Correction
When Selection Fails
Failed selection is not measured by what the official is paid. It's measured by the authority misused, the work obstructed, the people diminished, the opportunities lost, and the cost of correcting the mistake. When the work of Selection isn't done, the cost of Correction has to be paid.
1⃣ Contain
Limit the damage while the problem is evaluated
Containment does not remove the person. It reduces the authority, opportunities, and time available to cause further harm.
Possible actions:
☐ Document the specific conduct, failure, conflict, or incapacity.
☐ Increase audits, reporting requirements, and independent oversight.
☐ Require recusals from matters involving personal or financial conflicts.
☐ Remove the official from leadership, committee chairs, or discretionary assignments where legally permitted.
☐ Restrict delegated authority over contracts, appointments, spending, or confidential information.
☐ Issue a reprimand, censure, ethics finding, or vote of no confidence.
☐ Preserve records and protect employees, witnesses, and whistleblowers.
☐ Establish temporary succession or continuity procedures when incapacity is involved.
Containment is especially important when formal removal will take time or when the evidence is not yet sufficient to justify stronger action.
2⃣ Correct
Define the failure and provide a clear path to improvement
Some selection failures result from poor judgment, weak preparation, bad management, or correctable behavior rather than permanent unfitness. A correction process should resemble a public-sector performance improvement plan.
Possible actions:
☐ State what duty, standard, commitment, or law has not been met.
☐ Present the supporting evidence and allow a response.
☐ Establish specific corrective actions and measurable expectations.
☐ Set deadlines and scheduled progress reviews.
☐ Require training, coaching, mediation, disclosure, or compliance assistance where appropriate.
☐ Strengthen staffing or administrative support when incompetence rather than misconduct is the primary problem.
☐ Publish a scorecard showing whether promised corrections occurred.
☐ Escalate to containment or removal if the official refuses or repeatedly fails to improve.
Correction should not become an excuse for endless delay. Serious corruption, abuse of authority, violence, deliberate deception, or other grave misconduct may warrant moving directly toward removal.
3⃣ Remove
End the person’s candidacy, appointment, or authority
Removal methods depend on whether the person is still a candidate, has been elected, or holds an appointed position.
During a campaign
☐ Withdraw party, organizational, donor, or editorial endorsement.
☐ Negotiate a voluntary and orderly withdrawal.
☐ Replace the nominee where election law permits.
☐ File a legitimate ballot or eligibility challenge.
☐ Recruit and support a qualified primary or general-election opponent.
☐ Publish truthful, documented information so voters can reject the candidate.
After taking office
☐ Seek a negotiated resignation.
☐ Remove an appointed official through the authorized appointing or governing body.
☐ Use recall procedures where available.
☐ Pursue impeachment and removal for covered officials and qualifying misconduct.
☐ Expel a legislative member when constitutional requirements are met.
☐ Use judicial proceedings when the person is legally ineligible to hold the office.
☐ Apply established incapacity procedures when the problem is inability rather than misconduct.
☐ Defeat the official in the next primary or general election when earlier removal is unavailable.
Removal should follow an impartial process with evidence, notice, and an opportunity to respond. Otherwise, a legitimate correction mechanism can become a partisan weapon.
4⃣ Prevent Return
Reduce the likelihood that the same selection failure happens again
Removing someone from office does not automatically prevent another campaign. Permanent or long-term exclusion generally requires a separate legal basis.
Potential legal barriers:
☐ Impeachment followed by a separate judgment of disqualification where constitutionally authorized.
☐ Term limits established through the appropriate constitutional or statutory process.
☐ Disqualification resulting from specified corruption, ethics, or criminal findings where the law provides it.
☐ Judicial or professional disqualification for certain judges, licensed officials, or specialized offices.
☐ Enforcement of constitutional eligibility provisions.
☐ Constitutional amendment when existing qualifications cannot lawfully be expanded by ordinary legislation.
