The House Ethics Committee's Hidden Backbone: Why Policing Congress Matters Now
Tom Rust has spent nearly two decades as the House Ethics Committee's top staffer. His work matters more now than ever, because Congress's ability to police itself is collapsing.
By Common Good Policy Team · September 15, 2026 · Responding to The Hill
What Happened
Tom Rust has been working inside the House Ethics Committee since 2009. He's the chief counsel and staff director, the person who actually runs the machinery that's supposed to keep lawmakers honest. For 17 years, he's been there behind the scenes while Congress has cycled through scandals, investigations, and increasingly, a public sense that the whole system is broken.
The headline itself tells you something important: this is a profile of a staffer most Americans have never heard of. Most people don't know the House Ethics Committee exists, let alone who runs it. That anonymity is the first sign of a deeper problem.
What It Means for You
Here's what's at stake: Congress is supposed to police itself. When a representative takes a bribe, lies under oath, or trades on inside information, there's supposed to be a mechanism that holds them accountable. Tom Rust's job is to make that mechanism work.
But the mechanism is broken, and Rust has spent 17 years working inside a system with no real power. The House Ethics Committee can investigate. It can recommend sanctions. Congress can ignore it. In recent years, Congress has been ignoring it more often.
What does that mean for you? It means your representative can break the rules, and the only consequence might be a committee vote that gets overridden. It means the person making laws about healthcare, taxes, or infrastructure isn't required to tell you the truth. It means money from donors shapes policy more than evidence does. And it means Tom Rust, a career ethics official, is presiding over an institution that's increasingly theater.
The Bigger Picture
The House Ethics Committee was created in 1968 after a wave of scandals. It was supposed to be the guardrail. But guardrails only work if Congress actually uses them. Over decades, legislators have steadily weakened the committee's authority. They've blocked investigations. They've voted down recommended sanctions. They've made it clear that party loyalty matters more than conduct.
The evidence is written into the voting record. When the committee recommends ethics sanctions, the full House votes on whether to enforce them. More often than not in recent years, those recommendations die in that vote. Powerful members protect their allies. The penalty for being caught is often just the cost of a good lawyer.
Meanwhile, Americans are watching. A 2024 Gallup survey found that only 8 percent of Americans have confidence in Congress as an institution. That's not because people don't like the individual policies Congress passes. It's because they don't believe Congress is working for them. They believe it's working for the people who can afford to have it work for them. Ethics violations aren't the cause of that belief, they're the symptom.
Rust's career reveals something uncomfortable: the people inside the system who want to make it work can't. The structural incentives are too strong. A staff director can investigate diligently, document wrongdoing carefully, and watch it die in a party-line vote anyway.
Where This Goes
Tom Rust's profile matters in September 2026 because the midterm elections are weeks away. Voters will choose members of Congress based partly on whether those members have earned trust. But the system doesn't require Congress to earn trust. It requires Congress to report to donors and party leadership. Those are the people the rules protect.
The Common Good Party believes Congress should actually have to be honest with the people it serves. Not eventually, not mostly, actually. That means the ethics system needs real teeth: independent investigators who can't be overridden by a party-line vote, investigations that happen fast enough to matter before elections, and consequences that are serious enough that breaking the rules costs something real.
It also means fixing the incentives that create the corruption in the first place. When members spend half their time fundraising, the logic is obvious: the person writing the check matters more than the person casting the vote. Three-month campaign windows and public financing would flip that equation. Congressional housing would mean members focus on legislation instead of worrying about rent. These are structural changes, not moral lectures.
Tom Rust has done his job well, by all accounts. He's investigated diligently. He's built the case. But the system he works inside won't let him win. The next question is whether the system itself changes, or whether we keep putting good people in impossible positions and calling that accountability.