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.

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. There were no significant or substantiated accusations of fraud in any race in 2024, and most losing candidates quickly conceded.

Resignations and deaths created several vacancies in the House of Representatives that were filled over the course of 2025. While these by-elections were conducted without incident, Speaker Mike Johnson refused to seat one new member, Arizona Democrat Adelina Grijalva, for more than six weeks beginning in September as he kept the chamber in recess during Congress’s impasse over spending legislation. At year’s end the Republicans maintained a 218–213 majority in the House.

The electoral framework is generally fair, though it is subject to increasing manipulation due to both partisan pressures and recent legal decisions. The borders of districts for the House of Representatives, 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 growing partisan efforts to control redistricting processes and redraw electoral maps more than once in each census period. 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. 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.

In 2025, both Republican and Democratic state leaders undertook efforts to redraw their House districts in advance of the 2026 midterm elections. Prompted by a request from President Trump, officials in Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina proceeded to pass new maps, with the aim of securing some seven additional seats for Republicans. In response, California Democrats enacted a new map that was expected to add five Democratic seats. At year’s end, similar efforts were underway in several other states on each side, but court challenges and other potential obstacles were still pending. Both Republican and Democratic leaders in some states resisted the pressure to redraw maps, and the new districts’ ultimate impact on election results remained a matter of speculation.

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, partly due to an overlap with partisan gerrymandering in areas where Black voters tend to support Democrats and White voters tend to support Republicans. In March and October 2025, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Louisiana v. Callais, a case challenging the constitutionality of the creation of so-called majority-minority districts, which have been used to close the gap between the political representation and population share of racial minority groups. A final ruling was expected in 2026.

The US Constitution’s allocation of two Senate seats to each state regardless of its population skews congressional power away from population centers and toward less populous states. 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.

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 nominated to six-year terms by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Most enforcement actions require four votes, allowing partisan obstruction, and the body has long been considered ineffective as a result. In January 2025, President Trump dismissed one of the Democratic commissioners, a move that many experts said was unlawful because no cause was cited and no replacement was nominated; the dispute remained unresolved at year’s end. Two Republican commissioners resigned later in the year, leaving the panel with just two members and unable to conduct many of its statutory responsibilities.

In March 2025, the president issued an executive order that would require voters to provide proof of US citizenship, impose detailed rules and federal oversight on state vote-counting processes, and withhold federal funding from noncompliant states. The order was quickly challenged for exceeding presidential authority under the constitution and infringing on the states’ power to administer elections. Following a temporary suspension, it was permanently blocked by a federal district court in October; the government’s appeals were pending as of December.

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, partisan gerrymandering, and low voter turnout, the two parties’ primary elections often represent the main battleground for opposing views and have contributed to political polarization at the national level. Nevertheless, primaries and general elections in recent years have featured participation by ideologically diverse candidates across the country.

Those with no party affiliation make up a plurality of voters nationwide. 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. While ranked-choice voting systems for some posts have been adopted in several jurisdictions in recent years, including the District of Columbia, Maine, and Alaska, voters in other states have rejected proposals to adopt ranked-choice voting, nonpartisan or open primaries, or combinations thereof. 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. Gubernatorial elections during 2025 left Democrats with the governorship in 24 states, compared with Republicans’ 26. By the end of the year there was unified partisan control of the legislature and governorship in at least 39 states—23 Republican and 16 Democratic.

In April, President Trump directed the Department of Justice to investigate possible illegal donations to online fundraising platforms, specifically naming ActBlue, a central fundraising platform for the Democratic Party that was also under investigation by Republican-led committees in the House of Representatives. Critics of the presidential directive argued that it amounted to a politicized attack on the opposition party’s financial infrastructure, as a rival Republican platform was not subjected to the same scrutiny. No major developments related to the investigation had been made public by year’s end.

