The president, who serves as both head of state and head of government, is elected for up to two four-year terms. Presidential elections are decided by an Electoral College, with electors apportioned to each state based on the size of its congressional representation. In most cases, all of the electors in a particular state cast their ballots for the candidate who won the statewide popular vote, regardless of the margin. Two states, Maine and Nebraska, have chosen to divide some of their electoral votes among the candidates based on their popular-vote performance in each congressional district.

In the 2024 presidential election, the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, won 312 Electoral College votes, while the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, won 226. Trump also won the popular vote by a margin of approximately 2.3 million, or 49.8 percent to 48.3 percent. Roughly 64 percent of the eligible population cast ballots. The election for the most part proceeded smoothly, and the final results were widely accepted, with no high-profile attempt to challenge the outcome and no evidence of significant foreign interference. A series of bomb threats—including hoaxes that allegedly came from Russian email domains—targeted polling locations in several states, but the disruptions to voting were minor. The campaign period also featured some violence, most notably two assassination attempts against Trump in July and September, the first of which injured the candidate and killed a rallygoer. Neither event led to substantial constraints on campaigning.

Score Change: The score improved from 3 to 4 because, unlike with the previous two presidential elections, there were no reports of significant interference by foreign or domestic actors that would threaten the legitimacy or security of the election outcome in 2024.

Elections for the bicameral Congress are generally free and fair. The House of Representatives consists of 435 members serving two-year terms. The Senate consists of 100 members—two from each of the 50 states—serving six-year terms, with one-third coming up for election every two years. All national legislators are elected directly by voters in the districts or states that they represent. The capital district, Puerto Rico, and four overseas US territories are each represented by an elected delegate in the House who can perform most legislative functions but cannot participate in floor votes.

In the November 2024 general elections, the Republican Party maintained control of the House, losing two seats for a 220–215 majority. In the Senate, Republicans achieved a 53–47 majority and wrested control of the chamber from the Democrats. Despite false narratives about electoral fraud that were embraced by many Republicans ahead of the balloting, there were no significant or substantiated accusations of fraud in any race in 2024, and most losing candidates quickly conceded.

The electoral framework is generally fair, though it is subject to some partisan manipulation. The borders of House districts, which must remain roughly equal in population, are redrawn following each decennial census. In the practice known as partisan gerrymandering, House districts, and those for state legislatures, are crafted to maximize the advantage of the party in power in a given state. The redistricting system varies by state, but in most cases it is overseen by elected state officials, and observers have expressed alarm at the growing strategic and technical sophistication of partisan efforts to control redistricting processes and redraw electoral maps. Historically, gerrymandering has also been used as a tool of racial disenfranchisement, specifically targeting Black voters, as well as Hispanic and Native American populations. The Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 generally prohibits racially discriminatory voting rules, and racial gerrymandering has been subject to reversal by federal courts, but it remains a problem in practice. A dispute about Louisiana’s congressional district map and its impact on Black voters was left unresolved in 2024, with the Supreme Court ruling provisionally in May that an existing plan could go forward for that year’s elections only.

In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal judiciary has no authority to prevent state officials from drawing districts to preserve or expand their party’s power. However, some state courts have struck down partisan-gerrymandered maps based on their own constitutions, and a handful of states have established independent bodies to manage redistricting. Both major parties continue to engage in partisan gerrymandering, but Republicans have had greater opportunity to redraw state-level maps in recent years because they controlled more state legislatures nationwide.

False fraud claims following the 2020 presidential election spurred a new wave of state electoral legislation. Many of the laws made voting somewhat more difficult, with provisions including stricter voter-identification requirements and reduced eligibility for mail-in ballots. However, other states and laws moved in the opposite direction, and voter turnout for the 2024 elections remained high by historical standards.

A concern since the 2020 election has been efforts by election deniers—those who reject election results either without evidence or in the face of evidence to the contrary—to take control of election management authority in states that are closely contested in presidential elections; their opponents argue that such actors could facilitate the partisan subversion of presidential election outcomes in the future. No such local or state-level subversion materialized in the 2024 elections, and the presidential results were set to be certified in Congress in January 2025. Reforms enacted in late 2022 had strengthened and clarified the ambiguously worded Electoral Count Act of 1887, making it more difficult to disrupt the certification process through frivolous objections, competing slates of electors, and other such maneuvers.

The constitution’s allocation of two Senate seats to each state regardless of its population has meant that senators representing a minority of the population can control a majority in the chamber. Similarly, because Electoral College votes are allocated to the states based on the size of their congressional delegations, and because most states award all of their electors to the state-level winner regardless of the margin, it is possible for a candidate to win the presidency while losing the national popular vote—an outcome that took place in the presidential elections of 2000 and 2016.

