In August 2025, President Trump appointed Office of Management and Budget Deputy Director Eric Ueland as the acting director of the Office of Government Ethics. On its face, this may seem like just another personnel move. But it’s anything but normal. Ueland is the fourth person to hold the top position at OGE this year alone, adding to a rapid series of politically motivated shake-ups that are undermining one of the federal government’s most important independent watchdogs. 

An office once built for continuity and insulation from politics has now become a revolving door. This is no coincidence: Trump is the most corrupt president in American history and has launched an escalating effort to decriminalize political corruption, which includes but is not limited to pardoning over 18 politicians convicted of corruption charges to gutting the public integrity section of the Department of Justice. 

Trump’s revolving door of OGE directors is one alarming part of his assault on government ethics.

To understand the seriousness of the issue, it’s important to remember why OGE exists in the first place. Congress created OGE in 1978 in direct response to the Watergate scandal, recognizing that there must be a way to prevent and resolve executive branch conflicts of interest. The Ethics in Government Act established OGE as the central, independent agency managing individual agency ethics offices across the executive branch, ensuring consistency and accountability. The director’s five-year term was meant to span presidential administrations, reducing the risk of political pressure on the office. 

For nearly five decades, that structure worked. Directors who served under multiple presidencies—Republican and Democratic—helped maintain a consistent approach to ethics compliance regardless of the shift in politics. Until Trump, there have been no other known instances of a president attempting to remove a sitting OGE director mid-term.

Since Trump has returned to office, OGE leadership has rapidly changed. In December 2024, the Senate confirmed David Huitema, a respected career ethics official who was supposed to serve through 2029. But in February 2025, Trump abruptly removed him, offering no explanation beyond a short notice on the OGE website. The removal was an unprecedented act that contradicted the entire purpose of the directors’ fixed term.  

What followed was a rapid, unprecedented revolving door of acting directors. Soon after, Trump installed Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins, a political ally with no background in ethics, as acting director while Collins continued to run the VA simultaneously. By April 2025, Collins was replaced with Jamieson Greer, U.S. Trade Representative and also a longtime Trump loyalist. Greer was also made acting head of the Office of Special Counsel, which means he held two of the most sensitive oversight roles in the federal government while simultaneously advising the president on the global trade war he had just recently launched. 

And now, Trump has appointed Eric Ueland, a senior OMB political appointee, to simultaneously lead OGE. This kind of rapid turnover has never happened in the history of the office. For an agency built to be apolitical, Trump’s meddling amounts to a systemic effort to erode its independence. 

Why does this all matter? OGE is responsible for administering the executive branch ethics program, including oversight of agency programs that ensure that more than 2.7 million federal employees—and top government officials—operate within ethical standards. It sets ethics standards and regulations, reviews financial disclosures, provides guidance to agency ethics officials and ensures the integrity of the executive branch ethics program. These responsibilities require neutrality, continuity and clear distance from political influence. But Trump’s use of acting directors who simultaneously hold political or agency leadership roles creates multiple dangers.

When the acting OGE director is also a senior official in the White House or a federal agency, they may end up reviewing or creating rules for matters involving their own financial disclosures, their own staff, their own agencies’ conduct or their political allies. That kind of overlap is the exact scenario OGE was created to prevent. And it becomes nearly impossible for the public to be confident that decisions made behind closed doors are free from self-dealing.

This raises the stakes of every ethics decision OGE makes moving forward. If officials fear political blowback, they may hesitate to challenge misconduct or insist on stronger safeguards. If acting directors are beholden to the president for their continued employment, the impartiality of their decisions becomes suspect. Likewise, asking one person to juggle nuanced duties for multiple key roles undermines the importance of this work. A system that relies on independence cannot survive if independence is treated as optional. And the administration’s minimal communication around these leadership changes symbolizes a broader disregard for the transparency of an office whose mission centers on it.

At a moment when public trust in the government is at a historic low, the politicization of the OGE threatens one of the executive branch’s most important guardrails. We are witnessing a seemingly intentional undermining of an office designed to prevent abuse of power and self dealing.

OGE exists to protect the public interest, not serve the president. It is essential to public trust in government and public trust depends on stable, independent ethics oversight. Turning it into a revolving door of political loyalists undermines its mission, weakens safeguards put into place post-Watergate and erodes the foundation of trust that our democracy depends on—just as they are needed most. 

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