WASHINGTON — David J. Apol, named by President Trump last week as the new head of the Office of Government Ethics, has repeatedly clashed with colleagues over his career at the agency as he sought to roll back or loosen ethics requirements on federal employees, including those in the White House, three former senior officials at the agency said.
Mr. Apol’s former colleagues praised his intelligence and his experience as a federal government ethics lawyer at a half-dozen different agencies, including the White House, over three decades.
But the tension has been building for at least a decade, during two stints Mr. Apol served at the Office of Government Ethics, his former colleagues said. Mr. Apol has argued that the agency is often too rigid in interpreting conflict-of-interest laws, they said.
As recently as this spring, Mr. Apol had a disagreement with Walter M. Shaub Jr., the departing director, when Mr. Apol suggested that Derek T. Kan, then a general manager at Lyft, the car-sharing service, should not be required to sell his vested stock options in the company before he accepted a job at the Department of Transportation as the head of policy.
Mr. Shaub said he overruled Mr. Apol, who has served as general counsel of the agency since 2014, arguing that many policy matters now before the Department of Transportation could affect Lyft’s financial fate — including possible actions related to self-driving cars and the car-sharing industry.
“It was so immediately obviously crazy,” Mr. Shaub said. He said Mr. Apol’s general approach to government ethics was “loosey-goosey.”
