Opinion Piece Argues Congress Should Face Legal Fiduciary Duty Over Spending

A Fox News opinion column is renewing debate over whether members of Congress should be held to the same legal standard that governs corporate boards and financial advisers: a fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of the people they represent.

In the piece, author Carol Roth argues that while corporate directors and financial advisers can be sued for putting their own interests ahead of those they serve, or for negligence and bad judgment, Congress carries no comparable legal obligation. Lawmakers take what Roth calls a “moral” oath and operate under disclosure and ethics rules she describes as weak, but she contends they have no true legal, fiduciary role.

Roth points to the scale of federal finances as evidence of the consequences. The national debt now exceeds $40 trillion, she writes, with Congress spending around $7 trillion a year, roughly $2 trillion more than it collects in revenue. She also argues that this spending has fueled high inflation and that the country is now paying more in interest on its debt than it spends on national defense.

The column also cites other long-standing criticisms of Congress, including concerns about lawmakers trading stocks despite the STOCK Act of 2012, and the fact that calls for term limits — which Roth says most Americans favor — have gone unanswered, sometimes allowing members with diminished capacity to remain in office.

Roth, who writes regularly on the national debt, says she is often asked whether the debt crisis is solvable. Her answer, she writes, is that the tools exist but the political structure to use them does not.

“If Congress has no obligation to do what is in our best interest instead of theirs, if we cannot hold them accountable for misdeeds, and if our only real recourse is threatening to vote them out of office, nothing is going to change,” Roth writes.

Her conclusion calls for lawmakers to be bound by a legal, not merely theoretical, obligation of care, trust and duty toward the public — mirroring the fiduciary standards applied to those who manage other people’s money in the private sector.