President Biden issued a sweeping executive order on Wednesday evening outlining ethics rules for officials serving in his administration.
The executive order is one of many the new president signed just hours after taking the oath of office. Biden established a robust ethics platform during the campaign as well as a code of ethics for the transition. Now this ethics plan, for the approximately 1,200 Senate-confirmed positions in the federal government, builds on that code and is much stricter than those of his predecessors.
The executive order aims “to restore and maintain public trust in government, and ensure that we are a government for the people,” said the transition team. “The ethics pledge and related ethics rules in the executive order are designed to ensure that executive branch employees act in the interest of the American people and not for personal gain. And the pledge commits federal employees to uphold the independence of the Department of Justice.”
The order retains and strengthens several provisions from President Obama’s ethics orders. It keeps the ban from accepting gifts from lobbyists and the prohibition on appointees and lobbyists entering the administration from working on matters related to their prior employment for two years, but it also restricts foreign agents from entering the administration.
Biden’s order restricts appointees from lobbying their former agencies upon leaving the government for two years, like Obama’s, but also stops them from communicating with the former agencie ..
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