The six-member Federal Election Commission, which is legally prohibited from having a Democratic or Republican majority, is tasked with enforcing federal campaign finance laws. Commissioners are appointed to six-year terms by the president and approved by the Senate. Most enforcement actions require four votes, allowing partisan obstruction, and the body has consequently been regarded as ineffective in recent years.

The intensely competitive US political environment is dominated by two major parties: the Republicans on the right and the Democrats on the left. The country’s prevailing “first-past-the-post” (or plurality-winner) electoral system, along with single-member districts, discourages the emergence of additional parties. For the many seats at all levels that are regarded as “safely” Democratic or Republican due to a combination of geographical sorting and partisan gerrymandering, the two parties’ primary elections often represent the main battleground for opposing views, and many states exclude unaffiliated voters—who make up a plurality of voters nationally—from participating in this important stage of the electoral process. Nevertheless, primaries and general elections in recent years have featured participation by ideologically diverse candidates across the country.

Independent or third-party candidates have sometimes influenced presidential races or won statewide office, and small parties or ideological factions within the major parties—such as the Libertarian Party, the Green Party, and the Democratic Socialists of America—have also modestly affected local politics. Multiple third-party candidates ran in the 2024 elections but collectively drew less than 2 percent of the presidential vote; one presidential candidate, former Democratic contender Robert F. Kennedy Jr., dropped his independent bid in August, endorsed Trump, and was later nominated to serve in Trump’s cabinet.

While ranked-choice voting systems for some posts have been adopted in several jurisdictions in recent years, including Maine and Alaska, the largest jurisdiction to approve the system in 2024 was the District of Columbia; voters in several states rejected proposals to adopt ranked-choice voting, nonpartisan open primaries, or both. Such frameworks are regarded as more hospitable to third parties and centrist candidates than closed partisan primaries and plurality-winner voting.

Power changes hands regularly at the federal level, and while certain states and localities are seen as strongholds of one party or the other, even they are subject to intraparty competition and interparty power transfers over time. In the 2024 elections, Republicans retained control of the House of Representatives despite losing two seats, and flipped control of the Senate. After gubernatorial elections in 11 states, Democrats held the governorship in 23 states, compared with Republicans’ 27. By year’s end, there was unified partisan control of the legislature and governorship in at least 38 states—23 Republican and 15 Democratic.

Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss to Biden put serious pressure on the political and electoral systems, eroding the long-standing tradition of respect for official results and raising concerns that future opposition victories or transfers of power could be disrupted. While no such challenge occurred in 2024, the campaign period continued to feature rhetoric aimed at delegitimizing political opponents.

Various interest groups have come to play a potent role in the nominating process for president and members of Congress, partly because the expense and length of political campaigns place a premium on candidates’ ability to raise large amounts of funds from major donors. Attempts to restrict the role of money in political campaigning have typically been thwarted or watered down as a result of political opposition, lobbying by interest groups, and court decisions that cite the constitutional right to freedom of speech.

The 2024 election cycle was the most expensive to date, featuring an estimated $16 billion in spending by candidates and outside groups, compared with about $15 billion in 2020. As with other recent campaigns, much of the spending was routed through various types of “super PACs” (political action committees that are not supposed to coordinate with any candidate), nonprofit organizations, and other legal entities that often protect donor anonymity and carry few restrictions on the size and source of donations. Small donations make up an important share of candidates’ fundraising, but extremely wealthy contributors play an outsized role in overall spending, fueling concerns about undue political influence. Businessman Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person and the owner of companies with major government contracts, reportedly spent more than $280 million to support the 2024 campaigns of Trump and his allies, making him the election’s top individual contributor; Musk was expected to play a prominent role in the new administration.

Concerns about undue influence have also focused on lobbyists and others with ties to foreign governments who associate themselves with politicians or political campaigns. The Justice Department has increased enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) to ensure transparency, and in the year’s most prominent case, Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey who had served as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, was convicted in July 2024 of secretly working on behalf of the Egyptian and Qatari governments in exchange for bribes.

The January 6, 2021, attack on Congress—by Trump supporters attempting to disrupt the counting of Electoral College votes—underscored a broader rise in violence and intimidation as a tool of political influence in the United States. Reports of threats against elected officials and local election administrators have proliferated in recent years, and members of Congress have been subjected to a dramatic rise in intimidation. In 2024, Trump faced two serious assassination attempts in July and September; the first alleged perpetrator was killed, the second was arrested, and each apparently acted alone.

