United
Progress

In 2010, the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling opened the door to unlimited corporate and special-interest spending in American elections. The result is a system where a handful of billionaires and corporations can outspend millions of ordinary voters.

• Outside spending has exploded since the ruling: the 2024 federal elections drew billions of dollars in Super PAC money, more than any cycle in history.
• A single donor can now bankroll an entire campaign. In 2024, individual billionaires poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Super PACs backing their chosen candidates.
• "Dark money" nonprofits spend heavily on elections without ever revealing who their donors are.

The fix: Overturn Citizens United through a constitutional amendment or a reversal by the Court, cap outside election spending, require full public disclosure of every dollar spent to influence a vote, sharply limit lobbyist access to lawmakers, and ban members of Congress from ever becoming paid lobbyists after leaving office.

No foreign government should be able to buy influence over American policy. Yet foreign states and their lobbying operations spend enormous sums every year shaping what Washington does, and the money works.

• Foreign governments spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on registered lobbying and influence campaigns in Washington, and far more flows through channels that are barely tracked.
• Foreign money still reaches American elections through straw donors, shell companies, and loosely regulated online fundraising.
• Groups aligned with the Israeli government spent roughly one hundred million dollars in the 2024 cycle to sway American primaries and unseat critics of the war in Gaza.

The fix: Restrict foreign donations and foreign lobbying across the board, applied to every country, ally or not. That includes:

• Cut ties with the Israeli government and bar its lobbying operations and affiliated PACs from funding American politicians.
• Condemn the war in Gaza and support international accountability, including UN-led proceedings against Benjamin Netanyahu.
• Zero tolerance for antisemitism: our criticism is aimed at a government and its policies, never at Jewish people or Judaism. We explicitly condemn antisemites and antisemitic rhetoric.

Members of Congress receive private briefings and vote on laws that move entire markets. Many of them trade stocks at the same time, and some route trades through spouses and children instead. That is not a conflict of interest waiting to happen. It is one happening in plain sight.

• In early 2020, multiple senators sold large amounts of stock after private briefings on the coming COVID-19 pandemic, before the public understood the danger.
• Members of Congress routinely beat the market, and entire apps now exist just to copy their trades, including trades made in a spouse's name.
• The current law, the STOCK Act, punishes late disclosures with fines as small as $200, and even those are rarely enforced.

The fix: Ban members of Congress, and their spouses, children, and other immediate family, from trading or holding individual stocks while the member is in office. Blind trusts and broad index funds only, with immediate impeachment for any member caught violating it.

This is not about age limits, and it is not about criminal conduct. It is about mental capability. A politician does not need to break a law to be unfit for office; they can be a lifelong model citizen and still no longer have the cognitive sharpness the job demands. Americans deserve leaders, at every level of government, who can fully understand the laws they are voting on and the consequences of the decisions they make.

• Congress is among the oldest it has ever been, with dozens of members serving well past typical retirement age while holding enormous power over war, the economy, and public health.
• Recent years have brought well-documented, on-camera moments of visible decline from senior members of both parties who remained in office and kept voting.
• There is currently no mandatory, standardized way to evaluate whether an aging official is still capable of doing the job. Voters are left guessing based on public appearances alone.

The fix: Regular, nonpartisan cognitive fitness evaluations, administered by independent medical professionals, for older officeholders across the executive and legislative branches. Clear, publicly disclosed standards applied equally regardless of party.

A government that answers to its people does not treat its people like suspects. Networks of automated cameras and data contractors are quietly building a surveillance system that tracks ordinary Americans everywhere they drive, shop, and gather, with no warrant and almost no oversight.

• Flock license plate cameras now blanket thousands of American communities, logging the movements of millions of drivers who are suspected of nothing, into databases police across the country can search.
• Palantir holds billions of dollars in federal contracts to merge government data on citizens into unified profiles, an arrangement that would have been called dystopian a generation ago.
• The Fourth Amendment promises security against unreasonable searches. Mass tracking of innocent people is exactly the kind of general surveillance the founders wrote it to prevent.

