I want to tell you two stories from my own career before we get into the data, because these stories are the reason I believe so strongly that unsupervised government contracting is one of the most expensive structural failures in American governance.
The first was in my late twenties. I owned one of the largest remodeling companies in Maryland, generating $7 million in annual sales and doing 1,500 to 2,000 jobs per year. Through a connection in the political arena, I got an introduction to the Assistant Secretary of HUD. He agreed to give me Section 8 housing contracts. Then came the condition: 10 percent of the gross contract value, regardless of what I charged, paid to him personally. I declined because I believed it was illegal. Both he and the person who introduced me eventually went to prison.
The second happened after I left a medical practice in California. I arranged a meeting with a senior official in the Reagan administration to discuss minority set-aside contracts for AIDS testing. We had lunch at the White House. George Bush Senior was sitting at the table next to us. After lunch, the official told us he was entitled to one going-away gift: 10 percent of the top of whatever contracts we received, regardless of what we charged. I still have the Reagan tie to prove I was there. I walked away again.
What those two experiences taught me is not that government is uniformly corrupt. It is that when no independent oversight exists, when no one is required to get competing bids, verify pricing, or record the meetings where contracts get awarded, corruption becomes the path of least resistance for people who choose it.
What Is Happening Right Now in 2026?
The national debt has crossed $36 trillion. The CBO projects the fiscal year 2026 deficit at $1.8 trillion, $169 billion wider than the same period a year earlier. U.S. real GDP grew at a 2.1 percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2026, after a shutdown-driven 0.5 percent collapse in the fourth quarter of 2025.
Meanwhile, China is growing at 4.41 percent. India at 6.6 percent. The Eurozone is managing a slow recovery. The United States is the largest economy in nominal terms at approximately $32.4 trillion, but its growth advantage over China is narrowing every year as the gap in long-term planning capacity between the two countries becomes more consequential.
And one of the specific mechanisms through which American fiscal capacity is being quietly drained is the unreviewed, unsupervised legislative drafting process that produces $27 billion in annual rider waste that we know about, and a far larger figure in procurement inefficiency that we can only estimate.
Why Do Congressmen and Senators Draft Their Own Bills?
The question sounds naive, but it is fundamental. The process by which legislation gets drafted in the United States has no meaningful analog in how any competent organization makes major decisions. In a well-run company, the person who authorizes a significant expenditure is not the same person who designed the specification for what is being purchased. The separation of those roles is basic internal control, and it exists precisely to prevent the person making the authorization decision from designing the specification to serve their own interests.
In Congress, the legislator who stands to benefit politically from a provision is also the person who drafts it, introduces it, manages it through committee, and votes for it. The lobbyist industry exists, in large part, to exploit this absence of role separation. In some documented cases, lobbyists draft the actual legislative language that a sympathetic legislator then introduces as their own bill. There is no independent body that reviews whether this language serves the public interest before it becomes law.
The Center Forward Party’s Central Apolitical Organization is designed specifically to introduce that separation of roles into the legislative process.
What the Geopolitical Stakes Mean for This Reform
Marshall McLuhan wrote that the medium is the message. The medium of American governance, a legislative process with no independent drafting review, no outcome monitoring, and no external accountability, sends a specific message about what government is for: it is for the benefit of whoever has sufficient access to the drafting process.
China’s central committee makes economic plans with 50-year horizons. According to UNCTAD data, Chinese exports grew by more than 20 percent in dollar terms in the first two months of 2026 compared to the same period a year earlier, concentrated in AI-related products, semiconductors, and high-performance computing equipment. China is ahead of the United States in EV batteries, commercial shipbuilding, solar panel manufacturing controlling over 70 percent of global production, and closing the gap in semiconductor fabrication.
These are not accidents. They are the outputs of a government that has an institution whose job is to think 50 years ahead and draft plans accordingly, then monitor those plans annually and adjust when they are not working.
The United States has no structural equivalent. What it has is a legislative process that cannot even prevent a lobbyist from writing a bill in favor of their client and having it introduced by a legislator who received campaign contributions from that client.
What the Central Apolitical Organization Specifically Does
The Center Forward Party proposes an independent, nonpartisan organization staffed by career civil servants and private-sector experts whose sole mandate is to:
- Draft legislation based on evidence and demonstrated cost efficiency rather than donor preference
- Review every bill before passage for germane content, independent cost verification by the GAO, and absence of hidden donor-serving provisions
- Ensure three independent bids on all government contracts above defined thresholds, with pricing verified by the Government Accountability Office
- Conduct annual outcome reviews of every active law and submit corrective amendments to Congress when outcomes diverge from stated objectives
- Think long-range: proactively study challenges like AI-driven labor displacement and bring proposed solutions to Congress before crises arrive
The Secret Service protection and meeting recording component of this reform is the enforcement mechanism. Every legislative meeting with a lobbyist on the record means the kickback conversation that was so easy to have with me twice, in two completely different contexts, becomes structurally impossible. The private space where the arrangement gets made is removed.
The India Comparison
India’s economy is growing at 6.6 percent in 2026 despite facing a 50 percent U.S. tariff on the majority of its exports, imposed by the Trump administration. India has been proactively deepening trade relationships with diverse geographies, signing a trade agreement with the United Kingdom and progressing toward one with the European Union. India’s strategic response to U.S. trade policy has been systematic, long-range, and evidence-driven. It is managing the geopolitical disruption created by American tariff chaos with a discipline that reflects institutional capacity.
The United States, by contrast, has managed its trade policy with a frequency of change exceeding 50 adjustments since January 2025, a $250 billion revenue shortfall in fiscal year 2026, and a legal foundation that the Supreme Court struck down in February 2026. This is what governance without an independent drafting and review mechanism looks like at scale.
Conclusion
The cost of having no one supervise congressional bill drafting is not hypothetical. It is $27 billion annually in identifiable rider waste. It is the procurement corruption I personally encountered twice in two different industries. It is the $0.9 trillion in additional projected deficit attributable to tariff policy chaos made without independent expert review. And it is the growing gap between American and Chinese long-range institutional planning capacity that is visible in every technology sector where China has overtaken the United States in the last decade.
The Center Forward Party’s Central Apolitical Organization is the structural answer to a structural problem. Visit thecenterforwardparty.com to read the full proposal, and contact us here if you believe this kind of reform is overdue.
