Corruption is a persistent challenge in America, shaping institutions, influencing policy, and eroding public trust. Understanding its roots, mechanisms, and consequences is essential for assessing the health of democratic governance.

On February 3, 2026, Social Science Matrix brought together leading scholars from business, political science, and law to examine the many facets of corruption in the United States and the ways it is identified, constrained, and addressed.

Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Departments of Economics and Political Science, this Matrix on Point panel featured Ernesto Dal Bó, Phillips Girgich Professor of Business at the UC Berkeley Haas School, Sarah Anzia, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at UC Berkeley, and Erwin Chemerinsky, Jesse H. Chopper Distinguished Professor of Law and Dean of the UC Berkeley Law School. Sean Gailmard, Herman Royer Professor of Political Economy, moderated.

Matrix on Point is a discussion series promoting focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation. These thought-provoking events are free and open to the public.

Podcast and Transcript

Watch the panel above or on YouTube. Or listen to the audio recording via the Matrix Podcast below (or on Apple Podcasts).

(upbeat instrumental music)

[WOMAN’S VOICE] The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.

[MARION FOURCADE]

Thank you for joining us today. My name is Marion Fourcade. I’m the director of Social Science Matrix.

Corruption has long been an obsession of social scientists, who have generated various indexes and comparative measures. The United States, despite an elaborate arsenal of anti-corruption rules, remains vulnerable, typically through the quiet influence of money in politics and the revolving door between public office and private interest. Yet the scale of the problem appears to have shifted recently.

To take just one striking example, just three days ago, The New Yorker estimated that the Trump family’s profiteering in the first year of Trump’s second presidency amounts to a stunning $4.05 billion, mostly gained through crypto ventures. What does this mean for the way we think about policy and democratic institutions in America? And what institutional mechanisms, if any, might constrain these new forms of entanglement between public office and patrimonial gain?

Providing such an understanding will be the work of today’s absolutely fantastic panel, which I will introduce shortly. But before I do so, let me briefly mention a few other upcoming events for the spring semester at Social Science Matrix. We have, I think, no less than five Author Meet Critics, lots of books being published in the Social Sciences Division this semester and then I just want to draw your attention especially to next week’s California spotlight, a spotlight which is called Higher Education Under Attack, but it is really about the UC system, and so we have a specialist from actually across the UC systems who will come here to talk about what’s happening for our institutions.

Now let me turn to today’s event. I will note that it is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Departments of Economics and Political Science. And I will introduce our moderator, Sean Gailmard.

Sean studies how political institutions operate, change, and affect governance quality. His work focuses particularly on the US executive branch, checks and balances across branches of government, bureaucratic capacity, and the evolution of US institutions. He applies strategic and historical perspectives to these issues, and he’s the author of many books, including ‘Agents of Empire, English Imperial Governance and the Making of American Political Institutions,’ ‘Learning While Governing, Expertise and Accountability in the Executive Branch,’ which won two Best Book Awards from two sections of the American Political Science Association, and a PhD-level textbook, Statistical Modeling & Inference for Social Science, and of course, many articles in leading social science journals.

So without further ado, I will turn it over to Sean. Thank you very much for being here, and I look forward to this event.

[SEAN GAILMARD]

Thank you. Thank you, Marion, for that generous introduction and for setting up this panel. I’m delighted to be here today with you all to talk about this issue of this panel, Corruption in America.

The topic of our panel gives us so very much to talk about these days, perhaps more than any of us wish that it would. But to help us understand and diagnose these issues, we have some great panelists before us, and I will introduce the panelists and they will take us through their remarks one by one in sequence. We will start with Professor Ernesto Dal Bó.

Professor Dal Bó is a political economist interested in governance, broadly understood. His research focuses on a range of topics, political influence, social conflict, corruption, morality and social norms, state formation, the development of state capabilities, and the qualities and behavior of politicians and public servants. Most of his teaching takes place in the Berkeley MBA program and at the doctoral level, where he teaches courses on political economy.

Our next panelist will be Professor Sarah Anzia. Professor Anzia studies American politics with a focus on state and local government, elections, interest groups, political parties, and public policy. She is the author of Local Interests: Politics, Policy, and Interest Groups in US City Governments with the University of Chicago Press from 2022, which evaluates the political activity of interest groups in US local governments and how interest groups shake shape local public policies on housing, business tax incentives, policing, and public service provision more broadly.

Her first book, Timing and Turnout: How Off-Cycle Elections Favor Organized Groups, also published with Chicago, examined how the timing of elections can be manipulated to affect both voter turnout and the composition of the electorate, which in turn affects election outcomes and public policy. She has also written about the political activity and influence of public sector unions, the politics of public pensions, policy feedback, women in politics, political parties, and the historical development of electoral institutions. Her work has been published in numerous journals, including Leading Journals in Political Science.

She has a PhD in political science from Stanford. Our final panelist will be Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, dean and professor in the School of Law, who became the 13th Dean of Berkeley Law in 2017 when he joined the faculty as the Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law. Prior to assuming this position from 2018 to 2017, Professor Chemerinsky was the founding dean and distinguished professor of law and the Raymond Pryke Professor of First Amendment Law at UC Irvine School of Law.

