Lobbying Prohibitions Eased For Former Top Officials
5 December 2004, Dana Milbrank & Jim VandHei, Washington Post
The timing was perfect: On Nov. 23— exactly three weeks after the election and as a flurry of top Bush administration officials announced their departures— the Office of Government Ethics declared that it was relaxing prohibitions on lobbying by former Cabinet secretaries and other top officials.
Until now, senior officials at Cabinet departments and agencies had not been allowed to lobby former colleagues for a full year after leaving office— a rule designed to prevent an obvious conflict of interest. But, in a notice in the Federal Register, the ethics office issued a new rule invoking its power to declare that "a former senior employee who served in a 'parent' department or agency is not barred . . . from making communications to or appearances before any employee of any designated component of that parent."
Specifically, the Department of Homeland Security "requested that the [Ethics] Director designate seven distinct and separate components in DHS," including the Secret Service, the Coast Guard, the Transportation Security Administration, and the Emergency Preparedness and Response functions. The Justice and Treasury departments made similar requests.
These changes were so urgent that the ethics office found that "good cause exists for waiving the general requirements for notice of proposed rulemaking, opportunity for public comment and . . . a 30-day delayed effective date."
Larry Noble, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics watchdog group, was not amused.
"It's a problem," he said, noting that the administration also expanded the "banding," or ranges, of asset values that must be reported, making it more difficult for the public to know how wealthy government officials are. "We're seeing a general loosening of ethics rules," he said.
"We think of the patient hope of men and women across the centuries who listened to the words of the profits and lived in joyful expectation."
A White House transcript of President Bush's speech at the Christmas tree lighting on Thursday. Nineteen minutes later, a corrected transcript changed "profits" to "prophets."
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