There’s a version of corruption most of us picture from movies: a briefcase full of cash, a handshake in a parking garage.

What’s happening in Washington right now looks nothing like that, and that’s part of what makes it hard to see.

It’s paperwork. It’s a financial disclosure form filed in March, a contract awarded without competition, a fired inspector general nobody replaced. None of it makes for a great headline on its own.

Put together, it adds up to something the people who track this stuff for a living say they haven’t seen before, and it’s already showing up in a fertilizer bill on a farm outside Harrisonburg.

The Paper Trail

In March, ProPublica published the results of a year-long review of nearly 3,200 financial disclosure records covering more than 1,500 Trump administration appointees, including the president and vice president. The method was almost boring: pull the disclosure forms every senior official has to file, then see whether the numbers on those forms lined up with the calls the same people were making.

Some of what turned up: Steve Feinberg, the deputy secretary of defense and the Pentagon’s second-highest-ranking official, ran Cerberus Capital Management before taking the job. He still has an ongoing financial relationship with the firm for accounting, tax, and health care services, one that Defense Department officials extended past its original deadline at his request. Cerberus companies, meanwhile, hold Pentagon contracts tied to programs Feinberg has a hand in overseeing.

Todd Blanche, now the number two official at the Justice Department, held at least $159,000 in cryptocurrency while his department halted investigations into crypto firms. Attorney General Pam Bondi sold securities shortly before markets dropped following tariff announcements. Across the administration, ProPublica found more than 200 appointees who collectively held between $175 million and $340 million in crypto assets while helping shape the rules that govern it.

None of this is alleged. It comes from the officials’ own required filings, reviewed independently and confirmed by the Pentagon and Justice Department, which called the arrangements compliant with ethics law and dismissed criticism as “fake news.”

The people whose job it was to catch this are gone

Here’s the part that matters most for whether any of it gets fixed. Late on a Friday night in January 2025, four days into the new administration, at least 17 Senate-confirmed inspectors general were fired by email, with no cause given and none of the 30 days’ notice to Congress the law requires. A federal judge later ruled the firings unlawful. He declined to order the officials reinstated anyway.

One of those officials was Phyllis Fong, the USDA’s inspector general since 2002, first nominated by George W. Bush and kept on by every president since. Fong refused to leave, arguing the termination notice didn’t meet the legal standard, and was escorted from her office by security. Her old post oversees more than $200 billion a year in USDA spending, the crop insurance, conservation payments, and disaster aid programs that Shenandoah Valley farms run on, along with food-safety enforcement; her office was mid-investigation into the Boar’s Head listeria outbreak when she was removed. USDA now has a Senate-confirmed inspector general again, John Walk, sworn in more than a year later. For that stretch, the office charged with catching fraud in farm programs ran without permanent, independent leadership.

Virginia’s own senators didn’t stay quiet. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine joined 37 colleagues in a letter to the White House calling the firings unlawful and demanding reinstatement, pointing to inspector general work that had directly served Virginians, including oversight of the Postal Service and the investigation into the Envigo beagle-breeding facility in Cumberland County. “Removing these non-partisan watchdogs without providing a substantive and non-political reason is not lawful,” they wrote, “and undermines their independence, jeopardizing their critical mission to identify and root out waste, fraud, and abuse within federal programs.”

A few weeks after the IG firings, the administration removed David Huitema, director of the Office of Government Ethics, the agency responsible for reviewing the very disclosure forms ProPublica later combed through. He hadn’t been in the job three months. The office has run without a permanent director since. Richard Painter, who served as chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, has said the ongoing financial ties between regulators and the industries they oversee are exactly the kind of thing an intact ethics office exists to catch early. Right now, nobody’s catching them early. Reporters are catching them a year later, in a spreadsheet.

What he said he’d do

None of this arrived by accident, and none of it was hidden from voters beforehand. Trump built his 2024 campaign on the promise to root it out. At a Wisconsin rally that August, he vowed to “cast out the corrupt political class” and to “cut the fat out of our government for the first time, meaningfully, in 60 years.” The same speech announced what became the Department of Government Efficiency, pitched explicitly as the tool for “a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government” to root out waste. It was a repeat of the line that had carried his first campaign in 2016: drain the swamp.

The inspectors general were the government’s own standing version of that audit, nonpartisan by design, already inside every major agency, already doing the work Trump promised a new commission would do. He fired them instead. The Office of Government Ethics was the office built to stop officials from mixing public duty with private profit. He left it without a director. What replaced the watchdogs wasn’t a leaner, more accountable government. It was a Pentagon official with an open-ended contract with his old private equity firm, a Justice Department official holding crypto while his department eased off crypto enforcement, and a USDA with more than a year’s gap in independent oversight of the programs Valley farmers depend on.

The waste, fraud, and abuse Trump ran against didn’t disappear under this administration. Watchdogs who track this for a living, across think tanks, government-accountability nonprofits, and ethics offices from both parties, describe conflicts of interest at a scale and openness without real precedent in the modern presidency. That’s not a matter of interpretation. It’s a matter of which promise got kept and which got buried, and the paperwork shows the difference.

From a Trade Memo to a Feed Bill

This is where the story stops being a Washington story. Tariff policy set at the top has moved through trade negotiations and landed on farms in Augusta, Rockingham, and Shenandoah counties, and the people documenting the damage aren’t opposition researchers. They’re Virginia Tech agricultural economists and the state’s own Farm Bureau.

