1. Core principles & sourcing standards

This is an aggregation of publicly reported information, not original investigation. Every entry restates what established news organizations, government filings, court rulings, and watchdog groups have already documented. We make no claims that haven't been reported elsewhere first.

Sourcing requirements

• Every entry links to specific articles or primary documents — not homepages. Where possible we cite the original source (a court ruling, a CBO report, a congressional letter, an SEC filing) rather than coverage of it.
• We prefer multiple independent sources per entry, and favor primary documents (GAO, CBO, DOJ filings, congressional investigations) and established investigative outlets (ProPublica, Reuters, AP, NPR, major papers) over commentary.
• Claims we could not verify against a credible source are removed, even if plausible. (During this site's build, two draft entries were cut or rewritten for exactly this reason.)

Language discipline

We describe what was reported or documented, not what we conclude someone is guilty of. Phrases like "raised concerns," "was flagged by," and "investigators allege" are deliberate. This site documents publicly reported information; it is not a legal finding of wrongdoing.

2. What each category means

• Pay-to-Play — Requires a documented correlation between a financial contribution (donation, settlement payment, investment) and a favorable regulatory, legal, or policy outcome. Coincidence or proximity alone is not enough; there must be reporting connecting the two.
• Conflict of Interest — A government decision or position that intersects with the personal or family financial interests of the president or senior officials, where the conflict itself is the documented issue (e.g., officials trading stocks in companies they regulate).
• Tariff Exemption / Trade — Carve-outs, exclusions, or deal reversals granted to specific companies, especially following meetings, pledges, or payments.
• Taxpayer Funds Misused — Public money spent in ways that primarily benefit the president, family, or allies rather than the public, or congressionally appropriated funds withheld/redirected without authority.
• Public Safety Cuts — Confirmed eliminations or staffing reductions of programs with a documented public-safety function and documented or expert-projected impact.

3. How dollar figures are calculated

Each entry carries a single headline dollar figure. These are not uniform in meaning — and we flag what each represents in the entry's "amount note." A figure can be:

• An amount actually spent or transferred (e.g., $8B USAID rescission, $400M Qatar jet).
• An estimated benefit received (e.g., the ~$50B in avoided fines/preserved mergers from dropped enforcement — an estimate from watchdog analysis).
• A deal or asset value (e.g., the $14.9B Nippon/U.S. Steel transaction).
• Zero, when the harm is real but not monetizable (most Public Safety entries). These still appear and count as entries; they just don't add dollars.

Because these meanings differ, we do not present a single grand "total corruption" dollar figure. The category totals in the banner each sum only the comparable figures within that category, and even those mix estimate types — so treat them as orders of magnitude, not precise accounting.

4. The "cost per American" figure

This is a cumulative running total since January 20, 2025 — not a monthly or annual figure, and not a projection. It currently works out to roughly $60 per person, drawn from about $20B in documented direct waste.

This number is a deliberate floor, and it undercounts dramatically. It includes only entries with a concrete dollar figure. The largest harms carry $0 in the math because they can't be honestly priced: the destruction of fraud-detection capacity from firing 17 inspectors general, the 500,000–700,000 annual deaths modeled from USAID cuts, and the degraded weather, disease, food, and aviation safety services. We chose a defensible small number over an impressive shaky one. The real per-person cost is far higher.

5. The "family enrichment" figure

We sum the dollar figures from ledger entries that represent direct financial benefit to Trump or his family (foreign payments, crypto profits, government-backed contracts to family firms, the Qatar jet, property fees), and floor the result at $2.25 billion — the figure House Oversight Committee Democrats estimated in January 2026 for realized profits from foreign payments alone.

The displayed number carries an asterisk because it is a conservative floor. Independent estimates of total family enrichment during the term run to $4–5 billion and higher. We show the more defensible figure and note the larger estimate rather than leading with it.

6. Presidential comparison scoring (0–10)

On the Comparison tab, each administration is scored 0–10 in four categories (Pay-to-Play, Conflicts of Interest, Taxpayer Misuse, Public Safety Harm) for a total out of 40. Scores reflect the volume, scale, and personal-enrichment character of documented, sourced instances — not partisan judgment. Party is noted but is never a scoring input.

These scores involve editorial judgment — they are the most subjective element on the site, and we say so plainly. The underlying sourced incidents are listed on each president's card so you can assess whether you'd score them the same way. We score administrations of both parties by the same rubric.

Per-term scoring

Multi-term presidents are increasingly broken into separate term entries (e.g., Trump's 45th and 47th terms are scored separately) so that a partial current term isn't compared against a full two-term aggregate. Where a president is still shown as a combined two-term entry, that's noted on the card and flagged as expansion-pending. The current term is marked "partial" wherever it appears — it has had far less time to accumulate incidents, which makes its category totals all the more notable, but we never hide that context.

7. How severity & certainty are weighted

A common and fair objection: "Aren't you treating a proven crime the same as an unproven allegation?" We address this with two separate axes that you can see on every incident when you expand a president's card.

Severity — four dimensions (each scored 0–3 dots)

• Scale — how many people are affected, or how much money is involved.
• Deliberateness — whether it was an accident or competence failure versus knowing, intentional conduct.
• Personal enrichment — whether the official or their family financially benefited. This is the dimension that most distinguishes corruption from policy failure.
• Institutional damage — whether it corroded democratic guardrails: oversight bodies, the courts, elections, the free press, or the rule of law.

