The Hill reports that the Obama Administration did attempt to fulfill its campaign pledge to house all government ethics related content at a single URL, to be known as Ethics.gov. The campaign promise in question, according to The Hill, was Obama’s website pledge to “create a centralized Internet database of lobbying reports, ethics records and campaign finance filings in a searchable, sortable and downloadable format.”
Public interest groups have been calling for the introduction of the website in order to aggregate data from campaign finance, lobbying and other types of ethics disclosures, currently spread out among the various agencies’ websites. The newspaper reported that the administration had been working on finding funding for the project, but have hit walls in the actual implementation.
The Sunlight Foundation’s John Wonderlich told The Hill that “There is definitely a big distance from President Obama’s Ethics.gov campaign promise and what they have done so far… They are failing to live up to their promise, but their promise was aimed very high.” This comes after disappointment from some groups earlier this year when Norm Eisen’s post as White House special counsel for ethics was not refilled at the same level; Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington, among other groups, saw this as a step backwards for ethics efforts.
After the exit of Norm Eisen as the administration’s ethics chief, the focus on ethics seems to have gone mostly to pushing for passage of the DISCLOSE Act, and little else. The White House blog, once Eisen’s favorite format for announcements, now has posts in the “Ethics” category from Dan Pfeiffer and Jesse Lee, both high-level staffers in the White House communications department.
The Hill article is here: “Watchdog group waiting for Obama to fulfill ethics pledge for online hub.”
