Almost immediately after his election, President Trump announced to much fanfare a new and apparently strict revolving-door policy on ethics in hiring, which he later codified as an executive order.
In keeping with his promise to “drain the swamp,” Trump demanded that his new hires sign a pledge that they would not work as registered lobbyists for the first five years after they left the White House, and that they would be banned for life from lobbying for foreign governments.
That part was stricter than the Obama administration policy. But the new rule was a bit looser on the hiring of former lobbyists. They could now work at the agencies they used to lobby, but not on the specific issues on which they had lobbied their new employer.
Like President Barack Obama, Trump has the ability to make exceptions to his rules. Generally, Obama did this by hiring non-registered lobbyists. But he had, and Trump has, the authority to grant waivers in specific cases so that he can hire even registered lobbyists.
Here’s what is unusual about Trump’s rules and their implementation: When the Office of Government Ethics asked the various federal agencies for copies of waivers the Trump administration had issued for certain hires, White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney shot down the request.
In a letter obtained through a New York Times Freedom of Information Act request, Mulvaney told Walter Shaub, OGE’s director, that he lacks (or at least might lack) the authority to make the request.
“This data call appears to raise legal questions regarding the scope of OGE’s authorities,” Mulvaney wrote. “I therefore request that you stay the data call until these questions are resolved.”
On any list of the people whose business it is to see these waivers, OGE would seem to be right near the top. Perhaps only Congress is higher up. But either way, what is the point of this stonewalling? It assuredly runs contrary to the spirit of Trump’s ethics rules.
Even if OGE lacks the power to force compliance, the ethics office is looking out for the public good when it seeks to make sure the rules are being followed.
As we argued repeatedly in criticizing Obama, presidents don’t get to take credit for setting strict ethics rules if they ignore or circumvent them at every opportunity. Obama rightly received much criticism because he had promised to run “the most transparent” administration in history, and yet his senior staff immediately tried to make it as opaque as possible by, for example, concealing official meetings with lobbyists by arranging that they take place off White House grounds. In the light of that promise, we were unsparing in criticism of Obama’s record-setting obstruction of FOIA requests.
Obama got around his own lobbying and revolving-door rules, not solely through waivers, which he disclosed, but also by bending the rules. For instance, Mark Patterson, a former registered lobbyist at Goldman Sachs, was cleared to be the Treasury Department’s chief of staff, because the White House decided Patterson shouldn’t have registered in the first place. H&R Block’s former CEO was allowed to join the IRS to rewrite tax preparation rules because he didn’t enter the IRS as an “appointee” but as a “career” hire.
Using these non-waiver waivers was another Obama ruse for opacity.
Trump is avoiding transparency by not disclosing his waivers. He cannot claim to be “draining the swamp” if he is unwilling to cooperate in making sure staff in his administration are following his own rules.
