Fix the Court today is praising Rep. Stansbury (right) for reintroducing legislation that would create the Office of Inspector General in the judicial branch.

The Judicial Ethics Enforcement Act of 2025 makes a strong statement that the judiciary, which historically has been the most powerful, least accountable branch of government, should have the same types of guardrails and oversight procedures that exist in the other branches.

What’s more, the bill would accomplish what DOGE and other so-called government efficiency experts are purporting to do: empowering an office within a branch of government — but almost completely independent from its governance — to root out waste, fraud and abuse. (Fix the Court has even put together a list of large judicial branch contracts a judiciary IG could start reviewing, TinyURL.com/BigA3Contracts.)

FTC has long maintained that there’s little question, as this bill implicitly acknowledges, that Congress has broad authority to regulate the courts so long as they don’t tell them how to decide cases, which of course they’re not doing here.

And the idea has bipartisan origins: a near-identical version of the bill was introduced 19 years ago by Sen. Chuck Grassley and Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, and Grassley introduced it every Congress until a few sessions ago.

This bill is even more important today since earlies today NPR published an investigation into misconduct in the judiciary, in which a tipline they set up received accounts from judiciary employees of “more than two dozen judges…appointed by Democratic and Republican presidents [alike]” engaging in “abusive or hostile conduct and bullying” — behavior that an IG would be empowered to investigate under this bill.

Finally, in the last few years the American people have been increasingly concerned about ethics issues at SCOTUS, and it’s clear that the justices left to their own devices are not going to fix the violations themselves.

This bill gives critical tools to an IG, from document production to subpoena power, to identify and investigate instances where the justices violated federal recusal law, financial disclosure law and their new Code of Conduct — tools that will help build trust in the institution at a time when its work has become critical to the perpetuation of our democracy.