The fix: Ban warrantless mass surveillance of Americans: dismantle dragnet license plate tracking networks like Flock, end federal contracts that consolidate citizen data with spyware firms like Palantir, and require a warrant, real oversight, and strict data deletion rules for any surveillance technology the government uses.

In a real democracy, voters choose their politicians. In America, politicians increasingly choose their voters. Every decade, whichever party controls a state legislature redraws the maps to lock in power, and both parties have done it.

• Mid-decade redistricting fights, like the one that redrew Texas's congressional map in 2025, show how maps get rewritten purely to manufacture safe seats, not to represent people fairly.
• Districts are routinely carved into bizarre shapes that split communities and pack or spread voters solely to predetermine election outcomes before a single vote is cast.
• When maps are drawn to be safe, most general elections become uncompetitive, and the real contest shifts to low-turnout primaries that reward extremes over the will of most voters.

The fix: A complete national end to gerrymandering: independent, nonpartisan redistricting commissions in every state, federal standards that ban maps drawn to favor a party or incumbent, and district lines built around real communities instead of political advantage.

The United States is the only wealthy nation on Earth where getting sick can bankrupt you. We pay more for healthcare than any country in the world and get worse outcomes than most of our peers.

• Americans spend roughly twice as much per person on healthcare as people in other wealthy countries, yet live shorter lives on average.
• Medical debt is a leading cause of personal bankruptcy in America. It is essentially unheard of in nations with universal coverage.
• Tens of millions of Americans are uninsured or underinsured, and many skip prescriptions or doctor visits because of cost.

The fix: Medicare for All. Universal coverage that follows you regardless of your job, with the government negotiating prices the way every other developed country already does.

The tax code asks the least of the people with the most and the most of the people with the least. The people who benefit most from the American system contribute the least back to it, proportionally. That is backwards.

• Leaked IRS data showed several of the richest Americans paid true tax rates near zero in some years, legally. Billionaires can borrow against their stock instead of selling it, funding lavish lives while reporting almost no taxable income.
• Payroll and sales taxes take a far bigger bite out of a working family's paycheck than they do out of a top earner's total income.
• The bottom half of American households holds a small fraction of the country's wealth while carrying a disproportionate share of the tax burden.

The fix: Cut taxes for the bottom fifty percent of earners. Tax the gains of the ultra-rich whether or not they sell, close the borrowing loophole, raise rates on the top one percent, and fund the IRS to actually audit the people with the most to hide.

Some of the most profitable corporations in human history pay a lower effective tax rate than the people who stock their shelves. That is not a broken system. It is a purchased one.

• Dozens of major profitable American corporations have paid zero dollars in federal income tax in recent years.
• Companies shift profits to offshore tax havens on paper while making their actual money from American customers.
• Corporate tax revenue as a share of the economy has fallen dramatically over the past several decades while corporate profits hit records.

The fix: A real minimum tax on corporate profits with no zero-dollar years, an end to offshore profit-shifting games, and penalties that make dodging more expensive than paying.

Every loophole in the tax code was lobbied into existence by someone rich enough to use it. Tax avoidance at this scale is corruption by another name, and ordinary taxpayers cover the difference.

• The stepped-up basis rule lets billions in gains vanish for tax purposes when wealth passes between generations.
• The carried interest loophole lets private equity and hedge fund managers pay lower rates on their earnings than teachers and nurses pay on theirs.
• Estimates put the gap between taxes owed and taxes actually paid in the hundreds of billions of dollars every single year.

The fix: Close stepped-up basis, kill carried interest, shut down abusive trusts and shelters, and give the IRS the resources to collect what is legally owed by those most able to pay.

The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 an hour since 2009. Prices have risen relentlessly since then, but the wage floor has not moved an inch. Full-time work in America should never leave someone in poverty.

• A full-time worker earning the federal minimum wage makes about $15,000 a year, below the poverty line for a family.
• The minimum wage's buying power peaked decades ago. Adjusted for inflation, it is worth far less today than it was in the 1960s.
• Dozens of states and cities have already raised their own minimums well above the federal floor without the job losses opponents predicted.

The fix: Raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour and index it to inflation so workers never have to wait fifteen years for a raise again.

