WestTexasBliss

Chairman Davis, Representative Waxman, and Members of the Committee, Common Cause appreciates this opportunity to testify on legislative efforts to address the recent scandals in Congress and begin to restore the public’s trust in government.
We know that recent scandals have greatly frayed that trust. The spectacle of executive branch officials and Members of Congress betraying their duty to serve the public interest increases public cynicism and threatens to erode further citizen participation in our democracy.
The American public has grown increasingly disillusioned about ethics in government, finding fault with both the Administration and Congress for the current state of affairs. A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll last week revealed that 47 percent of those surveyed disapprove of the way the President is handling “ethics in government,” and only one in three Americans rank Congressional ethics as “excellent” or “good.” This is a bipartisan problem. Nearly seven in ten of those surveyed felt there was no difference in the integrity and ethical standards of Republicans and Democrats.
Vigorous enforcement of existing laws is critical to restoring trust. Legislation that makes clear that wrongdoing will not go unpunished is a part of the solution to this problem. For this reason, Common Cause supports the Federal Pension Forfeiture Act. This legislation would deny federal retirement benefits to federal policymakers, including Members of Congress and their staffs, and political appointees in the executive branch who are convicted of crimes related to public corruption, crimes such as accepting bribes or defrauding the federal government, embezzling federal property or falsifying federal documents.
Losing a federal pension will be a deterrent to officials who may consider actions that betray the public trust. The retirement benefits that Members of Congress and high-level federal employees are entitled to receive after they retire often are more than the average American earns annually from a full-time job. The fact that public servants who have seriously violated their duties to the public would be rewarded by a lifetime pension seems grossly unfair to average citizens. It seems particularly unfair when the majority of Americans can expect no pension when they retire, and when corporations like Enron implode and deny millions of innocent workers their retirement savings.
Passage of the Federal Pension Forfeiture Act is a good step in a multi-pronged effort to restore the public’s faith in government.