Stockholdings of Federal Executives Would Be Easier to Track Under New Bill
Legislation by Chuck Grassley and Gary Peters was triggered by Wall Street Journal’s Capital Assets series The ethics information that government employees must disclose ’is useless if the public can’t access it,’ Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley says. Photo: Tom Williams/Zuma Press By Brody Mullins July 12, 2023 2:33 pm ET WASHINGTON—A bipartisan group of senators introduced legislation Wednesday to create an online and searchable database of the corporate stocks, mutual funds and other assets owned by senior officials in the executive branch. The legislation, by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Sen. Gary Peters (D., Mich.), comes in response to The Wall Street Journal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Capital Assets series last year, which found that many
The ethics information that government employees must disclose ’is useless if the public can’t access it,’ Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley says.
Photo: Tom Williams/Zuma Press
WASHINGTON—A bipartisan group of senators introduced legislation Wednesday to create an online and searchable database of the corporate stocks, mutual funds and other assets owned by senior officials in the executive branch.
The legislation, by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Sen. Gary Peters (D., Mich.), comes in response to The Wall Street Journal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Capital Assets series last year, which found that many top executive-branch employees owned stocks in companies that their agencies helped to regulate.
“To promote transparency and public trust, Congress passed laws requiring government employees to disclose certain ethics information, but this information is useless if the public can’t access it,” Grassley said.
Supporters of the legislation are hoping to bring the bill to a vote in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in the next few weeks. Peters is chairman of the panel.
Similar efforts to make the financial holdings of government officials more transparent have been opposed in the past by the Senior Executives Association, which represents top employees in the executive branch.
The group, which didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, has previously said that a public database containing the financial holdings and debts of executive branch officials would be an unnecessary invasion of privacy and could create security risks for certain employees.
Congress considered creating a similar database more than a decade ago as part of broader legislation that made it clear that members of Congress weren’t allowed to trade stocks based on information they learned as part of their government jobs.
Democratic Sen. Gary Peters is chairman of the committee where a vote on the bill is expected in the next few weeks.
Photo: Jemal Countess/Getty Images
For its Capital Assets series, the Journal reviewed more than 30,000 financial-disclosure forms for about 12,000 senior executive-branch officials from 2016 through 2021. Senior executive-branch officials fill out annual reports disclosing their stocks, other investments and debts.
Those forms are supposed to be available to the public, but they can be difficult to get. They aren’t available online and must be obtained by contacting individual agencies. Some agencies made it very hard to get access to the disclosures.
At least one agency contacted by the Journal last year has yet to hand over the financial-disclosure forms for employees.
The new legislation would change that by establishing an online database for most executive-branch employees, with the exception of those who work at intelligence agencies.
The database would also include any waivers, recusals or exemptions to the federal conflict-of-interest rules received by individual government employees.
Write to Brody Mullins at [email protected]
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