Prospect In August, a federal judge overruled a jury to throw out a $72 million verdict against Boeing for allegedly stealing trade secrets from a smaller competitor. He shortly after that he had traded potentially up to $15,000 worth of Boeing stock while overseeing the trial last year, which he did not disclose. You might not have heard about this incident since, unfortunately, ethics scandals have become a norm in politics.
We could fill an article just with ethics scandals involving Boeing. It’s not just the judicial branch, either—although the Supreme Court’s rightly caused media furor, there are plenty more stories of ethical misconduct across the legislative and executive branches, from executive branch officials to the Senate Ethics Committee held in private equity funds, thank you very much. This surely helps explain why Americans lack trust in their leaders.
The most recent on this topic found that distrust in each of the three branches of government is at or near record-high levels. And people want action: Americans are in favor of more stringent ethics rules, with supporting a ban on members of Congress owning stocks in specific companies and 87 percent supporting a similar ban for Supreme Court justices, the president, and the vice president. Whoever is in the White House has an opportunity to set the tone for ethics enforcement across all of the government, even where they don’t have actual authority.
To his credit, President Biden saw the need for more .