Government ethics chief will resign; agency future uncertain
Watchdog sparred with president; critics applaud news.
Walter M. WASHINGTON — Shaub Jr., the government’s top ethics watchdog who has repeatedly gone head-tohead with the Trump administration over conflicts of interest, said Thursday that he was calling it quits.
Shaub’s five-year term as the director of the Office of Government Ethics is not set to expire until January, but with little chance of renewal and an appealing offer in hand from a nonpartisan advocacy group, he said the time was right to leave.
“There isn’t much more I could accomplish at the Office of Government Ethics, given the current sit- uation,” Shaub said in an interview Thursday. “OGE’s recent experiences have made it clear that the eth- ics program needs to be strengthened.” His new position, he said,
will allow him to advocate freely for such reforms.
In a short letter informing President Donald Trump of his decision, Shaub did not offer a specific reason for his departure but extolled “the principle that public service is a public trust, requiring employees to place loyalty to the Constitution, the laws and ethical principles above private gain.” He had not been pressured to resign, he said.
The White House promptly accepted Shaub’s resignation and Lindsay E. Walters, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement that it “appreci- ates his service.” Trump, she said, would nominate a successor “in short order.”
In departing ahead of schedule, Shaub has handed Trump an opportunity to begin putting his mark on the agency overseeing the federal government’s vast ethics program, including that of the White House. The office’s director tradition- ally has had wide latitude to set its priorities, its tone in working with the White House and other federal agencies and, perhaps most important, how to interpret
the country’s ethics laws. The impending vacancy is all but certain to raise fears among Democrats and those in the small world of government ethics who see the office under Shaub as an important political bulwark against conflicts of interest in the upper echelons of the government. To Trump’s defenders, who have seen Shaub, an Obama appointee, as politically motivated, it is more welcome news.
T he inten s ity of feel- ing over what is usually an obscure job speaks to the central role ethics issues have come to play in Trump’s Washington, where the vast holdings of the president and his Cab-
inet, as well as an influx of advisers from businesses and lobbying firms, have raised a rash of accusations of conflicts of interest.
It is the job of the eth- ics office, a creation of a post-Watergate Congress, to work with a web of ethics officials at each agency to help those entering the government sidestep potential
conflicts. The office guides each administration’s politi- cal appointees though finan- cial disclosure requirements and creates agreements to restrict participation in deliberations over topics they handled for paying cli- ents. Shaub, 46, has faced an u ncertain future at the agency since Trump took office in January. In the weeks between the pres- ident’s unexpected elec- tion victory and his inau- guration, Shaub had taken an extraordinary gamble: He advocated very publicly on Twitter, and in a rare public speech, that Trump liquidate his vast business and personal holdings. The arrangement, Shaub argued, was the only truly ethical option.
Trump did not heed his advice, and by the middle of January, Shaub thought he might be fired. To minimize his attachment to the position, he packed up the personal possessions that filled his office.
But he was notfired, even as he continued to spar with Trump’s aides over a range of ethical concerns, including the ethics office’s author- ity to exercise oversight of the White House. In Febru
ary, he recommended that the White House discipline Kellyanne Conway, a top adviser to the president, after she made an on-air endorsement of the clothing line of Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter. The White House Counsel’s Office disagreed and took no disciplinary action. More recently, Shaub and the administration fought over a routine request by the ethics office for copies of waiv-
ers issued to White House appointees to work in the Trump administration. The Office of Management and Budget initially balked at the request, challenging Shaub’s legal authority even to ask for the information and asking him to withdraw it. After Shaub fired back with a stern 10-page letter shooting down the argument, the White House backed down. The White House eventually released the waivers, show- ing it had granted at least a dozen exemptions for aides to work on policy matters they had handled as lobby- ists or to engage with former colleagues in private-sector jobs. Shaub objected to the fact that many of the waivers were undated and unsigned, and that some gave approvals for acts retroactively