Before that, he was the Alston and Bird Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University, and prior to that, a professor at the University of Southern California Law School, including as the Sidney M. Ermus Professor of Public Interest Law, Legal Ethics, and Political Science. He was prior to that a professor at DePaul College of Law. He’s the author of 19 books, including leading casebooks and treatises about constitutional law, criminal procedure, and federal jurisdiction.

His most recent major books are Worse Than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism from 2022, and Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights from 2021. In 2016, Dean Chemerinsky was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2024, National Jurist Magazine again named him as the most influential person in legal education in the United States. In 2022, he was the president of the Association of American Law Schools.

He received his BS at Northwestern and JD from Harvard Law. With that, I will turn it over to our panelists, and I’m so looking forward to the remarks that you’ll share with us. We’ll start with Ernesto for about 10 minutes, and I’ll give you a brief notice when you have a minute left.

Okay?

[ERNESTO DAL BÓ]

Okay. Thank you very much for the invitation. It’s great to be here.

Thank you, Sean, for the introduction. So corruption is old, so it’s always a timely subject But I was thinking, coming here, that maybe some of you might think, “Well, is corruption the most timely subject today or this week, or last week?

Maybe we should be talking about basic rights.” Not all of our constitutional guarantees are necessarily in perfect shape. But I will make the point that political corruption is connected to fundamental aspects of our political order, and this may be maybe an unexpected tack for an economist like myself to take.

So when we study corruption, economists, we try to focus on things that are measurable. And it is interesting that as prevalent as corruption is we don’t have great measures of the causal negative effects that corruption has on deadweight losses or net loss of wealth creation. You know, some of us have done work in that area, myself included, and there are some findings that I do find interesting and solid, but there are not many.

One that I, I, I particularly find useful is a paper by Khwaja and Mian in the QJ in 2005, where they find that distorted lending by public banks in, in Pakistan creates a destruction of wealth of up to 1.9 points of GDP per year, right? So that, those are losses of macroeconomic proportions. We’re not talking about chump change, but even if we think that corruption may create losses of macroeconomic proportions, I will argue that there are additional losses that are very important that we don’t tend to measure through standard economics methods that I would categorize as general political general equilibrium effects.

So to talk about those, I think it’s important to distinguish between two types of corruption. One is bureaucratic corruption, the type of corruption you may be involved in when you pay someone for your passport. And there’s political corruption, and that has to do with the situation where someone maybe changes a policy position as a legislator, let’s say, because someone has promised financial support for their campaign.

So you might think, “Well, the second kind is not necessarily corruption.” Often, those contributions are perfectly transparent. They are legal.

We can monitor them. But to the extent that someone is actually changing a policy position for something that confers some private gain, even if political in nature, does match the textbook definition of selling a piece of public property, in this case, the authority to make a decision for private gain. And that is, you know, the sale of public property for private gain is the textbook definition.

Now, when you ask Americans in polls, they tend to think that the bureaucracy, the police are quite clean. But they do think that political corruption is prevalent. In other words, Americans don’t tend to think that your passport or driver’s license are for sale, but they do think that the laws are.

According to the Pew Research Center, Americans rank corruption as the second most important problem in politics after divisiveness. So it’s, politically speaking, it’s an important thing. 85% of Americans consider that elections are too expensive for common people to run.

84% of Americans consider that special interests have too much say in the policy process, and maybe for these reasons, 72% of Americans think that we should impose some limits to the role of money in politics. So I mentioned at the beginning that there are what we could call this political general equilibrium effects, and so I will give two examples of what I mean by that. And I think this connects with the concerns that Americans seem to voice when people ask them, I will illustrate the first through experiment of sorts, and the second through a historical parallel.

So the first proposition I would like to put forward is that corruption is the undoing of democracy. What do I mean by that? So let’s think about two idealized mechanisms for making collective decisions.

One, let me call it the assembly. So think of this as the idealized situation where maybe we are all represented in some assembly where we can weigh in policy matters, right? And you may hold in your mind the image of, say, the an Athenian direct democracy where everyone can participate.

The second mechanism, I will call it the market. So you could imagine a market where people buy and sell policies. Now of course, the difference with regular things we buy in markets is if we go to the fruit and vegetables market, I can buy peaches, you buy oranges then we go and we consume them separately at home, and, you know, these are two completely separate activities.

When it comes to policies, we don’t do that. We have a single set of policies that apply to everybody. So maybe the better way to think of a market for policies is some sort of big auction where people are bidding with their money to push policy in a direction that they find advantageous.

So when you think about it for a moment, it becomes clear that it is a sort of assembly as well, except it’s one where people are voting with their money. And the obvious implication is that people who have more money will have more say in what the policies look like. Now when you go through the examples as we do in, in a class that I’ve taught often in political science on the history of government, for most of human history, the policymaking process was highly exclusionary and economic resources and coercion were the dominant resources that shifted policy one way or another.

Which means that whatever the economic property rights were determined what the political property rights were. Against that backdrop, you can imagine how radical the idea of a modern liberal democracy is that literally tries to create an assembly and enshrines a very different set of political property rights that are far more egalitarian through principles like, you know, one person, one vote or the right to due process, things that prevent money or coercion seeping in the policymaking process. Now, creating a liberal democratic constitution is not the end of the problems if we like a world that’s more egalitarian.

The reason being that humans have quite a tendency to trade. And so what you may expect to happen is that people that have very little money, and some votes may want to accept money in exchange for their votes, and people who have a lot of money may want to use some of their money to buy some votes. And then they may also buy some of the people who count the votes, and they may buy the people who implement the collective decisions that were agreed upon through the voting process.

