Postemployment Ban Prompts Staff To Sort Into Lower-Paid Jobs

Why This Matters

Elisa Wirsching investigates whether postemployment ethics rules actually slow the “revolving door” between Congress and K Street or simply reshape staff behavior to preserve lobbying careers. The study speaks to broader debates about how institutional rules affect incentives for nonelected public officials and why many ethics reforms appear to underperform.

What the Rule Did

The 2007 Honest Leadership and Open Government Act (HLOGA) introduced a specific postemployment restriction: staffers who become lobbyists and earn at least 75% of a member of Congress’s salary were barred from contacting their former employers in Congress for one year. That earnings threshold created a clear compliance margin that staff could potentially respond to strategically.

Data and Methods

Using the full roster of congressional staff from 2001–2016, Wirsching leverages panel-data approaches to track how staff salaries and career transitions changed after HLOGA. The analysis compares pre- and post-reform patterns in pay and career outcomes, and examines who becomes a lobbyist and what early-career revenues those new lobbyists capture.

Key Findings

• After HLOGA, congressional staff disproportionately moved into jobs with pay below the 75% salary threshold—evidence of sorting to avoid the rule’s coverage.
• Those who “selected out” of the regulation (by keeping earnings below the cutoff) were more likely to become lobbyists than similar staff who did not.
• Staff who avoided the rule also secured a substantial revenue premium at the start of their lobbying careers, indicating that the strategic sorting preserved lucrative post-Congress opportunities.

What This Means for Reform

These results explain one mechanism behind persistent revolving-door flows: when rules hinge on earnings cutoffs, affected workers can and do adjust employment choices to retain access to lucrative private-sector roles. Policymakers designing postemployment restrictions should account for behavioral responses to thresholds and consider alternative rule designs or enforcement strategies if the goal is to materially reduce access between government and lobbying careers.