Beltway bandit

English

Noun

Beltway bandit (plural Beltway bandits)

  1. (informal) A consulting or research company that mostly carries out work for US government departments or agencies.
    • 2001, Richard B. Schwartz, After the Fall, page 45:
      He worked for a beltway bandit firm, doing engineering work. He computed trajectories on missiles... that kind of thing.
  2. (informal) An employee of such a firm, especially a former employee of the firm's clients.
  3. (informal) A short-term money lender to contractors working for the US government, but whom are waiting for US congressional appropriations.
    • 1999 July 1, Po Bronson, “Gen Equity”, in Wired‎[1]:
      [He] turned out to be what is called a "Beltway bandit," lending money at short-term high (but legal) rates to government contractors low on cash who are awaiting congressional appropriation funding.
This article is issued from Wiktionary. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.