President Donald Trump has presided over one of the most unethical administrations in recent memory, and new laws are needed to stop it from happening again, ethics experts told Congress on Wednesday.

Trump set the tone for the ethical quagmire of his administration from the day he won the 2016 presidential election. His transition team ignored ethics officials and refused to abide by any ethics guidelines. He waved away anti-nepotism laws in elevating his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner , to positions of power with no relevant experience. He attracted aides who could not pass security clearance background checks. And most important, he refused to divest from his multibillion-dollar real estate business, allowing foreign governments , lobbyists and corporations seeking government action to directly pay the president.

They said they were going to drain the swamp, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said. They moved into the swamp. They built a hotel on it, and they started renting out rooms to foreign princes and kings and governments.

This situation upended decades of thinking about presidential ethics. It necessitates the enactment of stricter laws governing the executive branch, according to the ethics experts testifying at a Wednesday hearing on executive ethics provisions in H.R. 1, House Democrats top priority government reform bill.

While every presidential administration in our history has had its ethical challenges, weve never seen so many corruption scandals and appalling lack of concern for the ethics rules that should govern our executive branch than with this administration, said Karen Hobert Flynn, the president of the nonpartisan reform group Common Cause.

When presidents and agency heads do not lead on ethics issues, they can result in serious ethical lapses, said Rudy Merhbani, a senior counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice.

The trickle-down effects of Trumps refusal to abide by ethics norms have been widespread, according to Walter Shaub , a former Office of Government Ethics head under Trump now with the liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Six agency heads appointed by Trump stepped down or were fired amid ethics scandals. Nine aides were warned and six reprimanded for violating the Hatch Act when they used their official position to promote the presidents family businesses. Kushner has corrected his financial disclosures dozens of times . Then theres former national security adviser Michael Flynns guilty plea in the Russia investigation and the more than half a dozen staffers who resigned because they couldnt pass background checks to obtain the necessary security clearances.