Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher on Friday introduced an ethics bill that includes an extension of the ban on lobbying former lawmakers.
The “Serve the People, Not the Swamp Act,” obtained exclusively by The Daily Caller, extends the ban on lobbying former members of Congress and executive appointees from two to five years. The pension system for members of the Diet will also be abolished.Gallagher introduced ethics at the same time oathenforced by the Office of Government Ethics, which applies a ban on lobbying to executive officials.
Read the bill here:
Serve the people, not the text of the Swamp Law To Michael Ginsberg in Scribd
More than 400 former lawmakers are currently registered as lobbyists, according to the report. open secret. Democratic former California Senator Barbara Boxer has signed up in 2021 to lobby Hikvision USA, a US subsidiary of a Chinese company that has been blacklisted for her involvement in Uyghur massacres. worthy of Republican former Louisiana Senator David Bitter signed up to lobby the same office in 2020.
Four former members signed up to lobby TikTok in 2022, just as Congress began considering legislation to ban the app. (Related: Former Democrat staffer seeks to remove Chinese surveillance firm from government blacklist)
Members of Congress have been allowed to participate in the Federal Employee Retirement Savings (FERS) Program since 1984 and have been required to participate in the plan since 2003. More than 600 lawmakers participated in the FERS, or its predecessor, the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS), according to the Congressional Research Service, in 2018. report. These members received an average annual benefit of approximately $59,000.
“Washington is broken. Unless we change the way we do things in this town, the jersey may change, but the outcome for the American people will be the same,” Gallagher said in a statement to the Daily Caller. “House Republicans have fought the quagmire by abolishing proxy voting and restoring accountability in Washington, but now is the time to step up this effort by changing incentive structures for those at the highest levels of government. By eliminating taxpayer-funded legislative pensions and imposing strict lobbying requirements on lawmakers and government officials, these bills ensure that the people of Washington are here to serve the American people, not the swamp. It brings us one step closer to ensuring that