And so in all those acts represent forms of corruption. And in that sense, it is that by definition almost corruption is the undoing of democracy. The second point I will make is that corruption is not only the undoing of democracy, it is the undoing of the Republic.

And to illustrate this, I, I want to talk about the fall of the Roman Republic. And this is also another topic that we cover in some of our classes in political economy here at Berkeley. Um, I think the, the historical parallel matters because the Roman Republic functioned upon a dual basis one, a formal Constitution, and two, a set of norms of cooperation that sometimes overcame some of the shortcomings of what was in fact a rather unwieldy Constitution.

The key innovation in the Roman Republic according to historians like Finer is that it was the s– the first political system to really institute a system of checks and balances. Um, so Rome was a very unequal society. It had a set of citizen farmers that provided military service when required.

But politics were largely conducted by an oligarchy that competed for office. And the counterweights were some elements in the system of checks and balances, where popular elements had a say including a popular assembly and the fact that there was an army of citizen farmers. But this didn’t last forever.

There were a number of things that changed over time. And so one was the fact that Rome became very successful and it conquered a bunch of territories, and so there was a massive inflow of tribute and slaves into Rome. Um, now this expanded inequality and it created opportunities for massive private gain for people in public office.

Thank you. And what that meant is that competition for public office became fiercer, less observant of the norms that had gotten the system that far, and several rules that had to do with the rotation in power became things that people just ignored. So the norms went away, and competition for public office became more intensive in money and coercive resources.

And the other process was a process of land concentration that was also partly fueled by corruption, ignoring rules against the concentration of land ownership. And the result of that was the creation of a class of propertyless individuals that became clients of generals. And so at that point, when everything in politics was contestable through money or coercion, the rules-based system went away, and the republic was over.

So I will let you figure out how this parallel may matter to us. I described some of the problems, and I will await the audience to tell us what the solutions are.

(applause)

[SEAN GAILMARD]

Can’t wait to hear them. With that, the next panelist, Professor Anzia.

[SARAH ANZIA]

Thanks so much, Eva. Hi, I’m Sarah. I wanted to stand so I could see all of you.

Um, I’m on the faculty in the Goldman School of Public Policy and in the Political Science department. I’m also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Niskanen Center. I’m really excited to be part of this panel, but I wanna just start by saying my research is not about corruption.

Um, and I’ve never thought about it that way, but it got me thinking. The questions for this panel got me thinking, and I think my research is sort of corruption-adjacent. Um, I took this as an opportunity to think about that relationship between what I’ve been working on and corruption, and also take stock of where we are in political science research on corruption in the United States, and maybe to develop some ideas about what we might do going forward.

What have I done? I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about interest groups in the U.S. and whether and how they influence public policy. I, the interest group activity can take a lot of different forms and some of them are easier to measure than others.

Here, for example, you have some supporters of pay increases for firefighters packing the City Council meeting in Santa Maria, many of them in uniform. So, this is something you see a lot in local politics. When it comes to money in local elections, a lot of it comes from businesses and business associations.

This is just showing in city elections in 2015 in South Carolina and Washington State, a large percentage of the contributions from non-individuals, by which I mean groups and organizations, came from businesses. And I think a lot of people are concerned about what these kinds of things might do to the policies we get, what effects they might have on governance, and the truth is, it’s actually really hard to say. But as I’ve worked on these projects over the years, I’ve never thought that large amounts of this kind of thing was corruption.

I, in my mind, corruption means illegal And I suspect that most of these activities of businesses and unions and other groups do operate within the laws. It’s true certain people may not like the outcomes.

They might think some group has too much power or the resulting outcomes are undesirable, not in the public interest, or that some kind of political activity is shady. But, and I, I agree with that. I, you know, in my own view, there is a fair amount of bad governance in our country today, and that probably does have some role to play in the decline of public trust, shown here, the classic Pew slide.

But that could be true without any illegal activity whatsoever, without any corruption. I mean, just to give you a sense of where I’m coming from, I’m from Chicago. When I think of corruption, I think of shaking down a children’s hospital or the Hired Truck scandal, just a couple of things that happened while I was living there.

So, as I came to this panel, I was thinking about, “Well, how much of this kind of thing is there in the US and has it eroded public trust or worsened governance?” These are really good questions, questions we should be trying to answer, and there’s far less research on that in the US than you might think. I don’t know the answers to these questions or at least not yet.

So I suspect that some of the reason we are here today and we’re asking these questions now stems from questions and concerns we have about things going on at the federal level, and it’s really important that we investigate and understand those things. I also think that if we’re generally interested in corruption in the United States, we should take a sort of longer and broader view, which I’m gonna attempt to do in the next seven minutes. Okay.

So, what is corruption? Here’s the first challenge. There are different measures, different definitions of corruption.

This is from our colleague in political science, Jen Bussell, who puts it this way, “Corruption is taken to be the abuse of public office for private gain.” But as she says, this is interpreted and operationalized in a wide variety of ways, and it could be using a position of power to enrich oneself, it could be the misuse of political and administrative power at the expense of citizens, or bureaucrats furthering their own interests, or subverting the public good for private gain. Some of these are really broad and could include a lot of legal activity.

