This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.
In Virginia this year, a legislative committee killed a bill that would have required lawmakers to disclose any crypto holdings. In New Mexico, the Democratic governor vetoed legislation that would have required lobbyists to be more transparent about what bills they were trying to kill or pass. And in North Dakota, where voters who were galvanized by a group called BadAss Grandmas for Democracy established a state ethics commission nearly seven years ago, lawmakers continued a pattern of limiting the panel’s power.
At a time when the bounds of government ethics are being stretched in Washington, D.C., hundreds of ethics-related bills were introduced this year in state legislatures, according to the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures’ ethics legislation database. While legislation strengthening ethics oversight did pass in some places, a ProPublica analysis found lawmakers across multiple states targeted or thwarted reforms designed to keep the public and elected officials accountable to the people they serve.
Democratic and Republican lawmakers tried to push through bills to tighten gift limits, toughen conflict-of-interest provisions or expand financial disclosure reporting requirements. Time and again, the bills were derailed.
With the help of local newsrooms, many of which have been part of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, we reviewed a range of legislation that sought to weaken or stymie ethics regulations in 2025. We also spoke to experts for an overview of trends nationwide. Their take: The threats to ethics standards and their enforcement have been growing.
“Donald Trump has been ushering a new cultural standard, in which ethics is no longer significant,” said Craig Holman, a veteran government ethics specialist with the progressive watchdog nonprofit Public Citizen. He pointed to Trump’s private dinner with top buyers of his cryptocurrency and the administration’s tariff deal with Vietnam after it greenlit the Trump Organization’s $1.5 billion golf resort complex; and he said in an email it was “most revealing” that the White House “for the first time in over 16 years has no ethics policy. Trump 2.0 simply repealed Biden’s ethics Executive Order and replaced it with nothing.”
The Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit that pushes for ethics enforcement, documented the risks and challenges that specifically confront state ethics commissions across the country. Such commissions have a range of mandates, but they often enforce lobbying, campaign finance and conflicts of interest laws. In the center’s 2024 Threat Assessment report, it warned that “those who want to weaken ethics commissions are becoming more creative with how they approach their attacks, and all commissions should be battle ready.”
Delaney Marsco, the center’s director of ethics and the report’s lead author, told ProPublica, “Any attempts to chip away at ethics commission authority is actually just chipping away at the public’s right to know what’s actually going on in their government.”
Louisiana passed a law significantly weakening ethics standards by making it harder for the state Board of Ethics to launch and conduct investigations. The law raised the bar on when the 15-member board could launch its own investigation from “reason to believe” to “probable cause.” And where the board had been required to investigate any sworn complaint it received, now two-thirds of its members must agree probable cause exists before opening an inquiry.
The law, which had overwhelming bipartisan support, targets the processes that resulted in ethics charges against then-Attorney General Jeff Landry, who is now the governor; the private lawyer defending him against those charges helped craft the legislation. The ethics commission dropped the charges last month as part of a settlement deal.
Sponsoring Rep. Beau Beaullieu, a Republican, said that checks on the board’s power were needed in response to overzealous enforcement actions.
But more often, legislators stood in the way of ethics reforms.
In South Carolina, a sweeping Statehouse corruption probe during the 2010s led to the convictions of several legislative leaders and to the passage of a number of ethics reforms. “It’s been radio silent ever since,” Sen. Sean Bennett, a Summerville Republican who chairs the chamber’s Ethics Committee, told The Post and Courier. “There’s been attempts to do things, but they just have not gotten a lot of traction.”
And this year, legislators there moved in the other direction, introducing a bill that would have exempted government appointees from having to file statements of economic interest. These statements, required for all elected officials, most candidates for elected office and certain high-profile public figures like commission members or school district employees, include the disclosure of everything from an individual’s income sources and gifts received from special interests to any property or business interests in their name.
Sponsoring Rep. Mike Burns, a conservative Republican from the college town of Tigerville, argued the bill would help protect nonpaid appointees, who he said end up with fines because they often don’t know how to correctly file.
But in an interview with The Post and Courier, Rep. Roger Kirby, a Democrat from Lake City, pushed back. “Transparency is what the goal is, right? Why would we try to back away from that?”
South Carolina has two-year sessions, and the bill remains stalled in committee.
And in another example of legislation that sought to weaken reform, the leader of Oregon’s Senate Republicans at the time, Daniel Bonham, made a Hail-Mary effort and introduced a measure to dissolve the state’s ethics commission and allow state agencies to police themselves. The measure didn’t get out of committee, which, Bonham acknowledged in an interview with Oregon Public Broadcasting, was what he expected. Still, Bonham said he believes the ethics commission is “feckless” and its effectiveness and purpose merit “robust public debate.”
Across the country, even when some legislators did attempt to push forward ethics reforms, their efforts were largely blocked:
But ProPublica’s analysis did find some states, both red and blue, that had successfully enacted reforms. For example, in Maine, a bipartisan push for a waiting period of one year for legislative staff who want to become lobbyists won overwhelming support. Rhode Island’s Democratic legislative supermajority and its Democratic governor agreed on a prohibition against bid-rigging for state contracts. And in Oklahoma, lawmakers went so far as to overturn the governor’s veto to make self-dealing by government officials a felony offense, punishable by a fine of up to $10,000 and up to five years in prison. The governor said in his veto message the legislation would “create excessive bureaucracy with little meaningful impact.”
In Washington, legislators put into law a preexisting state requirement that lawmakers report on their financial disclosure forms any interest greater than 10% in a company or property. Though the bill was framed as a cleanup measure, critics pointed out that local officials are held to a much stricter standard. Local officials must disclose any financial interest greater than 1% when voting on a public contract and must recuse themselves.
What if “a real estate company offers a legislator a 5% interest in property that might benefit from a state project such as a highway interchange?” Rep. Gerry Pollet, a Seattle Democrat, asked in an example reported by The Seattle Times.
The 10% standard, he said, “undermines trust in the Legislature.”
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.
