The Office of Government Ethics was created by the Ethics in Government Act in the wake of the Watergate scandal to ensure an independent arbiter to promote ethics compliance and prevent conflicts of interest from undermining government efficiency and public trust. Earlier this week, President Donald Trump took another step toward rejecting those ideals when he fired David Huitema, the OGE’s director.
The OGE helps ensure that executive branch employees are making decisions based on the good of the public by policing those employees’ financial conflicts of interest. When people are set to serve in the executive branch, they must fill out a financial disclosure form detailing their assets. One of OGE’s critical functions is to review those forms for the president and his senior political leadership team to determine whether any of their financial holdings could be affected by the prospective employees’ work or decisions, and if that’s the case, come up with a plan to eliminate any potential conflicts of interest. For less senior government employees, OGE oversees and helps agency staff manage this process.
Those conflicts of interest can and do inflict direct and concrete harm on Americans.
What that means in practice is that the OGE is tasked with ensuring that the former oil and chemical lobbyists whom Trump has tapped to serve at the Environmental Protection Agency have divested from interests that could pose conflicts. The office also helps ensure that they recuse themselves from actions affecting their former clients. The Trump administration is poised to be full of lobbyists and billionaires, two groups that generally have numerous potential conflicts, meaning the OGE’s work and guidance are particularly urgent.
Those conflicts of interest can and do inflict direct and concrete harm on Americans. If a polluter can get away with not cleaning up a chemical spill because its former lobbyist now works at the EPA, the people living near that spill experience the harms of conflicts of interest. If a credit card company is permitted to offer a card with predatory levels of interest or onerous late fees because its former general counsel is now at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, that causes financial harm to the thousands of Americans who may use that credit card.
Rooting out conflicts of interest is not just about preventing Americans from being harmed by companies and powerful special interests that have connections in government willing to do their bidding. It’s also about ensuring that the public is not overpaying for government contracts to companies run by the president’s well-connected allies.
Trump’s tenure in government has been defined by his serving himself and his cronies, often to the detriment of the American people. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington tracked multiple examples of policies in Trump’s first administration that may have positively affected his bottom line, from holding the 2020 G7 summit at the Trump National Doral resort to the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s approving the $900 million sale of a Brooklyn housing complex in which Trump had a stake.
While the OGE director is nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, director serve five-year terms to ensure that their tenures are not attached to the presidents who appointed them. Huitema was confirmed by the Senate in November and fired by Trump less than two months after he was sworn in.
Removing watchdogs from these positions is not part of a normal presidential transition. Trump’s decision to dismiss Huitema without cause is even more disturbing in light of Trump’s firing or attempted firing of the head of the Office of Special Counsel, which protects merit-based civil servants and protects whistleblowers from retaliation; the chair of the Federal Election Commission, which works to keep illegal money out of elections; and 18 inspectors general, whose jobs are to root out waste, fraud and abuse in government agencies. To be clear, removing watchdogs is not part of a normal presidential transition, when a new chief executive fills senior political positions for his or her administration. Congress intended for these roles and others, like the IRS commissioner, the national archivist and the director of the FBI, to have terms separate from the president’s to preserve their apolitical status. Trump’s abrupt firing of officials like Huitema will create a cascading effect that could politicize these roles and frustrate congressional intent for generations to come. Some of these actions have already raised legal challenges — but the Trump administration is threatening to defy court orders that do not go its way. Congress should assert its constitutional checks and balances or carry out its oversight responsibilities, but there is been no indication that the Republican House and Senate majorities will do so. This leaves the public, which must speak out against these firings. The first three weeks of Trump’s second term have been a whirlwind of illegal, unethical and evasive actions. It is certainly understandable that in the midst of this chaotic assault on American taxpayers and institutions, the removal of the head of the little-known Office of Government Ethics may have gotten lost. But corruption can have dire consequences for all of us, and we must vocally oppose it. Trump’s actions will facilitate the ongoing efforts he and his administration make to personally profit or avoid accountability. We can’t let him get away with it.
Donald K. Sherman
Donald K. Sherman is executive director and chief counsel of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Before joining CREW, he was an oversight and ethics lawyer in the House, the Senate and the Obama administration. He also was chief oversight counsel to the late Rep. Elijah E. Cummings on the House Oversight Committee. 
