[FoxBusinessNews] Strategy aims to leverage entire U.S. government to fight corruption.
"Corruption threatens United States national security, economic equity, global antipoverty and development efforts, and democracy itself," Biden said in a statement on June 3, 2021, as he established a fight against corruption as a core national security interest of the United States. "But by effectively preventing and countering corruption and demonstrating the advantages of transparent and accountable governance, we can secure a critical advantage for the United States and other democracies."
The strategy involves five pillars: modernizing, coordinating and resourcing U.S. government efforts to fight corruption; curbing illicit finance; holding corrupt actors accountable; preserving and strengthening the multilateral anti-corruption architecture; and improving diplomatic engagement and leveraging foreign assistance resources to fight corruption.
The strategy comes after federal departments and agencies conducted a review "to take stock of existing U.S. Government anti-corruption efforts and to identify and seek to rectify persistent gaps in the fight against corruption."
The strategy lays out a few different types of corruption:
- Grand corruption: when political elites steal large sums of public funds or otherwise abuse power for personal or political advantage.
- Administrative corruption: the abuse of entrusted power for private gain — usually by low- to mid-level government officials — in interactions with citizens and the private sector, including to skirt official regulations and extort citizens in exchange for their basic services.
- Kleptocracy: a government controlled by officials who use political power to appropriate the wealth of its nation. Can include state capture.
- State capture: when private entities improperly and corruptly influence a country’s decision-making process for their own benefit.
- Strategic corruption: when a government weaponizes corrupt practices as a tenet of its foreign policy.
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