Bipartisan Letter Urges Administration to Make Ethics Waivers Immediately Publicly Available
WASHINGTON – Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley joined Senator Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) in urging Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Mick Mulvaney to ensure that any executive branch ethics pledge waivers granted by the Trump Administration are immediately provided to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics (OGE) and made publicly available. Grassley made a similar request of the Obama Administration in 2009. Those waivers were ultimately published on OGE’s website following Grassley’s request.
“Public disclosure of these records, including ethics pledge waivers, is essential to ensuring that ethical commitments are maintained so that the American people can be confident that government employees are working in their interest,” wrote the Senators in their letter. “Please ensure that the practice of providing ethics pledge waivers and recusals to OGE contemporaneously upon their issuance is continued. We trust that you believe this standard is reasonable in that it allows the American people to better understand how those employed at the highest levels of our government are fully focused on the public interest and not a private interest.”
On January 28, 2017, President Trump signed Executive Order 13770, similar to one issued in the early days of the Obama Administration, requiring all incoming political appointees to sign an ethics pledge as a condition of their employment in the federal government. The Administration’s ethics pledge places certain restrictions on appointees’ participation in matters directly related to their former employers, clients, or matters on which the appointee lobbied prior to their appointment.
Both executive orders also included provisions allowing the President or his designee to issue a waiver to any individual appointee from any of the ethics pledge’s requirements, though there is no specific requirement that the waiver be issued prior to an appointee’s first day of employment. Waivers to the ethics pledge are maintained by the appointee’s employing agency. As of May 31, 2017, the Trump Administration has released information regarding 11 waivers issued within the White House and five waivers issued within executive agencies in response to a formal request for this information from the OGE. The Obama Administration issued 17 waivers within the White House and 66 government-wide over eight years, which remain available on the OGE website.
Text of the letter is available here