Political and institutional barriers:
☐ Permanently withdraw party endorsement and organizational support.
☐ Refuse campaign funding, staffing, data access, and leadership positions.
☐ Maintain a searchable public record of sustained ethics and performance findings.
☐ Require stronger screening before future endorsements or nominations.
☐ Recruit credible alternatives early enough to prevent the former official from dominating the field.
☐ Inform voters clearly that resignation, censure, recall, or expulsion does not necessarily make a person legally ineligible to run again.
The strongest prevention is not punishment after failure. It is a better selection system: verified qualifications, meaningful disclosure, structured evaluation, continuing performance measures, and early correction triggers.
Selection Correction Ladder
What's needed to clean up the mess of bad selection? Look for options:
1⃣ Contain
2⃣ Correct
3⃣ Remove
4⃣ Prevent Return
Costs and risks of poor selection:
5⃣ Costs of a Problem Public Official
6⃣ Are Politicians Normal?
The GSG Principle
Contain the damage. Correct what can be corrected. Remove those who remain unfit. Prevent the same failure from cycling back into office. Correction mechanisms are necessary, but they are expensive, divisive, and disruptive. A sound governance system therefore invests far more heavily in selecting capable people than in cleaning up after bad selections.
Correction mechanisms — including investigations, hearings, and removals — are:
inherently reactive
often slow and politically constrained
applied inconsistently
By the time correction occurs, the damage is often already done. A system that relies primarily on correction is operating too late in the cycle.
6⃣ Are Politicians Normal?
The news reports a continuous stream of office holders having personal problems, divorce, cheating, insider trading, sexual harassment, and a myriad of criminal misbehaviors. Some writers, including Harold Lasswell, Psychopathology and Politics, have wondered whether as a group politicians exhibit greater mental illness. Is there any evidence that shows these issues are worse than among the general population?
1. The strongest evidence: sexual harassment and abuse of power
The National Women’s Defense League reports that since 2006, at least 30 members of Congress have faced public workplace sexual-harassment allegations, totaling at least 53 accusations. Including non-workplace misconduct and pre-office allegations, the count rises to 49 members and 137 accusations. For state government, NWDL reports at least 424 incidents of sexual harassment by 162 sitting state lawmakers since 2013, while warning that actual incidents are likely substantially undercounted.
That is not proof that legislators harass at a higher rate than similarly situated executives. But it is proof that the legislative workplace has a real, repeated, bipartisan abuse-of-power problem.
The comparison problem is that workplace sexual harassment is also common outside politics. The EEOC reported 27,291 sexual-harassment charges from FY 2018 through FY 2021, with 43.5% also alleging retaliation. So the useful conclusion is not “politicians are uniquely depraved,” but: politics creates unusually dangerous conditions for harassment—power imbalance, staff dependence, reputational fear, party protection, and weak enforcement.
2. Corruption and bribery: office creates special opportunity
Public corruption convictions are measurable, but they do not isolate elected officials neatly. TRAC reported 31 new official-corruption convictions in January 2025 alone; the largest category that month was local-government corruption, and the broad category includes federal, state, local, law-enforcement, procurement, and other public-corruption cases.
Cato notes an important caution: DOJ public-corruption conviction data includes elected officials, career officials, and private-sector accomplices; it also depends on prosecutorial effort. Still, analysts estimate that 80% to 90% of public-corruption convictions are brought by federal prosecutors, making DOJ data one of the better imperfect indicators.
The U.S. Sentencing Commission’s bribery data is revealing: among people sentenced for bribery offenses, 85.8% were men, average age was 49, and 90.7% had little or no prior criminal history. Sentences were enhanced in 49.8% of cases for being a public official and in 45.3% for involving a high-level elected official.
That last point matters for GSG: many corrupt actors are not lifelong street criminals. They are often otherwise respectable people who enter systems where discretion, access, secrecy, money, and weak controls combine.
