Watchdog Report: Biden Activists Get an Ethics Pass
- September 10, 2022
David Jones, West Orlando News
Government watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust issued a report analyzing the increasing reliance by the Biden Administration on ethics waivers for former activists to advance their policy agenda.
“Waivers can help ensure the American public benefits from having the most highly-qualified people serving in the Federal government,” said Michael Chamberlain, Director of Protect the Public’s Trust. “But many of the waivers we are seeing – mostly after suing the agencies to hand them over – are quite concerning.
The organization’s Ethics Waiver Tracker is a database for tracking waivers handed out to political appointees. PPT has been able to obtain many of these waivers only after suing the federal agencies for withholding the documents and, in some cases, hiding the existence of the waivers from the public’s view.
“Not only are they approaching record numbers, the justifications can be quite circular,” added Chamberlain. “Activists are seemingly hired because of their conflicted relationships and then ethics officials are forced to grant waivers allowing them to continue leveraging those relationships in order to perform their jobs. This is hardly serving the American people in an ethical and transparent way. It’s also placing tremendous undue pressure on career ethics officials to hand these activists a free pass lest the Biden policy agenda suffer.”