Various interest groups have come to play a potent role in the nominating process for the presidency 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, parties, 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 prohibited from coordinating 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 part in overall spending on behalf of both parties, fueling concerns about undue political influence. Businessman Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person and the owner of companies with major government contracts, was the 2024 election cycle’s top individual spender, reportedly dedicating more than $280 million to support the campaigns of Trump and his allies. In 2025, after taking on a prominent role in Trump’s new administration, Musk used his social media platform X to threaten to fund primary challenges against members of Congress who failed to support his priority issues, and spent millions of dollars in an unsuccessful bid to defeat a liberal candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court; in the latter case, other billionaires contributed smaller sums to counter Musk’s effort.

Concerns about undue influence have also focused on lobbyists and others with ties to foreign governments who associate themselves with politicians or political campaigns. In one prominent case, former Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey who had served as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, was sentenced to 11 years in prison in January 2025 for secretly working on behalf of the Egyptian and Qatari governments in exchange for bribes.

Violence and intimidation have become more common tools of political influence in recent years. In the wake of the January 6, 2021, attack on Congress—by Trump supporters attempting to disrupt the counting of Electoral College votes from the 2020 presidential election—more than 1,500 individuals were charged and more than 1,200 pleaded guilty or were convicted for related crimes. On the first day of Trump’s second term in January 2025, he pardoned virtually all of those convicted for conduct stemming from the attack, and also ordered the Department of Justice to seek dismissal of all pending cases that remained. Other forms of political violence have proliferated, and politicians have been subjected to a dramatic rise in intimidation, including from members of the public influenced by hostile political rhetoric. Following two serious attempts to assassinate Trump in 2024, major incidents during 2025 included the firebombing of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s official residence and the murder and attempted murder of two Minnesota state lawmakers and their spouses. In September 2025, Charlie Kirk, a well-known political activist and leader of the conservative group Turning Point USA, was assassinated while speaking publicly at a Utah university. The suspects in these cases were arrested and charged.

A number of important laws are designed to protect 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 enacted tighter restrictions on voter registration, identification, and access; engaged in flawed voter-roll purges; or launched initiatives to punish voter fraud, a very rare phenomenon in US elections. More recent Supreme Court precedents have further pared back federal authority to supervise and regulate state-level electoral and redistricting reforms. Separately, 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.

All people born or naturalized in the United States are deemed US citizens with full political rights, regardless of race, ethnicity, or national origin. After taking office in January 2025, President Trump issued an executive order meant to end birthright citizenship for the US-born children of foreign nationals whose presence in the country was unlawful or temporary, despite constitutional text and a century of legal precedent that afforded no such distinctions. After a lower court struck down the order, the administration appealed, and the matter was pending before the Supreme Court at year’s end. Separately, it was reported in December that the administration aimed to begin denaturalizing hundreds of citizens per month based on allegations of fraud or other grounds, though any such action would require case-by-case approval from a federal court.

The elected president and Congress are generally empowered to determine government policies and craft legislation. However, partisan polarization and obstruction in Congress have repeatedly delayed appropriations bills across multiple administrations, resulting in a series of partial shutdowns of federal government operations. Stopgap measures averted shutdowns in 2024 and carried government operations through September 2025, but partisan disputes over executive infringements on Congress’s spending authority as well as expiring health care subsidies led to a 43-day shutdown, the longest in US history. It ended in November when several Democratic senators agreed to join Republicans in backing a funding extension through January 2026.

Supermajority requirements in the Senate have frequently allowed the party in the minority to stall legislation backed only by the majority party, and despite controlling the lower chamber since the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans in the House of Representatives have had difficulty maintaining a stable working majority, seriously hampering productivity. Narrow margins, persistent vacancies, and intraparty disagreement have repeatedly forced Republican speakers to rely on Democratic votes as a last resort to overcome dissenters from their own party on crucial spending bills. House dysfunction peaked in 2025 when, before the government shutdown began, Speaker Mike Johnson adjourned the body and ultimately kept it out of session for 54 days. In total, the House held just 362 votes during 2025, the second-lowest number since 2001; the lowest was in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic sharply limited legislative activity.

