Ethics and Influence
We’re incentivizing Congress to legislate in the public interest — not to serve lobbyists and corporations.
Tackling unethical behavior in Congress must happen from inside and outside of the First Branch. On the inside, we need to overhaul the ethics rules pertaining to lawmakers and empower watchdogs to enforce those rules. On the outside, we need stricter lobbyist disclosure and better enforcement to decrease the opportunities for special interests to steer the congressional agenda.
We also need to change the incentives inside Congress so that members and staff are focused on the job at hand, not looking for their next employment opportunity, and that comes through better pay and benefits.
Office of Congressional Ethics
The Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) is an independent watchdog established by the House of Representatives in the wake of several scandals, including the Jack Abramoff lobbying corruption scandal and the Rep. Foley House page sexual misconduct scandal in 2007.
Its purpose is to investigate allegations of wrongdoing by members of the House of Representatives and it is empowered to start investigations on its own initiative or on a tip from the public. When OCE determines that wrongdoing may have occurred, it refers the matter to the House Ethics Committee, which is supposed to investigate.
The House established OCE in part because the Ethics Committee was not performing its job. So long as members of Congress did not refer matters to the Ethics Committee, the Committee was not empowered to conduct investigations — and for many years a detente existed where members refrained from filing complaints.
But the agency’s future is not secure. Since the OCE’s founding, the House has tried several times to undermine or zero out its funding. Fortunately, we were able to prevent that from happening by raising the alarm. These attempts on its life are an illustration of the importance of the Office of Congressional Ethics and underscore why we remain vigilant in protecting it.
We support further strengthening of the OCE and have mobilized public support when Congress tries to sabotage it. We believe the OCE should be strengthened, not weakened.
In particular, the House should grant OCE the power to subpoena third-party documents and witnesses, so it can obtain answers to its questions. Currently, witnesses can simply stonewall the watchdog, secure in the knowledge that the Ethics Committee will do its best to undermine OCE and ignore its investigations.
In addition, it’s high time the Senate created an equivalent independent ethics agency. Case in point: As of this writing in 2023, it’s been 16 years and counting since the Senate Ethics Committee has recommended a single disciplinary action for misconduct, underscoring the need for an independent ethics watchdog. This would ensure that matters relating to ethics are properly elevated for investigation.
Stock Trades by Members of Congress
A public office is a public trust. Congress should ban all members from trading individual stocks while in office as well as empower enforcers of these laws.
The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012 (STOCK Act), which was an attempt to place disclosure requirements on congressional stock transactions and was undermined before it fully went into effect, itself was a narrow reaction to a larger scandal. And it doesn’t always work. When it fails to stop unethical stock trades, we demand action. The lack of response by the Senate Ethics Committee just adds to the list of reasons why we need an independent Office of Senate Ethics.
Beyond stopping members from insider trading, we need stricter laws pertaining to campaigning and fundraising — starting with a ban on campaigning during session.
Lobbying
Our second line of attack on ethical misconduct is from outside Congress: curbing lobbyists’ ability to access and influence members, and addressing ethics in the other branches of government. We push for improved lobbyist disclosure systems for both domestic and foreign lobbyists; we and our civil society partners have called for the House Administration Committee to finally connect lobbyists’ disclosures to unique identifiers to improve real-time tracking of influence, something the Congressional Data Task Force is working to improve.
Lobbying reports should be modernized to ease filing and address common filing errors. The GAO has identified a number of commonly-made mistakes in LDA forms in a series of reports going back years. Some of these errors could easily be addressed by improving how the forms are designed, automatically validating some data fields for obviously erroneous and non-compliant answers, and other straightforward steps.
Additionally, all records held by the Senate Office of Public Records (SOPR) and its House equivalent that are available to the public and generated or received starting in the 116th Congress should be publicly available on the SOPR website.
Foreign Lobbying
The latest audit, in 2016, of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) found poor enforcement and rampant noncompliance. In 2017, we submitted testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee recommending provisions to strengthen FARA, including improving the fees and fines structure and ensuring better online disclosure of lobbyist data. We are continuing to recommend reforms to FARA and its intersection with domestic lobbying laws.
Court Ethics
We need to address the ethics systems pertaining to the other two branches of government, too, because corrupt entities collude. Financial conflicts of interest in the federal judiciary and Supreme Court have been tracked meticulously by the Free Law Project and reported by Business Insider and other outlets; now, it’s time to pass legislation directing the Supreme Court to promulgate a code of ethics to strengthen disclosure and reporting standards for the federal courts generally, to undo the pernicious provisions in the recently enacted Judicial Security Act that undermine accountability, and to push for court orders to be available online for free.
Confederate Statues in the Capitol
Finally, Congress must examine its ambient influences, too, such as the ideals embedded in the Capitol architecture. Right now, statues of Confederates still stand in the Capitol complex. Congress should not draw a line — even implicitly — to white supremacist heritage. The Capitol complex should reflect the higher ideals Congress aspires to.