White House ‘clarifies’ its position, will publicly disclose ethics waivers

WASHINGTON — The White House unexpectedly backed down Friday in a confrontation with the government’s top ethics officer, announcing it will publicly disclose waivers that have been quietly handed out since January to let certain former lobbyists work in the Trump administration.

The reversal came after the White House wrote last week to the Office of Government Ethics and asked its director to suspend his request for copies of the waivers. Such waivers are needed when officials want to work on policies or other government issues that they were directly involved in recently as private-sector lobbyists or industry lawyers.

The debate over the waivers — which were routinely made public during the Obama administration — has drawn heightened attention as the Trump administration hired dozens of former lobbyists and lawyers, and is frequently placing them into jobs that overlap with the work they did for paying clients.

Both the Trump and Obama administrations have had ethics policies, signed by each president, that prohibits newly hired government officials from handing particular matters they worked on in the private sector for two years. If the new government hires were formerly lobbyists, they were prohibited from working on the same issue for two years.

Waivers — which are issued by each federal government agency, and by the White House on a case-bycase basis — allow political appointees to ignore those ethics policies.

This appears to be the case with Michael Catanzaro, who until early this year worked as a lobbyist for a coal-burning electric utility and an oil and gas company, among other clients. He is now the top White House policy official overseeing the rollback of the same environmental protection rules he had lobbied against. The Trump administration has not said if Catanzaro was given a waiver, as it was keeping them confidential.

Lindsay Walters, a White House spokeswoman, called the new position a clarification and not a reversal of its earlier stand, adding that the White House itself had about a dozen waivers that would be made public within the next week.

“The White House is going to post these waivers,” Walters said Friday evening.

Walter Shaub, head of the Office of Government Ethics, said Friday evening that he was glad the White House had changed its position.

But he also made clear that there should not have been a need for a confrontation before these waivers were made public.

“This really is routine stuff, and I am glad we are back on track again,” said Shaub, whose agency does not have subpoena power.