Trump has canceled Biden's ethics rules. Critics call it the opposite of
'drain the swamp'
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 [January 23, 2025]
By WILL WEISSERT
WASHINGTON (AP) — 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Trump issued a Day 1 executive order that rescinded one on ethics that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,” Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the
government watchdog group Public Citizen, said in a statement. “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.
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Trump released current and former members of his administration from
those rules in one of his final acts before leaving office in 2020,
though. And that mirrored President Bill Clinton instituting
stricter ethics rules only to roll them back shortly before he left
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. But 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 on Wednesday
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 posts in government and back.
During a 2022 interview with podcast host Theo Von, Trump said, “I
was not a big person for lobbyists."
Rob Kelner, chair of the election and political law practice at the
firm Covington & Burling, said Trump might sign his own new set of
executive actions on ethics. But he also said that the new president
might not be anxious to do so given that it could ultimately be
redundant. “There are already hundreds of pages of ethics laws and
rules that govern executive branch employees,” Kelner said.
Kelner said 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 wiping out bans they
would have otherwise had to heed.
“As they're all out looking for jobs, this takes a burden off their
shoulders,” Kelner said.
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