Congress’s inability to effectively fulfill its responsibilities has been accompanied by increasingly extreme assertions of executive authority. Over the course of 2025, President Trump issued more than 220 executive orders, eclipsing the total from his entire first term and the four-year figures of all former presidents since Jimmy Carter (1977–81). The orders frequently invoked emergency laws to activate special powers. Many clashed with existing laws or jurisprudence and were blocked by the courts, while others were left in effect as hearings and appeals proceeded. For example, the administration both withheld funds that Congress had appropriated and spent or raised funds without congressional approval. In August it used a so-called pocket rescission for the first time in some 50 years, unilaterally canceling billions of dollars in appropriated foreign aid spending; opponents deemed the move illegal, but the Supreme Court allowed it to proceed without ruling on the merits. The administration also used layoffs, program cuts, and spending freezes to close or dismantle multiple agencies created by Congress, including the Department of Education, the US Agency for International Development, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and it sought to install or fire officials at statutorily independent, quasi-private, or legislative-branch entities over which it had little or no clear authority, such as the Federal Reserve, the Library of Congress, and the Government Accountability Office. These actions precipitated numerous lawsuits, some of which continued through the end of the year.

Score Change: The score declined from 3 to 2 due to the escalation of a multiyear trend of partisan gridlock and dysfunction in Congress, culminating in a funding crisis and the longest government shutdown in US history, as well as a parallel escalation in the executive branch’s assertions of unilateral authority, including its declaration of multiple national emergencies to claim special powers; its issuance of an unprecedented number of executive orders, many of which appeared to conflict with existing law; and its assumption of spending and oversight responsibilities that the US Constitution and statutory law assign to Congress.

The United States has historically benefitted 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. In recent years, those safeguards have suffered significant erosion.

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 2024, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that removed the ability of federal prosecutors to bring corruption charges against state and local officials who accept illegal “gratuities”—payments made to the official as a reward or token of appreciation. The court’s separate 2024 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 other official acts—also raised concerns that it could encourage future abuses of power related to corruption. However, the court held that no immunity applied to purely private conduct.

Over the course of 2025, President Trump took several steps that weakened ethics protocols and undermined oversight institutions. In January, he removed 18 inspectors general serving in various cabinet departments and agencies, without providing the legally required notice to Congress. In February, the president fired the head of the Office of Special Counsel, which plays a critical role in protecting whistleblowers; removed the director of the Office of Government Ethics, the official responsible for verifying that government employees comply with ethics requirements and conflict-of-interest policies; and paused enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for several months before issuing new guidelines on its application.

The administration was also plagued by both the plain appearance and allegations of significant conflicts of interest or corruption. In contrast with previous presidential practice, Trump did little to separate his public responsibilities from his family’s business endeavors. As with his first administration, Trump-owned properties again served as venues for political, fundraising, and quasi-official activity while generating revenue from corporations, lobbyists, and foreign-linked entities with federal interests. The family’s cryptocurrency ventures, which reportedly netted them nearly $1 billion in 2025, became a focus of particular concern as a potential vehicle for bribery. In one episode in May, an investment firm controlled by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) agreed to carry out a $2 billion transaction using a “stablecoin” issued by World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency firm founded by the families of the president and his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff. Weeks later, the administration scrapped a rule that limited the sale of advanced computer chips and struck a deal granting the UAE access to such chips. Also in May, amid broader concerns about the president’s solicitation of large gifts and donations from people and entities with business before the US government, the administration agreed to accept the Qatari government’s donation of a Boeing 747 for use by the president; after he left office, the jet would be transferred to Trump’s presidential library rather than remaining in government hands. In October, it was reported that Trump was personally seeking approximately $230 million from the Department of Justice in compensation for its investigations of him in the years before his return to office, meaning he—as a plaintiff and as president—would be heading both sides of the same dispute.

In terms of anticorruption enforcement, the new administration dramatically reduced staffing and resources at the Department of Justice’s specialized unit for investigating political corruption, cutting its roster of career lawyers from 36 to two. The administration also halted prosecutions or issued clemency decisions in a series of high-profile cases involving political corruption or private-sector fraud, and many of the beneficiaries had financial ties to the president’s political fundraising projects or family enterprises. Those moves were facilitated by the president’s dismissal of the career head of the Office of the Pardon Attorney and her replacement with a political loyalist.

