The phrase "authorities and incentives are not well matched" is doing a lot of work here — and I'd push it one layer deeper.
The OCE isn't just underpowered. It's a patch on a system that was never well thought out in the first place. Congress created an ethics accountability mechanism and then put the institution being held accountable in charge of operating it. That's not a political failure — it's a known structural failure mode. You cannot build effective oversight into a system and then make that system responsible for its own oversight. The incentives will always corrupt the mechanism, regardless of who's running it.
The result is what you'd expect: undersight, containment, and periodic scandals that produce marginal reforms without changing the underlying structure.
The Bacon/Beyer proposal you mention is a good example of this pattern — well-intentioned people trying to improve a mechanism that was structurally compromised from the start. The question worth asking isn't how to make the Ethics Committee work better within its current constraints. It's whether anyone ever seriously asked what an effective congressional ethics system would actually require to function — and then built it. Here's my design: https://statecraftblueprint.org/p/players-making-the-rules
The phrase "authorities and incentives are not well matched" is doing a lot of work here — and I'd push it one layer deeper.
The OCE isn't just underpowered. It's a patch on a system that was never well thought out in the first place. Congress created an ethics accountability mechanism and then put the institution being held accountable in charge of operating it. That's not a political failure — it's a known structural failure mode. You cannot build effective oversight into a system and then make that system responsible for its own oversight. The incentives will always corrupt the mechanism, regardless of who's running it.
The result is what you'd expect: undersight, containment, and periodic scandals that produce marginal reforms without changing the underlying structure.
The Bacon/Beyer proposal you mention is a good example of this pattern — well-intentioned people trying to improve a mechanism that was structurally compromised from the start. The question worth asking isn't how to make the Ethics Committee work better within its current constraints. It's whether anyone ever seriously asked what an effective congressional ethics system would actually require to function — and then built it. Here's my design: https://statecraftblueprint.org/p/players-making-the-rules