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The busiest time for the @OfficeGovEthics is a presidential transition. There are over 4,000 political positions to fill. About 1,100 of them require nomination for Senate confirmation. OGE reviews the disclosures of presidential nominees and crafts ethics agreements for them.
The financial disclosures of presidential nominees are available on OGE’s website. By law, disclosures for the top 69 positions are available automatically. The rest are available to anyone who fills out an online request form. OGE’s good at releasing those within a day or two.
But a financial disclosure report is only half the story. When accessing one, you’ll also want to look at the ethics agreement to see what arrangements the filer has made to resolve conflicts of interest. They’re also automatically posted on OGE’s website: http://OGE.gov
OGE’s director is Emory Rounds. He has a 5-year term, so he’ll carry over to the next administration. He’s a person of integrity, and the country is lucky to have him in that job. His deputy is a tough-as-nails career official, Shelley Finlayson. We’re lucky to have her too.
The volume of nominee work in a transition exceeds what OGE’s nominee team can handle. So OGE spends 2 years training other staff to pitch in. It spends a year training agency officials to increase their skills for the work. This year it released updated references materials too.
Here are some of the updated materials @OfficeGovEthics released this year to assist the presidential transition team and agency ethics officials: https://www.oge.gov/web/oge.nsf/Resources/Presidential+Election+Readiness. They also have updated an impressive TurboTax-style e-filing system for disclosures: http://integrity.gov
Admit it. You’re looking forward to government ethics becoming a bit less exciting.