Score Change: The score declined from 3 to 2 due to the weakening of anticorruption safeguards and enforcement efforts as well as serious violations of ethical standards under the new administration, including the president’s promotion of multibillion-dollar business ventures operated by his family that entailed clear conflicts of interest; his solicitation of large gifts and donations from businesses, individuals, and foreign governments; and a pattern of clemency and closed investigations that benefited both politicians implicated in corruption and businesspeople with ties to the president’s campaign or family enterprises.

The United States was the first country to adopt a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) 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 has continued to struggle with the magnitude and complexity of inquiries, leading to lengthy delays, growing backlogs of unresolved requests, inadequate responses, and lawsuits aimed at forcing compliance.

The executive branch includes a substantial number of auditing and investigative bodies that are designed to be independent of political influence; such bodies are often spurred to action by the investigative work of journalists. A law adopted in 2022 included provisions intended to reinforce the independence of inspectors general and protect them from arbitrary removal by the president. These rules, along with other legal protections, were tested by President Trump’s dismissals of inspectors general in 2025, and in September the administration withheld funding from the cross-agency Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, causing the websites of many inspector general offices to go dark; the council’s funding was restored under pressure from Congress in November.

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. In the executive branch, meanwhile, transparency advocates raised concerns during 2025 about the abrupt or unexplained removal, consolidation, or prolonged unavailability of government webpages and public datasets, as well as delays in updating information related to government spending, enforcement actions, and regulatory compliance. In one high-profile action, the president fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in August after it published disappointing national employment data.

In January, Elon Musk was put in control of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an initiative created by executive order to “moderniz[e] Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” DOGE’s efforts, characterized by the summary cancellation of government spending programs and efforts to seize control of targeted agencies’ databases and spending systems, precipitated myriad lawsuits centered on both its authority and its operations. While DOGE claimed to have saved hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, its lack of transparency made its impact difficult to verify, and critics both within and outside of government argued that its actions had actually imposed net costs on the US government. The administration repeatedly resisted and appealed attempts by watchdog groups to obtain information about DOGE’s activities via FOIA requests.

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 have been eroded by government pressure, market concentration, economic constraints, and partisan bias. 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. However, news coverage has grown more polarized, with certain outlets providing a consistently right- or left-leaning perspective. 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.

During 2025, many media outlets came under pressure from the federal government regarding their coverage or practices. The newly appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Brendan Carr, stated that the FCC could block merger-and-acquisition deals involving broadcast networks that maintain diversity, equity, and inclusion policies for staff, and threatened the broadcast licenses of companies whose content he deemed objectionable. Some major media and technology companies—including those seeking regulatory approval for business transactions—voluntarily made concessions or settled defamation lawsuits by President Trump, though other media outlets continued to defend themselves in court. Public television and radio broadcasters across the country, which had long faced accusations of left-wing bias from critics on the right, were dealt a financial blow in July, when Congress granted the administration’s request to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting; the entity ultimately closed down as a result. The government also put new conditions on media access to its officials and facilities, for example by excluding the Associated Press from presidential venues because it did not adopt the administration’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, and by imposing new reporting restrictions on outlets seeking to access the Department of Defense.

According to the US Press Freedom Tracker, a joint project of multiple nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the number of press freedom violations increased in 2025; the jurisdictions with the largest tallies were California, Illinois, and Washington, DC. While arrests of journalists declined to 35 from about 50 in 2024, the number of assaults increased to 188 from fewer than 90. The majority of these incidents stemmed from journalists’ efforts to cover protests against and other responses to the Trump administration’s crackdowns on illegal immigration in US cities.

The US 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 recent years, the court has 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, or that reinforced the free-exercise clause, for instance by allowing students to opt out of some school content on religious grounds. In 2025, groups dedicated to the separation of church and state accused the Trump administration of favoring Christianity or advancing Christian nationalism through measures such as the February creation of an interagency Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias, arguing that there was little evidence of such bias in practice. In July, to settle a lawsuit by conservative Christian groups, the Internal Revenue Service stated in a court filing that, contrary to a 1954 law, churches should not lose their tax-exempt status if their pastors endorse political candidates.

