The audacity —the blatant scamming of the system —is reaching a boiling point. And while numerous bills are floating around The Hill at this very moment that may eventually rein in some of this swampy self-enrichment scheme, right now, we have nothing.
According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, more than 2,600 federal workers in the Executive branch, from the Commerce Department to the Treasury Department, during both Republican and Democratic administrations, disclosed investments that present conflicts.
That amounts to more than one in five senior federal employees across 50 federal agencies reviewed by the Journal.
“A top official at the Environmental Protection Agency reported purchases of oil and gas stocks, WSJ reports. “The Food and Drug Administration improperly let an official own dozens of food and drug stocks on its no-buy list. A Defense Department official bought stock in a defense company five times before it won new business from the Pentagon.”
“The Journal obtained and analyzed more than 31,000 financial-disclosure forms for about 12,000 senior career employees, political staff and presidential appointees. The review spans 2016 through 2021 and includes data on about 850,000 financial assets and more than 315,000 trades reported in stocks, bonds and funds by the officials, their spouses or dependent children.”
Faceless federal agency officials wield “immense power and influence over things that impact the day-to-day lives of everyday Americans, such as public health and food safety, diplomatic relations and regulating trade,” said Don Fox, an ethics lawyer and former general counsel at the U.S. agency that oversees conflict-of-interest rules.
Fox adds that many of the examples in the Journal analysis “clearly violate the spirit behind the law, which is to maintain the public’s confidence in the integrity of the government.”
As a quick reminder, the STOCK Act was signed into law in 2012 with substantial bipartisan support following the release of the Government Accountability Institute president Peter Schweizer’s book Throw Them All Out. Schweizer’s book uncovered an epidemic of lawmakers, from both parties, leveraging knowledge acquired while in office to make insider stock trades.
The act was passed —then quickly gutted, designating it more as a gesture than a real act of change. Today’s STOCK Act is notoriously difficult to enforce. Members of Congress have rarely faced consequences for its violation. While Section 18 of the Act allows for fines and up to 15 years in prison for trading violations, not a single lawmaker has ever been charged.
As you can see by The Wall Street Journal’s analysis, we need the original STOCK ACT more now than ever before.
