Ever since Donald Trump was elected President of the United States and
declared, shortly afterward, “The law’s totally on my side, the
President can’t have a conflict of interest,” the hopes of those
concerned about government integrity have resided largely in one man:
Walter Shaub, the head of the Office of Government Ethics. Although
Shaub’s term was set to end in January, 2018, the announcement this week
that he is departing his post five months early was greeted with concern
by ethics watchers. In their view, Shaub and people like him are
urgently needed.

“Public service is a public trust,” Shaub wrote in his resignation
letter, one requiring “employees to place loyalty to the Constitution,
the laws and ethical principles above private gain.”

One of the gravest concerns that has weighed on ethics watchers over the
last six months is the disquieting sense that Trump and his family are
using his time in the White House to enrich themselves, a fear which
Trump has done little to assuage. As of July 4th, the President had
visited a Trump-branded property forty-nine out of his hundred and
thirty-three days in office, according to the Washington Post,
providing a running product placement for his Presidency, while a lawsuit
filed by the attorneys general of Maryland and D.C. asserts that the
Trump International Hotel in Washington has “specifically marketed
itself to the diplomatic community” since the Presidential election. The
suit also mentioned the troubling implications of Trump-branded
real-estate projects that are proceeding in the United Arab Emirates and
Indonesia. In an interview on CBS News on Thursday evening, Shaub
clarified some of his thoughts. “I can’t know what their intention is,”
he said of the Trumps. “I know that the effect is that there’s an appearance that the businesses are profiting from his occupying the
Presidency. And appearance matters as much as reality. So, even aside
from whether or not that’s actually happening, we need to send a message
to the world that the United States is gonna have the gold standard for
an ethics program in government, which is what we’ve always had.”

He also said, “I really feel like I’ve achieved all I can achieve under
the current circumstances.”

In the past, the Office of Government Ethics was a quiet, not terribly
exciting place whose director’s name was rarely known among the public; under
Trump, the office was transformed into a place of urgency. Shaub has
served as the only independent voice inside the government, monitoring
the many conflicts of interest that surround Trump, and as a regular source
of pressure and publicity around the Administration’s many ethics
violations. He has shown through his actions that he regards his role as
that of a guardian of the public interest in the purest sense. Most
recently, Shaub criticized the Administration’s attempt to keep secret
its decision to grant dozens of waivers that allowed government
officials to circumvent the Administration’s own ethics rules. When,
under pressure from Shaub, the waivers were made public, Shaub was quick
to point out that some waivers had been, essentially, backdated to the
beginning of Trump’s Presidency and might not even be valid. “If you
need a retroactive waiver, you have violated a rule,” he told the
Times.

His most powerful public comments came after Trump decided that he would
break with Presidential precedent and retain full ownership of his
real-estate and branding companies while in office. Previous Presidents
have divested themselves of their business interests or put their assets
in a blind trust, managed by a third party, over which they had no
control. The President pledged to place his ownership interest in a
trust and hand the day-to-day operational-management duties over to his
sons, which, Shaub noted, assuredly and publicly, was largely a cosmetic
decision. “This is not a blind trust,” he said at the time. “Not even close.”

Shaub also took issue with Trump’s claim that he couldn’t sell
his business, which most ethics experts said would come closest to
resolving his conflicts, because it would be complicated to try to sell
off a company based on his own brand and he might lose money in the
process. As President, there are many policies Trump is involved in that
could materially affect his company—rewriting the tax code; changing
environmental or trade rules; developing relationships with countries in
which the Trump Organization manages or licenses properties, or hopes to
in the future. Continuing to collect revenue from the Trump Organization
while making decisions as President that could affect the company would
have an irreparable, cheapening effect on the office of the President:
“We can’t risk creating the perception that government leaders would use
their official positions for profit,” Shaub said.

After leaving his post at the O.G.E., Shaub will join the Campaign Legal
Center, a nonpartisan organization based in Washington, D.C., as the
director of its ethics program. According to Lawrence Noble, the
Center’s general counsel, Shaub learned about the job opening only
recently. “When the opportunity came for us to hire Walt, we couldn’t
pass it up,” Noble said. He added that, to the best of his knowledge,
Shaub “was under no outside pressure” to leave the O.G.E. before his term ended, and Shaub told the Washington Post much the same.

In his new role, Shaub will be helping the Center to expand its ethics
program, strengthen its watchdog role, and help design potential
fortifications to the ethics rules, which have been “stress-tested”
under President Trump, as Noble put it. He added that Trump had exposed
many weaknesses in ethics laws. With Shaub’s help, his organization
will be looking at ways to strengthen and update conflict-of-interest
rules for the President specifically, as well as ways to potentially
give more power to the O.G.E., which, currently, can
only offer advice and suggestions and has no enforcement role.

Shaub made the best use of his advisory role as he could. As my
colleague Ryan Lizza described, after Trump revealed his plan for
keeping his business assets, Shaub gave a speech at the Brookings
Institution in which he tried to appeal to the President to set a better
example. “It’s important to understand that the President is now
entering the world of public service,” Shaub said in that speech. “He’s
going to be asking his own appointees to make sacrifices. He’s going to
be asking our men and women in uniform to risk their lives in conflicts
around the world. So, no, I don’t think divestiture is too high a price
to pay to be the President of the United States of America.”

If there is one thing to worry about surrounding Shaub’s departure from
government, it is whether the next head of the Office of Government
Ethics will use his or her position in the same fashion in the future.
“I hope he selects someone who is dedicated to the mission of the
office, but we’ll see,” Noble said. “I am waiting to see what he does,
anxiously.”