Hate crimes based on religion are generally prosecuted vigorously by law enforcement authorities. According to the latest available Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) statistics, covering 2024 and released in 2025, hate crimes based on religion rose slightly compared with the previous year; antisemitic and anti-Muslim incidents, respectively, remained the first and second most common types of religious hate crimes, even though Jews and Muslims together made up less than 4 percent of the US population. High-profile incidents during 2025 included deadly shootings at a Jewish museum in Washington, DC, and at churches in Michigan and Minnesota, and the vandalism of multiple mosques.

Despite a long history of autonomy and robust legal protections for academic freedom, educational institutions have become a significant site of partisan conflict and political pressure in recent years. Among the Trump administration’s central priorities in 2025 was the use of federal investigations, lawsuits, and suspensions of federal research funds as leverage to force universities to change their admissions systems, antidiscrimination policies, and academic practices. Among other cited concerns, the administration stated that following the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel in October 2023 and the ensuing conflict in the Gaza Strip, Jewish students on university and college campuses in the United States faced denial of access to campus common areas and facilities, intimidation, harassment, physical threats, and assaults. According to media reports, at least 60 universities were warned of possible investigation and enforcement actions under the Civil Rights Act for what the administration deemed insufficient attention to antisemitism and other forms of discrimination. With regard to funding, federal entities including the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation began both canceling and attaching new restrictions to grants that conflicted with administration priorities, affecting billions of dollars in allocations.

Several universities successfully challenged these actions in court, arguing that the federal interventions were ideologically motivated and violated legal and constitutional protections for academic freedom, while others reached settlements involving policy changes and the payment of fines. In October, the administration offered a group of nine universities preferred access to federal research funds if they signed an agreement requiring specific changes to their policies and academic practices; no institutions had accepted the offer as of December.

Academic freedom at colleges and universities had been under pressure from both ends of the political spectrum prior to 2025. Faculty have reported engaging self-censorship to avoid professional repercussions or harassment—including on social media—related to curriculum content, textbooks, or statements that some students strongly disagree with. State 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, sexual orientation, and gender identity, including at the primary- and secondary-school level. Some 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.

While the US Constitution has been interpreted to guarantee some of the world’s most expansive protections for speech and expression, both the government and nonstate actors have posed threats to those freedoms in recent years.

In 2025, the Trump administration cited concerns about hostility toward the United States and support for designated foreign terrorist organizations as reasons to increase vetting of the social media activity of visa holders and other immigrants. Based on these efforts, the government reportedly revoked hundreds of visas as well as some permanent residency documents during the year. Some of these decisions were known to have been prompted by the individual’s nonviolent online or offline speech about sensitive topics such as the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip and comments critical of Charlie Kirk in the aftermath of his assassination. In response, several lawsuits challenged the government’s ability to surveil the social media posts of noncitizens and deport noncitizens for engaging in activities protected by the US Constitution’s First Amendment. A federal court ruled in September that the administration had unfairly targeted noncitizens for their speech, a finding that the government said it would appeal.

Some US citizens who expressed their views on topics such as the Trump administration, immigration policies, and Kirk’s murder also faced the risk of reprisals, motivating broader self-censorship. In a small number of reported cases, the individuals were arrested or questioned by authorities over their comments. Federal agencies reportedly engaged in the large-scale use of administrative subpoenas to identify protesters and social media users who challenged immigration enforcement efforts.

The administration’s actions during the year revived older debates about the potential effects on free speech of electronic surveillance activities by law enforcement, immigration, and intelligence agencies, due in part to long-standing allegations of a disproportionate focus on religious, racial, and ethnic minority populations.

Meanwhile, the recent rise in offline political violence—against targets from across the political spectrum—has magnified the impact of online threats linked to political speech. 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.

