November 22, 2024
Dear Hon. David Huitema (David),
Congratulations on being confirmed to serve as director of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE). Thank you for accepting a job you will not enjoy.
It’s been more than a year since President Biden nominated you. The confirmation process took far too long, and it could not have been pleasant. Back in 2023, not long after President Trump’s appointee, Hon. Emory A. Rounds III, finished his term, Senator Mike Lee of Utah declared that the next OGE director should be chosen after the new president’s inauguration (although he had championed Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination shortly before the 2020 election). Since then, he has tried to block you from serving in that role. This September he even claimed in the Senate that “Mr. Huitema left open the possibility of supporting a partisan policy, a partisan approach, from a nonpartisan position.” If the senator had bothered to read the transcript of your confirmation hearing, he would have known you emphatically rejected partisanship. You can expect the Republicans to make increasingly frequent, intense, and unfair attacks on your character.
The straight party-line vote on your confirmation suggests that Senate Republicans will sheepishly fall in line behind a president-elect who wages war on ethics. Your uncontroversial nomination should have been confirmed promptly with a unanimous pro forma vote. As a career government ethics official, you served both Republican and Democratic administrations, assisting their nominees in preparing financial disclosures and ethics agreements, advising appointees on complex issues. No one questioned your commitment, and you gave no one reason to distrust you. That is surely why Biden chose you. I doubt he even knows your political affiliation. I worked with you for years but have no clue as to your political outlook.
Sadly, however, your fate is likely sealed. President-elect Trump could fire you on or soon after January 20. In Trump’s administration, you will be guilty not for being a party operative, but for not being one. Trump demands fealty. Everyone in his administration must put his private interest first, second, and last. The public does not factor into this calculation. Because your job will be “to place loyalty to the Constitution, laws, and ethical principles above private gain,” he will perceive you as an enemy.
If you aspire to keep this job, you will be tempted to appease Trump. Getting fired is a personal hardship. It’s true that, as a career government executive, you have a statutory right to be placed in another executive position if fired for any reason other than malfeasance. But getting fired by Trump will make you radioactive; few agency managers would court presidential retaliation by welcoming you into their ranks. Trump’s personnel office can choose to place you in any executive position. If you are not a fan of sunless days above the Arctic Circle, that may not be ideal.
I share these insights not to demoralize you but to disabuse you of the illusion that you can curry favor with Trump. Believe me when I say that, for as long as he employs you, he will not even know you exist. He does not care about financial disclosures and ethics agreements. As you know, President Obama appointed me to direct the OGE in January 2013. I was in office when Trump won the 2016 election. I worked with his transition team, then led the OGE until resigning in protest in July 2017. The frequent conflicts I faced in those early days, some of which I described in these pages, were also well documented in the media. When Kellyanne Conway hawked Ivanka Trump’s merchandise on White House grounds, I pressed the White House counsel to conduct an inquiry. I also successfully uncovered the secret ethics waivers for Trump White House personnel.
It is fair to say I infuriated members of his administration. Yet the only time Trump publicly mentioned the OGE was to confusedly complain that some “ethics committee” was slowing the progress of his Senate nominees through the broken Senate confirmation process. (In fact, the OGE processed Trump’s nominees faster than it did Obama’s, though they were more asset-rich and less cooperative.) His remark suggested that he thought the OGE was a congressional committee, not an executive agency. Based on this history, it should be clear that only the White House counsel’s office will be aware of your work, and that its staff will accuse you of dragging your feet on the ethics reviews of Trump’s nominees.
In your predicament lies freedom. Despite your long career of government service, you will be remembered only for your short time as ethics director. What you do in this job will define your legacy. It will not matter if you are fired. History harshly judges those who bow to autocratic corruption. Consider the contracting officer at the Government Accountability Office who wrote a letter letting Trump retain the government lease for his hotel at the Old Post Office. That the landlord and tenant were now one and the same clearly violated an anticorruption clause in the lease. But the letter snidely dismissed this concern as “simplistic.” At a later congressional hearing, Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-OR) remarked wryly that the contracting officer had asked Ivanka Trump out for coffee. Proximity to power had put stars in the officer’s eyes, and he seems to have mistaken people who no longer needed him for friends. Nobody remembers his name, only his act of complicity and his tragically naïve social gesture. Disgrace trails appeasement.
I am aware that in normal times we have not always seen eye-to-eye about how the OGE’s approximately seventy-five employees should hold to account the more than 4,500 ethics officials in agencies across the executive branch. The OGE’s demands of strict compliance can put agency officials in a difficult position when their agencies find compliance inconvenient—and across Republican and Democratic administrations, no major federal agency has been more resistant to the rules than the State Department. But now is no time to worry about unpopularity.
In the first Trump administration, one ethics official, terrified of the president’s nominee to lead his agency, suggested that I approve a dubious ethics waiver: he wanted to exempt everything the nominee owned from the criminal conflict of interest law. After all, he noted, the nominee was too wealthy to be corrupted. I cleared the room before reminding the official that this was not how wealth worked, and that his job was to serve the American people, not Trump. You will encounter similar acts of submission.
I wish you courage and the best of luck in your new role. I have respected your expertise, and now I respect your decision to accept a doomed appointment. But remember that the voice of your conscience will be louder if you are not overly attached to your job. Meanwhile, don’t bother hanging art on the walls of your new office.
Yours truly,
Walter M. Shaub Jr.
Walter M. Shaub Jr. was the Director of the US Office of Government Ethics from 2013 to 2017. (April 2024)