The more expert guidance regulators have, the better they’ll be able to discharge their responsibilities. Shutting down the revolving door that gives them access to the experts they need would be counterproductive, even if it would temporarily assuage populist outrage. Of course, that doesn’t mean that current and future public servants shouldn’t be scrutinized to be sure that they can break out of their firm-specific mind-set and start thinking as public servants and not investment bankers. “Sure, there’s a lot of opportunity for people to get up to mischief,” says Robert Kurucza, a Washington-based partner at Goodwin Procter, who himself used the revolving door to move to private practice decades ago. “But can any conflicts be more a matter of perception than reality, and can they be managed and addressed? Absolutely.”

If the revolving door is to work to the best advantage of Washington, the taxpayer, and the health of the financial system as a whole, a few ground rules need to be in place. The agency hiring the former Wall Street banker or executive needs to be able to justify the decision to bring the particular person on board. Does he or she have a unique understanding of an arcane area of finance? A distinctive set of skills (rather than just relationships)? “You also need to be sure that they are hiring people who have a backbone and integrity,” says John Chrin, a former M&A banker who has gone on to a different kind of second career, teaching finance courses at Lehigh University.

Chrin is one of those who feel that the time lapse between the date that a banker leaves his or her institution for a regulatory job and the date that person can begin policing what is taking place at their former firm should be made as wide as possible. The same is true in reverse; no one leaving an agency like the SEC or the Fed should move immediately to a job where they are expected to represent their new firm to their former colleagues. Currently, that time period is a year—Chrin suggests that two years or even longer is optimal. “If a firm isn’t willing to wait two years to use you in a role involving your former agency, then you need to ask whether they are really interested in providing you with a long-term career opportunity and themselves with a long-term asset, or whether they are just looking for a short-term advantage,” he opines.

Decisions made by the members of the new Wall Street-Washington “financial political complex” (let’s just use the now-common moniker Government Sachs, for short) also need to be as transparent as possible. For instance, Goldman Sachs was the single biggest beneficiary of the decision by the Treasury Department (under ex Goldman honcho Paulson) to make good on AIG’s collateral calls by paying counterparties directly. That put $13 billion in Goldman’s coffers at a critical juncture. Had Paulson and others involved in making that decision released details of the process leading up to that payout—or, even better, been required to release transcripts or summaries of their internal debate—that would have killed two birds with one stone. Knowing that everyone from the smallest blogger to the biggest media outlets would be scrutinizing that information would undoubtedly have caused Paulson and others to bend over backwards to avoid anything that could be perceived as a conflict of interest and spell out their criteria for making that decision. (Perhaps we might discover that, knowing his role would become public, Paulson would have recused himself entirely from the debate?) It would also have minimized the extent to which the public debate around Government Sachs is based on conspiracy theories.

Full disclosure is a great panacea. It’s human nature, for instance, for all of us to turn to the people they trust for advice and guidance in times of stress. But a policymaker or regulator, however, needs to show that they are willing to turn to a wide range of individuals to provide input. The release of details from Treasury Secretary Geithner’s appointment book shows that he’s eager to talk to Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs and Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase. It would be even better if he were just as eager to talk to other Wall Street CEOs—and because we’ve now go that data, we can ask why Geithner didn’t cast a broader net.

With care and effort, we can solve some of the problems that the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street creates. Certainly, we’ve got an incentive to do so, and it’s not the need to keep Wall Street out of the circles of power. Indeed, if anything, Washington’s policymakers and regulators need more input from a wider array of individuals with a background on Wall Street; people like Mike Gelband, who, as head of fixed income at Lehman Brothers, sought to alert the firm’s top brass to the credit bubble years before it burst and caused the firm to file for bankruptcy. True, as we try to rebuild the financial system, we can’t afford to have regulators and policymakers making decisions that will give their cronies an edge. But that’s something we can guard against. It’s a lot more difficult to protect ourselves from the fallout of decisions made by well-intentioned and independent folks who simply don’t understand the complexity of today’s financial markets or the unintended consequences of what they’re doing.