Score Change: The score declined from 4 to 3 due to a multiyear rise in threats and reprisals for political expression, and the new administration’s efforts to punish nonviolent speech by noncitizens, both of which produced a chilling effect on personal expression.

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.

There were multiple high-profile protests and public assemblies during 2025. For example, opponents of the Trump administration’s sweeping assertions of executive power organized so-called No Kings protests in over 2,000 locations in June, attracting an estimated five million people, followed by a larger round of nationwide protests in October. Though they were generally peaceful, some of these protests featured confrontations with police that resulted in arrests. More significant disruptions occurred during various protests against the administration’s immigration enforcement efforts. In several cities where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were deployed in large numbers to carry out detentions and removals, clashes with protesters included the use of tear gas, pepper spray, and other crowd-control devices, prompting accusations that federal agents or police had used excessive force. In response to such episodes, President Trump stationed National Guard troops in Los Angeles without the consent of California’s governor, and prepared to do the same in Chicago, Illinois, and Portland, Oregon, but he abandoned the effort in late December after a series of adverse court rulings. A separate deployment of National Guard troops to Washington, DC, which began in August for the stated purpose of fighting crime, was allowed to continue, as were similar operations in Memphis, Tennessee, and New Orleans, Louisiana, where they had the consent of state governors.

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.

Nonetheless, some categories of NGOs faced significant financial and investigatory pressure from the government during 2025. A series of federal funding freezes and grant terminations early in the year forced a wide range of groups across the country to suspend operations and lay off staff. An executive order in March directed changes to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program that ended eligibility for employees of organizations whose activities it characterized as having an “illegal purpose,” including certain forms of support for undocumented immigrants and medical care for transgender children. As part of a broader effort to combat speech they deemed dangerous, figures in the Trump administration in September signaled an interest in investigating liberal grantmaking organizations like the Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation. At the same time, President Trump issued an executive order designating “antifa”—an umbrella term for decentralized left-wing antifascist groups or individuals—as a “domestic terrorist organization.” The order was followed by a presidential memorandum that described “antifa” domestic terrorism as being animated by “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” and instructed federal investigators to target NGOs that have foreign ties and are involved in “activities that support or encourage domestic terrorism.”

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 2025. While public-sector unions had a higher rate of membership, with 32.9 percent, they have come under pressure as well. The overall unionization rate in 2025 was 10 percent.

Aspects of 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. President Trump’s dismissal of a board member in January 2025 denied the NLRB a quorum for much of the year, leaving it unable to issue new rulings; the Supreme Court allowed the firing to remain in effect while a legal challenge unfolded.

Private employers have used various tactics to hamper union activity, for example categorizing workers as contractors or applying rules pertaining to franchisees to prevent organizing. Twenty-six states have “right-to-work” legislation in place, allowing private-sector workers who benefit from union bargaining to opt out of paying union dues or fees. A 2018 Supreme Court ruling that government employees cannot be required to contribute to unions representing them in collective bargaining has led to further losses in union revenue and membership. In March 2025, the Trump administration issued an order that excluded employees at a range of federal agencies from collective bargaining rights, citing national security priorities. A similar executive order followed in August, expanding the number of agencies affected. Lawsuits challenging the orders, which implicated the contracts of more than one million workers, were ongoing at year’s end.

Despite these headwinds, labor activism and mobilization have remained at high levels in recent years, resulting in strikes during 2025 that affected the health care, retail, manufacturing, and hospitality sectors, among others.

Although the American judiciary depends on the other branches of government for nomination, confirmation, and funding, courts have historically enjoyed ample independence in their adjudication of cases, and federal judges are appointed for life as a safeguard against political interference. US courts regularly demonstrate their autonomy by blocking or limiting executive and legislative actions.

