WASHINGTON — Faced with mounting evidence that current ethics rules do not cover new ways lobbyists have devised to win favor with members of Congress, the House ethics committee plans to unveil an array of proposed changes next year.
But the proposed changes appear likely to loosen ethics restrictions, not tighten them.
One change would let special interests begin to pay some of a representative's official operating expenses -- in effect, making the member beholden for the daily activities of his or her congressional office. Another would increase the number of family members allowed to go on junkets paid for by private interests, a move seen as weakening the rules designed to keep members of Congress independent of outside groups.
The House proposals to loosen ethics restrictions parallel a lack of reform efforts on ethics issues in the Congress as a whole.
Former Senate ethics committee chairman Harry Reid (D-Nev.), now Senate minority leader, has made no apparent effort to push for the ethics review he called for last year after The Times detailed extensive financial relationships between members of Reid's family and business interests he had helped.
And this past fall, House Republicans voted to abolish a rule they had pushed for in 1993 that barred members who were under indictment on felony charges from serving in leadership positions.
The indictment rule was eliminated to protect Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), who is being investigated by a grand jury in Travis County, Texas. DeLay, whom the ethics committee admonished twice on other matters earlier this year, dismisses the inquiry as politically motivated.
"The message to members is clear," Gary Ruskin of the Congressional Accountability Project said. "The ethics committees are toothless by design."
Dennis F. Thompson, a Harvard University professor and the author of a book on congressional ethics, questioned whether the present system of self-policing on ethics was workable, though he expressed doubt that members would ever turn the matter over to an outside body, as some reformers suggested.
"Keeping investigations to themselves is the ultimate conflict of interest. And it is bipartisan in an unfortunate way," he added, noting that members know that "if a Republican is charged this month, a Democrat will be charged next."
"In the meantime," he said, "citizens and the democratic process suffer."
The kinds of ethics issues that have stimulated calls for reform are reflected in the recent activities of Rep. James C. Greenwood (R-Pa.), who chaired an investigative subcommittee of the Senate Energy and Commerce committee.
During the past year, Greenwood's subcommittee conducted two probes of the pharmaceuticals industry. One involved apparent conflicts of interest among scientists at the National Institutes of Health who also worked for pharmaceutical companies. The subcommittee also investigated suspected links between antidepressant drugs and suicide among children.
At one point, Greenwood sent a letter to the chief executive of the pharmaceuticals giant Pfizer demanding information on allegations that Pfizer and other companies withheld data showing that suicide rates rose among children who were given the antidepressants.
At the same time the probes were underway, a drug industry trade group supported by those companies was secretly negotiating with Greenwood over a job that would more than quadruple his House salary -- paying him $650,000 a year, with bonuses totaling as much as $200,000 more.
Greenwood did not disclose the negotiations or step aside as subcommittee chairman until after he announced he would retire from Congress at the end of the term and take the job heading up the Biotechnology Industry Organization.
Greenwood said in an interview that his announcement that he was accepting the job was not connected with a two-month delay in a hearing in the antidepressant drug probe. The postponement was announced just before the job announcement in July.
"I am absolutely convinced I handled this in the most ethical manner possible," Greenwood said.
That, advocates of ethics reform say, is exactly the problem: Outdated rules do not cover present-day circumstances, and Congress has shown little appetite for changing the rules.
"They really need to clamp down and at least enforce the existing rules, but it's clear they will not do that," said Melanie Sloan of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "They just don't want to enforce the rules."
In Greenwood's case, four months after he announced he would take the industry job, the House ethics committee issued a memorandum advising members to be cautious in negotiating for future jobs. A nearly identical memo had been issued two years earlier.
"First and foremost," the new memo stated, "it would be improper for a member to permit the prospect of future employment to influence his or her official actions."
Greenwood said his official actions were not influenced by the job prospect.
