This week gave us two accountability stories running in parallel, and the contrast between them tells you almost everything you need to know about how selectively Washington deploys the word “accountability” depending on whose ox is getting gored.
Story one: Democrats are making the case that now is the moment for anti-corruption reform — legislation aimed at checking the current administration and overhauling a system many voters believe has been captured against their interests. Story two: Anthony Fauci returned to Congress this week for a hearing on his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic response, facing backlash over decisions made years ago that reshaped American life in ways we’re still sorting out. Layer in a $547 million Medicare fraud case involving fake genetic cancer tests, doctor bribes, and kickbacks, and you’ve got a week that’s ostensibly about accountability from three different directions.
Here’s my problem, and it’s not with any single one of these stories. It’s with the pattern underneath all three: accountability in Washington runs almost entirely on a partisan clock. Whichever party is out of power discovers, with great moral clarity, that oversight and transparency are essential democratic values. Whichever party holds power discovers, with equally great moral clarity, that the same oversight is a partisan witch hunt, or “relitigating the past,” or a distraction from the real work of governing. Both sides have run this play, and both sides will run it again the next time the seats flip.
UNJ readers know I’m not here to do partisan cheerleading for either team, so let me be specific about where I actually land on each piece of this week’s news, because vague both-sides-ism is its own kind of dodge.
On anti-corruption reform: the impulse is right regardless of who’s proposing it and regardless of the fact that it’s politically convenient timing for the party currently out of power nationally. A system where lobbying influence, financial disclosure gaps, and revolving-door appointments between industry and regulatory agencies go largely unchecked is a real problem, documented across administrations of both parties for decades. The test isn’t whether Democrats are sincere right now. The test is whether the reforms they’re proposing would still make sense if a Democratic administration were the one being checked. If the answer is no — if this is structured as a Trump-specific cage rather than a durable institutional fix — then it’s not anti-corruption reform. It’s opposition-party messaging wearing a good costume, and it’ll get repealed or ignored the next time Democrats hold the White House.
On the Fauci hearing: accountability for pandemic-era decisions is legitimate and overdue, and I say that as someone who thinks both the reflexive “Fauci was always right” camp and the reflexive “Fauci was a tyrant” camp have spent five years refusing to update their priors with new information. Real accountability here means asking what specific decisions were made, on what evidence, with what tradeoffs acknowledged at the time versus in hindsight — not a theatrical grilling designed to produce a viral clip for one side’s base. If this hearing is actually about understanding what public health decision-making should look like next time, it’s valuable. If it’s a revenge tour, it’s theater, and Congress has enough of that already.
On the Medicare fraud case: this is the one nobody’s arguing about, and that tells you something too. Half a billion dollars stolen through fake cancer tests and doctor bribes is corruption in its purest, least politically complicated form — no ideology attached, just theft from a system meant to protect sick and elderly Americans. It’s also the one that will get the least sustained coverage, because there’s no partisan angle to milk out of it. That’s worth sitting with: the corruption everyone agrees is corruption gets a news cycle. The corruption that can be assigned to a party gets a movement.
My actual ask, for whatever it’s worth from an independent Wisconsin-based outlet with no national megaphone: build the anti-corruption infrastructure now, while it’s politically convenient for Democrats to want it, and write it durable enough that Republicans can’t just gut it the next time they hold both chambers and the presidency. Hold Fauci to a real accounting instead of a partisan pep rally. And maybe, just maybe, put a fraction of the institutional energy spent on Fauci reruns into prosecuting the Medicare fraud ring that actually stole from sick people this year. Accountability that only shows up when it’s useful to one side isn’t accountability. It’s just strategy with better PR.