Why Ethics Rules Don't Work
The federal government has extensive ethics rules. It has almost no reliable way to enforce them.
The federal government is not without ethics rules. Senior officials must disclose their finances. They must recuse themselves from matters where they have conflicts of interest. They must avoid using their office for personal gain, accepting certain gifts, or leveraging government relationships for private benefit after they leave. The rules exist. They are written down. In many cases they carry legal weight.
And yet the pattern is familiar enough to feel inevitable: a violation is reported, an investigation is opened, a finding is issued — and then, more often than not, very little happens. The official remains. The conduct continues or goes uncorrected. Public trust erodes a little further. And the cycle begins again with the next administration.
This is not a story about bad actors defeating a good system. It is a story about a system whose design makes consistent enforcement structurally difficult — regardless of who is in charge.
What the framers assumed.
The Constitution contains no ethics enforcement mechanism. There is no independent body charged with investigating financial conflicts, no constitutional officer whose sole responsibility is accountability, no automatic consequence for ethical violations short of impeachment. This was not an oversight. It was a design choice, based on a set of assumptions about how ethical behavior would be maintained.
The framers assumed three things would do the work. First, that institutional rivalry — each branch jealously guarding its own choice — would expose misconduct in other branches. Second, that public accountability — the scrutiny of an informed citizenry and a free press — would make violations politically costly. Third, that the limited scale of federal power would mean that opportunities for significant self-dealing were few.
All three assumptions have weakened considerably. The scale of federal power has grown beyond anything the framers imagined. Public attention is fragmented across an overwhelming information environment. And institutional rivalry, as the previous piece in this series explored, has been substantially displaced by partisan loyalty — making cross-branch accountability unreliable precisely when it is most needed.
What remains is a patchwork.
A system designed to find problems, not fix them.
The modern ethics infrastructure includes the Office of Government Ethics, agency ethics officers, Inspectors General, congressional oversight committees, and the Department of Justice. Each has a role. None has the combination of independence, authority, and jurisdiction necessary to enforce meaningful standards across the federal government consistently.
The Office of Government Ethics can review financial disclosures and issue guidance, but it cannot compel compliance or impose consequences. Agency ethics officers work within the agencies they oversee, subject to the same institutional pressures as every other employee. Inspectors General — the most effective of the group — can investigate and recommend, but as discussed in the previous piece, their independence is structurally compromised by presidential appointment and removal authority.
Congressional oversight, the ultimate backstop, faces the partisan loyalty problem that makes sustained, bipartisan accountability investigations rare. And the Department of Justice, which would prosecute the most serious violations, faces its own structural conflict when investigations involve senior executive officials.
The result is a system with considerable capacity to identify ethical problems and limited capacity to resolve them. Findings accumulate. Reports are issued. Referrals are made. And at each transfer point — from investigation to recommendation, from recommendation to action, from action to consequence — the process can stall when the political will to move it forward is absent.
This is not a failure of any single institution. It is the predictable outcome of a design that distributes ethics enforcement across multiple bodies without giving any of them sufficient independence and authority to act decisively on their own.
The voluntary compliance problem.
Beneath the institutional fragmentation lies a deeper structural issue: most ethics rules, at their core, depend on self-reporting.
Financial disclosures rely on the honesty of the person disclosing. Recusal decisions rely on the judgment of the official deciding whether a conflict exists. Conflict-of-interest rules rely on officials identifying their own entanglements and acting accordingly. These mechanisms function well when officials choose to abide by them. They function poorly when the incentives — financial, political, or reputational — run the other way.
The framers never intended to rely on voluntary compliance as the primary safeguard against self-dealing. They built a system of checks precisely because they understood that self-interest was a reliable force and virtue was not. But the ethics enforcement architecture that has developed over two centuries has drifted back toward the assumption they deliberately rejected: that good behavior will be chosen when it could just as easily be declined.
When the scale of modern governance means that a single regulatory decision can be worth billions, and when the mechanisms for accountability depend on the cooperation of those being regulated, the incentive to test the limits becomes very large and the structural disincentive remains very small.
Questions worth asking:
If ethics enforcement depends at every stage on the cooperation of the people being regulated, what does enforcement actually mean?
When financial disclosure rules rely on self-reporting, conflict-of-interest rules rely on self-identification, and recusal decisions rely on personal judgment, what structural protection do those rules actually provide?
Can ethics be enforced by a fragmented system of bodies that can each identify problems but none of which has the authority to resolve them independently?
What is the relationship between the scale of modern executive power — where a single decision can move markets worth trillions — and the adequacy of ethics safeguards designed for a much smaller federal government?
When violations are identified but consequences are rare, what signal does that send to future officials weighing the costs and benefits of compliance?
This is the fourth piece in an ongoing series examining structural vulnerabilities in the U.S. constitutional system. Previous pieces are available in the archive. A full framework document is available at sholberg.com.