A government watchdog group filed 30 ethics complaints with a bevy of government agencies claiming federal employees may be in violation of President Trump’s executive order prohibiting former registered lobbyists working in the administration from working on issues on which they lobbied.
Public Citizen, the organization, said it identified 36 lobbyists who have been named to positions within the Trump administration that oversee the same issue areas they recently lobbied. Six of those appointees received publicly disclosed waivers from Trump’s ethics rule.
“The bottom line is that neither Trump nor his administration takes conflicts of interest and ethics seriously,” Lisa Gilbert, Public Citizen’s vice president of legislative affairs, said in a statement. “’Drain the swamp’ was far more campaign rhetoric than a commitment to ethics, and the widespread lack of compliance and enforcement of Trump’s ethics executive order shows that ethics do not matter in the Trump administration.”
The watchdog group cites Executive Order #13770, which Trump signed early into his presidency as part of his pledge to “drain the swamp.” A section of the executive order prohibits former registered lobbyists who were appointed to positions within the Trump administration from participating in matters on which they lobbied within the past two years.
The ethics complaints cite potential violations by federal employees working at the Departments of Labor, Transportation, Interior, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, Defense, Commerce, Energy, Education, and Agriculture, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, National Economic Council, and the Office of Management and Budget.
“These 30 apparent violations of Trump’s own ethics rules are only the top of the iceberg,” Craig Holman, a lobbyist for Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division, said. “We looked at only a quarter of all presidential appointees because records because records were not readily available at the time. I suspect the real number of potential violations is fourfold.”
