USA TODAY, Jan. 28, 2017 – President Trump said Saturday he is imposing a lifetime ban on administration officials lobbying foreign governments, and a five-year ban on other types of lobbying.
‘Most of the people standing behind me will not be able to go to work,’ Trump joked to aides as he signed the document, noting that the five-year ban will replace the two-year ban put in place by the Obama administration.
‘You have one last chance to get out,’ he added to his aides.
Norman Eisen, President Obama’s ‘ethics czar’ and the principal author of that administration’s executive order on lobbying, said Trump kept the Obama limits on the ‘revolving door’ coming into government but eliminated Obama’s revolving door protections for non-lobbyists leaving government.
While there are some things to like in the Trump order, there are also loopholes said Eisen, now chairman of Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington.
‘It gives non-lobbyists too much leeway when they leave,’ he said. ‘That is where the biggest problem in the system is: unregistered, shadow lobbyists. They should be getting more regulation, not less.’
Eisen also said that, under the Trump order, ‘lobbyists can now work for agencies they lobbied,’ and ‘that is another weakening element.’
The ethics order signed by Obama after he became president in 2009 barred appointees from accepting gifts from registered lobbyists or lobbying organizations. It also banned any of his officials from participation in a decision that affected lobbying clients from the previous two years, or working with any executive agency that person had lobbied over the previous two years.
Appointees leaving government during the Obama administration are banned from communicating with workers in their agency for two years and cannot lobby “covered executive branch official or non-career Senior Executive Service appointee for the remainder of the Administration.”