Former U.S. Ethics Chief: Under Trump, Only "Dust & Ashes" of Government Ethics Remain
Walter Shaub's warning of creeping fascism ignored by the news media
Before there was DOGE, Donald Trump’s ad hoc Department of Government Efficiency, there was OGE, the Office of Government Ethics, created by Congress in 1978 in the wake of the Watergate scandal to prevent executive branch conflicts of interest. Every president since then has complied with its rules requiring them to divest from their financial assets or establish a blind trust—until there was Trump.
The director of OGE in 2017, Walter Shaub, tried unsuccessfully to coax Trump to comply with the law by fully divesting from the Trump Organization. In an unprecedented move, he held a press conference the week before Trump took office in January of that year, charging that the plan the president-elect proposed was “meaningless from a conflict of interest perspective.” “This is not a blind trust,” he said, “it’s not even close.”
For Trump’s trust to be truly “blind,” he would have to liquidate all of his assets—including Mar-a-Lago, Trump Tower, and his 15 golf courses. The proceeds would then be placed in a trust managed by an independent, OGE-approved trustee. Trump would not be privy to any information about what was bought or sold with his money, although he could get reports on how much income his portfolio generated.
Flouting the law, Trump handed over the management of his businesses to his three oldest children and other Trump Organization executives.
Shaub resigned out of frustration in July 2017, six months before his five-year term was up. “It’s hard for the United States to pursue international anticorruption and ethics initiatives when were not even keeping our own side of the street clean. It affects our credibility,” he told The New York Times. “I think we are pretty close to a laughingstock at this point.”
Trump’s repeated trips to his golf courses and other properties—which he continued throughout his first term and now in his second term—particularly rankled Shaub. “It creates the appearance of profiting from the presidency,” he said—and that was before Trump started hawking bibles, watches, sneakers and guitars. He called on Congress to expand OGE’s authority to address what he said amounted to a historic ethics crisis.
Shaub’s new warning
Last Friday, Shaub sent an email to reporters assessing the state of government ethics during Trump’s second term. One of the reporters who received Shaub’s email was Money Trail contributor Dave Levinthal, who hosted a panel discussion on the first Trump administration’s ethical challenges featuring Shaub in September 2017, when he was a senior reporter with the Center for Public Integrity.
Shaub’s main message? There is “nothing resembling government ethics left in the United States government.” Further, he issued a stern warning: “It would be a mistake to treat the current threat to democracy as anything less than a fascist movement that seeks to emulate the corrupt leaders of countries like Hungary and, eventually, Russia.”
Levinthal thought Shaub’s message was worth reporting, and he did so immediately on his Substack site, posting Shaub’s email in its entirety. Remarkably, no news organization has followed suit. Why? Perhaps journalists see Shaub’s warning as old news—after all, doesn’t everyone know Trump poses a serious threat to democracy? Or perhaps they are afraid that if they reported on Shaub’s message, they would antagonize Trump and lose access. So why poke the bear?
Whatever the reason, the fact that someone with the stature of Walter Shaub is saying these alarming things is no doubt news. So, with Levinthal’s permission, I have posted Shaub’s email below. Please share it widely with your friends.
June 27, 2025
I truly respect what you do as journalists in these dark times, with authoritarianism eclipsing democracy both at home and overseas.
I’ve been deeply engaged in projects directly related to defending democracy, and I haven’t always had the bandwidth to respond to journalists. Although it’s no longer part of my job duties to talk to the media, I feel it’s extremely important to help your work whenever possible. Unfortunately, these projects have had me at maximum capacity most of the time these days, and I rarely am able to find time to respond to press inquiries.
My focus has largely shifted away from government ethics for one simple reason: There is nothing resembling government ethics left in the United States government. The current administration has shattered all semblance of government integrity in the federal executive branch, both with its unprecedented firing of the director of the Office of Government Ethics and with the shocking misconduct of the president and his appointees. Congress has failed to ban its members from trading stocks. The Supreme Court’s justices have accepted gifts, failed to recuse from cases when needed and hawked books for personal profit. To say only the wreckage of a government ethics program exists would be to exaggerate what has survived. There remain only dust and ashes of a program that, while never strong enough, represented a genuine effort to instill trust in government. There is no basis for any trust in the United States government at this point.
For that reason, I have stopped endeavoring to keep abreast of the evolving conflicts of interest of individual members of the Trump administration, including the president. Reviewing their personal financial disclosure forms and evaluating their conflicts of interest has felt to me like trying to figure out what happened to a passenger sitting in seat number 47A on a commercial jet that slammed into a mountain and disintegrated in a ball of fire. No one made it.
For that reason, I’ve focused on supporting litigation efforts to challenge the aggrandizement of executive power at the expense of the legislative branch and other safeguards against autocracy. It would be a mistake to treat the current threat to democracy as anything less than a fascist movement that seeks to emulate the corrupt leaders of countries like Hungary and, eventually, Russia. Dissent has already become risky and, in some cases, dangerous. That is the true measure of how far we’ve backslid from democracy.
I am glad many of you are highlighting the individual ethical failures of members of the administration. It is important to show the American people how government power is being misused for personal gain. As for me, I’ve concluded that my particular set of skills is more usefully put to the work of challenging the consolidation of presidential power wherever I can. That effort has left me little time to focus on the lack of government ethics.
Again, I apologize for having fallen so woefully behind on responding to you, especially those of you with whom I’ve had long professional relationships. You should feel free to send me messages whenever you think I can be of help. In all honesty, I don’t anticipate having more bandwidth to respond anytime soon, so please don’t take a lack of response personally. I’ll support your crucial work whenever I can, even if that’s only rarely.
I wish you the best with your work and your safety.
Walt
Elliott Negin, Money Trail’s executive editor, was previously the managing editor of American Journalism Review, the editor of Public Citizen and Nuclear Times magazines, a news editor at NPR, and a regular contributor at HuffPost.
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