginia and other states to boost clean energy development on current and former mine land. The funds will be used in Nicholas County to repurpose two former coal mines with utility-scale solar infrastructure, to power around 39,000 homes and create hundreds of construction jobs.

Solar development on degraded land and brownfields is expected to increase, along with use of residential solar. West Virginia's Office of Energy received $106 million last year from the Environmental Protection Agency's Solar for All
program to install solar panels on homes and reduce utility costs for low-income residents.

Mustafa Santiago Ali, executive vice president of the National Wildlife Federation, said continued federal investment is needed to help Appalachian residents build in healthy and thriving communities.

"We need to ensure communities without clean air and water, especially those suffering disproportionate environmental burdens from years of disinvestment and legacy pollution, get the funding and support that they need," Santiago Ali urged.

Green industries manufacturing alternatives to plastic including biodegradable and mycelium-based products are also on the horizon as potential regional economic drivers.


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Experts agree climate-smart agriculture will be critical in the fight against climate change. But with a divided Congress and no update to the Farm Bill since 2018, those who support New Mexico farmers are worried.

Sayrah Namaste, program co-director for the American Friends Service Committee, regularly meets with farmers who provide food to local schools. She said many tell her their mitigation efforts are outpaced and unlike the old days, they cannot ask experienced farmers for advice about such things as the best date to plant crops or when to expect the first frost.

"It's accelerating so fast that it's hard to even keep up with what they need to do," Namaste pointed out. "You know, it used to be you had guideposts, you had dates and it's not anymore. The climate is so chaotic that it's very hard to know, and that's just not happened for generations of farmers."

Congress was scheduled to update the 2018 Farm Bill in 2023, but a failure to agree on what's included delayed it to 2024 and now, again until next September. In addition to crop insurance, farm subsidies and U.S. Department of Agriculture conservation programs, the enormous farm bill includes the federal food stamp program, animal health, disaster preparedness and more.

Namaste noted to cope with climate change, New Mexico farmers plant a diversity of crops and sequence them to make sure they have at least one successful crop if others fail. She added the American Friends Service Committee will encourage lawmakers to support small-scale sustainable farms to give those who grow food a fighting chance.

"Record-breaking heat for weeks, or the largest wildlife in New Mexico history, or a drought that's the biggest in a century," Namaste outlined. "Those are really hard odds for farmers to be up against."

In 2022, New Mexico experienced its largest and most destructive wildfire in the state's history. Climate scientists recently confirmed 2024 was the hottest year on record, with damages from U.S. weather disasters estimated at more than $1 billion.

By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Mark Moran for Iowa News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

The revolving door isn’t just something you get stuck in while attempting to enter a hotel. It’s also a political phenomenon that creates all sorts of conflicts of interest throughout the American government. While not illegal, the revolving door is certainly unsavory, and even has deep impacts on the food we eat.

“Revolving door” refers to a cycle in which individuals alternate between working in the private sector and serving in the government as regulators of that sector; in this context, “regulator” can mean an employee of a regulatory agency, a lawmaker or any public official who plays some role in regulatory policy.

“Whether you are moving from the public sector to industry, or vice versa, there are incentives to look after your future self,” Silvia Secchi, professor and researcher at the University of Iowa’s Public Policy Center, tells Sentient. “You could be more lenient on the private sector in the way you implement regulations, or the way you assess fines in your regulatory capacity, because you think that’s going to help you in the future.”

The revolving door is usually a bidirectional, ongoing process, but it can also simply be a one-time switch from one sector to another.

Why Is the Revolving Door a Problem?

The revolving door gives industries an outsized, and sometimes even dominant, role in shaping the laws and regulations to which they are subject. In the worst-case scenarios, it can lead to something called regulatory capture — when an industry succeeds in fully co-opting the agency that regulates it.

Somebody who worked as a regulator has detailed insider knowledge of how the regulatory process works, loopholes and all. This knowledge is very useful for businesses seeking to avoid regulation, which gives heavily regulated industries a strong incentive to hire former regulators.

Meanwhile, the revolving door incentivizes lawmakers and regulators to implement industry-friendly policies while in government, as this can lead to well-paid jobs in those same industries after leaving government. These same folks might also be hesitant to enact regulations that would significantly disturb those industries, lest they jeopardize their employment prospects after leaving government.

