In his second term, President Trump has illegally accepted a $400 million Boeing 747 from the government of Qatar. He has leveraged his family’s cryptocurrency ventures as a bribe machine. And he has presided over dozens of transactions in which political donations buy regulatory favors and make federal investigations disappear. By one conservative estimate published this winter, the Trump family has personally pocketed close to $4 billion off the presidency, enough to pay the salaries of over 50,000 public school teachers. But it is not just the Trump family. Through no-bid contracts to the Trump Administration’s friends and allies, a rising class of oligarchs and other businesses have profited handsomely from the corruption ecosystem growing across the federal government.
It is a basic American principle that you cannot keep what you stole. When Trump’s successor takes office, this money must be returned to the American people. We call it America’s “corruption rebate.”
A corruption rebate should be the centerpiece of a Trump accountability agenda pursued by Congress and the next president. Every dollar a court, settlement, or asset forfeiture proceeding can claw back–from the Trump family, the corporate benefactors of Trump’s pay-to-play regime, and the officials who participated in these schemes–should be deposited into a public fund and disbursed to American households. Those rebates should be accompanied by a plain-language accounting of who stole from the public, and how the government clawed the money back.
The case for this approach is foremost a matter of accountability. The scale of corruption during the second Trump Administration is without modern precedent, and if unchecked will spread like an infection. As more firms and oligarchs decide that paying tribute to a politician’s family is simply the cost of doing business in America, the pressure on the holdouts to fall in line becomes irresistible. Watching this happen, citizens draw the rational conclusion that the government is rigged. The perverse irony is that this democratic backsliding props up the very authoritarian populists who benefit from corruption, as their calls for blowing up the system resonatemore deeply with a disillusioned public. Reversing this trajectory will require more than new ethics rules. It will require a public, dollar-by-dollar reckoning that creates a real financial cost to corruption, and proves to the public that democracy works for the people’s interest.
Importantly, corruption should be defined broadly. Corruption rebates should be funded by clawing back bribes and other familiar forms of quid pro quo arrangements. But they should also be funded by recouping funds from federal contractors that have profited by abusing our rights. That includes, for instance, private firms profiting from creating mass surveillance systems designed to violate privacy laws.
A corruption rebate also offers practical benefits to the next administration. Trump’s successor must address an extraordinary set of crises: easing the affordability crisis, regulating artificial intelligence, and rebuilding a hollowed-out federal workforce, all while delivering policies that improve the lives of American families in a severely constrained fiscal environment. A corruption rebate is an accountability project, but it is equally an affordability project, putting real money in the hands of Americans at a moment when Trump’s tax cuts will make funding ordinary spending programs more difficult.
Where should the money go? The simplest possible structure involves equal payments to every American household that has struggled in Trump’s economy, each one itemized with the corrupt acts that funded it. But there is also a case for directing funds to the communities that bore the heaviest costs of Trump-era misgovernment: towns whose workforces and civic life were shattered by mass immigration enforcement raids; farming communities bankrupted by chaotic tariff policies; or disaster-struck counties denied federal aid because their politics were inconvenient. Any targeted approach would need to be governed by clear, transparent, and legally defensible criteria. The point is to repair the injuries this administration has inflicted and to help the greatest number of Americans possible, not to mirror its habit of turning federal money into a political weapon as with Trump’s Anti-Weaponization Fund.
Of course, the wealthy who have profited from their connections to Trump will work hard to evade accountability and shelter their financial gains. They will be aided by Trump’s creation of a marketplace for bribes around federal pardons. But we can prepare for these headwinds. Congress can prepare to appropriate sufficient funds for the offices within the Department of Justice, the Treasury Department, and even the Secret Service that are experts in investigating financial crimes, money laundering, and public corruption. And Congress and the states can use their investigative powers now to ensure the case has been built by day one of a new presidency.
We should build momentum for corruption rebates because the politics are likely to be especially favorable. Polling by the Brennan Center and others consistently finds that overwhelming majorities of Americans, across party lines, regard government corruption as one of the country’s most serious problems and want to see it confronted directly. The international evidence runs the same way. Earlier this year, former Orbán insider Péter Magyar swept Hungary’s election on a single, but powerful, promise: he would identify the money the prime minister’s circle had taken from the public, and he would get it back. Despite possessing almost no formal party infrastructure, Magyar won in a landslide.
Importantly, a corruption rebate should cut across ideological lines. While we are progressives, we believe this proposal draws on conservative traditions. It is a defense of the proposition that public office is a trust, that the betrayal of that trust must carry a real cost, and that a country which cannot enforce that principle has already lost something it may not get back.
Trump’s corruption has been a stress test of whether Americans still believe themselves to be the owners of their government. The corruption rebate is how we answer.
Alexander Hertel-Fernandez is Herbert H. Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University.
K. Sabeel Rahman is a Professor of Law at Cornell Law School.
Rakeen Mabud is a political economist and national policy expert.
Jamie Keene is a public policy strategist and former Special Assistant to the President in the Biden White House.
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