White House moves to block ethics inquiry

The Trump administration, in a significant escalation of its clash with the government’s top ethics watchdog, has moved to block an effort to disclose any ethics waivers granted to former lobbyists who have work in the White House or federal agencies.

The latest conflict came in recent days when the White House, in a highly unusual move, sent a letter to Walter M. Shaub Jr., head of the Office of Government Ethics, asking him to withdraw a request he had sent to every federal agency for copies of the waivers. In the letter, the administration challenged his legal authority to demand the information.

Shaub returned a scalding, 10-page response to the White House late Monday, unlike just about any correspondence in the history of the office, created after the Nixon Watergate scandal, and the White House.

“OGE declines your request to suspend its ethics inquiry and reiterates its expectation that agencies will fully comply with its directive,” Shaub wrote in a letter he also sent to every federal agency ethics officer, six members of Congress who oversee government operations and the inspector generals from agencies governmentwide. “Public confidence in the integrity of government decision making demands no less.”

Dozens of former lobbyists and industry lawyers are working in the Trump administration, which has hired them at a much higher rate than the pre- vious administration. Keeping the waivers confidential would make it impossible to know whether any such officials are violating federal ethics rules or have been given a pass to ignore them.

Shaub, who is in the final year of a five-year term after being appointed by President Barack Obama, said he had no intention of backing down. “It is an extraordinary thing,” Shaub said of the White House request. “I have never seen anything like it.”

Marilyn L. Glynn, who served as general counsel and acting director of the agency during the George W. Bush administration, called the move by the Trump White House “unprecedented and extremely troubling.”

“It challenges the very authority of the director of the agency and his ability to carry out the functions of the office,” she said.

In a statement issued Sunday evening, the Office of Management and Budget rejected the criticism and instead blamed Shaub, saying his call for the information, issued in late April, was motivated by politics. The office said it remained committed to upholding ethical standards in the federal government.

“This request, in both its expansive scope and breathless timetable, demanded that we seek further legal guidance,” the statement said. “The very fact that this internal discussion was leaked implies that the data being sought is not being collected to satisfy our mutual high standard of ethics.”

President Donald Trump signed an executive order in late January — echoing language first endorsed by Obama — that prohibited lobbyists and lawyers hired as political appointees from working for two years on “particular” government matters that involved their former clients. In the case of former lobbyists, they could not work on the same regulatory issues they had been involved in.

Both Trump and Obama reserved the right to issue waivers to this ban. Obama, unlike Trump, automatically made any such waivers public, offering detailed explanations. The exceptions were typically granted for people with special skills, or when the overlap between the new federal work and a prior job was minor.

Glynn, who worked in the office of government ethics for nearly two decades, said she had never heard of a move by any previous White House to block a request like Shaub’s. She recalled how the Bush White House had intervened with a federal agency during her tenure to get information that she needed.

Democrats in the House and Senate also jumped in. Eighteen House Democrats from the Oversight and Government Reform Committee made public a letter they sent last week, protesting the issuing of secret ethics waivers, and Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Tom Udall of New Mexico and Ed Markey of Massachusetts, all Democrats, added their protests Monday.

“If OMB does not stand down from its attempt to prevent designated agency ethics officials from responding to the OGE data call, we will seek the waivers directly ourselves,” the letter from the senators said. “The administration certainly cannot dispute that Congress has the right to this information.”

Ethics watchdogs, as well as Democrats in Congress, have expressed concern at the number of former lobbyists taking high-ranking political jobs in the Trump administration. In many cases, they appear to be working on the exact topics they had handled on behalf of private-sector clients — including oil and gas companies and Wall Street banks — as recently as January.

Shaub, in an effort to find out just how widespread such waivers have become, asked every federal agency and the White House to give him a copy by June 1 of every waiver it had issued. He intends to make the documents public.