In 2025, litigation surrounding President Trump’s executive actions put increased pressure—both logistical and political—on the judicial system. A July media investigation found that the administration had defied or otherwise resisted court oversight in over a third of the cases decided against them. Trump and his allies, both within and outside of government, responded to adverse rulings by questioning the authority of courts to control executive actions and, in at least one case in March, by calling for the impeachment of the judge involved. The impeachment threat drew a rare rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts, who released a statement noting that the normal appeals process was the appropriate means of responding to disagreement with a ruling. In June, the Department of Justice took the remarkable step of suing all 15 federal judges in Maryland after the chief judge there imposed an automatic 48-hour pause on any deportation order that is challenged in court; a federal judge in Virginia dismissed the suit, but an appeal was pending at year’s end.

The pattern of judicial appointments in recent years has added to existing concerns about partisan distortion of the appointment and confirmation process. Senators from both parties have weakened rules that effectively required bipartisan supermajorities to advance judicial nominations, and 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 in 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.

Recent decisions by Presidents Joseph Biden and Trump have amplified existing concerns about abuses of the pardon power and their impact on the durability of judicial rulings. These concerns were previously exacerbated by the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling on presidential immunity, which granted presidents absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for any misuse of core constitutional powers, including the pardon power. Biden granted a broad pardon to his son in late 2024, and just before stepping down in January 2025, he issued preemptive pardons to several family members and public officials who were seen as vulnerable to politicized prosecutions under the incoming Trump administration. Once in office, Trump eliminated the convictions or commuted the sentences of numerous personal or political allies, including perpetrators of the 2021 attack on the Capitol, other individuals involved in the effort to overturn the 2020 election results, a former Honduran president who had been convicted on drug-trafficking charges, a cryptocurrency executive with connections to Trump family business ventures, and a range of others convicted of fraud, corruption, or financial crimes.

The United States has a deeply rooted rule-of-law tradition, and legal and constitutional protections for due process are generally 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 about 1.2 million in 2025. There are also hundreds of thousands of pretrial detainees and people serving short-term sentences in local jails, and tens of thousands of people in immigration detention. 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. In 2025, the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts were widely characterized by disregard for or avoidance of due process protections, precipitating scores of lawsuits by affected individuals and advocacy organizations.

Multiple events over the course of 2025 caused observers to raise concerns about the politicization of the Department of Justice and the federal legal system more broadly. In March, the president issued executive orders intended to punish law firms that had either employed lawyers involved with or otherwise supported litigation and investigations of which he disapproved; under the orders, the firms would be cut off from government contracts, security clearances, and access to government sites and officials, among other repercussions. While some firms successfully challenged the orders in court, others agreed to terms ranging from modification of diversity-related employment policies to the provision of pro bono legal services in support of the administration’s priorities. Under public pressure from the president, the Department of Justice also opened investigations into former and current public officials who were perceived as his opponents. The department ultimately filed indictments against former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and former National Security Advisor John Bolton; associated appeals and several other probes were reportedly still in progress at year’s end. In a related development, the administration attempted to install Trump’s personal and political allies as US attorneys in multiple districts across the country, using procedural maneuvers to sidestep the Senate confirmation process; federal courts repeatedly deemed the appointments invalid, affecting the viability of the prosecutions they oversaw.

Both the criminal homicide rate—at 5.0 per 100,000 inhabitants as of 2024, according to the latest 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.

An increased policy focus on reforming the criminal justice system over the past 20 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. Nevertheless, some officers have received substantial prison sentences. In 2025, the Trump administration’s deployments of National Guard troops to help combat crime in the cities of Washington, Memphis, and New Orleans raised concerns about the militarization of policing, but aside from one fatal attack on guard members in the capital, no major violence between soldiers and civilians was reported during the year.

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 in part by suicides and drug overdoses, with negligence or understaffing among corrections officers a contributing factor in some deaths. Conditions in immigration detention facilities also remain a concern. In 2025, as the Trump administration’s enforcement campaign led to a surge in the number of people in immigration detention, the annual total of deaths in ICE custody rose to 32—the highest since 2004.

Despite a significant decrease in the use of the death penalty since the late 1990s, there were 47 executions in 2025, nearly twice as many as in 2024 and the most since 2009. All were carried out at the state level, with Florida accounting for 40 percent of the total. Chronic problems with the administration of lethal injections led some states to use alternative execution protocols or methods, including gas asphyxiation and firing squads, which prompted allegations of torture and warnings about human rights abuses.