In the years since the January 6 attack, more than 1,500 individuals have been charged and more than 1,000 have pleaded guilty or been convicted for related crimes. However, during 2024 Trump pledged to pardon at least some of the convicted attackers. Trump himself was charged for allegedly instigating the attack as part of a 2023 federal indictment on broader efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, but the case was dropped after his November 2024 election victory, in keeping with a Justice Department policy against prosecuting sitting presidents. Separate moves by authorities in Maine and Colorado to exclude Trump from the presidential ballot—based on a constitutional provision barring officials who had engaged in “insurrection”—had been struck down by the Supreme Court in March, and a July Supreme Court ruling had granted presidents broad immunity from prosecution for their “official acts,” complicating the federal case prior to its dismissal.

A number of important laws are designed to ensure the political rights of women and members of racial and ethnic minority groups, and such individuals—in addition to LGBT+ people—have exercised their rights in practice, increasing their participation as successful candidates in recent elections. However, some legal protections have been weakened over time, and a number of obstacles to participation persist. White Americans and men continue to hold an outsized share of elected leadership positions relative to their share of the general population.

Members of racial and ethnic minority groups are disproportionately affected by laws and policies that create obstacles to voting. A 2013 Supreme Court ruling invalidated portions of the VRA of 1965, ending a requirement for certain states to submit changes to their electoral systems for prior review by federal authorities; the review was meant to prevent enactment of racially discriminatory voting rules. In the years since, a number of states—including some that were never subject to the preclearance rule—have partially rolled back innovations like early voting that contributed to higher rates of participation among minority groups. Other court decisions have challenged the VRA’s safeguards against illegal racial gerrymandering. In June 2024, the Supreme Court handed down a decision on a South Carolina map for congressional districts that effectively raised the evidentiary burden for identifying an impermissible racial gerrymander.

Various other state election-management policies have been criticized for having a disparate impact on racial and ethnic minority groups, including voter-roll purges, arbitrary bureaucratic hurdles to registration, and efforts to punish voter fraud—a very rare phenomenon in US elections. State laws that deny voting rights to citizens with felony convictions continue to disproportionately disenfranchise Black Americans, who are incarcerated at significantly higher rates than other populations.

The elected president and Congress are generally empowered to determine government policies and craft legislation. However, partisan polarization and obstruction in Congress has repeatedly delayed appropriations bills across multiple administrations, resulting in a series of partial shutdowns of federal government operations, most recently in 2018–19. A partial shutdown was averted in January 2024 via a stopgap measure that extended funding deadlines until early March, at which point Congress funded the government through the close of the fiscal year at the end of September. Two more close-run stopgap spending packages carried government operations from September to December and then through March 2025.

Despite controlling the chamber since the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans in the House of Representatives have had difficulty maintaining a stable working majority, seriously hampering legislative productivity. The Republican speaker repeatedly relied on Democratic votes as a last resort to overcome dissenters from his own party on crucial spending bills. The Democrats’ tenuous control of the Senate also complicated legislative action. Objections from senators, most often Republicans, slowed the confirmation of President Biden’s executive branch nominees, contributing to scores of vacant positions in the higher levels of government departments, agencies, and the military.

The United States benefits from strong structural safeguards against corruption, including traditionally independent law enforcement and judicial systems, a free and vigorous press, and an active civil society sector. A variety of regulations and oversight institutions within government are designed to curb self-dealing and conflicts of interest and prevent other situations that could lead to malfeasance.

However, regulations pertaining to the influence of money in US politics have long been criticized as inadequate, and Supreme Court rulings in recent years have narrowed the legal definition of political corruption to include only a clear exchange of bribes for government action, making prosecutions more difficult. In June 2024, the Supreme Court ruled that federal anticorruption laws on bribery of state and local officials did not prohibit such officials from accepting “gratuities” paid in appreciation for their past actions. The court’s July decision on presidential immunity—which established presidents’ absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for acts within their core constitutional authority, and at least presumptive immunity for all other official acts—also raised concerns that it could encourage future abuses of power related to corruption.

For much of 2024, three Republican-led House committees conducted investigations into alleged impropriety by President Biden stemming from his family’s business dealings. They released a report in August that accused the president of abuses of power and obstruction of Congress’s investigative efforts. While the report called for Biden’s impeachment, no such resolution was ultimately put to a vote in the House.

Among other high-profile developments during the year, Senator Menendez resigned from his seat in August after his July conviction for accepting bribes to work on behalf of the Egyptian and Qatari governments, and Representative Henry Cuellar, a Democrat from Texas, was charged in May with accepting bribes from both a Mexican bank and the Azerbaijani government.

