Hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs - Opening Statement of Sen. Carper, Business Meeting

Hearing

Mr. Chairman, thank you for bringing this legislation to a markup and for your work on improving the presidential transition process over the years. Two years ago, we worked together to pass the Ted Kaufman and Michael Leavitt Presidential Transitions Improvement Act. That bill laid the foundation for the most recent presidential transition and ensured that there was a process in place to provide the new administration with the resources it needed to hit the ground running.

"However, what we didn't envision at that time was an Administration coming into power with a blatant disregard for the ethical norms that have guided previous administrations. We also didn't envision a presidential candidate who would refuse to disclose how he would deal with his own conflicts of interest.

"Senator Warren and I asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to review the most recent presidential transition. As part of their review, the GAO identified serious ethical lapses during the most recent presidential transition. To address these issues, and to elevate ethics as a central tenet of a new administration, we drafted the Transition Team Ethics Improvement Act which has been filed as an amendment to your presidential transition bill. The bill will provide more accountability and transparency in presidential transitions by requiring presidential candidates to disclose how they will address their own conflicts of interest before the election and by requiring those candidates to develop and publicly release ethics plans for their transition teams.

"The bill also includes requirements for transition team members that are given non-public access to federal agencies and will improve Congressional oversight for those who are granted security clearances. The bill is supported by bipartisan ethics experts from both the Obama and Bush Administrations as well as former Senator Ted Kaufman. For those reasons, I urge my colleagues to support this amendment."

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