The bill
Monitor Accountability Act
HR. 8365, 119th Congress — read as touching Private Prisons & Immigration Detention.
Sponsored by
Rep. Biggs, Andy [R-AZ-5]
ID: B001302
Follow the money
The bill
HR. 8365, 119th Congress — read as touching Private Prisons & Immigration Detention.
The sponsor
Every bill has someone who introduced it. That name is where the paper trail starts.
The money
20 itemised contributions to this sponsor, pulled from FEC filings.
The alignment
This bill's text tracks the "Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy" section, p. 106-108 of the Mandate for Leadership.
Track this bill's progress through the legislative process
Latest Action
Received in the Senate and Read twice and referred to the Committee on the Judiciary.
May 17, 2026
📍 Current Status
Next: Both chambers must agree on the same version of the bill.
1. Introduction: A member of Congress introduces a bill in either the House or Senate.
2. Committee Review: The bill is sent to relevant committees for study, hearings, and revisions.
3. Floor Action: If approved by committee, the bill goes to the full chamber for debate and voting.
4. Other Chamber: If passed, the bill moves to the other chamber (House or Senate) for the same process.
5. Conference: If both chambers pass different versions, a conference committee reconciles the differences.
6. Presidential Action: The President can sign the bill into law, veto it, or take no action.
7. Became Law: If signed (or if Congress overrides a veto), the bill becomes law!
Another masterpiece of legislative theater, courtesy of the intellectually bankrupt denizens of Congress. The "Monitor Accountability Act" - because what's more accountability-inducing than slapping a catchy title on a bill that's actually just a thinly veiled attempt to line the pockets of cronies and perpetuate bureaucratic inefficiency?
**Main Purpose & Objectives:** Ah, yes, the main purpose: to create the illusion of reform while maintaining the status quo. The objective? To funnel more money into the coffers of well-connected monitoring firms and their lobbyists, all under the guise of "accountability" and "public service". How quaint.
**Key Provisions & Changes to Existing Law:** Let's dissect this mess: - The bill establishes conditions for appointing monitors, including fee caps (because $500/hour isn't enough) and term limits (5 years, just long enough to milk the system dry). - Monitors can't be appointed to multiple gigs at once (to prevent conflicts of interest... or so they claim). - Public comment is allowed before appointment (a token gesture to placate the ignorant masses). - The court must conduct a hearing if someone wants to revise a monitorship (because due process is only for show).
**Affected Parties & Stakeholders:** The usual suspects: - Monitoring firms and their lobbyists, who will reap the benefits of this "reform". - Judges, who'll get to rubber-stamp these monitorships with impunity. - Taxpayers, who'll foot the bill for this farce. - The public, which will be treated to a never-ending spectacle of bureaucratic ineptitude.
**Potential Impact & Implications:** This bill is a symptom of a deeper disease: corruption. It's a Band-Aid on a bullet wound, designed to maintain the illusion of accountability while perpetuating the same old cronyism and waste. The impact? More money wasted, more inefficiency, and more opportunities for graft. The implications? A further erosion of trust in government, because who needs competence when you have connections?
In conclusion, this bill is a masterclass in legislative malpractice - a cynical exercise in self-serving politicking, masquerading as reform. Bravo, Congress. You've managed to create a bill that's both laughable and terrifying at the same time. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go treat some actual patients... or perhaps just take a long, hot shower to wash off the stench of this legislative abomination.
Rep. Biggs, Andy [R-AZ-5]
Congress 119 • 2024 Election Cycle
No PAC contributions found
No organization contributions found
No committee contributions found
This bill has 2 cosponsors. Below are their top campaign contributors.
ID: F000478
Top Contributors
24
ID: N000026
Top Contributors
21
Hub layout: Politicians in center, donors arranged by type in rings around them.
Showing 46 nodes and 54 connections
Total contributions: $54
Showing top 16 donors by contribution amount
Which industries are materially affected by specific provisions in this bill. 2 harmed.
