Two instruments, and what each one actually sees.
The chart people reach for when they want a corruption trend is the Corruption Perceptions Index, and it
comes with a warning its users routinely ignore. Transparency International rebuilt the scale in 2012.
Scores before that year are not comparable to scores after it, which is why the line here starts in 2012
rather than running the full thirty years. The rough guide further back is world rank: the United States
placed 15th in 1995 and 14th in 2000, against 29th in 2025.
On the comparable series the direction is not ambiguous. The score peaked at 76 in 2015 and reached 64 in
2025, the lowest the United States has ever recorded, with the steepest falls after 2017 and again after
2023.
But the index measures perception, not corruption. It aggregates expert and business
surveys. It can move because behavior changed, or because coverage changed, or because people simply
became more willing to say so. A perception index is evidence about a mood as much as about conduct, and
anyone treating it as a count of crimes is using it for something it was never built to do.
The obvious correction is to look at prosecutions instead, on the theory that convictions are facts and
surveys are opinions. That is the second chart, and it is the reason this page exists. The federal unit
responsible for prosecuting public corruption went from roughly 40 full time staff at the start of 2025 to
two full time attorneys, and from 175 to 200 open matters down to about twenty.
The scarcinality reading. Over the next few years the federal corruption conviction count
will almost certainly fall, and that fall will be available to anyone who wants to argue that corruption
declined. It will not be evidence of that. A conviction count is a measure of enforcement capacity before
it is a measure of conduct, and the capacity was removed deliberately and recently. This is the same
defect
the disease data now has, and the same one the
Credit Counterfeit Index admits about its own monetary side: an
instrument built on aggregates reports whatever its inputs are still able to see.
What the two charts honestly support together is narrow and worth stating plainly. Perceived corruption in
the United States is at its recorded low, and the apparatus for establishing whether that perception is
correct has been substantially dismantled. Those are two separate facts. Neither one proves the level of
actual corruption, and the second one makes the first much harder to check.
Corrections welcome. Staffing figures for the Public Integrity Section vary between reports, from
two attorneys to five or six, and the pre-2012 index is genuinely not comparable rather than merely
inconvenient. Both are noted rather than smoothed over.