President Donald Trump announced some $200 billion in potential arms sales to Saudi Arabia and Qatar a week ago — this is huge potential business for major U.S. defense contractors like RTX, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and General Atomics, all of which deploy armies of lobbyists in Washington each year to influence such contracts.

A new bipartisan bill dropping this week will impose some of the strictest bans to date to make sure former government officials aren’t lobbying on behalf of those big companies or foreign countries to get their share of this massive federal pie. In fact, the legislation will make it a crime to do so.

House Foreign Affairs Committee colleagues Reps. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) and Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) are planning to introduce the No Revolving Doors in Foreign Military Sales (FMS) Act, which aims to tackle a space that has been growing exponentially due in part to major current conflicts in Israel and Ukraine and the desire of partner countries to arm up and enhance “deterrence.”

In 2023, the U.S. government sold a record $81 billion worth of weapons — the vast majority via U.S. defense contractors — to foreign governments through the FMS program. That number jumped to $117 billion in 2024.