Institutional investors are buying up single-family homes and rental properties by the thousands, bidding out regular families and turning neighborhoods into portfolios. Housing should be shelter first, not an asset class.

• Large investment firms have bought entire subdivisions of single-family homes, often paying cash and above asking price.
• Corporate landlords have been shown to raise rents faster and evict more often than individual property owners.
• As investor ownership rises in a neighborhood, home prices and rents climb further out of reach for the families who actually live there.

The fix: Restrict large institutional investors from buying up single-family homes and rental properties, so supply goes back to families instead of portfolios and prices come back down to earth.

Good policing requires good pay and real standards. We keep officer pay where it is and hold every officer to the standard the badge demands. High pay, high standards, zero shield for misconduct.

• Officers fired for misconduct in one department are routinely rehired by another, moving from town to town with their records trailing behind.
• Qualified immunity regularly blocks lawsuits against officers even in cases of clear and serious misconduct.
• Cities pay out hundreds of millions of dollars a year in misconduct settlements, and taxpayers foot the bill instead of the officers responsible.

The fix: Maintain strong officer pay, create a national misconduct registry so fired officers stay fired, reform qualified immunity, and enforce real punishment for those who break the public's trust.

The people who write the laws have quietly built themselves protections from those laws. Power without accountability is exactly the corruption every other pillar exists to fight.

• Congressional ethics complaints are handled by internal committees that rarely punish anyone in a meaningful way.
• Politicians have used taxpayer money to quietly settle serious complaints against themselves without public disclosure.
• Officials caught in blatant conflicts of interest routinely keep their seats, their committee posts, and their pensions.

The fix: Strip away the legal protections that let politicians escape consequences: independent ethics enforcement with real teeth, mandatory public disclosure, and prosecution under the same laws as everyone else.

The presidency is the most powerful office on Earth, and it currently has fewer entry requirements than most jobs at a bank. The Constitution sets almost no bar for who can hold it, and convicted criminals are not barred from running or serving. The office demands standards worthy of its power.

• Presidential candidates face no requirement to release tax returns, divest from businesses, or prove basic fitness for office, let alone a clean legal record.
• Recent years have shown presidents can profit from their office through hotels, properties, and business dealings with foreign governments while facing active criminal charges.
• The Supreme Court's 2024 immunity ruling put many official presidential acts beyond the reach of criminal law entirely, raising the stakes of who is allowed to hold the office in the first place.

The fix: Bar individuals convicted of felonies or other serious crimes from running for or holding the presidency, alongside mandatory financial disclosure, business divestment, and enforceable ethics rules. A criminal record should disqualify a candidate from the nation's highest office, full stop.

January 6th proved that an attack on the democratic process itself can end in pardons and book deals. If assaulting democracy carries no lasting consequence, it will happen again.

• A violent mob stormed the United States Capitol to overturn an election, and many convicted participants were later pardoned or celebrated.
• Election officials and volunteers across the country now face harassment and threats simply for counting votes.
• Attempts to submit false electors and pressure state officials to change results came within inches of succeeding.

The fix: Far stricter sentencing for attacks on the democratic process, pardon-proof accountability for organizers of election subversion, and federal protection for the workers who make elections run.

Immigration enforcement should be judged by whether it makes communities safer, not by how many people it removes. That means concentrating resources on people who commit crimes, not on law-abiding immigrants who have built their lives here.

• Enforcement resources are routinely spent pursuing long-term residents with no criminal record instead of the small share of immigrants who actually pose a public safety risk.
• Undocumented immigrants with clean records, steady jobs, and deep community ties face the same deportation risk as violent offenders, with no clear path to fix their status.
• Violent criminal offenders who are deported are frequently just released once they cross the border, with no continued accountability for the crime they committed here.

The fix: Focus deportation on immigrants who commit crimes, not on those with clean records. Create a clear pathway to citizenship for non-criminal immigrants who meet residency and background requirements. For violent criminal offenders, require them to serve their full sentence in prison, then deport them directly into a prison in their home country to continue serving out justice, so accountability doesn't end at the border.