Potash, a fertilizer input, comes more than 85 percent from Canada. Tariffs on it raise costs for any farm relying on tight, just-in-time delivery, according to Virginia Tech trade policy analyst Xi He, who told reporters the disruption “can then ripple through rural economies, in regions like the Shenandoah Valley.” More than 90 percent of Virginia’s farms are classified as small operations. They don’t have much room to absorb a cost spike that starts as a line in a trade memo.

Canada is Virginia’s largest export market, accounting for $2.9 billion in goods in 2025, roughly 15 percent of the state’s total exports. When Trump imposed a 50 percent tariff on a range of Canadian goods this year, Canada answered with retaliatory tariffs on American dairy, steel, agricultural equipment, and paper, set to begin in September. Scott Sink, president of the Virginia Farm Bureau Federation, told Senator Tim Kaine this year has been “the perfect storm” of drought, spring freezes, fuel costs, and tariffs, all landing on the same operations at once.

Then in late August, the administration eased tariffs on imported beef, allowing up to 300,000 metric tons of lean beef trimmings into the country starting September 1. Maple Springs Farm owner Jeff Slaven, already dealing with drought and rising feed costs, said the imports worried him less than the chance that packing plants would use the moment to consolidate, buying leverage over local producers by shrinking the number of places a farmer can sell cattle at all.

Governor Glenn Youngkin’s successor, Governor Abigail Spanberger, put the throughline in writing in a letter to the Commerce and Agriculture secretaries this August, stating plainly that the administration’s tariff policy has “directly contributed to a marked decline” in Virginia’s agricultural and forestry exports, and that the state’s small businesses have “very little capacity to absorb sustained cost increases.”

A War Nobody in Washington Voted On

Farm costs aren’t the only place a Washington decision has shown up at the pump this year. In late February, the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran without a vote in Congress beforehand. The Constitution gives that power to the legislature, not the president, and lawmakers in both parties said so at the time. Senator Kaine co-sponsored a war powers resolution with Kentucky Republican Rand Paul aimed at reining in further action, telling NPR that troops’ lives were on the line and Congress needed to “come back to Washington right away to vote on this.” The administration notified Congress of the strikes in early March; under the War Powers Act, that notification started a 60-day clock for lawmakers to grant formal authorization. That deadline passed on May 1, and Democrats in Congress said at the time that the administration was now “operating in clear violation of the law.” By September, Senate Democrats had brought seven separate resolutions to curb the president’s war-making power. All seven failed, the closest by a single vote.

Whatever the legal outcome of that fight, the price at the pump moved fast and moved hard. The conflict disrupted tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the channel that carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil, and Brent crude spiked to around $118 a barrel within weeks of the first strikes. In Harrisonburg, the average price of a gallon of gas was $2.81 in late February. By early May, Virginia’s statewide average had crossed $4, the highest the state had seen in four years. Asked about it directly, the president didn’t deny the connection. “We are really doing well,” he said. “Now, gasoline is high. Other prices are way down, but gasoline is high.” He framed it as a worthwhile tradeoff for keeping Iran from a nuclear weapon. For a Harrisonburg commuter, that tradeoff worked like an indirect tax, one levied without a vote, for a military campaign their own elected representatives never got to approve.

Two stories, one thread

It would be easy to treat the disclosure filings and the fertilizer bill as unrelated news items. They’re not. An ethics system built to slow down self-dealing has been hollowed out at exactly the moment officials with direct financial stakes in defense contracts and crypto policy are making decisions that touch those stakes. The same administration setting trade policy that Virginia Tech economists and the governor’s own office say is squeezing Shenandoah Valley farms is the one that fired the inspector general whose job was watching over the USDA programs those same farms depend on. And the same administration that skipped the constitutional step of asking Congress before striking Iran is the one whose own senator had to fight, and lose, seven separate votes to bring war-making power back under the roof it’s supposed to live in.

Set the two sides next to each other and the trade is plain. Officials with the most to gain from weaker oversight got it, in writing, through fired watchdogs and a vacant ethics office. Farmers and drivers with the least room to absorb a bad year got a fertilizer bill that went up, a beef market that got more crowded, a trade war with the country that buys more Virginia goods than any other, and a gas pump that jumped more than a dollar a gallon for a war Congress never approved. One side spent the last year and a half filing disclosure forms about crypto holdings and defense contracts. The other spent it filing insurance claims after a frost and watching the number on the pump climb.

None of this requires speculation to establish. It’s on the record, in disclosure forms, court rulings, war powers votes, a letter signed by both of Virginia’s senators, and the president’s own words from the campaign trail and the podium. The paperwork made the outcome close to inevitable. The rest of the Valley is simply paying the tab.

Sources: ProPublica, “Documents Reveal a Web of Financial Ties Between Trump Officials and the Industries They Help Regulate”; Investigative Post; Associated Press; Partnership for Public Service; Farmers Advance / Reuters, on Phyllis Fong; House Appropriations Committee, USDA OIG oversight hearing remarks; Sen. Tim Kaine, joint letter with Sen. Mark Warner; WISN, Trump Wisconsin rally remarks; Virginia Tech News; Augusta Free Press; Virginia Mercury; WHSV; Office of the Governor of Virginia; WAMC/NPR, on the Iran strikes and Congress; Eastern Progress, on the failed Senate war powers votes; Wikipedia, “2026 Iran war fuel crisis”; WSLS, Virginia gas prices; WHSV, Harrisonburg gas price economic report