The United States was the first country to adopt a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) nearly 60 years ago, and the law—along with its state-level counterparts—is actively used by journalists, civil society groups, researchers, the private sector, and members of the public. Although a 2016 reform law was designed to improve government agencies’ responsiveness to FOIA requests, the federal government continued to struggle with the magnitude of inquiries, leading to lengthy delays, inadequate responses, and lawsuits aimed at forcing compliance. Complaints about years of rising backlogs and calls for further FOIA reform persisted in 2024, which featured significant growth in the number of unresolved information requests.

The executive branch includes a substantial number of auditing and investigative agencies that are designed to be independent of political influence; such bodies are often spurred to action by the investigative work of journalists. In 2020, then-President Trump fired a series of agency inspectors general who had documented or investigated malfeasance by administration officials. A law adopted in late 2022 included provisions intended to reinforce the independence of inspectors general and protect them from arbitrary removal by the president.

Political polarization and related dysfunction in Congress has had a negative impact on the transparency of the legislative process in recent years. Negotiations on bills are increasingly conducted behind closed doors, among smaller groups of lawmakers, and in close proximity to voting, limiting opportunities for open debate and public consultation.

The United States has a free and diverse press, operating under some of the strongest constitutional protections in the world. Nonetheless, media freedom and independence are impaired by challenges ranging from market concentration and economic constraints to partisan bias and information manipulation.

According to the US Press Freedom Tracker, a joint project of multiple nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the number of press freedom violations increased in 2024 after years of decline, rising to 49 arrests or criminal charges and 80 assaults on journalists, from 15 and 45, respectively, in 2023. The vast majority of the incidents involved journalists covering demonstrations related to the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.

The national media environment retains a high degree of pluralism, with newspapers, newsmagazines, traditional broadcasters, cable television networks, and news websites competing for readers and audiences. While internet access is widespread and unrestricted, independent local sources of news have struggled to keep up with technology-driven changes in news consumption and advertising, contributing to significant ownership consolidation in some sectors, and a number of communities with just one or no local news outlet.

News coverage has also grown more polarized, with certain outlets providing a consistently right- or left-leaning perspective. The highly influential cable television network Fox News has been unique, however, in its close alignment with the Republican Party; several prominent on-air personalities and executives migrated to government jobs under the 2017–21 Trump administration, and key hosts have openly endorsed Republican candidates or participated in campaign rallies. Fox News agreed in May 2024 to pay more than $787 million to settle a defamation suit by a voting machine company over the network’s airing of false conspiracy theories that cast doubt on Trump’s 2020 election defeat. In late 2024, President-elect Trump nominated several Fox News contributors to high-profile positions in his new administration.

A growing number of Americans look to social media platforms, popular social media personalities, and other online sources for political news, increasing their exposure to false or misleading content of both foreign and domestic origin. The larger platforms have struggled to control harmful material without undermining freedom of expression or damaging their own business interests, though they have at times engaged in mass removals of foreign accounts used to spread false or disproven information.

State-level efforts to restrict social media platforms’ ability to moderate content on the grounds that they were limiting speech have been stalled in the courts in recent years, though other states have adopted laws requiring platforms to be more transparent about their content-moderation policies. In June 2024, the Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit claiming that the Biden administration was improperly pressuring social media companies to suppress content related to the COVID-19 pandemic or elections; the court found that the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the case.

The constitution protects the free exercise of religion while barring any official endorsement of a religious faith, and there are no direct government subsidies to houses of worship. The Supreme Court regularly adjudicates cases involving the relationship between religion and the state. In 2022, the court issued several rulings that eased restrictions designed to avoid the appearance of an official endorsement of religion, for example by authorizing public funding of religious schools under some circumstances.

Hate crimes based on religion are generally prosecuted vigorously by law enforcement authorities. The Hamas terrorist attack on Israel in October 2023 and the ensuing Israeli military campaign in Gaza precipitated a rise in both anti-Muslim and antisemitic incidents in the United States. According to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) statistics for 2023, released in 2024, hate crimes based on religion spiked sharply in the last quarter of the year.

The academic sphere has long featured a high level of intellectual freedom. However, this liberty has come under pressure from both ends of the political spectrum.

On many university campuses, such pressure is associated largely with the progressive left. University faculty have reported instances of professional repercussions or harassment—including on social media—related to curriculum content, textbooks, or statements that some students strongly disagreed with. As a consequence, some professors have engaged in self-censorship. Students on a number of campuses have obstructed guest speakers whose views they find objectionable, especially those related to race, gender, immigration, Middle East politics, and other sensitive issues.

