GovExec Daily: Congress and Investment in Defense Firms

The Defense Department is the largest and most funded agency in the federal government. Its budget is measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars and some of the publicly-traded firms with which the Pentagon contracts have market caps over 100 billion dollars. The ethics around this come into play when  members of congress who control the Defense budget legislation also own stocks in the very publicly-traded companies that may benefit from that Pentagon budget.

Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette is a Government Affairs Manager at the Project on Government Oversight and Nathan Siegel is an intern at POGO. They are also co-authors on a piece on the POGO site right now headlined “Representatives are Too Invested in Defense Contractors.” They joined the podcast to discuss their post and conflicts of interest in Congress.

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