Monday, March 12 | 10:00 a.m. - 11:30 a.m.
Walter Shaub, Jr.
For more than 20 years, Walter Shaub, Jr., former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics (OGE) and currently senior director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, has provided a standard of public service excellence and promoted the practice of ethics in governance. His achievements have garnered him attention in the national media spotlight in the past year as he has continued to strenuously voice the value of ethical governance.
A supervisory attorney at OGE in the early 2000s, Shaub led a team of attorneys, financial analysts and ethics officials who reviewed financial disclosure reports of presidential nominees. He transformed the nominee program and developed a 75-page guide for drafting ethics agreements that reduced processing times and produced better outcomes in resolving conflicts of interest. Recognized for his leadership, he became OGE's deputy general counsel, where he advanced President Obama's 2008-2009 transition effort by leading a cross-divisional team in effectively resolving potential conflicts of interest for nearly 800 presidential, Senate-confirmed positions and senior White House positions.
President Obama appointed Shaub as director of the OGE in January 2013; he served in that capacity until July 2017. During his tenure as director, he modernized regulations, advised agencies, issued legal and program guidance, expanded ethics education, conserved taxpayer resources and built a strong performance structure. He oversaw an ethics program comprised of 4,500 agency ethics officials who prevented conflicts of interest on the part of 2.7 million civilian federal employees, plus officers in uniform—all on a $16 million budget.
Following a widely reported speech earlier in 2017 in which Shaub called on President Trump for full divestiture of his financial interests, CNN reported, "Lofty speeches about patriotic duty are normally the bailiwick of three lawmakers on Capitol Hill, not wonky government lawyers who work behind the scenes and comb through reams of paperwork ..." One ethics expert called the speech a "great act of courage;" another called it "extraordinary."
In July 2017, Shaub resigned as director of the OGE and began his current position at the Campaign Legal Center, stating that working on the outside of the administration would enable him to reform and strengthen existing federal government ethics programs.
Prior to his experience at OGE, Shaub worked as an attorney with the law firm Shaw, Bransford, Veilleux and Roth, P.C., where he focused on federal employment law, representing federal employees, primarily Senior Executive Service members, managers and law enforcement officials. He also held a number of staff attorney positions at a variety of government agencies including the Central Office of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the Office of General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the VA's Baltimore-Washington Regional Counsel's office.
Shaub earned his BA from James Madison University and his JD from American University Washington College of Law.