Here are some folks in criminology and economics saying the same thing, that there isn’t a single definition. Without a single definition, it’s hard to answer this basic question, how much is there in the US? And as comparativists some in this room have talked about, some of the ways in which we might define corruption depend on what question we’re trying to answer.

Also, even if we had a single definition it’s very hard to get data on corruption. In fact, if you are a quantitative empirical scholar looking to find some data, this is possibly the worst area you could go into. We are talking about if either illegal activity or possibly legal exchanges that wouldn’t be popular if people knew about them, people are trying very hard to not reveal these things.

’cause they’re trying to hide these kinds of exchanges. This is probably why there isn’t as much research in American politics on corruption ’cause people tend to go where the data are. That said, it’s not as though there are no data at all.

One data set looks at did a survey of state legislative reporters to get their perceptions of corruption. There are data, the PIN data, surveys of US district attorneys about their activities. There’s the TRAC data.

When cases are referred to federal prosecutors the assistant U.S. attorney in the district codes the referral and records it. One of those codes is official corruption. So there’s a nonprofit that keeps this in a database.

These are really useful in a lot of ways. For example, you can compare the states which this does here, and you can see that Mississippi has a very high rate of convictions per million in population. So, explaining these kinds of cross-state differences a lot has been a major focus of the pretty limited quantitative empirical political science research on corruption in the U.S.

There are some studies on how corruption across the states varies by particular institutions or political competition. There is research on whether states with less education or lower income are more likely to have corruption. There is also work on enforcement and deterrence and how that affects the number of convictions.

But actually, most of the political science and political economy research on corruption focuses on countries other than the U.S. And I think that there’s a lot we can learn and borrow from the comparativists. And one idea I’d like to highlight that Jon Bussell talks about in particular is that we might think about one of the things, one of the ways we might think about corruption is in terms of resources or different kinds of resources, and who controls those resources.

I think this makes a lot of sense. If we start to think about welfare fraud in Minnesota, and Mississippi, you know, there are a lot of reasons for that, but one reason is there’s a lot of money involved. Medicaid is one of the major categories of expenditures in every state.

And one thing I have learned from thinking about public pensions a lot over the years is, when government has a big pot of money, groups and individuals will try to get that money. Um, it’s like the famous Willie Sutton quote. When he was asked, “Why do you rob banks?”

He said, “Because that’s where the money is.” So in thinking about corruption in the U.S., we should probably be thinking about it along these lines. And if we do that in the U.S., yes, we should be thinking about the federal government, but also, I think it leads us to think more about local government and public pensions.

And I’m just gonna say a quick word about those two things and close up. Local government. We have 90,000 or so governments in this U–

Uh, in the United States. Almost all of them are local governments. That’s over 500,000 elected officials.

Most of them are local. That doesn’t even include the agencies, boards, commissions of these local governments. 11 million people work full-time for local government in the U.S.

That’s more than state and federal level combined, even before DOGE. What do these local governments do? A lot.

In addition to providing services, think all the teachers and police, and firefighters and public works folks, which is where most of the spending is, they regulate housing. Think permits. They build and maintain roads and contract out for services.

Think procurement and contracts. There are a lot of people, and there’s a lot to get. Our local governments also comparatively have a lot of authority and independence compared to local governments in other countries around the world.

And compared to federal or even state government, public engagement is quite low. Turnout in local elections can be very low. Local news coverage has declined.

So there’s a lot to get in local government, and there are probably fewer eyes on what local governments are doing. And there is confusion in accountability. We have local governments layered on top of each other.

See Chris Berry’s work. Within a single government, we have numerous boards and commissions in making decisions and giving advice. Not to mention, the nonprofits that deliver services.

At any given time, if we are upset about some outcome, it’s hard for us to know what’s going on. So, because of all this, if we look at some of the basic figures on which officials are engaged in corruption, you can see in a couple of papers that are out there, that a lot of these are local-level officials. And you see this line here that the local-level convictions are on the rise.

Okay, and you see it in the news too. Here’s Oakland, Baldwin Park. This is even in California.

And we have a, we even have a corridor of corruption in California. Okay, public pensions. If we’re looking for big pots of money government money, it really doesn’t get much bigger than this.

State and local governments collectively have about $6 trillion in public pension assets. This is to pay government employees their retirement benefits. But this is a lot of money.

And you see example after example of cases in which when these funds are flushed with cash, either, you know, employees will say, “You should give us more, more in benefits.” And often the government say, “Okay, we will.” What about the people in charge of managing these funds?

Well, who decides where the money’s gonna be invested? You better believe there are people who really care where this money gets invested. Take private equity.

It’s opaque, so we don’t know all the details, but it’s a large and growing share of the American economy. And by any measure, this is just from the Wall Street Journal yesterday, a large share of money in private equity is coming from public pensions. And the feeling is mutual.

My co-author and I have explained why we think state and local public pension funds have been so eager to invest in private equity. All I wanna suggest in closing is that these are areas where we, we, she, there are opportunities corrupt for corruption that we should be looking into.

Not to say that local governments and public pension folks are corrupt, just that there are possible opportunities there that we should explore. So in sum, and there is an example of New York, where actually there was the New York State Comptroller who was convicted of doing precisely this thing. These, I think we can learn a lot from comparative politics scholars about wha–

how, how we should be thinking about corruption in the United States. And if we’re gonna follow the resources, we might look more to local governments and public pension funds. Thank you.

