[3] During the 1st United States Congress, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton proposed several new economic initiatives that involved taxes, tariffs, debts, and a national bank.
[3] Corruption reemerged as a major theme in American politics in the 1824 United States presidential election, where Andrew Jackson ran as an anti-corruption candidate.
While they were generally used in ways that promoted the economic development of the states, there were instances of charters being given preferential treatment to political allies.
Grant had been elected without political experience, and he had little ability to control or regulate the members of his government, who proceeded to take advantage of his inexperience.
However, unlike many developing countries today, the United States had a free press, an honest federal judiciary, and citizen activists who led the reaction against corruption in the early 20th century.
Too, the United States did not struggle against widespread poverty as well as corruption, and the executive branch of the federal government never descended to the levels of kleptocracy seen in some developing countries today.
While running for Vice President in 1952, Nixon famously gave a speech declaring that he accepted one gift, a dog named Checkers, and that he had no intention of returning it.
[13] In 2019, Stephen Walt argued that the United States was becoming increasingly corrupt, pointing to the Trump administration, the causes of the Great Recession, the failure of the Boeing 737 MAX, and the 2019 college admissions bribery scandal as examples.
Walt argues that these examples show that corruption is a growing problem in the United States and in the longer term threaten the country's soft power.
[18] Accusations arose after a ProPublica report in 2023 that Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted gifts from real-estate investor and Republican donor Harlan Crow without disclosure.
[21] A January 2018 report by the Public Citizen non-profit describes dozens of foreign governments, special interest groups and GOP congressional campaign committees that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars at President Donald Trump's properties during his first year in office.
The study said that these groups clearly intended to win over the president by helping his commercial business empire profit while he held the office.
[22] On the 22nd of September, Senator Bob Menendez, a prominent figure in the United States, was formally charged with corruption alongside his wife, Nadine.
As per the indictment from the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, Menendez and his wife were reportedly engaged in a bribery scheme with three businessmen from New Jersey.
Allegedly, in exchange for these favors, the Democratic Senator from New Jersey used his influential position to assist both the businessmen and the government of Egypt, the home country of one of the individuals implicated.