Trump has canceled Biden’s ethics rules. Critics call it the opposite of ‘drain the swamp’
Donald Trump took office eight years ago, pledging to “drain the swamp” and end the domination of Washington influence peddlers.
Now, he’s opening his second term by rolling back prohibitions on executive branch employees accepting major gifts from lobbyists, and ditching bans on lobbyists seeking executive branch jobs or vice versa, for at least two years.
Trump issued a Day 1 executive order that rescinded one on ethics that former President Joe Biden signed when he took office in January 2021.
The new president also has been benefitting personally in the runup to his inauguration by launching a new cryptocurrency token that is soaring in value while his wife, first lady Melania Trump, has inked a deal to make a documentary with Amazon.
All of that comes as the Trump Organization has instituted a voluntary agreement that forbids making deals with foreign governments, but not with private companies abroad.
“Trump is opening the floodgates for conflicts of interest and exploiting his power in office in the hopes of making billions of dollars on the backs of taxpayers,” said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the government watchdog group Public Citizen. “Instead of focusing on the needs of the American people, Trump’s only interest is to secure a next deal to line his pockets.”
That Trump and his family are looking to convert political success into profits is no surprise. While seeking reelection last year, Trump sold bibles, gold sneakers, photo books, and diamond-encrusted watches.
But it also marks a departure from when Trump began his first term in 2017 and signed an ethics order banning executive branch employees from becoming lobbyists for five years.
Trump released current and former members of his administration from those rules in one of his final acts before leaving office in 2020, mirroring President Bill Clinton’s approach of instituting stricter ethics rules only to roll them back shortly before leaving office.
Trump’s promise to eradicate the “swamp” of institutional corruption in Washington was a key theme of his 2016 presidential campaign. As a former president seeking to reclaim the White House, it was less of a rallying cry during last year’s campaign. However, Trump supporters often still broke into chants of “Drain the Swamp!” when their candidate pledged to “shatter the Deep State,” a term for entrenched government civil servants who have frustrated Trump and his allies.
The White House press office didn’t answer questions about whether Trump might have his own ethics rules in the works to replace the Biden-era ones he nullified. Trump himself has in the past criticized the “revolving door” of people who move from government positions to private sector jobs and back.
During a 2022 interview with podcast host Theo Von, Trump stated, “I was not a big person for lobbyists.”
Rob Kelner, chair of the election and political law practice at the firm Covington & Burling, suggested that Trump might sign his own new set of executive actions on ethics. However, he also noted that the new president might not be inclined to do so, as it could ultimately be redundant. “There are already hundreds of pages of ethics laws and rules that govern executive branch employees,” Kelner explained.
Kelner pointed out that a more immediate impact of Trump scrapping Biden’s order might be that it gives former members of the Democratic administration additional employment options by eliminating bans they would have otherwise faced.
“As they’re all out looking for jobs, this takes a burden off their shoulders,” Kelner added.