(audience applauding)

[SEAN GAILMARD]

Thank you, Sarah. It’s a remarkable scale of those figures, and we will turn it over to our final panelist, Dean Chemerinsky.

[ERWIN CHEMERINSKY]

It’s such an honor to be part of this terrific panel. I apologize that I can’t be with you in-person. My daughter had surgery in Chicago last Friday, and my wife and I came here and are staying for the week to help care for her.

She’s doing well in recovering from surgery, but it’s really good to have the chance to be with her, and I’m glad I can do this panel by Zoom. Corruption is endemic in many places throughout the world, and we’ve already talked a bit about that. And we’ve seen it at times in state and local governments in the United States.

I grew up in Chicago, where I am tonight, and there certainly has been corruption here at times. A stunning number of recent Illinois governors have gone to prison. Although there have been prior incidents of corruption in the federal government, it is truly nothing like we’re seeing from the Trump administration.

It is unprecedented in American history. That’s what I want to focus on, and I’ll address three questions. First, what is corruption?

Second, why has, what has President Trump done and why should we be concerned? And then third, I want to talk about, what do we need to do in light of this for this presidency and future ones? As to what is corruption, I very much agree with Professor Anzia that there’s no agreed-upon definition, but I think for purposes of our discussion, we can use a simple one, and she presented it.

It’s the use of public office for private gain. What we’re focusing on here is dishonest or fraudulent conduct by those in power who are using their authority to enrich themselves, not for the public good. Could point to so many examples throughout the world, can point to examples throughout American history.

In the 19th century, there’s so many instances of politicians who took bribes from corporations with regard to influencing their actions. Probably the most famous prior incident of corruption at the presidential level was the Teapot Dome scandal in 1921 and ’22. At the heart of that scandal was Albert Fall, a former Secretary of Interior, who was charged with accepting bribes from oil companies in exchange to exclusive rights to drill for oil on federal land.

The sites included land near a teapot-shaped outcrop in Wyoming that was known as Teapot Dome, and there were also other government-owned sites in California, in Elk Hills, and in Buena Vista Hills. Prior to now, the most recent major corruption scandal, it’s under the broad label of Watergate. Some of that was the use of government power to cover up the break-in in the Watergate building at the Democratic National Headquarters and the linkage to the campaign to re-elect the president into the Nixon White House.

But Watergate also refers to much broader corruption during the Nixon presidency. It was getting campaign contributions from those who were being regulated by the government, even illegal campaign contributions. It was using power for retribution, such as the enemies list.

But with all of this in mind, I still want to suggest to you that what we’re seeing now from the Trump administration has no precedent in American history. The New York Times did a story a couple of weeks ago, and if you haven’t seen it, I commend it to you, and it showed in a graphic that President Trump had been enriched by $1.4 billion in his first year in office. They gave the examples, 25, $3 million in licensing using his name in foreign countries, $90 million in settlements with tech companies for frivolous lawsuits, a $400 million airplane that he received for his personal use and possession after he’s done in presidency, $867 million in cryptocurrency.

That didn’t include his family members. And then there was the article that was mentioned from this weekend from the New Yorker that said that actually, he’s been enriched by $4 billion. But this isn’t the only corruption that we’ve seen.

There’s also been the use of the power of his office for retribution. To me, what’s most startling is how open President Trump has been about retribution being the motivation for his actions. There’s the criminal prosecutions of James Comey, Letitia James, John Bolton, the investigation of Jack Smith just for retribution.

There’s creating within the Justice Department a task force that was openly for the purpose of retribution. Or think of the targeting of law firms. Last spring, President Trump issued an executive order directed at the law firm of Perkins Coie.

If the executive order could go into effect, it would put the law firm out of existence. It said that all the lawyers in the law firm would lose their security clearances. It said the federal government wouldn’t contract with any business represented by the law firm.

It said none of the lawyers in the law firm could go into a federal building, including a federal courthouse. What did it do to deserve the punishment? The executive order says it was because the firm represented Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Executive orders were directed at other law firms, like Jenner& Block and WilmerHale. What had they done? Well, one of them had hired Robert Mueller, and they hired lawyers that worked for Robert Mueller.

But even these examples just are part of what we’ve seen. Let me rattle off many of the things that President Trump has done in taking office. He’s fired the head of the Office of Government Ethics.

He fired or demoted at least 20 agency inspector generals who are supposed to be dealing with and preventing corruption within the agencies. He’s drastically reduced the staffing of the Department of Justice Public Integrity Section, which prosecutes public officials accused of corruption. He’s disbanded the FBI squad that investigates Congressional misconduct and fraud within agencies.

He’s scaled back any enforcement of the Corporate Transparency Act, which requires corporations to make reports to try to prevent corruption. He’s disbanded the Department of Justice’s Foreign Influence Task Force. He said that the federal government isn’t going to enforce the Foreign Corrupt Practice Act, which is crucial with regard to stopping corruption, especially corporations.

And he’s openly used pardons to benefit political allies and to undermine corruption convictions. It appears at times that he’s even selling pardons. These are examples.

When you put them together, I hope you can see why we’re witnessing now is unprecedented. So what can we do about it? Lemme offer several suggestions.

One is to reenact the Ethics in Government Act. After the Nixon presidency, Congress passed the Ethics in Government Act, and one of the key provisions was if there are allegations of wrongdoing by the president or high-level government officials, then an independent counsel would be appointed to investigate and prosecute. This, for example, is the law that was used to appoint Kenneth Starr to investigate the Whitewater scandal.

