The Nation - News from March 16, 1987

A General Accounting Office study challenged the propriety of the 1983 Office of Government Ethics ruling that limited a law imposing a one-year ban on business contacts between certain former top government officials and their former agencies. The GAO said that “without any substantiating explanation,” the ethics office allowed the Executive Office of the President to be divided into nine compartments for purposes of the law. The report also found that the office had relied on justifications provided by the counsel to the President, even though those justifications resembled arguments it had rejected two years earlier.