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- Hacker News
- In the 2026 Transparency International ranking of corruption, the U.S. sits behind nations such as Uruguay, Lithuania, and the United Arab Emirates.by israelrt
- Lots of people here are focused on one guy. But the the article says "widespread". In my experience, much of the corruption is at a local or state level. At the federal level it seems the corruption is mostly related to agencies (GAO reports) and lobbying.by giantg2
- Related:
New High of 45% in U.S. Identify as Political Independents (January 12, 2026)
https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-politi...
by swed420 - Even before this new record high, in the previous ~15 years the average seemed to be around 75% (±), which seems… high? I would perhaps understand the US public thinking that (some levels of) government being "incompetent", but not corrupt.
By some measure the US does seem to have 'decent' scores for perception of corruption:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
* https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2025
Meta: in some ways it seems that the public's perception of government is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the US there is a large vein of "government is bad/incompetent/corrupt" and that's apparently what the US often gets. While in (e.g.) Scandinavian countries there appears to be a higher level of trust in government, and the people there tend to elect more competent politicians (?).
by throw0101a - What I'm wondering these last few years is whether American "politics" has anything actually political to discuss like ensuring the pension system is still intact in 30 years, improving access to a solid education (and even more so: what does that mean?), drug prevention, transparent election processes, tax and debt management... Over here in Europe you only hear about "US politics" like guns and cars or DEI ... stuff that you could bicker over after all the actual politics were decided upon.
Is there actual politics? Or is it all for show?
(This is relevant to corruption because I think a populace is a lot more receptive to ignoring corruption if the politics is emotionalised and people are entrenched and you don't talk about stuff that actually would benefit you but you have to decide on how to act on it)
by garte - Most democracy measurement projects and indices have shown a decline in democratic performance for the US over the past decade.
EIU reclassified the country from "full democracy" to "flawed democracy" in 2016.
V-Dem went from "liberal democracy" to "electoral democracy" in 2025.
When you have a wide variety of entities measuring the same trend, it is probably broadly correct.
The hope the good citizenry find a fix.
[To be fair the trend is global unfortunately: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/countries-democracies-aut...]
by chr15m - Looking at their charts, Democrats and Independents clearly think corruption is up a lot since 2024. But Republicans think corruption is down from 2024. The polarization of the electorate in the U.S. is pretty incredible.by pseudosavant
- Corruption in the US isn't new, but it's never been done as openly as it has been recently. I don't think it's a good thing. It shows that the government isn't concerned about what the public thinks, which suggests that they believe they no longer have to be. That's not a healthy sign for what's supposed to be a democracy.by autoexec