But after Whitewater, Democrats became disenchanted with the independent counsel law. Republicans never liked it ’cause of its ties to the Nixon administration, and so it just expired. So now if there’s ever gonna be an independent counsel, it’s not really independent.

It’s just part of the Justice Department, the answerable to the Attorney General, could be fired by the President at any time. We need to reenact the Independent Counsel Act where there’s an independent counsel who can’t be fired by the President’s Attorney General except for just cause. We need to enforce the Emoluments Clauses of the Constitution.

It’s the second thing I would point to. There are two provisions in the Constitution. One is in Article I, Section 9, which says that no one holding federal office can receive any emoluments from a foreign government.

The Framers of the Constitution were deeply afraid that foreign governments might try to influence the fledgling nation, and so they prohibited all that work in the federal government from taking benefits from foreign governments. There’s a second provision in Article II of the Constitution that says the President cannot receive any emoluments, any benefits from being in the office, other than the salary that he’s paid. There were lawsuits brought in the Trump first term with regard to violation of the Emoluments Clause.

I was co-counsel in one of those suits. President Trump simply ran out the clock using appeals till at the end of his first term. The court said, ‘Oh, it’s moot now.’

There’s no enforcement of the Emoluments Clause, even though President Trump is blatantly violating these constitutional provisions. They must be enforced. A third thing is that Congress must insist on enforcing existing laws.

I gave you many examples where existing laws about corruption, like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, aren’t being enforced at all. Congress can tie funding for the Justice Department to an insistence that these laws be enforced. More generally and in the longer term, we have to rethink campaign finance in the United States.

The way it works now, individuals and corporations can spend unlimited amounts of money to get the candidates they want elected or defeated. This breeds cynicism and distrust in our government, and it’s also something President Trump has taken advantage of. And finally, we need to think about how are we gonna control the Department of Justice.

President Trump has shown that he’s using the Department of Justice for the sake of retribution. There’s no independence. After the Trump presidency, we need to reconsider this and how to create greater controls and checks so the awesome prosecutorial power of the federal government isn’t used in this way.

I would just conclude by saying I think it is so important as we talk about corruption not to think of what the Trump administration is doing as business as usual. It’s not. It is different from what we’ve ever seen, and we need in response to it to develop new checks and controls.

After the Nixon presidency, many laws were adapted. Many of them have now no longer being enforced. We need to enforce those laws, and we need to use the Trump presidency as the inspiration for new laws to prevent corruption.

Thank you.

(audience clapping)

[SEAN GAILMARD]

Thank you, panelists for those really provocative remarks. It’s really great to hear the perspectives of social scientists, economics, and political science, as well as a legal scholar reflected on this issue. What I wanna do now is take a few minutes to pull out some threads of discussion among the panelists, and I will kind of seed them a little bit in that regard, and then we will turn it over after that to audience Q&A.

When we get there, we have a microphone to pass around, and we’ll do that for a couple minutes and maybe gather a couple of questions. So putting some of the remarks of the panelists more directly in conversation with each other, I want to talk a little bit more about why, or hear from you about why, in your view, is the problem of corruption, especially at the federal level as Erwin addressed, why is it getting worse in the sense of what political conditions are we seeing today that are creating this problem? Is the issue that Donald Trump is a uniquely malevolent agent who has because of this malevolent force taken it upon himself to behave in this way?

And therefore, when, the, you know, presence of Donald Trump is dispatched from our politics, are we back to business as usual or are there broader changes in structural conditions in politics in the United States, changing and ongoing developments that are making it worse and going to keep it worse even when Donald Trump leaves politics? It’s kind of a structure and agency type of question about why we are seeing what we are seeing, and what Dean Chemerinsky has described. Do any of you have thoughts on that?

If you want to jump in, that would be great. If not, I’ll just ping you about it.

[ERWIN CHEMERINSKY]

Okay. I don’t wanna cut off anybody else. I think it’s both of what you say.

I think it is a structure that allows for this and a president who’s taking advantage of that structure in the ways that I described. I think we have a president now who really doesn’t care about the Constitution and laws and norms that have preceded him. In fact, his Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles said in an interview in November he believes he can do anything, literally anything.

And I could spend all the rest of our time now describing the illegal and unconstitutional things that we’ve seen. And in that sense, I think it is about the individual, but there’s also the structure there that allows him to do that. We’ve had a tremendous accretion of power to the president over a long period of time.

In 1973, Harvard Professor Arthur Schlesinger wrote the book, The Imperial Presidency, about what had gone on between World War II and then. In the last 50 years, there’s only seen an increase of it. So my sense is that we’re very fortunate in hindsight that we’ve gotten this long in American history without having a president who showed little regard for the Constitution and laws and norms of the United States.

So, you have a structure that allows this, and a president who’s taking advantage of that structure. What’s gonna follow it? I don’t think there’s any way to know at this point.

Will we return to normalcy? Will there be a president who will emphasize the importance of honesty as Jimmy Carter did following Richard Nixon? Or will we have a president who will follow Trump and take advantage of these structures for personal gain?

That’s the crucial question for the future of American democracy and we can’t know it one year into the Trump presidency.

[SEAN GAILMARD]

Thank you. Sarah, do you have thoughts on this?