Social and political forces on the right have applied pressure of their own in recent years. State-level officials have advanced policies and legislation that limit classroom discussion of—or access to books and other materials on—certain topics or ideas related to race, sex, and gender. In 2023 and 2024, several states imposed restrictions on diversity initiatives in public colleges and universities. Educators and administrators who were concerned about accreditation, legal liability, and parental anger have reportedly acted preemptively to eliminate or alter courses or programs and to remove previously well-regarded texts from school libraries. These developments took place against the backdrop of a sharp rise in threats and intimidation aimed at school officials. Separately, Republican-led state governments and congressional committees have scrutinized academic researchers who study online disinformation, alleging that the research was part of an effort to censor conservative views; the pressure has reportedly led some experts and institutions to curtail their work.

The conflict in Israel and Gaza that began in October 2023 ignited campus protests and other tensions, testing universities’ policies on free speech and academic freedom. While some institutions allowed disruptive, largely pro-Palestinian protests to proceed, others determined that the occupation of campus facilities was impermissible. A number of administrations suspended student organizations for breaching university rules. Following testimony at a December 2023 congressional hearing about antisemitism on US campuses, the presidents of three prominent universities faced calls to resign over answers that were deemed unsatisfactory by members of both political parties, and two stepped down in the subsequent weeks. As protests continued into 2024, many universities introduced new policies designed to prevent extended campus demonstrations. Several universities also adopted institutional neutrality policies to limit the extent to which they took official positions on various issues, prompting debate about whether the measures would foster or stifle open discussion.

Americans are generally free to engage in private discussion and air their personal views in public settings, including on the internet, though there are a number of threats to this freedom.

Civil libertarians, many lawmakers, and other observers have pointed to the real and potential effects of the government’s collection of communications data and other forms of intelligence-related monitoring on the rights of US residents, despite the adoption of significant reforms over the past decade. Separately, surveillance programs run by federal and local law enforcement agencies have long raised concerns among civil liberties groups, due in part to allegations of a disproportionate focus on religious, racial, and ethnic minority populations. A growing number of law enforcement and other government agencies are monitoring public social media content, with targets including applicants for US visas and participants in protests.

A public debate about law enforcement access to encrypted communication services continues. Some officials warn that their technical inability to break encryption even with a judicial warrant poses a threat to the rule of law, and opponents argue that any weakening of encrypted services’ security would expose all users to criminal hacking and other ill effects.

Aside from concerns about government surveillance, internet users in the United States have faced problems such as aggressive efforts to spread false or misleading information, intimidation, and frequently sexualized harassment on social media that may deter them from engaging in online discussion and expressing their views freely. In recent years, these problems have been compounded by the practice of doxing, the nonconsensual release of individuals’ personal information. Although several states have passed legislation designed to prevent and punish doxing, the laws have drawn criticism for allegedly infringing on free-speech rights.

In general, officials respect the constitutional right to public assembly. Demonstrations on political and other topics are common and typically proceed without incident, though local authorities often place restrictions on the location or duration of large protests. Such restrictions have increased in recent years, with a spate of state-level laws imposing changes such as the reduction of permissible protest spaces, the criminalization of customary protest tactics, and the establishment of more severe punishments for assembly-related infractions.

Police officers rarely face punishment for violence against protesters. Conditions surrounding recent mass assemblies have generally been peaceful, however, and this remained true for those triggered by the fighting in Israel and Gaza that began in 2023, notwithstanding certain incidents featuring arrests and clashes with police.

US laws and practices give wide freedom to NGOs and activists to pursue their civic or policy agendas, for example by mounting public campaigns or filing lawsuits to block government actions that they consider harmful. Organizations committed to the protection of civil liberties, immigrants’ rights, equality for women and minority groups, and freedom of speech have been especially active in recent years, as have those seeking to address deficiencies in the electoral and criminal justice systems.

Federal law generally guarantees trade unions the right to organize and engage in collective bargaining. The right to strike is also legally protected for most workers, though many public employees are prohibited from striking. Over the years, the strength of organized labor has declined, and just 5.9 percent of the private-sector workforce belonged to unions in 2024. While public-sector unions had a higher rate of membership, with 32.2 percent, they have come under pressure as well. The overall unionization rate in 2024 was 9.9 percent, down slightly from 10 percent in 2023. The country’s labor code and decisions by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) during Republican presidencies have been regarded as impediments to organizing efforts, but Democratic administrations, which are generally more supportive of union interests, have failed to reverse the deterioration. Union organizing is also hampered by resistance from private employers. Among other tactics, many employers categorize workers as contractors or use rules pertaining to franchisees to prevent organizing.

