The
Trump administration, in a significant escalation of its clash with the
government’s top ethics watchdog, has moved to block an effort to
disclose any ethics waivers granted to former lobbyists who have work in
the White House or federal agencies.
The
latest conflict came in recent days when the White House, in a highly
unusual move, sent a letter to Walter M. Shaub Jr., the head of the
Office of Government Ethics, asking him to withdraw a request he had
sent to every federal agency for copies of the waivers. In the letter,
the administration challenged his legal authority to demand the
information.
Dozens
of former lobbyists and industry lawyers are working in the Trump
administration, which has hired them at a much higher rate than the
previous administration. Keeping the waivers confidential would make it
impossible to know whether any such officials are violating federal
ethics rules or have been given a pass to ignore them.
Mr.
Shaub, who is in the final year of a five-year term after being
appointed by President Barack Obama, said he had no intention of backing
down. “It is an extraordinary thing,” Mr. Shaub said of the White House
request. “I have never seen anything like it.”
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Marilyn L. Glynn,
who served as general counsel and acting director of the agency during
the George W. Bush administration, called the move by the Trump White
House “unprecedented and extremely troubling.”
“It
challenges the very authority of the director of the agency and his
ability to carry out the functions of the office,” she said.
In
a statement issued Sunday evening, the Office of Management and Budget
rejected the criticism and instead blamed Mr. Shaub, saying his call for
the information, issued in late April, was motivated by politics. The
office said it remained committed to upholding ethical standards in the
federal government.
“This
request, in both its expansive scope and breathless timetable, demanded
that we seek further legal guidance,” the statement said. “The very
fact that this internal discussion was leaked implies that the data
being sought is not being collected to satisfy our mutual high standard
of ethics.”
President Trump signed an executive order in late January — echoing language first endorsed by Mr. Obama
— that prohibited lobbyists and lawyers hired as political appointees
from working for two years on “particular” government matters that
involved their former clients. In the case of former lobbyists, they
could not work on the same regulatory issues they had been involved in.
Both
Mr. Trump and Mr. Obama reserved the right to issue waivers to this
ban. Mr. Obama, unlike Mr. Trump, automatically made any such waivers
public, offering detailed explanations. The exceptions were typically
granted for people with special skills, or when the overlap between the
new federal work and a prior job was minor.
Ms.
Glynn, who worked in the office of government ethics for nearly two
decades, said she had never heard of a move by any previous White House
to block a request like Mr. Shaub’s. She recalled how the Bush White
House had intervened with a federal agency during her tenure to get
information that she needed.
Ethics
watchdogs, as well as Democrats in Congress, have expressed concern at
the number of former lobbyists taking high-ranking political jobs in the
Trump administration. In many cases, they appear to be working on the exact topics
they had previously handled on behalf of private-sector clients —
including oil and gas companies and Wall Street banks — as recently as
January.
Document
Letter to Office of Government Ethics
The White House, in an extremely unusual move, asked the
Office of Government Ethics to hold off on its investigation into
ethics waivers granted to ex-lobbyists and industry lawyers.
Mr.
Shaub, in an effort to find out just how widespread such waivers have
become, asked every federal agency and the White House to give him a
copy by June 1 of every waiver it had issued. He intends to make the
documents public.
Federal law gives the Office of Government Ethics, which was created in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, clear legal authority
to issue such a “data request” to the ethics officers at federal
agencies. This is the main power the office has to oversee compliance
with federal ethics standards.
It
is less clear whether it has the power to demand such information from
the White House. Historically, there has been some debate over whether
the White House is a “federal agency” or, as it calls itself, the
“executive office of the president.” Such an office might not be subject
to oversight.
The
White House, however, tried on Wednesday to stop the process across the
entire federal government, even before most agencies had responded to
Mr. Shaub’s April 28 request.
“This
data call appears to raise legal questions regarding the scope of
O.G.E.’s authorities,” said the letter, which was sent to Mr. Shaub by
Mick Mulvaney, the head of the Office of Management and Budget. It
continued, “I therefore request that you stay the data call until these
questions are resolved.”
The letter,
which was obtained by The New York Times after a Freedom of Information
request, created confusion among federal agency heads about whether
they should honor the request from the ethics office.
Norman Eisen,
the top White House ethics lawyer in the first years of the Obama
administration, said he believed that the Trump administration was
trying to intimidate federal ethics officers, who are career appointees,
without actually ordering them to ignore the directive from the ethics
chief.
“It
is yet another demonstration of disrespect for the rule of law and for
ethics and transparency coming from the White House,” Mr. Eisen said.
Mr.
Shaub, in a conference call with federal government ethics officers on
Thursday, told them that he had the clear authority to make such a
request and that they were still obligated under federal law to provide
the requested information, according to a federal official who
participated in the call.
The
Office of Government Ethics, however, does not have the power to take
enforcement action directly against the agencies if they do not respond.
Traditionally, if it has trouble getting the information it needs, it
turns to the White House to get compliance, Ms. Glynn said.
“The agency is more or less dependent on the good graces of the party that is in power,” she said.
Tensions
between Mr. Trump and Mr. Shaub first started to grow in late November,
when the Office of Government Ethics sent out an unusual series of
Twitter messages urging Mr. Trump to limit potential conflicts of
interest by selling off his real estate assets. Mr. Shaub then gave a speech in January,
after Mr. Trump announced that he would not take such a step, which was
highly critical of the incoming president, provoking speculation that
Mr. Shaub might be fired before his term ended.
“One of the things that make America truly great is its system for preventing public corruption,” Mr. Shaub said during that speech.
“Our executive branch ethics program is considered the gold standard
internationally and has served as a model for the world. But that
program starts with the office of the president. The president-elect
must show those in government — and those coming into government after
his inauguration — that ethics matters.”
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