Every low level lanyard job person in DC: please don’t wear a campaign button in my house, someone could see it and I might get in trouble
SCOTUS: first you take a loan from someone with business before the court and then you just don’t pay it back. Did you see my insurrection flag.
True story, I watched a friend / anonymous Dept of (Redacted) civil servant refuse to eat from a buffet because it wasn't made clear who had paid for the food at the event.
To be clear, I find this kind of thing a little silly and at least *slightly* paranoid. Like, who really cares if you have a cup of coffee and it turns out some PAC paid for it.
But, the contrast in mindset at the top and the bottom is very revealing!
It IS silly but several people genuinely believed they could lose their jobs for it and I know there are higher ups who are happy to swing that axe for fun. But yep the contrast is remarkable
For the record, the general executive branch gift rules at 5 C.F.R. § 2635.203(b)(1) exclude modest items of food and non-alcoholic refreshments like soft drinks, coffee, and donuts from the definition of a "gift" if it's not part of a meal, so it's generally okay to accept. The buffet is different.
And there's nothing wrong with erring on the side of caution and saying "no", but the disparity between how seriously the vast majority of people covered by the rules treat them and how certain high-level folks react is really striking.
See: Federal rules about GS employees owning certain stocks and other investments.
Contrast: Congressmembers being able to engage in insider trading.
Hi-Contrast: Trump.
for sure, there is a lot of pragmatic politics to all this. A low-level staffer doesn’t have to break the rules to be fired by a politician or a politicians crony, while supreme doesn’t have to literally do or refrain from doing anything on earth
it was such a fight to get Apple to include the crucial word “a” and it went on and on and on, and then the phone decided to just delete that word while I was clicking post
It was interesting to me that during the Trump administration a lot of the yearly ethics training seemed to focus more on political activity by employees (especially on social media) and de-emphasized rules about actual or perceived conflict of interest.
During my time working for state government, I’ve seen the pendulum swing a few times. At one point it was okay to accept freebies as long as it was a public event, then it was almost nothing was acceptable. Now there’s an inconveniently vague “nominal value” rule.