A 2018 Supreme Court ruling that government employees cannot be required to contribute to unions representing them in collective bargaining has led to losses in union membership, and 26 states have “right-to-work” legislation in place, allowing private-sector workers who benefit from union bargaining to similarly opt out of paying union dues or fees.

However, a labor shortage that accompanied the economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic starting in 2021 emboldened many workers to make demands in negotiations with employers. The trend continued through 2024, which featured high-profile strikes by some 30,000 workers at the airplane manufacturer Boeing and about 45,000 longshoremen at East and Gulf Coast ports. Both actions were later halted after employers offered concessions on wage increases and other matters.

The American judiciary is largely independent. The courts regularly demonstrate their autonomy by blocking or limiting executive and legislative actions, and this continued during 2024.

However, the pattern of judicial appointments in recent years has added to existing concerns about partisan distortion of the appointment and confirmation process. Democrats changed Senate rules that had required a supermajority to end debate on lower court nominations in 2013, and Republicans enacted a similar rule change for Supreme Court nominations in 2017, allowing judges to be confirmed without broad bipartisan support. Senators from each party have since used procedural maneuvers to either stall nominations by presidents of the opposing party or accelerate those by presidents of their own party, with the goal of shaping the ideological makeup of the federal judiciary.

A series of ethics scandals over gifts or outside income to Supreme Court justices have spurred calls for Congress to enact a binding code of conduct for the Supreme Court, which is exempt from certain existing rules for federal judges. The high court voluntarily adopted its own code of conduct at the end of 2023, though it had no clear enforcement mechanism and drew criticism from good-governance groups.

In many states, judges are chosen through either partisan or nonpartisan elections, and a rise in campaign fundraising and party involvement in such elections over the last two decades has increased the threat of bias and favoritism in state courts. In addition, executive and legislative officials in a growing number of states have attempted to exert greater control over state courts. In 2024, nearly a quarter of state supreme court seats were up for election, and races in critical states like North Carolina and Ohio both demonstrated and exacerbated the politicization of supreme courts at the state level.

Since 2023, ongoing court cases against Donald Trump have exposed judges, clerks, prosecutors, witnesses, and others to harassment and intimidation, fueled in part by Trump’s own verbal attacks on the legitimacy of the proceedings and the impartiality of the officials involved. At the same time, decisions and public statements favorable to Trump by judges he appointed while in office added to concerns about judicial independence and impartiality.

In December 2024, President Biden issued a broad pardon for his son Hunter Biden, covering two convictions on tax and gun charges as well as any other crimes he may have committed over the previous 11 years. The move amplified existing concerns about abuses of the pardon power, which Trump had repeatedly used to overturn the convictions of personal or political allies during his first term in office. The Supreme Court’s July 2024 ruling on presidential immunity also contributed to these concerns, as it granted presidents absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for any misuse of core constitutional powers such as the pardon power.

The United States has a deeply rooted rule-of-law tradition, and legal and constitutional protections for due process are widely observed. However, the criminal justice system suffers from a number of chronic weaknesses, many of which are tied to racial discrimination and contribute to disparities in outcomes that disadvantage members of racial minority groups, particularly Black Americans. Media reports and analyses have drawn attention to the extensive use of plea bargaining in criminal cases, with prosecutors employing the threat of harsh sentences to avoid trial and effectively reducing the role of the judiciary and juries; deficiencies in the parole system; long-standing funding shortages for public defenders, who represent low-income defendants in criminal cases; racial bias in risk-assessment tools for decisions on pretrial detention; and the practice of imposing court fees or fines for minor offenses as a means of raising local budget revenues, which can lead to jail terms for those who are unable to pay.

These problems and evolving enforcement and sentencing policies have contributed to major increases in incarceration over time. The population of sentenced state and federal prisoners soared from about 200,000 in 1970 to more than 1.6 million in 2009. The figure has decreased since then, and despite a series of increases that began after the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the number of people in state and federal prisons stood at about 1.2 million as of March 2024. The incarceration rate based on such counts rose from around 100 per 100,000 US residents in 1970 to a peak of more than 500 in the late 2000s, then fell to about 374 as of March 2024. There are also hundreds of thousands of pretrial detainees and people serving short-term sentences in local jails. Black and Hispanic inmates continue to account for a majority of the prison population, whereas Black and Hispanic people account for roughly a third of the general US population.

Congress and the executive branch have enacted modest reforms to address mass incarceration and racial disparities in sentencing, such as a 2018 law that eased federal mandatory-minimum sentencing rules and a 2022 Justice Department policy designed to reduce sentencing gaps between similar drug offenses. A majority of states have also passed laws in recent years to reduce sentences for certain crimes, decriminalize minor drug offenses, and prevent recidivism. Such gradual steps have slowed amid fears of rising crime, though these concerns are not always supported by crime statistics.