3. Insider trading and financial conflicts: suspicion exceeds proof
Congressional stock trading is a major public-trust problem, but “insider trading” is hard to prove legally. The STOCK Act requires covered officials, including members of Congress and senior staff, to report transactions over $1,000 within 45 days. In the current Congress, CRS reported that at least 25 measures had been introduced to limit or prohibit financial activity by members, spouses, dependents, or congressional employees.
That tells us the risk is recognized institutionally. It does not prove that members commit insider trading at a higher rate than corporate insiders. But the governance point is simple: when legislators can affect industries, receive nonpublic briefings, trade individual securities, and face weak penalties, the system invites suspicion even when no crime is proven.
4. Formal discipline understates the problem
The House has broad constitutional power to discipline members, but expulsion is rare. Since the Civil War expulsions, the House history list shows only three modern expulsions: Michael Myers after a bribery conviction in 1980, James Traficant after corruption-related convictions in 2002, and George Santos in 2023 after extensive fraud-related findings and indictment.
That low number should not be read as “misconduct is rare.” It means the penalty threshold is high, political will is uneven, and many problems are handled through resignation, nonpublic investigation, party pressure, settlement, or voter fatigue.
The House Ethics Committee’s own 118th Congress report shows a large ethics-advice and compliance workload: over 38,000 informal guidance requests, nearly 9,979 financial disclosure statements and amendments, more than 2,775 periodic transaction reports, and 41 separate investigative matters commenced or continued. That is a compliance ecosystem under strain.
5. Personality evidence: politics may attract certain traits
There is research suggesting that political life may attract or reward traits associated with ambition, dominance, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and risk-taking. A 2022 study of German state-parliament candidates discusses the “dark triad” traits—narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism—and notes prior research finding that political leaders often show high narcissism and moderate psychopathy/Machiavellianism.
The same study found that aversive personality traits were more likely among younger, conservative, and ideologically extreme candidates, but it did not find that “darker” candidates were more electorally successful overall.
So, politics may not turn normal people bad; it may attract some high-drive, high-ego, power-seeking personalities—and then fails to screen, supervise, or sanction them adequately.
Bottom line
While the statistics are unproven that politicians are worse people than the general population, it is accurate to state that public office is a high-risk environment for misconduct because it combines power, money, publicity, weak supervision, factional protection, and poor consequences. The available evidence shows recurring misconduct in sexual harassment, corruption, financial conflicts, ethics violations, and abuse of office—but the best data supports a governance-system failure more strongly than a simple moral claim that politicians are uniquely abnormal.
The problem is not that politicians are drawn from a different species. The problem is that the system selects for ambition, grants unusual power, tolerates conflicts, hides early warning signs, and imposes consequences too late.
5⃣ The Cost of a Problem Public Official
The costs of a corrupt and incompetent public official scale upwards due to their influence and control over large funds and issues:
Research illustrates the possible scale:
The IMF has estimated global bribery at approximately $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion annually, roughly 2% of global GDP.
The IMF has also found that less-corrupt governments can collect about 4% of GDP more in tax revenue than similarly developed but more corrupt governments.
Research covering public projects in eight European countries estimated that corruption increased project costs by an average of approximately 13%.
OECD work associates governmental trust with lower transaction costs, greater participation, and better compliance with public policy.
These are not measurements of one particular “problem official,” but they show why the governmental equivalent may greatly exceed an eight-times-salary estimate.
Categories of Public-Official Damage
A GSG assessment should calculate the incremental damage compared with what a reasonably competent officeholder would probably have produced—loss of time and opportunities.
1. Direct office cost
Salary and benefits.
Staff payroll.
Travel, security, vehicles, and facilities.
Consultants and political appointees.
Communications and promotional spending.
Staff time devoted to protecting or defending the official.
2. Management and oversight burden
Time spent by colleagues managing around the person.
Extra audits, investigations, and reporting.