This is why two serious events can score very differently. The Iraq War scores at or near maximum on scale, deliberateness, and institutional damage — but zero on personal enrichment, because no one was lining their pockets. A meme-coin launch might score lower on scale but maximum on personal enrichment. Showing the dimensions lets you see why a score landed where it did, instead of trusting a single number.

Certainty — evidence tier

Separately, each incident is tagged by how well-established it is:

• Confirmed — established by a court ruling, an official admission, or direct records (e.g., on-chain transactions, a Special Counsel report).
• Documented — established by congressional investigation, an inspector general, a GAO/CBO report, or solid investigative reporting.
• Alleged / contested — a serious, widely-made allegation that has not been established, or where credible sources disagree.

Severity and certainty are deliberately kept separate. A high-severity but contested allegation does not score like a high-severity, confirmed fact. This is the mechanism that lets us include politically charged allegations honestly — for example, the Biden/Burisma quid-pro-quo claim is included on Biden's card, tagged "Alleged / contested," and scored low on every dimension, with an explanation that years of investigation did not establish personal benefit. It's neither buried nor inflated. The same standard is applied to allegations against every president, regardless of party.

8. Policy vs. corruption — the boundary

This site scores corruption and abuse of power, not policy you might disagree with. A policy can be unwise, harmful, or unpopular without being corruption. To keep this principled rather than political, an action is only scored if it involves at least one of:

• Self-enrichment — the official or family financially benefited.
• Deliberate deception for personal or political gain — knowingly misleading the public or Congress, not an honest mistake or contested judgment call.
• Documented abuse of power — using government authority outside its lawful bounds (defying courts, dismantling oversight, bypassing due process).

Worked examples, including ones flagged by a moderate-conservative reviewer:

• Immigration levels / deportation numbers — a policy choice. Not scored. (Obama's record deportations are noted on his card as context, explicitly outside the scored set, so the boundary is visible.)
• Military interventions generally — policy. Not scored on their own.
• The Iraq War — does score, and scores high, because bipartisan Senate findings concluded the administration deliberately misrepresented intelligence to the public. The trigger is the documented deception, not the decision to go to war.
• A drone-strike program — the strike policy isn't scored, but operating it through a secret legal framework and killing a citizen without trial scores on institutional damage and due-process grounds.

The aim is a boundary you could apply yourself and get the same answer, whoever is in office.

9. Notable items we considered but didn't score (and why)

A reasonable reader — from any political direction — may look for a specific scandal and wonder why it isn't reflected. This section names the most likely such items and gives the rubric-based reason. Some are scored elsewhere and noted here for orientation; some are deliberately not scored. The point is that omission is a documented decision, not an oversight.

If you think something belongs here that isn't — or that an item we scored shouldn't be — that's exactly the kind of challenge the corrections process (below) exists to handle.

10. What we deliberately exclude

11. Corrections & how to flag errors

This site will contain mistakes — every aggregation does. Our commitment is to fix them quickly and visibly rather than defend them. If a figure is wrong, an entry is outdated, a source has been retracted, or a date is off, that's a correction we want to make.

If you spot an error, note the entry and the specific problem (wrong number, dead link, superseded reporting). Accuracy is this project's only real defense, so corrections are treated as improvements, not attacks.

Last methodology update: June 2026. Figures reflect the documented record through that date and update as the ledger does.

What this is

This is an aggregation of public reporting — from established news organizations, government filings, court rulings, inspector-general and GAO reports, and congressional investigations. Every entry restates what credible sources have already documented and links directly to them. It makes no original accusations.

The aim is a reference that is hard to dismiss: accurate, sourced, and consistent in how it treats everyone. Where something is contested or unproven, it is labeled that way rather than asserted as fact.

What this is not

• It is not a legal finding of guilt. "Documented" means publicly reported, not convicted.
• It is not a partisan scorecard. The comparison tab applies one rubric to administrations of both parties, includes documented issues for presidents of every stripe, and shows its work — including when high-profile allegations score low because the evidence is contested.
• It is not comprehensive. It captures what is sourced and significant; omissions are explained in the Methodology.
• It does not track accomplishments or offer a "both sides" balance — it is an accountability record, and the comparison tab is how it answers "aren't they all the same?"

Who maintains it

The Public Ledger is maintained independently. It is not affiliated with any party, campaign, candidate, or organization, and it carries no advertising. It is offered as a civic resource — a place to check claims against sources and to see how the current moment compares with the documented record of the past.

How to use it

• Current Term — the running ledger of documented incidents, filterable by category and sortable by date, amount, or source.
• Presidential Comparison — every administration scored 0–10 across four categories, with severity dimensions and evidence tiers visible on each incident.
• Timeline — every incident across administrations, grouped and collapsible by presidency.
• Money Flow — where documented family enrichment came from and went, plus net-worth-during-term comparisons.
• Methodology — exactly how every figure and score is produced, what's excluded and why, and how to flag an error.

Read the full methodology →

Corrections

Accuracy is this project's only real defense, so corrections are treated as improvements. If a figure is wrong, a link is dead, reporting has been superseded, or a date is off, that's something to fix — not defend. The Methodology tab's final section explains the standard.

Last updated June 2026 · An aggregation of public reporting, maintained independently.