Research: What the Data Shows — Discovered Groupings in the Ratchet Dataset
Run 551 people, 487 institutions and 1,247 sourced career edges through centrality and co-occurrence counts and the patterns nobody hand-picked fall out: Kissinger at the center, the White House as the real bridge desk, a five-person surveillance core, and the AI founders and AI regulators as one revolving cohort. With the findings that did not survive the count.
Contents
The people graph itself is browsable on the Revolving Door explorer. The narrative pages built on it: Watching the Watchers, The Trust & Safety Pipelines and The EA to AI-Safety Funding Pipeline.
What this is. The Ratchet dataset records people, the institutions they passed through, and the documented edge between them, each person carried on at least two sources. Every person is tagged with plays (a career pattern: Wall Street → Treasury → Wall Street, say) and actors (the mechanism the person worked on: mass collection, content flagging, AI governance). The curated clusters were drawn by hand. This page reports what falls out when the whole dataset is counted instead: centrality, co-occurrence and small surprising overlaps. Snapshot: 551 people, 487 institutions, 1,247 edges (October 14, 2026).
Every finding here is a count of documented co-memberships and career moves. Moving between government and industry is lawful and common. A shared seat is not evidence of coordination, and nothing on this page claims it.
The vocabulary
Plays (career patterns): Pulpit, CFR → State → think tank; Pipeline, tech executive → policy or regulator → tech; Cousin, sustained Bilderberg, WEF or Trilateral attendance while in senior office; Bar, senior DOJ officer → large-firm partnership → senior DOJ or judicial office; Acquisition, a chief executive who buys into a cabinet seat; Bretton Woods, IMF or World Bank → finance or regulator role; Backstop, defense → defense-contractor board → defense; Cycle, Trilateral → senior administration role → think tank; Ward, health regulator → pharmaceutical or payer industry → regulator; Vault, Wall Street → Treasury → Wall Street.
Actors (mechanisms): Tap, signals-intelligence mass collection; Watchers, bulk metadata programs (Section 215, 702, PRISM); Backdoor, encryption mandates and lawful intercept; Flagging, coordinated content flagging toward platforms; Blueprint, AI governance; Model, facial recognition and biometric surveillance; Papers, digital identity; Money, payment-system control; Embassy and Eagle, foreign policy posture and extraterritorial enforcement; Hospital, global health governance.
1. The largest club is the narrowest one
| Institution | People | Where those people come from |
|---|---|---|
| Council on Foreign Relations | 88 | government 57, intelligence 10, IMF/multilateral 7, finance 5, defense 5, other 4 |
| White House | 50 | government 25, think tanks 12, tech 6, judiciary 2, finance 2, other 3 |
| State Department | 45 | government 34, think tanks 3, other 8 |
| Department of Defense | 45 | defense 21, government 12, intelligence 7, think tanks 3, tech 2 |
The Council on Foreign Relations is edged to more people than any other institution (the Council publishes its membership roster), but 65 percent of them come from a single sector. It is a large, dense, homogeneous membership club. The White House, with fewer people, draws from eight sectors with none past half: it is the actual bridge. The CIA is the opposite extreme, 19 of its 24 edges from intelligence.
Rotation happens at the desk, not the club. The institutions that touch the most different sectors are the ones people rotate through; the membership organizations are where the people who already rotated meet.
2. Kissinger is the most connected person, by a wide margin
Henry Kissinger has 12 institutional edges. Next: Summers (9), Paulson (8), Mark Carney (8), Zoellick (7), Eric Schmidt (7), Rice (6), Stanley Fischer (6). Measured by the number of sectors a person spans, Kissinger and Summers tie at six, and Kissinger’s six include both a Chinese state forum (Boao) and a Russian one (Valdai). The dataset shows numerically what the historical record already says: the American foreign- policy dean was also a repeat engagement partner of both rival states’ forums.
3. Surveillance is a trinity, and its core is five people
28 people carry both tap and watchers: mass signals collection and bulk metadata. That is the largest actor overlap in the data, more than twice the next (embassy + eagle, 13). The cohort runs across administrations: the legal authors (Yoo, Addington, Bybee), the cabinet-level enablers (Cheney, Wolfowitz, Bolton), and the intelligence and FBI directors (Hayden, Clapper, Brennan, Petraeus, Comey, Mueller, Wray, Keith Alexander). It is a 25-year continuity cohort, not a partisan one.
Add backdoor (encryption mandates) and the 28 drop to exactly five: Cheney, Hayden, Keith Alexander, Yoo and Addington. The architectural team of the post-2001 surveillance state, in one query.
4. The AI founders and the AI regulators are one revolving cohort
The sharpest small cohorts in the data are now in AI:
- Pipeline × Blueprint — 12: Schmidt, Andreessen, Hoffman, Altman, Hassabis, Suleyman, Amodei, Musk, Sacks, Palmer Luckey, Arati Prabhakar, Shyam Sankar.
- Pipeline × Model — 11: Schmidt, Thiel, Hassabis, Lonsdale, Luckey, Gina Raimondo, Sriram Krishnan, Prabhakar, Trae Stephens, Regina Dugan, Sankar.
