That’s true for all government employees and elected officials.
For Congress specifically, I’m in favor of raising salaries to $1M/year while simultaneously taking a zero tolerance policy on all lobbyist funded excursions. That’ll attract plenty of honest folks as the base salary would be more than enough.
You'd have to ban all private sector employment, book deals, and basically any other means of money transfer. It's impossible.
The only way to stop corruption is to make the incentive structure altogether unattractive. Singapore, for example, has done a world class job doing so and has one of the lowest corruption rates in the world.
I’m not opposed to this. but a more reliable solution might be extending terms to 6-8 years and then making second terms illegal.
People would still love to hire someone with experience in the highest rungs of government and it would decrease the negative influence of lobbyists on currently serving members.
Yes, but the FBI contains part of the US government's attempts to counter spies and infiltrators, and my understanding is that it's seen as especially important that those people aren't easily bribable.
I would think domestic bribes would be far more likely. Less risk to the agent due to less exposure to a high profile failure. If an agent gets pinched for taking bribes from a business owner or a local sheriff, it's not as big of a scandal as if they took foreign money. And probably easier to set up in the first place.
I don't think the scandal would be the main concern. The main concern would the life imprisonment that treason/spying, when discovered, usually leads to.