Legal review and compliance controls.
Legislative hearings.
Crisis communications.
Senior staff diverted from substantive work.
The workplace analogue is the 13% of managerial time reportedly consumed by incivility problems.
3. Workforce productivity and morale
Delayed decisions.
Avoidance behavior.
Reduced discretionary effort.
Increased absenteeism.
Internal conflict.
Loss of institutional knowledge.
Premature retirement and resignations.
Difficulty recruiting capable replacements.
4. Turnover and replacement costs of disaffected staff
Recruiting and screening.
Vacancy time.
Interim staffing.
Training.
Lower initial productivity.
Severance or leave payouts where applicable.
Consultant or contractor premiums.
The private-sector benchmark of roughly 21% of salary for ordinary replacement—and substantially more for senior or specialized employees—provides a starting point, not a direct governmental rule.
5. Poor decisions and program failure
Misallocated appropriations.
Failed programs.
Unnecessary subsidies.
Poorly designed regulations.
Bad emergency responses.
Delayed maintenance.
Foregone preventive investments.
Benefits paid to the wrong recipients.
Eligible citizens improperly denied services.
6. Procurement and contracting loss
Inflated contract prices.
Change orders.
Sole-source favoritism.
Low-quality work.
Abandoned projects.
Litigation and rebidding.
Vendor reluctance to compete.
Long-term maintenance costs resulting from poor construction.
7. Appointment multiplication: A problem official can multiply damage through:
Unqualified appointees.
Patronage selections.
Loyalists who suppress adverse information.
Vacancies left unfilled.
Removal of capable career officials.
Boards and commissions captured for years beyond the official’s own term.
This “downstream selection damage” may be one of the largest differences between a problem employee and a problem officeholder.
8. Legal and integrity costs
Ethics investigations.
Inspector-general work.
Civil litigation.
Settlements and judgments.
Consent decrees.
Records preservation and discovery.
Compliance monitors.
Election challenges.
Defense costs paid by the government.
9. Service interruption and backlog
Permit delays.
Benefit-processing delays.
Court backlogs.
Public-safety vacancies.
Infrastructure repair delays.
Unanswered citizen complaints.
Deferred inspections and enforcement.
10. Policy instability and reversal
Cost of implementing a policy that is quickly repealed.
Systems and forms that must be rebuilt.
Contracts cancelled or renegotiated.
Employees retrained repeatedly.
Businesses unable to plan.
Litigation caused by unclear or changing rules.
11. Revenue loss and financing costs
Taxes and fees not collected.
Grants lost through noncompliance.
Federal matching funds forfeited.
Reduced credit rating.
Higher borrowing costs.
Poor asset sales or leases.
Underpriced concessions and public contracts.
12. Trust and compliance damage
Reduced voluntary compliance.
Greater enforcement expense.
Lower participation in public programs.
Reduced willingness to report wrongdoing.
Declining voter participation.
Increased belief that rules are selectively enforced.
Civic polarization and resistance to even sound policies.
13. Economic and reputational harm
Businesses locating elsewhere.
Reduced tourism or investment.
Loss of skilled employees.
University or institutional partners withdrawing.
Philanthropic and federal partners becoming reluctant to participate.
Long-term damage to the jurisdiction’s reputation.
14. Opportunity cost: the value of what competent leadership could have accomplished but did not:
Reforms never initiated.
Infrastructure not built.
Problems allowed to worsen.
Qualified people who declined to serve.
Investments postponed.
Years consumed by distraction rather than improvement.
15. Democratic correction cost
Recall election.
Special election.
Impeachment or expulsion proceedings.
Transition administration.
Replacement appointments.
Public communications.
Institutional paralysis during the controversy.
Yes, we can vote them out, but the sign suggests something's gone wrong, either in Selection, or in lack of Correction actions. That means there's a system problem—worry more about system than the sins of whoever you want to disappear. System problems repeat until they're fixed.
