President Donald Trump is treating America to a round of déjà vu with his latest move: the removal of the director of the Office of Government Ethics.
According to Politico, Trump made the move despite the director, David Huitema, being confirmed in December to a five-year term that was meant to be an independent check on the administration.
"His dismissal was announced in one sentence on the OGE website, stating that the office had been notified that Trump is removing him as director. The website also said OGE will revert to an acting director: Shelley K. Finlayson, chief of staff and program counsel at the office."
Before his service at the ethics office, Huitema spent nine years as the ethics czar for the State Department and was nominated for the position two years ago by former President Joe Biden.
"Senate Democrats tried [last] September to move his nomination through a unanimous consent request, but Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) objected, arguing that Hitema would engage in 'partisan lawfare' and that the winner of the 2024 presidential election should make the appointment," noted the report.
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The removal of Huitema is a similar state of affairs to when Trump first took office in 2017; shortly after beginning his term, he got into a series of clashes with then-OGE Director Walter Shaub, refusing to follow Shaub's advice to fully divest from his personal businesses and to disclose his appointees' ethics waivers in an orderly fashion.
While Trump did not outright fire Shaub, the immediate friction between the two ultimately led Shaub to resign in frustration, citing his inability to enforce ethics standards. He went on to join the watchdog groups Campaign Legal Center and the Project on Government Oversight, with the intent of policing the government's ethics from outside if he couldn't do so from within.
Trump's purge of the ethics office comes as Democratic lawmakers ramp up pressure for ethics enforcement against tech billionaire Elon Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency task force has summarily accessed critical government systems, fired civil servants, and recommended the termination of various funds and programs with none of the standard oversight or transparency an initiative like this would typically involve.