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The Head of the Government Ethics Office Just Quit (Bill Moyers)

Walter Shaub, the director of the Office of Government Ethics, has thrown up his hands in the face of the Trump administration’s disregard for, well, government ethics. The veteran public servant sent a short resignation letter to Donald Trump today, half a year before his five-year term expired.

Shaub’s office was founded in the wake of Watergate, and oversees 4,500 employees who work on ethics-related issues across the government. But Shaub himself was little-known before Donald Trump became president. However, once it became clear that Trump intended to take his seat in the White House while doing next to nothing to resolve his conflicts of interest, Shaub, in consultation with Obama ethics lawyer Norm Eisen, hatched a plan to get Trump’s attention through Twitter and public speeches.

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The office was created in the wake of the Watergate scandal.

Just last month, for example, the Justice Department’s top lawyer for compliance resigned. Hui Chen, whose career includes public service as a federal prosecutor as well as stints as a lawyer for Pfizer and Microsoft, said she couldn’t ask companies to act ethically when the administration was so willing to flout the rules. “Trying to hold companies to standards that our current administration is not living up to was creating a cognitive dissonance that I could not overcome,” Chen wrote in a LinkedIn post last week. “To sit across the table from companies and question how committed they were to ethics and compliance felt not only hypocritical, but very much like shuffling the deck chair on the Titanic.”

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