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. While rates of hate crime—criminal offenses motivated by racism or other forms of group animosity—had increased in previous years, there was a 1.5 percent decrease in 2024, 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 81 percent of that for male workers, a gap that has grown slightly in recent years, according to Census Bureau data covering 2024. Black women, who are affected by both the gender and racial components of wage inequality, made about 65 cents for every dollar earned by White men; the figure for Hispanic women was 58 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 average wealth of White households in 2024 was more than four times the average 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. Among President Trump’s central priorities in 2025 was combating the proliferation of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in both government and the private sector. To this end, he issued executive orders intended to end affirmative action and limit the use of disparate impact liability in antidiscrimination litigation.

LGBT+ people’s efforts to secure legal equality have suffered setbacks after a period of progress. Although a 2020 Supreme Court decision held that federal civil rights legislation includes LGBT+ people as a class protected from workplace discrimination, a 2023 ruling by the court 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 some states have adopted a variety of laws that negatively affected the rights of transgender people. Upon returning to office in January 2025, President Trump issued an executive order that rejected any recognition of gender identity as distinct from one’s “immutable” and binary biological sex, affecting a wide range of government policies and practices regarding transgender and intersex people. For example, the order required government-issued identification documents like passports to reflect a person’s rigidly defined biological sex. In another consequence of the new policy, the administration reinstated a former ban on transgender people serving openly in the military. In both instances, the Supreme Court allowed the changes to remain in effect while legal challenges continued.

Immigration and border security remained hotly contested policy issues in 2025, after a surge in irregular arrivals during the Biden presidency further strained the government’s ability to process asylum cases. In keeping with his campaign promises, President Trump issued a series of immigration-related executive orders early in the year, laying the foundation for a mass deportation program that was ongoing as of December. The program entailed declaring a national emergency at the southern border, maximizing detention and removal of undocumented immigrants rather than focusing on those with records of criminal violence, using the military and other federal personnel to support immigration enforcement, abruptly ending temporary protected status for those from certain unstable countries, and summarily expelling detainees to home countries or third countries where they could face unsafe or abusive conditions. In all, nearly 300,000 people were detained by ICE between January and October, up 19 percent from the same period in 2024, and more than 68,000 remained in immigration detention as of December. In June and December, the Trump administration issued executive orders imposing new travel and immigration bans affecting people from 39 countries. The president also sharply restricted refugee resettlement programs, but made a special exception for White South Africans. Immigration court backlogs remained high at some 3.4 million pending cases as of September, down slightly from the previous year, but President Trump dismissed about one-seventh of the country’s roughly 700 immigration court judges, who are officials of the executive branch rather than the independent judicial branch, over the course of 2025. A raft of legal challenges pertaining to individual cases as well as broader aspects of the administration’s enforcement program—particularly its alleged violations of the constitutional right to due process for both noncitizens and citizens who had been caught up in the crackdown—were still making their way through the courts at year’s end.

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.

In 2025, the Trump administration pushed for greater federal involvement in strategic sectors of the economy and took the unusual step of obtaining ownership stakes in private technology, mineral, and industrial material companies, in some cases applying regulatory or political pressure to secure the assets. By year’s end, the administration had undertaken nine such deals worth more than $10 billion.

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 US Constitution did not guarantee a right to abortion, thereby returning the issue to the states. Some states have responded by adding new, or strengthening existing, protections for abortion access. By 2025, however, 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. Bans based on gestational duration had been imposed by 28 other states, with 7 banning abortion at or before 18 weeks and 21 banning it after 18 weeks. 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 lifesaving care, and the closure of clinics compelled women to travel to other jurisdictions for treatment, disproportionately burdening women with lower incomes.

The recent pattern of legislation restricting the rights of transgender people intensified in 2025, with more than 100 such bills reportedly introduced or under consideration in Congress and a similar number winning passage at the state level. Many of these measures featured implicit or explicit restrictions on people’s bodily autonomy and personal appearance, including limitations on access to medical treatments. 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.