Both the criminal homicide rate—at 5.7 per 100,000 inhabitants as of 2023, according to FBI data—and overall crime rates in the United States have declined substantially since the 1990s. However, the figures remain high when compared with other wealthy democracies. After a sharp rise between 2019 and 2021, the number of murders fell in the subsequent years and by mid-2024 had dropped back below the 2019 level.

The increased policy focus on reforming the criminal justice system in recent years has coincided with a series of widely publicized incidents in which police actions led to civilian deaths. Most of these prominent cases involved Black civilians, while Native Americans are reportedly killed by police at a higher rate per capita than any other group. Only a small fraction of police killings have led to criminal charges; when officers have been brought to trial, the cases have often ended in acquittals or sentences on reduced charges. In many instances, long-standing and rigid labor protections prevent municipal governments and police departments from imposing significant administrative sanctions on allegedly abusive officers. Nevertheless, some officers have received substantial prison sentences.

Conditions in prisons, jails, and pretrial detention centers are often poor at the state and local levels. Death rates in jails are believed to have risen over the past decade based on media investigations, though complete official data are not publicly available. The reported increases have been driven not only by the COVID-19 pandemic but also by increased suicides and drug overdoses, with negligence or understaffing among corrections officers a contributing factor in some deaths.

Use of the death penalty has significantly declined since the late 1990s. There were 25 executions carried out by nine states in 2024, up from 24 executions in 2023 and 18 in 2022, but dramatically lower than the peak of 98 in 1999. The death penalty has been formally abolished by 23 states. In 2020 the federal government resumed executions for the first time since 2003, and 13 federal executions were carried out before the Biden administration imposed a moratorium in 2021. In December 2024, Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 federal inmates to life in prison, leaving just three individuals on federal death row. Factors encouraging the decline of the death penalty include clear racial disparities in its application; a pattern of exonerations of death-row inmates; states’ inability to obtain chemicals used in lethal injections due to objections from producers; multiple cases of botched executions; and the high costs to state and federal authorities associated with death penalty cases. The US Supreme Court has effectively ruled out the death penalty for crimes other than murder and in cases where the perpetrator is a juvenile or intellectually disabled, among other restrictions.

The United States features a range of legal guarantees intended to ensure equal treatment, from constitutional provisions and civil rights statutes at the national level to antidiscrimination ordinances at the subnational level. Nonetheless, significant disparities on key indicators of equality persist, particularly with respect to gender, race, and immigration status. Moreover, while overall rates of violent crime have declined in recent years, rates of hate crime—criminal offenses motivated by racism or other forms of group animosity—have increased, with the number of incidents rising by another 2 percent in 2023, according to the latest FBI data.

Although women constitute almost half of the US workforce and have increased their representation in many professions, the average compensation for female workers is roughly 84 percent of that for male workers, a gap that has remained relatively constant over the past several decades. Meanwhile, although the wage gap between White and Black workers has shrunk in recent years, it has increased across the last several decades; according 2023 census data, Black workers earned approximately 76 cents for every dollar earned by White workers. Black women, who are affected by both the gender and racial components of wage inequality, made about 69 cents for every dollar earned by White men; the figure for Hispanic women was 57 cents. Women are also most often affected by sexual harassment and assault in the workplace.

In addition to structural inequalities and discrimination in wages and employment, racial and ethnic minority groups face long-running and interrelated disparities in education and housing. De facto school segregation is a persistent problem, and the housing patterns that contribute to it are influenced by factors such as mortgage discrimination. These factors in turn influence overall gaps in wealth and social mobility. For example, the median wealth of White households in 2022 was approximately six times the median wealth of Black households. In 2023, the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions systems at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, finding them unconstitutionally discriminatory. The decision cast doubt on the legality of a range of other institutions’ efforts to address long-standing racial disparities through affirmative action.

In general, LGBT+ people have made strides toward legal equality in recent years. In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that federal civil rights legislation includes LGBT+ people as a class protected from workplace discrimination. The Biden administration lifted a Trump administration ban on transgender people serving openly in the military in 2021, and it took other steps to affirm the rights of transgender people. However, a 2023 Supreme Court decision limited the reach of public accommodations laws, affirming the right of certain vendors to deny services to LGBT+ customers on free-speech grounds. Over the past three years, lawmakers in several states have adopted laws that ban discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in most primary-school classrooms, and states continued to pass legislation that negatively affected transgender people in 2024.

