Trump's Shutdown Impacts Ethics Oversight

Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW) has been an effective watchdog for abuses by political hacks. The regime of fraudster and sociopath Donald "Rump" Trump has been the most corrupt in American history, with numerous officials resigning due to ethics violations (a fairly recent accounting of the regime's scandals -- including at the Trump Organization, etc. -- was compiled by Bloomberg, and it's astonishing).

CREW's latest study indicates that the very internal watchdogs for ethics are being hampered by the Rump shutdown, and that furloughs of Federal employees at the Office of Government Ethics (OGE), and numerous Inspector General offices have slowed or stopped investigations into the regime's wrongdoing. There's more:

"OGE is not the only government watchdog whose work is threatened by the shutdown. In the first two years of the Trump Administration, ten administration officials, including then-U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, have violated the Hatch Act by impermissibly using government resources for partisan politics. The agency responsible for enforcing the Hatch Act, the Office of Special Counsel, is currently closed '[d]ue to a lapse in appropriations.”\' The agency’s website advises that “[c]omplaints may still be filed, but most will not be addressed until OSC reopens.” [snip] Many Offices of Inspector General (OIG), which investigate waste, fraud, and abuse in federal agencies, are also limited by the shutdown. For example, despite numerous ethics scandals involving leadership at the Department of Interior, the agency’s Inspector General complaint hotline 'will not be monitored and will not accept voice messages.'” (our emphasis)

Imagine what these Trumpist grifters will do now that the ethical lights have been temporarily turned off. Just another casualty of Rump's malicious taking of the Government and its employees as hostages for a vanity wall that Mexico was supposed to pay for.