Democracy 21 Says OMB has No Basis for Interfering with OGE Oversight of Ethics Rules
Democracy 21 sent a letter today to Mick Mulvaney, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), calling on him to back off from interfering with the efforts of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) to oversee and enforce the Executive Branch ethics rules.
On May 17, 2017, Mulvaney sent a letter to OGE Director Walter Shaub stating that he should delay his request to Executive Branch agencies “to provide OGE with copies of any waivers that have been issued to permit agency appointees to work on matters that they previously worked on as lobbyists or lawyers in the two years prior to joining the government.”
Mulvaney said in his letter that Shaub’s request sent on April 28 to all appropriate agency officials raises “legal questions regarding the scope of OGE’s authorities,” and that the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice may need to be consulted regarding these question.
According to the Democracy 21 letter to Mulvaney, “Contrary to your letter, however, and as made clear in a letter sent to you by Director Shaub on May 22, 2017, OGE has clear legal authority to request the information it has asked for from the agencies.”
The Democracy 21 letter stated:
There is no basis for the Office of Management and Budget to interfere with OGE’s efforts to carry out its oversight and enforcement responsibilities for Executive Branch ethics rules, including rules established by an Executive Order issued by President Trump.
The letter noted that a May 22, 2017 report in The New York Times stated that “Dozens of former lobbyists and industry lawyers are working in the Trump administration, which has hired them at a much higher rate than the previous administration.”
The letter said:
President Trump in his 2016 presidential campaign repeatedly attacked the role being played by special interest lobbyists in Washington, D.C. to undermine the interests of the American people. He repeatedly promised “to drain the swamp.”
It appears that OMB’s efforts are now aimed at hiding information from the American people that would tell them whether the lobbyists and lawyers who have been brought into the Trump Administration are violating federal ethics rules — or have been given a pass by the Trump Administration to ignore those rules.”
Your request to OGE that it should delay, perhaps indefinitely, its ability to collect this information is without any merit and would do great harm to the public’s right to effective and transparent oversight and enforcement of the Executive Branch ethics rules.
According to the Democracy 21 letter to Mulvaney:
In raising unstated “potential legal questions” as a basis to postpone agency compliance with Director Shaub’s request, you have provided no substantive explanation or basis for such a delay. Thus, your request appears to be simply pretext to delay and perhaps deprive OGE, and the public, of any knowledge about the existence, number, scope and nature of the waivers that have been issued to former lobbyists and others.
If former lobbyists or lawyers who represented special interests with business before certain agencies are now serving as decision-makers for those agencies and are passing judgment on matters on which just a few months ago they represented private clients, the public has a right to know that information. The public also has a right to know whether these employees are doing so under color of what is now a secret waiver from Executive Branch ethics rules.
The letter stated:
The Administration has issued an Executive Order that purports to draw certain lines to protect the public against conflicts of interests, and has claimed great credit for this action.
The Administration cannot credibly turn around now and hide from both OGE and the American people vital information that is essential to determining whether President Trump’s Executive Order is being effectively implemented and enforced, or whether his Executive Order has turned out to be a sham that is being undermined by the inappropriate issuance of multiple waivers.
The letter concluded:
You should not be raising unspecified “legal questions” to hide from the American people information they have a right to know.
Democracy 21 strongly urges you to withdraw your letter to Director Shaub and to refrain from any future efforts to interfere with OGE from carrying out its statutory responsibilities to oversee and enforce Executive Branch ethics rules.