“Basically, you remain friendly to industry,” Secchi says of those who move through the revolving door. “Not necessarily to one specific entity in the industry, but to industry as a whole. Which means that you remain marketable once you leave the administration, or once you leave government writ large.”

Corruption From the Revolving Door Can Be Hard to Trace

In one sense, the revolving door process unfolds transparently; hirings are usually a matter of public record, and are often announced eagerly in press releases. Even when they’re not, it’s easy enough to look at an official’s LinkedIn page and trace their employment history.

In another sense, though, the process is extremely opaque. Hirings may be public record, but the conversations and decisionmaking that results from those hirings are not. They take place behind closed doors, and usually stay that way; regulators generally don’t come out and say, “I’ve implemented weaker chemical regulations than I otherwise would have, because I want to get hired by a chemicals company after I leave government.”

As a result, it can be difficult to trace a precise path of causation from a revolving door hire to a specific public policy. But there are plenty of revolving door situations that, if nothing else, look mighty suspicious.

Revolving Door Case Study #1: School Lunches

Every five years, the USDA and HHS jointly publish updates to the Dietary Guidelines For Americans (DGA), a lengthy document of nutritional recommendations that influences wide swaths of public food policy. One such policy is the national school lunches program; by law, menu offerings in school lunches must adhere to the DGA’s recommendations.

In 2015, when it was time for the DGA to be updated, the committee that drafts the document recommended that the next version take planetary health, as well as personal health, into consideration. This would have been a radical change, and because plant-based foods are almost uniformly better for the environment than animal-based ones, it would almost certainly have resulted in plants comprising a much larger portion of school lunches than they do now.

But before the next version of the DGA could be published, Congress passed an appropriations bill stating that the DGA’s recommendations must be “solely nutritional and dietary in nature.” This effectively forbade the USDA and HHS from taking environmental factors into concern when drafting the new DGA, and so they didn’t.

Why did Congress squash the environmentally focused DGA? It’s impossible to know for certain, but it’s also impossible to ignore who was passing through the revolving door as this whole episode was playing out.

In the beginning of 2015, Sen. Pat Roberts hired a load of new staffers to run the Senate Agriculture Committee, which he headed. This committee would go on to draft the appropriations bill that restrained the DGA — and Roberts stacked it with food industry lobbyists.

As chief of staff, Roberts hired Joel Leftwich, a senior lobbyist for PepsiCo who’s passed through the revolving door many, many times. The new head of livestock and food safety issues on the committee was Chelsie Keys, a lobbyist for the National Pork Producers Council. Other new committee staffers included Julian Baer, a longtime food industry lobbyist, and Matt Erickson, formerly a lawyer for the American Farm Bureau.

If the DGA had been updated to include environmental concerns, it would have hurt the bottom lines of both PepsiCo, which has been sued for pollution by multiple state and local governments, and the pork industry, which has a strong presence in school lunches.

We’ll probably never know for certain if the Senate staffers who used to work for Pepsi and Big Pork played a role in killing a policy that would have hurt Pepsi and Big Pork. But they were certainly in a position to do so, and had an incentive to as well. They had, as Sherlock Holmes might put it, both motive and opportunity.

Revolving Door Case Study #2: Tom Vilsack

A classic case of a “revolver,” as the nonprofit information site Open Secrets likes to refer to them, is outgoing USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack.

Vilsack served two terms as Iowa governor, briefly worked as a lobbyist, and was then appointed by President Obama to head the USDA. After eight years as Secretary of Agriculture, Vilsack left government to work for the dairy industry, becoming vice president of Dairy Management, Inc (DMI) and CEO of the U.S. Dairy Export Council, one of DMI’s subsidiaries.

These are just two of many interrelated trade organizations that exist to bolster the U.S. dairy industry and promote the interests of American dairy farmers. In his dual positions as vice president and CEO, Vilsack earned a salary of nearly $1 million, according to public records — more than four times what he made as a public official.

In 2021, Vilsack returned to the public sector, serving as Secretary of Agriculture under President Biden.

What sorts of policies were impacted by Vilsack’s movement through the revolving door? Secchi tells Sentient that it’s not a matter of “a specific policy that will favor one specific industry,” but rather, the fact that Vilsack “has always been incredibly friendly to Big Ag, of which Big Dairy is a manifestation.”

