Ethics Reform

The mayor of Miami-Dade County has announced the formation of a Procurement Review Task Force to, according to his May 6 memo (attached; see below), "improve and simplify our procurement process."

The principal goals of the task force are:

To ensure that all procurements continue to be conducted with the maximum level of transparency, fairness and integrity."

To "make procurement more efficient, easier to navigate for vendors," in other words, to...

Ethics reform can take the oddest forms, especially when those doing it put on blinders and consider nothing but the situation before them, thereby failing to consider best practices or, in fact, the practices of any other jurisdiction.

This is the kind of ethics reform that recently happened in Park Ridge, IL, a suburb of Chicago with 37,000 inhabitants. According to...

Another day, another grand jury report recommending government ethics reform. This report (attached; see below) comes from Orange County, NY, a county northwest of New York City, whose biggest town is Newburgh and whose most famous towns include the very different Tuxedo and Kiryas Joel.

The report criminally exonerates the county legislator who is its subject, because he did a couple things right:  he sought ethics advice from the ethics board, and he disclosed his employment with...

According to an article this week in the Sun-Sentinel, the Broward County, FL commission is discussing changes to the countywide ethics program, focusing on gifts and ethics advice.

Gift Bans
Conversations about the problems with gift bans are like Hollywood monsters:  they never die (see...

Reading in The Economist a distinction made by Paul Kingsnorth, a leader of the uncivilization movement, a response to climate change, made me wonder whether it is also important with respect to government ethics. His distinction is between a "problem" and a "predicament." A "problem" is something that can be solved. A "predicament" is something that must be endured, for which there is no real solution. When faced with a predicament, the appropriate response is not to try to solve it,...

I read something very exciting today in the April 1 newsletter of the Ethics Section of the American Society for Public Administration. In a short essay entitled "Living in Glass Houses: Ethics Commissions in the United States," Stuart C. Gilman, who has had an illustrious career both in academia and on the front lines of ethics and anti-corruption efforts, wrote the following:

I believe it is time for the ethics section to become more activist by encouraging targeted research or...