A headhunter firm is putting out the word that if you are a fancy Wall Street investment banker, the Pentagon is open for business. Literally.
Yes, the Pentagon wants you, Richie Rich, to come to work for Uncle Sam. Sure, it’s probably a pay cut, but what if a small temporary pay cut bought you incredible future political access? Because that’s what is on offer here.
If one of these aspiring master-of-the-universe types decides to join the 30-person investment team at the Pentagon, they get to play with house money—aka up to $200 billion in your tax dollars over the next three years.
But the deal sweetener here is that the Pentagon gig gets you “unmatched access to top-level government officials and privileged information flow—whatever you need, you can get,” in the words of the headhunting firm’s slide deck, which was viewed by The New York Times.
Sorry, was that too subtle? How about this part of the pitch?
“If you ever want to raise your own fund, you will gain access to fund-raising channels that include royal families and foreign sovereign contacts,” the slide deck continued.
You see, there’s no intention that any of these people would stay at the Pentagon. Instead, the pitch says that this is “not a career move, but a two-to-three-year secondment program.”
While these investment bankers are in their temp gigs, they get the opportunity to “serve” their country by playing with “more capital than most investors deploy in their entire careers,” per the slide deck.
The rough translation seems to be that investment bankers should come work for the government for a few years only, and while there, the government will facilitate their connections to foreign sovereign wealth that they can then take back to the private sector. Everybody wins.
Well, not us. But definitely those folks.
This pitch is targeting those who work at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, and Bank of America. Any lucky duckies who take the government up on this will get to advance their career under the direction of Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg, the billionaire co-founder of an investment banking firm.
Did Feinberg have any defense industry or military background that made him qualified for a high-level job at the DOD? Well, he participated in ROTC in college, though he bailed before graduating—does that count?
So Feinberg, an investment banker LARPing as a defense official, will soon steer a team of 30 investment bankers who will also LARP as Pentagon employees, but really, they’re all just doing investment banking. It’s distressingly similar to “Detachment 201,” the 2025 Army initiative in which four tech executives got to LARP as part-time senior advisers in the Army Reserve, no pesky quitting their day jobs required.
The investment-banker push is because Trump really wants a sovereign wealth fund, just like his big overseas billionaire dictator pals. Sure, the whole issue with sovereign wealth funds is that they are vehicles for corruption and malfeasance, but for Trump, that’s a feature, not a bug.
Listen, if America had a sovereign wealth fund, it could do things like give the son-in-law of a world leader $2 billion for his private equity firm. Or it could use $2 billion worth of a world leader’s private family company’s stablecoins, whatever on earth that means. The possibilities are endless!
In return, the bankers who come aboard this corrupt nightmare apparently get the opportunity for some transnational corruption on steroids, with the United States government helpfully paving the way. And when they return to Wall Street in just a few years? They’re more than set for life.
Who says public-private partnerships aren’t great?
Lisa Needham March 16, 2026 at 01:30PM From Daily Kos
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