> Is it really so weird that a company would hire someone with intimate knowledge of a system in order to help navigate that system? This type of hiring occurs

> Is it really so weird that a company would hire someone with intimate knowledge of a system in order to help navigate that system? This type of hiring occurs all the time, it literally has a name in the tech community - "acquihire". Do you find acquihires just as distasteful and filled with conflicts of interest? I think most people would find an acquihire of public resources into private hands distasteful for obvious reasons. In the tech community the conflict of interest is the point, in the public sector its the problem. The gist of it is this: we've come up with this notion (right or wrong) that we've created institutions that are somehow for the public good. It thus upsets us when they behave like institutions that operate like those that generate profit. Furthermore, one could argue that since all of government functions on the premise that it exists to serve its population, it gets certain lenience that the profit corporations do not: monopolistic protections and legal protections. That is to say, there are not multiple competing forest agencies, and not just coincidentally, but by design. So of course it is WORSE when the forest agency is "bought out": we don't even have the opportunity to make a competitor to keep it on its toes. In fact, these institutions are often protected from being sued.