We learned in April that Donald Trump’s White House has hired several lobbyists, lawyers, and consultants who are now crafting policies “for the same industries in which they recently earned a paycheck.” The administration has ethics rules to prevent this from happening, but Team Trump quietly issued waivers, allowing officials to ignore the rules.
What we didn’t know at the time was just how common this practice has been in Trump World — because the White House insisted on keeping information about the waiver secret. The Office of Government Ethics told the administration it had to disclose the details, and the White House relented.
The New York Times reported on the information the Trump and his aides were so reluctant to share.
President Trump has given at least 16 White House staff members dispensation to work on policy matters they handled while employed as lobbyists or to interact with their former colleagues in private-sector jobs, according to records released late Wednesday. […]
The list of waivers includes high-profile names such as Reince Priebus, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, and Kellyanne Conway, a senior White House adviser. They had to be granted waivers because of their prior work with organizations such as the Republican National Committee, which Mr. Priebus once ran, and because they continue to have contact with those organizations as part of their White House work.
But the waivers granted by the White House are also going to former lobbyists, despite Mr. Trump’s campaign vow to try to reduce the influence of lobbyists in Washington.
So, for example, Michael Catanzaro was a corporate lobbyist for an oil company and a coal-burning electric utility. Trump then hired him to help undermine the same environmental safeguards he used to target as a lobbyist, thanks to a waiver that allows Catanzaro to ignore the ethics rules Trump used to brag about.
The White House and its allies will be quick to note that the Obama administration relied on similar waivers. That’s true, to a point, but the details matter: not only did the Obama White House volunteer to publicly disclose these waivers, which were narrowly focused, but Trump World has issued more ethics waivers in four months than Team Obama did in eight years.
Obama also didn’t extend waivers to much of his senior White House staff, while Trump has done exactly that.









