Washington, D.C. — After the staggering levels of corrupt policies under the Trump administration, a new report from the Center for American Progress urges the incoming Congress to take up an anti-corruption agenda to restore faith in American government.
Cracking down on political corruption is now Americans’ top noneconomic policy priority, stoked by the unending reports of self-enrichment by top politicians while in public office.
“The second Trump administration has exposed and exploited every gap in America’s current ethics law infrastructure,” said Devon Ombres, senior director for courts and legal policy at CAP and co-author of the report. “It’s time for a major overhaul. Congress must take strong action to root out misconduct within the ranks of government and restore faith in the system.”
The report sets forth a new anti-corruption agenda that identifies the classes of ethical problems that must be addressed, delineates their legal failures, and sets forth novel policy proposals that can hinder corruption, provide enforcement mechanisms that avoid capture, and reinforce governmental integrity. In doing so, the report provides a menu of options and alternatives to address the following categorical areas of corruption:
- Presidential self-enrichment
- Official self-dealing and insider enrichment—below presidential levels
- Lack of anti-corruption enforcement
- Abuses by special government employees
- Foreign entanglement in presidential business
- Corrupting the pardon process
These proposals would not just affect the Trump administration but also set new restrictions on all future administrations. Among the proposals, it would:
- Ban individual stock trading by all members of Congress, senior executive officials, and the judiciary.
- Ban all federal employees and contractors from placing bets in prediction markets.
- Bar officeholders from launching or endorsing their own meme or stablecoins and make it a crime to use official powers to benefit their own crypto holdings.
- Codify constitutional emoluments clauses and establish enforcement mechanisms.
- Require more transparency around the presidential pardon process, including disclosure of any financial relationships between the pardon recipient and the president’s family, businesses, or political supporters.
- Bar any individual worth more than $100 million from serving as a special government employee unless they divest from all assets related to the areas in which they will be working.
- Codify the strongest elements of past administrations’ ethics pledges for senior executive officials and establish binding ethics and enforcement standards for the U.S. Supreme Court.
Read the report: “Building an Anti-Corruption Agenda To Restore Faith in American Government” by Devon Ombres and Ben Olinsky
An executive summary of the report is available here.
For more information or to speak with an expert, please contact Sam Hananel at [email protected].