From stock trades to lobbying to a Supreme Court with no binding ethics code, the people who write the rules keep exempting themselves from them — what should actually change?
Each issue breaks into the specific questions Congress actually fights over. Read each position, then head to the interactive version of this issue to mark which reflects your view and build a message to your representatives.
Members of Congress get classified briefings and advance knowledge of pending legislation that can move markets, and current disclosure-only rules haven't stopped a pattern of well-timed trades. A ban on individual stock ownership and trading while in office — for members and their spouses both — is the only fix that removes the conflict of interest instead of just disclosing it after the fact.
The HONEST Act's evolution — dropping its original framing as a bill targeting one member by name, adding coverage of the President and Vice President, and advancing out of committee with bipartisan support — shows the core idea now has real momentum, even if which officials it covers and how violations are enforced are still being negotiated.
A blanket ban forces members of Congress into the same kind of hastily-designed blind trust rules that have already tripped up presidents and presidential candidates who weren't prepared for how strict genuine blind trusts have to be. Members should be able to participate in a free market economy like any other citizen, provided real-time disclosure makes any suspicious trading pattern immediately visible to voters and reporters.
Nearly half of the hundreds of members and staff who left Congress in 2025 moved directly into lobbying or lobbying-adjacent roles — a record pace exceeding even the pre-2007-reform high. A lifetime ban on former members of Congress lobbying their old colleagues, not just a longer waiting period, is the only way to actually close what's become a well-worn career pipeline.
The 2007 Honest Leadership and Open Government Act's two-year cooling-off period was a real improvement over what came before, but the record 2025 revolving-door numbers suggest it hasn't kept pace with how lobbying firms now recruit. Extending the waiting period further and requiring public disclosure of exactly which former officials firms are paying, as several pending bills do, tightens the existing model without eliminating the practice outright.
Former members of Congress bring genuine policy expertise that improves the quality of information available to current lawmakers, and a lifetime ban would push that same influence further underground into informal 'strategic advising' roles that don't even require registration as a lobbyist — arguably making the problem less transparent, not more.
The administration fired at least 17 inspectors general in a single night in January 2025 without the 30-day advance notice to Congress the law requires — including the watchdog at USAID, fired one day after his office published a report critical of the agency's dismantling. A federal judge ruled the firings unlawful in September 2025, but declined to reinstate anyone, leaving the law's real teeth in doubt.
Congress has strengthened the Inspector General Act three times since 2008 specifically to prevent politically motivated removals, and it did so again in 2022 with bipartisan support — Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican, has been among the most vocal critics of the 2025 firings. That existing bipartisan consensus, that IGs need real independence regardless of which party controls the White House, is worth defending even when it's inconvenient for the party in power.
Inspectors general are executive branch officials serving at the pleasure of the President, who retains constitutional authority to remove them; the 2025 firings followed the same legal mechanism used by presidents of both parties in 2009 and 2020. The real question is whether Congress's 30-day notice requirement itself is a permissible limit on that removal power — a live and unresolved legal dispute, not settled misconduct.
The Constitution gives Congress, not the President, the power of the purse, and the 1974 Impoundment Control Act exists precisely to stop a president from unilaterally refusing to spend money Congress has already appropriated. DOGE's operations — including reported access to sensitive payment and personnel systems without clear congressional authorization — tested that boundary before the initiative's scheduled shutdown on July 4, 2026.
Using the Impoundment Control Act's actual rescission process — as the administration did in June 2025, formally asking Congress to claw back billions in previously appropriated funds — is the legitimate, lawful way to cut spending Congress has already approved. Whether Congress approves any individual rescission request is a normal legislative fight; the process itself isn't in dispute.
DOGE identified real, auditable waste — the administration's rescission requests targeted specific programs like public broadcasting subsidies and foreign aid administrative overhead that Congress itself has questioned in the past. Formally submitting those cuts through the Impoundment Control Act's rescission process, rather than impounding funds unilaterally, is Congress and the executive working the system as designed.
The Supreme Court is the only federal court in the country without a binding, enforceable code of ethics — its own 2023 code has no investigation mechanism and no consequences for violating it. After years of reporting on undisclosed gifts and luxury travel from politically active donors, only a congressionally imposed binding code, with a real investigative body, will restore any accountability.
Congress has clear, decades-old statutory authority to regulate judicial ethics and recusal that already explicitly applies to the Supreme Court — the constitutional question isn't whether Congress can act, but how much investigative authority and enforcement power any new law should give an outside body over sitting justices without crossing into the judiciary's own turf.
The Constitution's separation of powers gives each branch primary authority over its own internal conduct rules, and the Court's voluntary 2023 code of conduct — its first ever — was a meaningful self-imposed step. A congressionally mandated investigative body with power to sanction sitting justices risks exactly the kind of inter-branch entanglement the framers built separation of powers to prevent.