In Brief: Why Can’t New York Build an Effective Ethics Agency?

In Brief articles are short explanations of important topics, agencies, and questions affecting the Empire State and its citizens. Do you have a question we can answer? Ask it here.

New York has faced the same conundrum for decades: how to build an effective ethics watchdog agency.

The tension is structural: The state legislature and the governor are responsible for passing any law that creates an ethics agency, yet those are the very same people the agency will scrutinize — and potentially penalize.

Good-government groups have long argued that the laws creating New York’s ethics agencies have led to bodies that lack true independence from those regulated.

Over the decades, criticism of the ethics agency has intermittently spurred lawmakers to replace it with a new one — which has then come under fire itself. One constant throughout the cycle: The commissioners of these various iterations have always been appointed by the state politicians they oversee.

That criticism most recently came to a head during the governorship of Andrew Cuomo, who created the Joint Commission on Public Ethics (JCOPE) through a 2011 ethics reform law.

Cuomo earned a reputation for resisting independent scrutiny, and the body came to be viewed at times as a tool for the governor. That culminated with a 2019 controversy over the apparent leak of confidential information to Cuomo concerning a commission vote over whether to investigate one of his top aides.

After Cuomo resigned in 2021, many of his JCOPE appointees were replaced, and the agency began more aggressively pursuing investigations into Cuomo, including his use of government staff to complete a book that netted him $5 million.

Governor Kathy Hochul pledged to do away with JCOPE, and initially proposed a new body with commissioners who’d be various New York law school deans. But the Democratic-controlled legislature balked at relinquishing any control of the ethics panel.

In a compromise, lawmakers eventually approved a plan whereby statewide elected officials and the legislature would still appoint the 11 commissioners, but the appointments would be approved by a panel composed of law school deans.

Since its inception in July 2022, the Commission on Ethics and Lobbying in Government (COELIG) has been relatively quiet, and has not successfully completed any enforcement case against a current or former elected official. But after more than two years of existence, the body did announce in October that it had reached four settlements totaling $338,000 — though they all involved state agency employees or lobbyists, not elected officials.

COELIG hears cases concerning the misuse of government resources, potential violations of “revolving door” laws, alleged sexual harassment, illegal gifts given to public officials, and more.