Promise to Beef Up Ethics Rules Plagues Clinton Staff : Transition: Aides are worried that strict standards may keep many potential appointees from government service.

Advisers to Bill Clinton have grown increasingly concerned that the strict ethics standards promised by the President-elect may dissuade many qualified appointees from entering government service.

Clinton promised during the campaign to tighten ethics rules far beyond those already in place and vowed soon after the election that new rules would be forthcoming. But aides said this week that drafting the regulations was proving far more complicated than expected.

A particular problem for the Clinton team has emerged in efforts to translate into policy a recurrent campaign pledge: that to slow the so-called revolving door, officials would be barred from contact with their former government agencies for five years after leaving office.

Although Clinton aides said they expect him to stand by the commitment, they suggested that it is highly possible the ban might be applied only to several hundred top-ranking officials among the thousands who will be appointed.

“We didn’t go into (the ethics question) with our eyes open,” a senior Clinton aide acknowledged.

Top government officials are currently subjected only to a one-year ban on lobbying activities, and Clinton aides have had to turn to ethics lawyers across the nation for advice as they seek to make the standard stricter.

“We’re still very much in the looking-at-the-problem phase,” said Harold Ickes, a New York attorney who is among those struggling to find ways to ensure that the guidelines do not create too great a barrier to potential nominees.

On Thursday, as vehicles with tinted windows continued to ferry unidentified job hopefuls to the Arkansas governor’s mansion, problems with the proposed code presented a potential obstacle as the President-elect begins to make choices for Cabinet and sub-Cabinet posts.

There has always been tension between efforts to attract the best candidates to public service and parallel efforts to establish safeguards designed to prevent special interests from gaining undue influence over government decisions.

But while decisions about that trade-off have been high on the agenda of every recent administration, Clinton’s ambitious promise to “send a signal that we are going to change politics as usual” has made the task particularly vexing for his advisers.

The quest for an ethics code has taken on particular urgency this week as Clinton prepares to announce his first Cabinet appointments. As his advisers acknowledged, potential appointees should know how their future options would be restricted.

But with a final code now not expected before late next week, George Stephanopoulos, Clinton’s communications director, had suggested that prospective nominees would have to rely on “general outlines” of the guidelines in deciding whether to accept Administration posts.

Clinton’s promise to toughen the ethics codes applicable to government employees comes as some experts, including a panel assembled earlier this year by the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that in some technical fields, at least, such efforts may be counterproductive.

In a published report, the panel said it had found that “the laws restricting post-government employment have become the single biggest disincentive to public service.” It concluded that “the unintended costs of broader conflict-of-interest restrictions . . . have reached the point where they substantially outweigh the benefits.”

Stephanopoulos and other top Clinton advisers said this week that the President-elect had no intention of abandoning his call for tougher restrictions. In interviews, officials in Washington and in Little Rock also said they had seen no indication that the promise of a strict ethics code would dissuade prospective nominees.

Until now, however, the transition team has largely focused on filling only the highest-level government jobs. The aides acknowledged that the effect of the new guidelines will become clearer when the group turns to lower-ranking appointments, matching as many as 3,000 lawyers, lobbyists, academics and other experts to the sub-Cabinet and government agency jobs.

That task, headed by Richard Riley, the former governor of South Carolina, is only now beginning. Officials involved said the recruiting effort could be accelerated once the guidelines are in place.

The team of lawyers assigned to the ethics problem was said by Clinton aides to be headed by Washington attorney Jack Quinn. He did not return a telephone call.

Several outside legal experts said they believe that the team will have no choice but to establish exceptions to the rigid guidelines Clinton has mentioned.

“You can’t practice tax law without talking to the (Internal Revenue Service),” one ethics law expert said. “So if you want tax lawyers working in the IRS, you’re going to have to find some way for them to make a living afterward.”

The National Academy of Sciences report, titled “Ensuring the Best Presidential Appointments,” expressed similar concerns.

At highly specialized agencies like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Energy Department and the National Institutes of Health, the report warned, “high-level appointees may be effectively barred from immediate post-employment opportunities with many or all of the firms or institutions at which they could practice their career specialties.”

Efforts to enforce strict ethical standards also have contributed to other delays in the selection process. Even before turning to the FBI for background checks, the Clinton team assembled lawyers to conduct preliminary reviews of the financial affairs of prospective candidates, sources said.

Clinton advisers defended the practice as necessary to ensure that appointees fulfilled the highest ethical standards. But they said that the introduction of the time-consuming practice would make it all but impossible for Clinton to complete his Cabinet nominations before the Christmas holiday.

Among the job candidates reportedly interviewed by Clinton at his mansion in recent days were Donna Shalala of the University of Wisconsin, a possible candidate for secretary of education, and John Young of Hewlett-Packard Co., a potential choice to head either the Commerce Department or the Defense Department.

The visits suggest that Clinton is prepared to move on to other appointments quickly after making his selections on the economic-policy posts that he has pledged to give top priority. But his advisers said privately that a logjam already has begun to develop because of the internal background checks.

Asked whether he now believes that it is possible Clinton could be prepared to announce all of his choices by Christmas, one senior adviser replied: “I just don’t see how.”