Eliza Newlin Carney at The American Prospect writes—Ethics Watchdog Can Only Do So Much. To really take on the Trump administration, the Office of Government Ethics would need a stronger arsenal:
For more than 30 years, watchdogs have pleaded in vain with Congress to strengthen the Office of Government Ethics (OGE), an independent agency set up in the wake of Watergate to ward off executive branch conflicts of interest.
Now, lawmakers may finally take notice. Until this year, it’s been easy for Congress to overlook the OGE’s relative lack of clout, sleepy profile, and reluctance to take forceful action. After all, until now all presidents have voluntarily followed fixed ethics conventions, such as disclosing their taxes and placing their assets into blind trusts, and have stood squarely behind the OGE in its inevitable clashes with other federal agencies.
But Donald Trump’s determination to throw those conventions out the window, and his administration’s moves to not only reject OGE’s advice but block it from doing its job, have made it impossible to ignore just how tightly the ethics agency’s hands are tied—as OGE Director Walter M. Shaub Jr.’s recent showdown with Trump’s Office of Management and Budget clearly illustrates.
The fight centers on Shaub’s request in April that all agencies hand over information on how many ethics waivers have been granted to onetime lobbyists who now have administration positions. Although a Trump executive order bars such former lobbyists from working on issues on which they’ve lobbied within the last two years, his administration has nonetheless hired dozens of lobbyists to work on matters that impact their recent lobbying clients. And unlike prior presidents, Trump has refused to publicly disclose or justify the lobbyist waivers. [...]
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“Show me a healthy community with a healthy economy and I will show you a community that has its green infrastructure in order and understands the relationship between the built and the unbuilt environment.”
~William Rogers, president and CEO of The Trust for Public Land
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2005—FBI: Newsweek was right:
The American Civil Liberties Union released the memo and a series of other FBI documents it obtained from the government under court order through the Freedom of Information Act.
"Personally, he has nothing against the United States. The guards in the detention facility do not treat him well. Their behavior is bad. About five months ago, the guards beat the detainees. They flushed a Koran in the toilet," the FBI agent wrote."
The guards dance around when the detainees are trying to pray. The guards still do these things," the FBI agent wrote.Darn it. Now who can the wingers blame for setbacks in Afghanistan and Iraq?
n today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin bodyslams the news roundup. Trumpcare’s so bad, it brings Republicans to (fake) tears. Who’s planning (and forgiving) Kushner’s Shabbat jaunts? Was Comey duped by the Russians? GunFAIL’s legacy: inconsistency in how accidents are treated.
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