Donald Trump will have stronger rules against lobbying than President Obama did, said no one ever. Isaac Arnsdorf writes:
President Donald Trump's much-hyped ban on administration officials becoming lobbyists removed some of President Barack Obama's ethics rules instead of strengthening them.
Trump's ethics pledge, issued as an executive order on Saturday, includes a five-year "lobbying ban" that falls short of its name, preventing officials from lobbying the agency they worked in for five years after they leave, but allowing them to lobby other parts of the government.
The order also lets lobbyists join the administration as long as they don't work on anything they specifically lobbied on for two years. Obama's order from 2009, which Trump revoked, blocked people who were registered lobbyists in the preceding year from taking administration jobs.
President Obama's order also prohibited all administration officials from reaching out to their former agencies for two years after their departure from their posts. Remember all those Obama-era scandals? Nope—and neither does the architect of Obama’s ethics rules, Norm Eisen.
"The single biggest insulation that we had, in retrospect, against scandal in the Obama administration was the two-year exit ban," Eisen said in an interview. "People will pay you to put you on ice for one year and then after that year is up to ply your contacts. But no one wants to pay you to put you in cold storage for two years." [...]
"What Trump has created is a system that incentivizes shadow lobbyists because former government employees who did not become registered lobbyists previously still had a two-year waiting period to communicate with employees of their former agency which they no longer do," Trevor Potter, president of the Campaign Legal Center, said in a statement. "One of today's great Washington scams is former government officials running lobbying operations and attempting to affect official policy while claiming they do not technically qualify as 'lobbyists.' Such conduct remains unaddressed. Trump is just skimming the surface of the swamp."
Trump transition officials had originally weighed tougher lobbying restrictions but that plan was scrapped when Mike Pence took over for Chris Christie. Yep, Pence knows how to work the swamp.