But Secchi does point out that, when the time came for the USDA to distribute Inflation Reduction Act funds to “climate-smart” initiatives, Vilsack opted to send much of the money to powerful, well-established organizations in the agriculture sector.

“He gave money to Tyson, he gave money to the National Pork Board, he gave money to Land O’ Lakes,” Secchi says. “If you look at the beneficiaries of that money, they are largely conventional, large scale entities.”

So, after making millions working for Big Ag in the private sector, Vilsack returned to the federal government and gave millions to Big Ag. He did so under the auspices of the USDA’s climate-smart program; the fact that beef, pork and butter production are nowhere near “climate-smart” is the icing on the cake.

Revolving Door Case Study #3: Pesticide Regulation at the EPA

The EPA’s pesticide division offers another helpful, if discouraging, example of the revolving door at work.

Jim Jones (no relationship to the cult leader) is a former pesticide regulator. He worked at the EPA for 20 years in a number of capacities, including Director of the Office of Pesticide Programs (OPP) and Deputy Assistant Administrator for the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention (OCSPP).

During his tenure, a chemical company called Vive Crop Protection requested EPA approval for an insecticide containing bifenthrin, a Class C carcinogen. Normally, such approval would require extensive inhalation testing; however, the OPP waived that requirement, according to a report in the Intercept, and approved the insecticide.

After leaving the EPA, Jones joined the board of directors at Vive Crop Protection. In 2017, he became executive vice president of the Household and Commercial Products Association; while there, he boasted of the organization’s “strong and mutually respectful relationship with the EPA [which] continues to give members direct access to officials at every pertinent level of the agency,” according to the Intercept.

In 2023, Jones returned to the public sector to serve as Deputy Commissioner for Human Foods at the FDA, where he remains to this day.

Jones is not an anomaly. Since 1974, the OPP has had nine directors; two went into retirement immediately after departing the EPA, but the other seven all went on to work for the pesticide industry after leaving their positions as regulators. Other EPA officials have gone on to work for Monsanto, Scotts Miracle-Gro and DuPont.

As of 2019, 72 pesticides that had been banned in the European Union were still legal in America.

The Revolving Door Leads to Consolidation and Deregulation

The revolving door does more than just influence individual policies here and there, Secchi says. It’s also created a culture in government in which regulators are encouraged not to crack down too hard on the industries they’re regulating.

“It’s not necessarily a direct, simple connection between one individual, one industry and one job,” Secchi tells Sentient. “It’s more like a whole culture of, you know, patting ourselves on the back, and not enacting policies that may question the primacy and the overall approach of conventional agriculture.”

The revolving door also intersects with a trend in the agriculture industry known as consolidation. This is when larger producers and conglomerates buy smaller companies or put them out of business en masse, resulting in less competition, fewer farms, and more power and money in the hands of the richest agricultural producers.

“In the 1950s, there was still a sizable population that was engaged in agriculture,” Secchi explains. “The number of farms was much larger, the number of farmers was much larger. But now there are very, very few farmers.”

Consolidation both reduces the total number of people working in agriculture and ensures that the largest agribusinesses increasingly dominate the sector. As a result, when people like Vilsack implement policies that benefit “the agriculture sector,” they’re really implementing policies that benefit a tiny minority of wealthy Americans.

“[Agriculture policy] has become more and more separated from the realities of the majority of American people, and the issues that are relevant to American people,” Secchi says. “And so I would say it’s become a much bigger problem, because the rent-seeking industry has become much more potent, and much less representative of social values and interests.”

The Bottom Line

There’s no clear solution to the revolving door problem. Sure, lawmakers could pass laws to crack down on it — but lawmakers are among those who benefit from revolving door politics, so why would they? It’s not a surprise that legislative efforts to close the revolving door have all gone absolutely nowhere.

“I think it’s a real problem for this country that there is this bipartisan support for an obviously rent-seeking minority, very wealthy and very well connected, and through things like the revolving door door process, very capable of influencing the public decision making process,” Secchi says. “Big Ag now represents the interests of a very, very, very small minority of people, and causes a lot of problems for the rest of us.”


Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.


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