A government watchdog group is accusing Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) of violating ethics rules for backing laws that financially benefited his wife's environmental organization.
Whitehouse, a ranking member of the U.S. Senate Environment Committee and co-founder of the Senate's so-called "Oceans Caucus," voted in favor of key legislation that provided funding for grants to the climate alarmism group that works with his wife, Sandra Whitehouse, and pays her through a consulting company.
Now, the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT) is asking the GOP-led Senate Select Committee on Ethics to investigate Whitehouse, determine whether he violated the Senate's ethics rules surrounding conflicts of interest, and "take appropriate action."
FACT alleges that Whitehouse has helped his wife's employers rake in large sums of taxpayer money.
Whitehouse's wife is currently president of Ocean Wonks LLC, a left-wing consulting firm specializing in ocean conservation. A self-described expert on "advancing ocean sustainability grounded in social justice," per her LinkedIn page, Sandra Whitehouse has also served as senior policy advisor at Ocean Conservancy, providing consultation services since 2008.
Ocean Conservacy's tax filings show that every year between 2010 and 2022, either Whitehouse or Ocean Wonks LLC was one of the organization's highest-paid consultants. During that 12-year reporting period, Whitehouse was paid a total of $2.6 million directly or through her firm.
According to grant records, since Whitehouse's employment, Ocean Conservancy was awarded 19 government grants totaling more than $14.2 million. Notably, nearly half of this amount was allocated in FY 2024 alone.
Last year, the group was given two grants: one in September for $5.2 million from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), as part of a marine debris cleanup project, and another in December worth $1.7 million from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), again to assist with cleaning up marine debris.
Senator Whitehouse rallied behind the legislation that led to these grants.
The former was funded by the Biden administration's Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which Senator Whitehouse publicly supported and voted for. The latter received its funding through the EPA's annual appropriations bill, another Whitehouse-backed measure.
"While these two grants alone appear to be a conflict of interest, it is even more egregious in the context of Senator Whitehouse's long history of working on legislation being lobbied for by organizations tied to his wife," FACT's executive director Kendra Arnold explains in the ethics complaint lodged Monday.
Arnold noted that Ocean Conservancy has spent millions on federal lobbying expenses over the years on a number of climate-related causes that Senator Whitehouse championed. According to Arnold, Ocean Conservancy urged Congress to pass the International Maritime Pollution Accountability Act, which Whitehouse introduced in 2023. Ocean Conservancy also advocated for funding coastal restoration projects via the Inflation Reduction Act. At the time, Senator Whitehouse touted its passage as well as securing a suite of climate provisions within the massive spending package.
Last week, Whitehouse railed against Kash Patel, the Trump administration's director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Outside the FBI's headquarters, Whitehouse claimed that Patel "will cause evil in this building behind us."
Sen. Whitehouse: “Kash Patel, mark my words, will cause evil in this building behind us.”
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) February 20, 2025
They are terrified pic.twitter.com/EQDVwmQTj2
This isn't the first time that Whitehouse's activities have been brought to the attention of the Senate Ethics Committee. In February 2024, Judicial Watch also asked the committee to "immediately investigate" Whitehouse over similar allegations concerning his consultant wife. "Senator Whitehouse seems to have stepped over the line of standard environmental legislative advocacy and used his Senate office to advance his and his wife's personal and financial interests," Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a press release.
In response to FACT's ethics accusations, Ocean Conservancy defended Sandra Whitehouse's work, claiming she was never compensated from the flow of federal funding.
"Dr. Sandra Whitehouse, a well-respected marine ecologist and ocean policy consultant, has not received compensation from these federal grants allocated to Ocean Conservancy," Ocean Conservancy's vice president of external affairs Jeff Watters told Fox News Digital.
For 40 years, Watters noted, Ocean Conservancy has been "a global leader" in marine debris cleanup through its signature initiative, the International Coastal Cleanup. Following "a competitive, independent" selection process, Ocean Conservative was picked as a grant recipient among hundreds of NGOs "based on our decades of expertise in addressing marine debris and protecting the ocean," Watters insisted.
Watters also pointed to the "broad bipartisan support" of both bills behind the funding.
With these federal funds, Ocean Conservancy simply plans to remove trash from beaches and waterways across the country, "which will not only protect these places for generations of Americans to enjoy but improve the health of our fishing and tourism industries," Watters said.
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