[SARAH ANZIA]

Yeah. I guess, I just make, I want to point to maybe three things. One, the break I think is at the federal level, but it’s not necessarily a break.

I think it’s been building for a long time. State and local, I think, that probably this has been going on at a steady clip for very long time. At the federal level I, I want to plug an event next week where Terry Moe is going to be coming to present his most recent book with Will Howell, where they offer up an explanation of it, it has a, it’s the, the political parties and the growth of the administrative states.

So there’s sort of a long historical building of growth in the administrative state and a difference in the parties and how, what they want to do with it and their willingness to use it for different purposes and particularly the Republicans. And so kind of Trump is the, an instance in this moment but didn’t come out of, out of nowhere, which would suggest this is not something that would go away with once Trump is out of the picture. And I think also it’s worth talking about the Democratic side and polarization and just how far apart the parties are and what that, you know, what, what the viable options are given the state of our political parties today.

I think all of these are factors in kind of explaining where we are at this moment.

[SEAN GAILMARD]

Ernesto, can you follow up on that last piece and just say like, so if the, the, the, the skeleton key of so much of American politics we point to polarization. Does that play a role in the willingness of voters to sanction or punish candidates that they favor who engage in corruption? The other side is so much worse.

Maybe you just have to let it slide.

[ERNESTO DAL BÓ]

Yeah. I, I think there’s one aspect of the analogy I made with the Roman Republic, which is that you have in a context of increased inequality you have the rise of personal rule, personal loyalties of clients to particular political leaders, and a, a real fest of of populous politics. And so when you think about the enforcement of the laws and, and, and constitutional stipulations that Dean Chemerinsky was talking about there is an important asymmetry between the president and vice president and secretaries and below and everybody else in the executive branch.

And that is that there’s no direct criminal responsibility for ethics rules as expressing the ethics in government. So in a way, the president and vice presidents are not employees. They are constitutional officers.

The real accountability mechanisms there are elections and impeachment. And so then we need to ask, “Okay, what’s happening with Congress? You know, why, why aren’t they doing something?”

And I think one relevant factor there is, well, what are the politics behind it? And when you have a populist dynamic like the one we perceive, then Congress may not be as active as we wish it to be. And so even if the laws are there, it doesn’t mean that they’re going to be enforced.

So we have to be asking exactly this question of, you know, what’s happening in the politics that because legislators do feel that they are accountable to someone. And so that doesn’t mean that they’re going to enforce the, the laws and the Constitution.

[SEAN GAILMARD]

Interesting. Thanks. The social scientists reflected, as we always do when we talk about corruption, is how hard it is to define it and to measure it.

And Sarah, one thing you talked about that I want to try to pull out a little bit is, can we sharpen or how can we better understand the meaning of it and exactly what we’re talking about? And specifically, I want to ask, what is the dividing line between corruption in government and incompetence in government that happens to be really beneficial to one of the governing parties? We have projects like high-speed rail in California that do a lot of things, but roll trains is not one of them.

Or you know homeless spending that does, again, does a lot of things, but reduce homelessness is, doesn’t seem to be it. We, you referenced welfare fraud being another example. There’s– is it a way you know, can it be interpreted as a corrupt action and where is that kind of dividing line?

[SARAH ANZIA]

Well, I mean, I wouldn’t call it a corrupt action. I think there’s maybe we’ve gotten out of balance, right? And I, you know, I wrote down something recently where I said, “Look, a lot of these processes and institutions and groups that were created decades ago were done so to solve some problem because they made things better,” right?

We invited more citizen participation in local decision-making, and that was, you know, we did that presumably to take away power from corporate developers who were bulldozing neighborhoods and treading on other people’s rights. And now it’s getting in the way of all kinds of things that we would consider to be good. And so the challenge is, though, it’s very hard to go back, right?

You say, well, okay, maybe we have too much political participation at the local level. Citizens have too many opportunities to participate, but you want to take that away, good luck, right? You know, you’re eroding local democracy, but then you have governments that can’t, have a very difficult time or cannot do very basic things that we expect our governments to do, and I think that plays a big role in the decline in trust.

And, you know, it’s not corruption not to say no corruption ever happens there, but sort of broadly speaking, we wouldn’t think of it as corruption. But certain institutions and groups having too much power, yeah. I would say so.

[ERWIN CHEMERINSKY]

One, Ernesto, you brought out the point about the undoing of, of the Republic ultimately from the example of, of the, the Roman comparison. So I would like to hear other thoughts or, or Dean Chemerinsky’s or Sarah, Sarah’s thoughts as well about where this kind of goes and how the state of corruption, the decline of trust and disaffection in the political system kind of plays into, specifically into a populist politics that rejects the set of solutions that our governing system has offered over many years and further enables or amplifies the rise of Trumpist elements in governments. Is that a possible consequence that we see here?

Or what others should we be concerned about? Dean Chemerinsky, would, perhaps we could start with you on that. Sure.

I think you raise a great point. Underlying what we’re talking about is there’s been a tremendous decline in trust in government, and for that matter, trust in all major institutions.

[SARAH ANZIA]

Um, we saw statistics from the Pew Research Institute, where I think the high watermark was 1965 of trust in government, and now we’re at a low point. Um, Congress’s approval rating right now, the last opinion poll I saw was 16, and that might be 16 people, not 16%. The president, again, has opinion approval ratings in the 30s.

