Of the nine Donald Trump Cabinet picks who were to head to Capitol Hill for confirmation hearings this week, only six have reached agreements with the independent Office of Government Ethics to resolve potential ethical conflicts stemming from their personal finances, according to a POLITICO review of public records.

By contrast, all seven of Barack Obama’s Cabinet selections facing confirmation hearings at this point in the process in 2009 had already signed ethics agreements.


What may sound like arcane comparisons between 2009 and this year are taking on outsize importance as the Senate barrels toward its first partisan blowup of 2017. Democrats accuse the GOP of ramming Trump’s nominees down their throats without the advance vetting that Obama gave his first-term Cabinet, while Republicans insist that the minority party is channeling its lingering post-election anger into a pointless political charade.

The public spat over confirmations is fueled by some inconvenient facts for both parties. While Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Monday decried the “jammed” slate of hearings for Trump nominees, the number of hearings Republicans have set for this week — nine — isn’t far from the number scheduled by Democrats in 2009, when eight were held during the Senate’s second week in session.



And Schumer’s insistence that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell abide by “the same set of standards” for nominee disclosures that Republicans sought in 2009 skirts the reality that most of Obama’s Cabinet was already confirmed by the time the Kentucky Republican outlined his criteria that year. The vast majority of those nominees had signed ethics agreements before their confirmation hearings, however.

Four top-level Obama nominees had yet to come to the Senate floor in 2009 when McConnell asked in a Feb. 12 letter that no confirmation hearings be announced without a finished OGE agreement and FBI background check. The four were future Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, future Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, future Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and future U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk.

But Trump’s nominees are following a slower pace of ethics disclosures than Obama’s senior nominees. Of the seven top appointees the Senate confirmed by voice vote on Inauguration Day 2009, six had signed OGE ethics agreements at least a week before their committee hearings, according to POLITICO’s review of public records. (OGE’s public roster of ethics letters for public officials does not include an agreement for the seventh Obama official confirmed on his first day in office, former budget chief Peter Orszag.)

The president-elect's team counters that all nominees will be fully scrubbed before their confirmations. "Everyone who has a hearing this week has their paperwork in," Trump spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters in New York on Monday.

But OGE's website currently does not list financial disclosures and ethics agreements for three Trump nominees who were set to have confirmation hearings this week: Housing and Urban Development pick Ben Carson, Commerce pick Wilbur Ross, and Education Secretary-in-waiting Betsy DeVos. (The DeVos hearing was rescheduled late Monday for next week.)

It’s possible that OGE has finished reviews for some of the three but not yet publicly released the relevant paperwork. Representatives for the committees that will vet Carson and retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, the president-elect’s choice to lead the Department of Homeland Security, did not return requests for comment on the status of their disclosures, but a source close to the transition said that Kelly's paperwork was finished on Monday — hours ahead of his Tuesday confirmation hearing.

A source confirmed that DeVos’ OGE paperwork was not yet received by press time. However, DeVos’ nominee questionnaire and FBI background check have been completed, which meets the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee’s standard for her Wednesday confirmation hearing to go ahead. Committee rules require DeVos to have finished the OGE process before the panel votes on sending her nomination to the Senate floor.

Six Trump advisers-in-waiting whose confirmation hearings are teed up for this week already have completed their review by the ethics office: Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.), the pick to lead the CIA; secretary of state pick Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil; Transportation Secretary pick Elaine Chao; Defense pick James Mattis; Attorney General pick Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.); and Kelly.

Schumer noted in a Monday floor speech on his ethics-review concerns that Democrats are “not doing this for sport." The New York Democrat escalated his prodding of the GOP's Trump confirmation push over the weekend, releasing a letter from OGE director Walter Shaub criticizing the “undue pressure” that this week’s confirmation hearing schedule places on his office’s ethics reviewers to work quickly.

The GOP has countered that Democrats are insisting on “unprecedented disclosure and delays,” as the Republican National Committee put it on Monday. Conservative opposition-research group America Rising issued its own hit on the Obama-appointed Shaub, accusing his office of “utter incompetence” when it came to policing potential conflicts in the paid speeches Hillary Clinton delivered while leading the State Department.

"In the midst of a historic election where Americans voted to drain the swamp, it is disappointing some have chosen to politicize the process in order to distract from important issues facing our country," a Trump transition spokesman said in a statement on the OGE ethics-review concerns.

All of Trump's nominees have submitted their paperwork to the ethics office and FBI, leaving any still-unfinished oversight in the hands of the vetters themselves to complete, according to a transition source. It's uncommon but not unprecedented for nominees to proceed to their confirmation hearing before the OGE process is done.

Nominees are required by the post-Watergate Ethics in Government Act to file financial disclosures with OGE and undergo an ethics review by the office. But the clock for complying with that law would not start until after Trump's inauguration, when nominations start to be officially transmitted to the Senate.

Seung Min Kim contributed to this report..