Over at BigGovernment.com, Don Loos of National Right to Work examines the abysmal record of the Obama Department of Labor when it comes to enforcing the Administration’s ethics policy against union officials:
On January 8th, BigGovernment.com posted a blog that began, “Outrageously, U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) Secretary Hilda Solis and other DOL Obama appointees appear to have blatantly disregarded the President’s Executive Order #13490 – the Ethics Pledge.”
Somebody at the U.S. Department of Labor must be reading BigGovernment.com because just 11 days after the posting, the DOL ethics officer wrote a letter to The National Right To Work Legal Defense Foundation President Mark Mix and provided copies of signed “EO 13490 ethics pledges.” (See related Foundation ongoing lawsuit against DOL for DOL’s failure to comply with the Freedom of Information Act.) Each of these newly provided pledges matched the ethics order language (more on this in another post) unlike the self-administered waivers included in the publicly distributed pledges provided to ProPublica.org and referenced in the earlier blog.
In addition, the DOL ethics officer asserted that 51 people at the DOL have signed the ethics pledge and there has been only one (1) ethics waiver issued by DOL and that was for Naomi Walker. Her Job: Big Labor Liaison (an Associate Deputy Secretary position). Her past experience includes a stint as an AFL-CIO lobbyist among others. Walker’s ethics waiver is the subject of this blog.
Walker’s ethics waiver and its accompanying explanatory memo was approved “after consultation with the Counsel to the President” expose The President’s Ethics Executive Order for the joke that it is.
The ethics officer provides a four-page memo (probably written in a large part by the Counsel to the President) to justify the reasons that Walker must be provided an ethics waiver of Obama’s ethics executive order. My summary of the memo follows:
The Counsel to President Obama and the Department of Labor reached the conclusion that it would be impossible for Walker not to violate the Ethics Order because of her previous positions with the AFL-CIO; therefore, she must be granted an ethics waiver so that she can do the job for which she was appointed.
Wasn’t the reason for the ethics pledge to prevent appointing someone to a position where their previous employer could greatly benefit with them as a government insider?
[…]
Continue reading the post here.
