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Require presidents and vice presidents to divest conflicting financial interests by statute, and create a statutory enforcement path for the Emoluments Clauses that does not depend on a private lawsuit.
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AI-researched, unverifiedLast Reviewed
Jul 5, 2026
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What is failing, what we would change, and the conclusion we are willing to defend.
Federal conflict-of-interest law binds nearly every executive branch official except the two who run the branch. 18 U.S.C. § 208 requires officials to step back from any government matter touching their own financial interests. Section 202(c), added by the Ethics Reform Act of 1989, expressly excludes the President and Vice President from that duty, along with Members of Congress and federal judges. The Foreign and Domestic Emoluments Clauses were supposed to catch what the statute misses, but no modern emoluments lawsuit against a sitting president has produced a ruling on the merits: courts have dismissed every one for lack of standing or mooted it once the term ended.
The gap is not new, and it does not belong to one party. In May 2025, MGX, an Abu Dhabi state-backed investment fund, agreed to settle a $2 billion investment in Binance using a stablecoin issued by World Liberty Financial, the Trump family's own crypto venture. Five months later, President Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the Binance founder convicted of a Bank Secrecy Act violation as part of a $4.3 billion Justice Department settlement. Binance's chief executive has denied any link between the deal and the pardon, and Senators Warren and Merkley have opened an inquiry into the arrangement. No statute required Trump to divest from World Liberty Financial or recuse from that decision, because none exists. Two decades earlier, Vice President Cheney held deferred compensation from Halliburton while the Pentagon steered the company a no-bid Iraq reconstruction contract; no statute reached that either, for the same reason. Section 202(c) is a blind spot regardless of which administration is standing in it.
The Innovation Party position: extend the qualified-blind-trust-or-divestiture standard that cabinet officials already use to satisfy Section 208 to the presidency and vice presidency, and back the Emoluments Clauses with an enforcement path that does not wait for a private plaintiff to prove personal injury.
Require the President and Vice President, starting with the term after enactment, to divest financial interests that pose a conflict or place them in a qualified blind trust meeting the existing 5 U.S.C. § 13104(f) standard: independent trustee, no reporting back to the officeholder, OGE-approved trust terms.
Extend that requirement to a spouse or dependent child who holds a controlling stake in a business seeking foreign-government or federal-contract business, and, closing the gap a dependent-child threshold alone would leave, to any adult child who holds a controlling interest in a business bearing the officeholder's name or brand and seeking that same kind of business, regardless of the adult child's dependency status.
Create a defined statutory cause of action, held by the Comptroller General, to seek injunctive relief for violations of the Foreign and Domestic Emoluments Clauses, so a case can reach a court's merits without a private litigant proving individualized injury.
Give the Office of Government Ethics and the Comptroller General civil-penalty authority over late or omitted STOCK Act transaction reports and annual disclosures by the President and Vice President, independent of Justice Department referral.
Apply the divestiture mandate prospectively only, starting with the next term; apply the enforcement and penalty provisions on enactment.
A president has to be able to trust a rule was not written about them specifically. The next one has to know it already applies before taking the oath.
Turn frustration into useful pressure.
If this position misses evidence or a lived consequence, challenge it. If it holds up, help test it locally and connect it to the issues around it.