Immigration and border security remained prominent policy challenges in 2024, after a surge in irregular arrivals during the first three years of Biden’s presidency further strained the government’s ability to process asylum cases. In January 2023, the Biden administration announced a policy offering humanitarian parole to a fixed number of migrants fleeing repressive conditions in Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, but only if they adhered to strict eligibility requirements and applied from abroad; those crossing the US-Mexican border without doing so would be expelled. Separately in 2023, as an emergency authority that had allowed expedited expulsions on public health grounds expired, the administration issued a new regulation presuming that migrants who seek asylum in the United States are ineligible if they passed through third countries without seeking protection there first. In June 2024, the Biden administration again tightened asylum rules, requiring rapid deportations or returns of asylum seekers so long as unlawful border crossings remained above 2,500 per day on average, unless individuals expressed fear and passed additional screening. These and other new restrictions contributed to an overall decrease in unlawful border crossings during the year, though the figures remained historically high. Many states and municipalities have struggled to manage new arrivals, and states including Texas have sought to enforce their own bans on irregular crossings, prompting a series of legal disputes.

With arrivals far outpacing the government’s capacity to process asylum claims, removal orders, and other immigration matters, a backlog of cases in immigration courts continued to balloon, denying due process to those affected. As of December 2024, there were some 3.6 million pending cases, including some 1.8 million people awaiting asylum hearings. Average wait times for immigration court cases were reportedly more than four years, though the cases of people held in immigration detention tended to move more quickly. Human rights and immigrant advocacy groups criticized the government for taking inadequate measures to address poor conditions in immigration detention facilities. Separately, challenges to the legality of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which prevented the deportation of undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children, continued to make their way through the courts in 2024.

There are no significant undue restrictions on freedom of movement within the United States, and residents are generally free to travel abroad without improper obstacles.

The legal and political environments are generally supportive of entrepreneurial activity and business ownership. Property rights are widely respected in the United States, though civil liberties groups have criticized abuses related to civil asset forfeiture, in which law enforcement agencies, particularly at the local level, are able to confiscate and dispose of property that was allegedly involved in a crime. In many states, the assets can be seized without any criminal conviction.

Men and women generally enjoy equal rights in divorce and custody proceedings, and there are no undue restrictions on choice of marriage partner, particularly after a 2015 Supreme Court ruling that all states must allow same-sex marriage. A growing number of states have passed laws to eliminate exemptions that allowed marriages of people under age 18 in certain circumstances. Rape and domestic or intimate-partner violence remain serious problems. The applicable laws vary somewhat by state, though spousal rape is a crime nationwide. Numerous government and nongovernmental programs are designed to combat such violence and assist victims.

In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned a 1973 precedent and found that the federal constitution did not guarantee a right to abortion, thereby returning the issue to the states. By late 2024, near-total bans on abortion had taken effect in 13 states, with only narrow exceptions that would make access extremely difficult or dangerous in practice. Increased restrictions that would have been blocked before 2022 were in effect in at least seven other states, and litigation stemming from restrictive legislation continued elsewhere. Critics of the new or revived state restrictions noted that their vague language introduced considerable uncertainty about whether doctors would face prosecution even for providing potentially life-saving care, and the closure of clinics compelled women to travel to other jurisdictions for treatment, disproportionately burdening women with lower incomes. Some states have responded to the Supreme Court ruling by adding new, or strengthening existing, protections for abortion access. In 2024, voters in seven states enshrined or expanded abortion rights in their state constitutions via ballot measure, while similar efforts were unsuccessful in three other states.

The recent pattern of state laws restricting the rights of transgender people has notably included a number of limitations on access to medical treatments related to bodily autonomy and appearance; while most such laws have placed limits on treatments for minors, some state policies and legislative initiatives have also targeted public funding for the treatment of transgender adults.

The “American dream”—the notion of a fair society in which hard work will bring economic and social advancement, regardless of the circumstances of one’s birth—is a core part of the country’s identity. In recent decades, however, studies have shown a widening inequality in wealth and a narrowing of access to upward mobility.

One key aspect of inequality in the United States is the growing income and wealth gap between Americans with university degrees and those with a high school degree or less; the number of well-compensated jobs for the less-educated has fallen over time as manufacturing and other positions were lost to automation and lower-cost foreign production. These jobs have generally been replaced by less remunerative or less stable employment in the service and retail sectors, where there is a weaker tradition of unionization.

The inflation-adjusted national minimum wage has fallen substantially since the 1960s, with the last nominal increase in 2009, though many states and localities have enacted increases since then. Other obstacles to gainful employment include inadequate public transportation and the high cost of living in economically dynamic cities and regions. The latter problem, which is exacerbated by exclusionary housing policies in many jurisdictions, has also contributed to an overall rise in homelessness in recent years.