Prohibit Trading by Elected Officials
Senior officials should not actively trade individual securities while in office. Conflicting holdings should be divested, placed in genuinely independent blind trusts, or moved to broadly diversified vehicles.
Institutional resilience
Government should be built to survive bad incentives.
Resilient systems require resilient institutions: transparency, accountability, regular turnover, broad democratic participation, and long-term fiscal responsibility.
Horizon One • 0–5 years
Restore Trust and Accountability
Strengthen Financial Transparency
Make financial interests, gifts, outside compensation, and significant conflicts timely, searchable, and understandable to ordinary citizens.
Begin Long-Term Debt Reduction
Reduce federal debt relative to the economy during normal conditions without sudden austerity that damages infrastructure, public services, or growth.
Horizon Two • 5–20 years
Structural Democratic Reform
Some reforms require constitutional amendments or major structural change and should be treated as long-term democratic projects.
Congressional Term Limits
Establish reasonable limits that preserve enough time for officials to become effective while ensuring eventual turnover.
Supreme Court Terms
Replace lifetime active service with long, fixed, staggered terms so vacancies are predictable while preserving judicial independence.
Structural Fiscal Balance
Require sustainable budgets over the economic cycle, while preserving borrowing for recessions, wars, disasters, public-health emergencies, and major long-lived investments.
Direct Presidential Elections
Support a constitutional amendment eliminating the Electoral College so every citizen’s vote contributes equally to a national presidential election.
Ranked-Choice Voting
Allow voters to rank candidates so new political movements and independents can compete without functioning primarily as spoilers.
Institutional Resilience
Build safeguards, transparency, turnover, checks on concentrated power, and recovery mechanisms so good government does not depend on unusually good individuals.
A governing principle
Design for the failure mode.
A good political system should not depend on every politician being unusually honest, every judge being perfectly impartial, every administration being competent, or every generation making good decisions.
Build systems that remain healthy even when individual components fail.