Today we looked at government ethics in my Ethics course. It's a brief little glance as they get their major projects ready, so it's not intended to be a heavy-lifting class. We look briefly at the civil service, and at the Pendleton Act and why it developed, and I give them some standard training materials used by the U. S. Office of Government Ethics for ethics training and (very briefly) discuss them. And then I have them break into groups and do this crossword puzzle (PDF), which at one time was regularly used as a training tool -- it's slightly dated at this point, being a few years old, but still gives a sense of what is done to avoid conflicts of interest at the civil service level.
18 Down is the clue, "Once you receive ethics advice, _________ it" (six letters), and my students (some of whom work for companies that do contracting for government and so are familiar with complications involved in these matters) joked that the answer was "forget".
