By John & Nisha Whitehead
The Rutherford Institute
November 6, 2025
" Kleptocracy: a society whose leaders make themselves rich and powerful by stealing from the rest of the people."-Cambridge Dictionary
America has been backsliding into kleptocratic territory for years now, but this may finally be it.
A kleptocracy is literally "rule by thieves."
It is a form of government in which a network of ruling elites "steal public funds for their own private gain using public institutions." As analyst Thomas Mayne explains, it's "a system based on virtually unlimited grand corruption coupled with, in the words of American academic Andrew Wedeman, ' near-total impunity for those authorized to loot by the thief-in-chief'-namely the head of state."
One could fairly say that a kleptocracy was always going to be the end result of the oligarchy that was America.
The signs were visible long before now: power and wealth have been trading places for decades.
Indeed, it has been more than a decade since researchers at Princeton and Northwestern concluded that the U.S. is a functional oligarchy in which " political outcomes overwhelmingly favored very wealthy people, corporations, and business groups," while the influence of ordinary citizens was at a "non-significant, near-zero level."
So now we find ourselves in this present moment where billionaires are running the show.
The optics are undeniable: while the country suffers through a government shutdown, with welfare programs shuttered and inflation, healthcare and basic cost-of-living expenses skyrocketing, the elite are living it up.
In the White House, President Trump is redecorating, transforming what had been known as "the people's house" into a palace fit for an American king, complete with marbled bathrooms and a sprawling, gold-fitted ballroom. The rest of the administration, taking its cue from their leader, are jetting around at taxpayer expense for lavish vacations, sporting events-and decadent parties at Mar-a-Lago, Trump's Florida retreat.
The responses to criticisms either deflect to how other administrations wasted money or, in the case of the ballroom, insist the project is privately funded-and therefore beyond reproach because taxpayers aren't paying for it.
But money is never truly "private" once it purchases influence over public office. The moment a government accepts such funding, it becomes indebted to the funders rather than accountable to the people.
Case in point: the list of donors to Trump's White House ballroom.
It reads like a who's who list of the government's biggest contractors and those most eager to curry favor. Collectively, the corporations and individuals on the ballroom donor list have received staggering sums in government contracts in recent years, and more than half face or have faced government investigations or enforcement actions "that includes engaging in unfair labor practices, deceiving consumers and harming the environment."
This is how you bring about a kleptocracy-one crooked buy-in at a time.
The constitutional question that follows is unavoidable: if presidents and agencies can do whatever they please simply because someone else foots the bill, what remains of constitutional, representative government?
Follow that rationale to its end and you find yourself in dangerous territory.
If a president can privately fund a ballroom, could he privately fund a battalion? If a cabinet agency can accept donations to expand its reach, could it sell policy favors to the highest bidder?
If every public act can be recast as a private transaction, then the public no longer governs-it merely observes.
That is why the defense of demolishing and reconstructing the White House ballroom-an undertaking never authorized by Congress-on the grounds that no public funds will be used does not pass constitutional muster.
The Constitution gives Congress-and only Congress- the power of the purse.
This safeguard was designed not as a bureaucratic formality but as the chief restraint on executive abuse-the people's means of holding the presidency to account.
Once presidents can raise private money to do what the people's representatives refuse to fund, that weapon is disarmed.
What follows is the slow unraveling of constitutional restraint, replaced by the notion that money-not law-sets the limits of power. The same mechanism that once protected the people from tyranny now becomes the means of financing it.
What was meant as a safeguard becomes a loophole-a backdoor to unchecked power.
The logic is as seductive as it is corrupting: if private dollars cover the cost, the Constitution doesn't apply.
By that reasoning, a president could wage war, build prisons, or launch surveillance programs-all without congressional authorization-so long as a billionaire or corporate sponsor signs the check.
That's not democracy. It's privatized despotism.
This is how republics fall: not only through coups and crises, but through the quiet substitution of private interests for public authority.
What begins as a gift ends as a purchase. What begins as a renovation ends as a revolution in how power operates.
We have already seen this creeping privatization at every level of government: private contractors running prisons and wars, corporate donors dictating policy priorities, and surveillance and censorship outsourced to tech firms.
Now the presidency itself is for sale-brick by brick, ballroom by ballroom.
The Founders feared monarchs; they never imagined CEOs with armies or presidents who could raise war chests independent of Congress. Yet that is exactly where we are headed: toward a government financed by private power and answerable only to it.
When public power can be bought, sold, or sponsored, the Constitution becomes nothing more than a branding tool-and when a nation mistakes private funding for public legitimacy, it ceases to be a republic at all.
The power of the purse was meant to be the people's last line of defense against tyranny.
