This article was created for Propublica’s local reporting network in collaboration with the North Dakota Monitor. Sign up for Dispatch to get stories in your inbox every week.
Since North Dakota voters created the Ethics Watchdog Agency seven years ago, questionable lawmakers have opposed the power to actually give state officials the attention.
That was just the case in the session that ended as lawmakers closed many requests from the ethics committee and closed many requests from the ethics committee to deny measures that gave them more latitude in their investigation.
The governor and the attorney general’s office also argued during the session that the state constitution did not allow the committee to create or impose penalties for ethics-related violations.
“We were hoping the tide was turning,” said Rep. Carla Rose Hanson, a Fargo Democrat and a member of the Approximate Budget Committee, who worked on the committee’s budget. “But my general perspective is that the entire legislative body, particularly the majority party, is very hostile to the ethics committee and their work.”
North Dakotan is tired of what was considered an ethical lapse by civil servants and voted to amend the state constitution in 2018 and create an ethics committee. The amendment set rules for civil servants and forced the committee to create more rules and investigate alleged violations related to corruption, elections, lobbying and transparency.
North Dakota was one of the last states to establish an ethics agency, and since then the committee has struggled to fulfill its mission, North Dakota Monitor and Propublica reported this year. This amendment left ambiguity about the role of the committee and whether ethics laws could be enforced, leading to continued disagreements about how it would work.
This year, state leaders’ actions further hampered the agency as civil servants across the country were working in a variety of ways to reverse or curb policies created through citizen-led voting initiatives, including those related to abortion and employee benefits.
Daniel Caputo of the National Nonprofit Campaign Law Centre said several state governments are working to undermine ethics initiatives in particular. This year, the North Dakota leader’s claims are another example of ethics agencies unable to punish officials for misconduct, she said.
“We’ve seen what appears to be a coordinated effort in these states to twist the language in the most beneficial way for those who want to overturn vote initiatives or have fewer enforcement,” she said North Dakota was “one of the worse examples of that I’ve seen.”
In an email to North Dakota Monitor and Propovica, the governor’s office was called Caputo’s “gross mischaracterization” and said the governor had no opposition to the ethics committee. In another email, Assistant Deputy Attorney General Claire Ness called the notion that the Attorney General’s Office undermines voter intentions “unthinkable.”
Just as government officials discuss the committee’s powers, North Dakotan has reported concerns to the agency this year about ethics violations more than any other. May The committee recently received 72 complaints this year. 41 complaints were filed for all 2024.
By the end of last month, the committee had 63 pending complaints, some of which date back to 2022. It has three full-time staff members and five commissioners, receiving small scholarships to oversee the work, but it has not yet been revealed whether they have demonstrated the complaint. (Little is known about the nature of the application, as state law requires the committee to keep the complaint secret until the end of the process.)
The Ethics Committee supported the law for the session, which said it had overhauled the process to speed up the investigation and allow cases to be closed faster.
Under the measures sponsored by eight Republicans and two Democrats, the committee could have resolved and rejected the complaint at any time, not just at a specific stage in the complaint process. They would also have been allowed to investigate suspicious ethical violations without anyone filing an official complaint. Agency is currently unable to investigate North Dakotan tips. Because they have to file it as a formal complaint, some complainants are doing something offensive, agency staff said.
Staff in the office of Gov. Kelly Armstrong and Attorney General Drew Wrigley testified that they both were Republicans and opposed the bill because they said they gave the committee too much power.
Faced with strong opposition from national leaders and their own reluctance to give the institution more power, the House voted overwhelmingly to reject legislation. Most of the house sponsors voted against it.
Rep. Austin Schauer, a Republican West Fargo, who chaired the committee that worked on legislation, acknowledged the tension between the Ethics Committee and Congress and testimony against the administrative department.
“The bill was basically a DOA and we had to move on,” Schauer said.
Instead, lawmakers settled down with tweaks to existing processes. One requires the committee to develop time management standards, and the other allows the accused to informally resolve ethical complaints. These settlements are made publicly available to all parties to the agreement.
“For years, there have been people who have been sitting on their heads with this complaint, and that’s absolutely unfair,” said Rep. Mike Neisse, a Republican Bismarck who criticized the committee and proposed some changes. He also said he believes the committee’s caseload includes fake complaints filed by North Dakotan, who wants to “weapon” the system against political enemies. (State law requires the committee to keep the complaint confidential, so this request cannot be verified.)
Rebeccabinstock, executive director of the Ethics Committee, said the agency is looking for ways to avoid the hurdles that keep the investigation process slower. “The committee now has to consider ways to fix the process that has no law,” Binstock wrote in an email.
Rebeccabinstock, executive director of the North Dakota Ethics Committee, said the agency will seek ways to overcome the hurdles of delaying work without the law. Credit: Michael Achterling/North Dakota Monitor
Congress has also approved measures to protect its members from prosecution in order to vote for something that provides financial benefits as long as they disclose the dispute.
Lawmakers said they wanted to protect the committee to avoid taxpayer consideration, but also turned down the agency’s request for $250,000 over the next two years for a fourth staff member who will train and educate them for the public. This would have allowed current employees to spend more time investigating complaints, agency staff said.
“We don’t recall the argument that ‘We’re going to have a multi-million dollar branch of the government,” Minott Republican Rep. Scott Loser said at a legislative hearing in April.
State leaders also argued that legislature was the only one capable of creating penalties for ethics violations and delegating enforcement of penalties against state agencies. The committee, they said, can only punish officials for misconduct if Congress grants its authority.
Chris Joseph, the general advisor to the governor, testified this year that if the committee is given the authority to create and enforce penalties, it will “define, implement and interpret its own rules” without supervision from other parts of the state government.
However, the committee says its enforcement body is implicit in constitutional reform. That interpretation can be tested immediately. Binstock has shown in an email that committee staff have concluded their investigation into several cases and that the commissioner is waiting for the penalty.
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Ellen Chaffee, part of a group called The Badass Grandmas who organized the voting initiative and drafted the amendment, said voters whose ethics committee intended to impose punishments for misconduct.
“People who worked on the amendments understood that the only way to provide fair follow-up on violations of ethics regulations was to have the ethics committee liability,” she said.
Governor spokesman Mike Novatzki said if the amendment does not reflect what their supporters wanted, “they can always try to clarify it with another constitutional amendment.”
