Aides and executive staffers could be exempt from posting financial disclosures online. | iStock Congress scales back STOCK Act

Congress has quickly and quietly moved to considerably scale back financial disclosure requirements that were mandated by the STOCK Act last year after a report released last month raised security concerns about posting the information online.

The House on Friday cleared a bill by voice vote that would exempt congressional aides and executive branch staffers from a requirement that they post financial disclosures online. The requirement would still apply to the president, vice president, lawmakers and congressional candidates and positions that require Senate confirmation.


The Senate cleared the legislation, also by unanimous consent, Thursday night.

Open government groups are slamming the bill, charging Congress with overreacting to worries that could be addressed with more modest changes to the law.

They were especially irked by the decision to remove congressional aides from the requirement to post financial details online — viewing it as a “knee-jerk” reaction to a legitimate security issue involving executive branch officials.

“Boy, that’s a problem,” Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, said in an interview, adding, “because congressional staff really was the heart of what I consider a lot of congressional insider trading and also the sources for the political intelligence consultants who are roaming the halls.”

The disclosure provision of the STOCK Act — legislation initially drafted to curb congressional insider trading but blossomed into a broader ethics law — had been repeatedly delayed amid concerns over publicizing personal financial information for various government officials in sensitive national security jobs.

During the delay, Congress requested a study to investigate those concerns.

That report from the National Academy of Public Administration, released last month, recommended scaling back the disclosure requirements, arguing that foreign countries and others could use the information to pressure government officials in ways that would compromise national security and law-enforcement efforts.

“Virtually all the cybersecurity, national security and law-enforcement experts interviewed during this study noted that making this information available in this fashion fundamentally transforms the ability (and the likelihood) of others — individuals, organizations, nation-states — to exploit that information for criminal, intelligence and other purposes,” according to the report.

Public Citizen and other watchdog groups had agreed those provisions for executive branch officials could prove problematic and had called for another delay of those requirements in advance of an April 15 deadline. But they took issue with scrapping the requirement for congressional staffers.

A Senate Democratic aide said the changes tracked with recommendations provided by the NAPA report and guidance from the Office of Government Ethics.

The disclosures will still be publicly available offline, but that didn’t quiet open government advocates.

“Not only does the change undermine the intent of the original bill to ensure government insiders are not profiting from nonpublic information — if anyone thinks high-level congressional staffers don’t have as much or more insider information than their bosses, they should spend some time on Capitol Hill — but it sets an extraordinarily dangerous precedent suggesting that any risks stem not from information being public but from public information being online,” wrote Lisa Rosenberg of the Sunlight Foundation on the organization’s website.

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 1:11 p.m. on April 12, 2013.

This article tagged under: STOCK Act