On the recordMarch 7, 2019
The Office of Government Ethics is a prevention and education agency. OGE is responsible for ensuring compliance with ethics requirements, such as financial disclosure and conflict of interest rules. These are the folks that the executive branch employees call when they have an ethics question. Their mission is to advise Federal employees on ethics matters. OGE is not an investigative office, but that is exactly what H.R. 1 wants to turn OGE into, by granting the director the authority to subpoena information and records. Here is the thing. OGE does not even need to have subpoena authority. It already has the power to request any information needed from Federal agencies, and the Federal agencies are required to comply under the Ethics in Government Act. The only reason to give subpoena authority is to empower OGE to harass executive branch employees. This is not farfetched, Madam Chair. The former director of OGE, Shaub, was openly hostile to the Trump administration and to Mr. Trump personally, even before he took office. Under Shaub, OGE went so far as using its official Twitter account in an attempt to coerce President-Elect Trump to divest his business interests. That is not what OGE's role is supposed to be. We don't want to allow an office that has become so partisan to have subpoena authority and thereby open the door to overt harassment to executive branch employees.…