In the architecture of the Constitution, Congress alone was entrusted with the ability to raise and spend money-not because the Founders trusted legislators more than presidents, but because they feared concentrated power. They understood that whoever controls the purse ultimately controls the government itself.
"Money," Alexander Hamilton warned, "is the vital principle of the body politic."
Without that restraint, the president could accumulate funds, build armies, and buy loyalty at will, consolidating power beyond constitutional limits-what Madison called " the very definition of tyranny."
When presidents or agencies can act outside congressional appropriations by appealing to private donors, super PACs, or corporate "partners," they dissolve the constitutional boundary between public office and private gain.
Decisions that once required debate and oversight now happen behind closed doors, in boardrooms and donor suites. The result is a shadow government financed by privilege instead of the people.
The privatization of power isn't theoretical-it is happening in plain sight.
As The Intercept recently revealed, the Trump administration has even floated cash bounties for private "bounty hunters" to locate and track immigrants on behalf of ICE. In other words, law enforcement is being farmed out to freelancers motivated not by duty or justice, but by profit.
This is what a pay-to-play police state looks like: private actors deputized to do the government's bidding, free from constitutional safeguards, answerable only to the wallet that funds them.
Once the machinery of enforcement can be financed, directed, or rewarded through private channels, the rule of law gives way to the rule of money. Government ceases to function as a neutral arbiter and becomes a contractor for hire, wielding the badge, the gun, and the gavel on behalf of whoever can afford its services.
These arrangements substitute profit for principle and contract for Constitution, blurring the line between the state and its sponsors: private donors finance political events in public buildings, corporate partners shape executive policy, and billionaires underwrite the very forces-military, law enforcement, surveillance-that keep the rest of the population in check.
A police state funded by private wealth is even more dangerous than one funded by public taxes, because it answers to no electorate, no oversight committee, no constitutional restraint. Its accountability points upward-to financiers-not outward to the people it governs.
Under such a system, justice becomes transactional. Enforcement becomes selective. Rights become negotiable.
What began as the privatization of services metastasizes into the privatization of sovereignty: the executive branch no longer merely executes the law-it markets it. The idea of constitutional limits erodes the moment the state claims exemption by calling its actions "privately financed."
And so, when a president boasts that he could raise his own army-through donors, contractors or loyalists-he is not being metaphorical. He is articulating the next logical stage of a government that has already sold itself to the highest bidders.
The Founders warned that liberty would perish when the instruments of power could be bought or sold. We are watching that prophecy unfold in real time.
In the pay-to-play police state, money doesn't just talk-it arrests, surveils, and kills.
The fight to restore constitutional government begins where it was first betrayed: not merely with who pays, but with who decides.
If Congress no longer controls the nation's spending-and if presidents, agencies, and corporations can bypass public consent by courting private benefactors-then the people no longer control their government.
That is not democracy; that is debt servitude to power.
The Founders knew that taxation and representation rise and fall together-and representation means more than writing a check. It means the power to set priorities, to attach conditions, to withhold funds, and to say no.
A government funded independently of its citizens will inevitably rule independently of them; it will spend without oversight, act without restraint, and enforce without accountability. That is why Madison stressed that "the power over the purse... is the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the people's representatives against executive encroachments."
The inverse is also true: once the president depends on private money, the people become dependent on the will of those who pay the president.
In other words, an oligarchy-and when that oligarchy turns government itself into a vehicle for enrichment, a kleptocracy.
To reclaim the republic, the people must reclaim ownership of both the purse and the plan-the money that funds the government and the mandates governing how those funds are used.
That requires drawing a hard constitutional line between public office and private enrichment; restoring congressional authority over every dollar spent in the name of the American people; and dismantling the system of shadow funding-super PACs, donor networks, corporate partnerships, and "public-private collaborations"-that now serve as pipelines for corruption disguised as efficiency. It also requires the sunlight of disclosure for any outside contribution touching government action, and strict prohibitions on off-budget schemes that treat private cash as a license to ignore the law.
Most of all, it requires remembering that citizenship is a public trust, not a private transaction.
We need more than the right to pay for our government-we need the right to say how those payments are used, and the power to refuse when they are misused or abused.
The moment we accept the notion that government may do whatever it wants so long as someone else pays for it, we have already sold the republic.
As we make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the restoration of liberty will not come from new donors, new deals, or new rulers-it will come from a renewed insistence that power in America flows only from one source: We the People.
Our forebears fought a revolution to end taxation without representation. We may yet have to fight another-this time, against representation without appropriation, where officials claim the right to govern without the duty to answer to those they are supposed to represent.
Remember, they are the servants. We the People are supposed to be the masters.
This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.