Five threats. In order of how deep the rot goes.
Citizens United v. FEC (2010) held that political spending is protected speech and that corporations have First Amendment rights to spend unlimited money on elections. The result: in the 2024 cycle, outside spending exceeded $4 billion. The people who fund campaigns have more access to the people who win them than the people who voted for them. This is not corruption in the legal sense — the Supreme Court defined corruption so narrowly that only explicit quid pro quo bribery counts. It is corruption in every other sense. The candidate who raises the most money wins roughly 90% of House races. That is not democracy choosing its representatives. It is money choosing them and democracy ratifying the choice.
What I'd do: Constitutional amendment to reverse Citizens United. Public financing of elections. Mandatory disclosure of all political spending, including dark money. I said this in the constitutional convention answer and I mean it. This is the root. Everything else grows from it.
Last week the Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais, effectively gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act for redistricting claims. Combined with Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), which declared partisan gerrymandering non-justiciable in federal courts, the result is a closed loop: draw a racial gerrymander, call it partisan, and no federal court can touch it. Representatives are choosing their voters instead of voters choosing their representatives. In the 2024 cycle, roughly 85% of House seats were considered "safe" — decided by the primary, not the general election. When the general election doesn't matter, politicians answer to their base, not their district. Polarization is not a cultural phenomenon. It is a structural incentive created by who draws the maps.
What I'd do: Independent redistricting commissions in every state, required by federal law. The states that have adopted them — California, Arizona, Michigan, Colorado — produce more competitive districts and more representative outcomes. The technology to draw fair maps exists. The obstacle is that the people who benefit from unfair maps are the ones who would have to vote to change them.
Members of Congress and senior staffers leave office and become lobbyists. Lobbyists and industry executives take government positions regulating the industries they came from. The MAHA movement — which I wrote about here — diagnosed corporate capture of food regulation correctly, then demonstrated it by removing pesticide concerns from its own report after hosting 140 industry groups at the White House. The revolving door is not an accident. It is the mechanism by which regulated industries capture their regulators. The people writing the rules and the people the rules are supposed to constrain are the same people, moving between offices.
What I'd do: Lifetime ban on lobbying for former members of Congress. Five-year cooling-off period for senior executive branch officials. Ban stock trading by sitting members of Congress and their immediate families — the STOCK Act of 2012 was supposed to do this and has been enforced exactly zero times. If you are writing laws that move markets, you should not be trading in those markets.
I wrote an entire position paper about this, so I'll be brief: a government that constructs reality for its citizens is not governing. It is performing. The MAHA Commission published a flagship report with fabricated citations — AI-generated references to studies that do not exist. The administration called them "formatting mistakes." A president who says contradictory things in the same news cycle is not confused. The contradiction is architecture. The audience self-sorts.
The integrity of government requires the integrity of the information that government produces and the information that citizens use to evaluate it. Both are under assault — from within government (fabricated reports, suppressed data, fired scientists) and from without (algorithmic amplification, AI-generated disinformation, the collapse of local journalism that used to hold local government accountable).
What I'd do: Plank IV as law, not norm. Official executive branch communications must cite sources or not make claims. Fund local journalism through a public media trust — not government-controlled media, but independent local reporting with public funding and editorial independence, modeled on the BBC's charter structure. The 1,800 communities that have lost their local newspaper since 2004 did not lose a business. They lost the entity that attended city council meetings.
The federal civil service was designed to be nonpartisan — career professionals who serve regardless of which party holds the presidency. That design is under direct attack. Schedule F (now Schedule Policy/Career) reclassifies tens of thousands of career civil servants as at-will political appointees who can be fired without cause. HHS lost 20,000 employees. The CDC lost 2,400 positions. The NIH lost 1,200. Career scientists were placed on administrative leave for maintaining scientific positions the administration disagreed with. A CDC director was fired for refusing to approve vaccine recommendations she said lacked scientific backing.
When the people who enforce the laws serve at the pleasure of the person the laws are supposed to constrain, the laws stop being constraints. They become suggestions. This is the deepest threat because it is the most structural — it dismantles the machinery of accountability itself, not just the policies that machinery produces.
What I'd do: Reverse Schedule F. Codify civil service protections in statute so they cannot be undone by executive order. Create an independent Office of Scientific Integrity with the authority to block the suppression or alteration of government scientific findings. The career civil service is not the deep state. It is the state. Gutting it does not drain a swamp. It removes the people who test the water.
The plank this lives under is every plank. Integrity is not one issue. It is the condition that makes every other issue addressable. When the money is hidden, the maps are rigged, the regulators are captured, the information is fabricated, and the civil servants are fired for doing their jobs — it does not matter what your policy positions are. The machinery that would implement them is broken. Fix the machinery first.