- Pipeline × Flagging — 12: Schmidt, Sandberg, Stamos, James Baker, Bickert, Joel Kaplan, Kent Walker, Yoel Roth, Alex Stone, Savannah Badalich, Nathaniel Gleicher, Chris Krebs. The people who moved between government and the platforms are the people who wrote and ran the takedown rules (the full account is The Trust & Safety Pipelines).
Eric Schmidt is in all three. And OpenAI is now edged to 27 people, more than the CIA (24), the Treasury (22) or Bilderberg (22). Two caveats: part of that measures where records were added (the AI policy cohort was a deliberate recent expansion), and the claim is that the AI apparatus sustains a dense, well-sourced personnel graph on the same two-source standard, not that it has overtaken the intelligence community.
5. The two new revolvers
Two career patterns had no name, so people executing them were misfiled. Both now have one.
- Bar (28 people): the DOJ-to-BigLaw-to-DOJ legal revolver. Wray, Mueller, Holder, Barr, Yates, Rosenstein, Lynch, Gorelick, Bharara; solicitors general and acting solicitors general Olson, Verrilli, Francisco, Katyal, Clement and Waxman; White House counsel McGahn, Cipollone, Bauer, Ruemmler and Flood; Justices Roberts and Gorsuch. The shape in one record: Noel Francisco was “a partner in the Washington, DC office of Jones Day” before he was “sworn in as the 47th Solicitor General of the United States on September 19, 2017” (DOJ, Office of the Solicitor General). Where it meets surveillance and flagging, it meets at the FBI director’s desk: bar × tap is Wray, Mueller and Barr; bar × flagging is Wray, Holder and Barr.
- Ward (9 people): the health-regulator-to-industry revolver. Gottlieb, Hahn, McClellan, Gerberding, Azar, Slavitt, Elizabeth Fowler, Zerhouni, Carmona. Eight of them also carry the global-health actor.
6. The forums overlay everything
The cousin play (sustained Bilderberg, WEF or Trilateral attendance while in senior office) holds the largest play overlaps in the data: cousin + pulpit (5) and cousin + pipeline (5). It is not a sector revolver of its own. It is where the people running the other plays meet. The numbers are small, so state it as breadth, not as a ruling layer.
7. The bridges between the old establishment and the AI world
Counting how many distinct curated clusters each person sits in, two people tie at five: Eric Schmidt and Reid Hoffman, the same two names that appear wherever the new AI-policy world touches the legacy CFR, Bilderberg and China-engagement circuit.
- Schmidt: Schmidt Sciences is a named funder of the Frontier Model Forum’s AI Safety Fund (FMF) and Schmidt a founding backer of ROOST, the open-source safety-tooling initiative launched in February 2025 (PR Newswire); on the old side, Bilderberg attendance and the China Development Forum roster with Schwarzman, Paulson, Kissinger, Summers and Geithner. CNBC reported that Schmidt chaired the National Security Commission on AI while he and connected entities held AI investments not publicly disclosed at the time, and noted there is “no indication that Schmidt broke any ethics rules or did anything unlawful” (CNBC, Oct 24 2022).
- Hoffman: his $10 million anchored the 2017 Ethics and Governance of AI Fund at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center ($27 million in all, with $10 million from Omidyar and $5 million from Knight) (Knight Foundation); he later sat on OpenAI’s board and co-founded Inflection; on the old side, Bilderberg and the PayPal network.
One institutional bridge: Brookings, through Chris Meserole, who ran AI and emerging technology there and went straight to executive director of the Frontier Model Forum (FMF).
And the platform-era enforcement bench feeds the AI-era one: Alex Stamos and Renée DiResta (Stanford Internet Observatory), Anika Navaroli (Twitter and Twitch policy) and Meta sit in both the older censorship cluster and the AI enforcement cluster (Platformer).
8. Western elites and the Chinese and Russian state forums
The dataset’s foreign-state cluster has no named foreign persons, but the edges into it from Western figures are dense: the China Development Forum (Schwarzman, Paulson, Kissinger, Schmidt, Summers, Geithner), the Boao Forum (Kissinger, Paulson, Schwarzman, Schwab, Bernanke), Tsinghua (Schwarzman, Paulson, Summers), and Russia’s Valdai Discussion Club (Kissinger, Greenspan). The same handful of names recurs across several forums, each in a documented founder, keynote or advisory role.
9. What did not survive the count
The dataset is useful partly because it kills claims that sounded right.
- “CFR is the gravitational center.” It is the largest node, but it leads the White House by 1.8 times, not the factor of four once claimed, and it is the narrowest (section 1).
- “The Vault and Cycle plays are sister patterns.” No one in 551 people carries both.
- “The defense-contractor revolver and the signals apparatus are the same people.” Before the retag of play tags, backstop × tap was 12 people. Checked against the play’s definition (a defense-contractor leg is required), it is four: Cheney, Petraeus, Deutch and Vickers. The larger backstop overlap is with foreign policy: backstop × embassy is nine (Rumsfeld, Cheney, Mattis, Esper, Austin, Work, Flournoy, Deutch, Stavridis).
- Coverage. 347 of the 551 people carry no play. The vocabulary describes revolving careers; a tag that did not fit the definition was removed rather than kept.