# Ethics in Government Act The **Ethics in Government Act of 1978** (Pub. L. 95-521) is the central post-[[Watergate Scandal]] accountability statute. Signed in October 1978, it built three things: mandatory public financial disclosure for senior officials across all three branches, the [[Office of Government Ethics]] as the executive branch's ethics supervisor, and the independent counsel mechanism for investigating high-level executive wrongdoing. Two of the three survive. The independent counsel provision required periodic reauthorization; after the Starr investigation it was allowed to lapse in 1999, and the [[Department of Justice]]'s internal special counsel regulations replaced it — a substitution that moved the appointment and removal of corruption investigators back inside the department they investigate. [[Office of Government Ethics]] retains its supervisory role but has no independent enforcement power. The Act is the statutory backbone of [[Conflict of Interest]] practice in the executive branch and the reason financial disclosure exists at all. It is also a case study in accountability architecture decaying by non-renewal rather than repeal — see [[Oversight and Accountability Hub]]. ## Title by title - **Titles I–III** — annual public financial disclosure for the President, Vice President, members of Congress, federal judges and senior officials (originally GS-16 and above, now the SES pay bands), with the reports public on request. This is the regime that produces the OGE Form 278 and the congressional reports the [[STOCK Act]] (2012) later moved online and put on a 45-day clock for transactions. - **Title IV** — the [[Office of Government Ethics]], created inside OPM and made an independent agency by the 1988 reauthorization: a supervisor of agency ethics programs with no investigative or enforcement power of its own, which is why its 2025 director could be removed and its guidance ignored without legal consequence. - **Title V** — post-employment restrictions on senior officials (the one- and two-year "cooling off" bars on lobbying former agencies), tightened by the Ethics Reform Act of 1989, which also banned honoraria and raised judicial and congressional pay in exchange. - **Title VI** — the [[Independent Counsel]], upheld in [[Morrison v. Olson]] (1988) and allowed to sunset on June 30, 1999. ## What decayed and how The Act was written on the premise that disclosure plus an outside prosecutor would keep the executive honest. The prosecutor is gone by non-renewal; the disclosure regime survives but exempts the President from the conflict-of-interest statute it was meant to enforce, and the office that supervises it cannot compel anything. The second Trump term is the demonstration: financial disclosures that list hundreds of entities and no divestitures, an OGE without a director for much of 2025, and a [[Special Counsel]] regulation that the Attorney General can rewrite. The Act is the vault's model of accountability architecture that expires rather than repeals. See [[Conflict of Interest]] and the [[Oversight and Accountability Hub]]. ## See Also - [[Independent Counsel]] — the Title VI mechanism, upheld in [[Morrison v. Olson]] and sunset June 30, 1999 - [[Special Counsel Appointment and Removal Flow]] — the regulation that replaced it nine days later, and the crosswalk of what was traded away - [[Office of Government Ethics]] - [[Conflict of Interest]] - [[Watergate Scandal]] - [[Oversight and Accountability Hub]] - [[STOCK Act]]