The Supreme Court has its lowest approval rating ever. But it’s not just government institutions. Look at the loss of confidence in educational institutions, especially higher education, and I think one of the crucial questions is, can a democracy survive in the long term, if people have lost faith in the institutions?

And the more the institutions are perceived as corrupt, the less they’ll have confidence. And also, our society is more ideologically divided and polarized than it’s been at any time since Reconstruction, and there are many measures of this. Again, you can ask, can democracy survive when there’s this kind of intense polarization?

And as I said earlier, there’s no way to know at this point in time, but there’s every reason for all of us to be very concerned, and I think corruption, what we’re talking about tonight, is a key part of that.

[ERWIN CHEMERINSKY]

Ernesto, what can we say– Can I throw one more in? About the connection between the Roman example and our current one?

[ERNESTO DAL BÓ]

So I think one connection is that a big part of this dynamic was the cultivation of demagoguery and populist politics by, paradoxically, members of the elite, which is exactly what we see then and now. Um, but I think what was problematic is that access to, to politics was very restricted because it became a very high-stakes game. So you needed resources that a common person wouldn’t have.

And that’s the sort of thing that people complain about right now. So one thing I’ve I feel partially hopeful about is initiatives we’ve seen in different parts of the world to create programs to train citizens to enter political careers. So we recently did an evaluation of a program in Brazil, where they try to train normal people to, not to say that politicians are not normal people

[SEAN GAILMARD]

But, but maybe, you know, they might not be doing their own grocery shopping as often as a non-politician does. And so these, there are initiatives like the one we evaluated where they try to get people who have are partial to democracy who are, who don’t have anti-democratic attitudes, who are competent who have integrity who are diverse, to try to start careers in politics. And we’ve seen that those things are promising.

So even in very short periods of time, they managed to get people to run for office and get elected. So I think to the extent that we can refresh and replenish the political ranks, I think it’s gonna be easier for people to feel that democracy is worth it And it’s viable.

[HOST]

That’s great. I’m delighted to hear a hopeful note about it. With that, maybe we should turn it over to audience Q&A.

I would ask please keep your questions focused and make them actually questions. If you have a panelist you want to direct it to, please name them. We’ll start with Paul.

We have a microphone coming around, so. And yeah, please say who you are and let everybody know.

[PAUL PEARSON]

I’m Paul Pearson, I teach in the political science department here. Thanks to the panelists. Sarah, I’m glad you plugged Terry Mohs’ talk on Tuesday afternoon, which is very relevant to this discussion.

My question is about the Supreme Court, so it’s mostly for Dean Chemerinsky. Not much mentioned yet of the Supreme Court, but from where I observe all this, it seems like whether you want to talk about the immunities decision or you want to talk about the way in which the court with the unitary-executive theory has turned the presidency into the the executive branch into the personal play thing of the president, it’s like they’re running a giant snowplow, removing all the obstacles to the kind of presidential corruption that you described. So I’m, I’m interested in whether or not, what you would say about the role of the Supreme Court, and also, does that mean that we should be pretty pessimistic about the prospects of reversing courts because wouldn’t that require really radical changes of the Supreme Court?

[ERWIN CHEMERINSKY]

It’s a great question. Let me focus on two aspects of what the Supreme Court has done, one that directly relates to your question, and the other that directly relates to corruption, and we haven’t talked about it tonight. With regard to the former, you’re right.

The Supreme Court has made it much harder to hold the president accountable. Back in 1982, in Nixon versus Fitzgerald, the Supreme Court said, “A president can’t be civilly sued for money damages for any official act taken in office.” And then on July 1, 2024, in Trump versus United States, the Supreme Court held that the president cannot be criminally prosecuted for any official acts taken in office.

I think there should be a Hall of Shame for bad Supreme Court decisions. Cases like Dred Scott versus Sandford, Plessy versus Ferguson, Korematsu versus United States. Trump versus United States belongs in that hall of shame.

The core of the rule of law is that no one, not even the president, is above the law. It is impossible to reconcile Nixon versus Fitzgerald and Trump versus United States with that. And President Trump knows even if he violates the law, even if his actions impose great injuries on people, he can’t be criminally prosecuted or civilly sued.

I think there is a real question as to whether the Supreme Court will uphold the guardrails of democracy. So far, there have been 24 Supreme Court rulings in the last year, involving challenges to President Trump’s actions, and the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of President Trump in 22 out of 24. We’ll see what happens going into the future, but there’s certainly every reason to worry.

But let me then say quickly a second thing about the Supreme Court. There are a number of federal laws that deal with corruption, a federal bribery statute, a law called the Honest Services Act. One of the interesting things over the last decade is the Supreme Court has consistently interpreted these laws to weaken them, to make it harder to use against so-called white-collar crime or corruption.

Now, these aren’t necessarily laws that would be directed at the president, but it is a way in which the Supreme Court has contributed this. When I was first asked to be on this panel, that’s what I was gonna talk about, but then decided focusing on what Trump is doing is more important.

[HOST]

All right. With that, I think we have actually reached the time for the end of our panel, unfortunately. And it’s not great that we have to be here to talk about this, but the path to solution starts with understanding.

And in that sense, we got one step closer today. I want to thank our panelists for shedding so much light on this issue, and helping us understand better. Thank you.

(applause)

[WOMAN’S VOICE] Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.

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