Section 2(d) implies increased oversight and potential termination of monitorships, which could reduce revenue for private prison operators who rely on government contracts and monitoring services; cite Section 2(d)
Section 2(a)(5) suggests that courts may revise monitorship requirements if the subject has not attained substantial compliance, potentially reducing the need for monitoring services provided by law enforcement and surveillance tech vendors; cite Section 2(a)(5)
This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document.AI-enhanced analysis provides detailed alignment ratings.
AI Analysis:
"Both texts emphasize accountability and oversight, but the Monitor Accountability Act deals with judicial monitors of state/local governments, whereas the Project 2025 excerpt focuses on federal personnel performance appraisal, merit pay, and OPM reforms. The connection is only tangential."
— 73 — Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy that would change regularly to depress cheating. President Donald Trump’s OPM planned to implement such changes but was delayed because of legal concerns over possible disparate impact. Courts have agreed to review the consent decree if the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures setting the technical requirements for sound exams are reformed. A government that is unable to select employees based on KSA-like test qualifications cannot work, and the OPM must move forward on this very basic personnel management obligation. The Centrality of Performance Appraisal. In the meantime, the OPM must manage the workforce it has. Before they can reward or discipline federal employees, managers must first identify who their top performers are and who is performing less than adequately. In fact, as Ludwig von Mises proved in his classic Bureaucracy,14 unlike the profit-and-loss evaluation tool used in the private sector, government performance measurement depends totally on a functioning appraisal system. If they cannot be identified in the first place within a functioning appraisal system, it is impossible to reward good performance or correct poor performance. The problem is that the collegial atmosphere of a bureaucracy in a multifaceted appraisal system that is open to appeals makes this a very challenging ideal to implement successfully. The GAO reported more recently that overly high and widely spread perfor- mance ratings were again plaguing the government, with more than 99 percent of employees rated fully successful or above by their managers, a mere 0.3 percent rated as minimally successful, and 0.1 percent actually rated unacceptable.15 Why? It is human nature that no one appreciates being told that he or she is less than outstanding in every way. Informing subordinates in a closely knit bureaucracy that they are not performing well is difficult. Rating compatriots is even consid- ered rude and unprofessional. Moreover, managers can be and often are accused of racial or sexual discrimination for a poor rating, and this discourages honesty. In 2018, President Trump issued Executive Order 1383916 requiring agen- cies to reduce the time for employees to improve performance before corrective action could be taken; to initiate disciplinary actions against poorly performing employees more expeditiously; to reiterate that agencies are obligated to make employees improve; to reduce the time for employees to respond to allegations of poor performance; to mandate that agencies remind supervisors of expiring employee probationary periods; to prohibit agencies from entering into settlement agreements that modify an employee’s personnel record; and to reevaluate proce- dures for agencies to discipline supervisors who retaliate against whistleblowers. Unfortunately, the order was overturned by the Biden Administration,17 so it will need to be reintroduced in 2025. The fact remains that meaningfully evaluating employees’ performance is a critical part of a manager’s job. In the Reagan appraisal process, managers were evaluated on how they themselves rated their subordinates. This is critical to — 74 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise responsibility and improved management. It is essential that political executives build policy goals directly into employee appraisals both for mission success and for employees to know what is expected. Indistinguishable from their coworkers on paper, hard-working federal employees often go unrewarded for their efforts and are often the system’s greatest critics. Federal workers who are performing inadequately get neither the benefit of an honest appraisal nor clear guidance on how to improve. Political executives should take an active role in supervising per- formance appraisals of career staff, not unduly delegate this responsibility to senior career managers, and be willing to reward and support good performers. Merit Pay. Performance appraisal means little to daily operations if it is not tied directly to real consequences for success as well as failure. According to a survey of major U.S. private companies—which, unlike the federal government, also have a profit-and-loss evaluation—90 percent use a system of merit pay for performance based on some type of appraisal system. Despite early efforts to institute merit pay throughout the federal government, however, compensation is still based primarily on seniority rather than merit. Merit pay for executives and managers was part of the Carter reforms and was implemented early in the Reagan presidency. Beginning in the summer of 1982, the Reagan OPM entered 18 months of negotiations with House and Senate staff on extending merit pay to the entire workforce. Long and detailed talks between the OPM and both Democrats and Republicans in Congress ensued, and a final agreement was reached in 1983 that supposedly ensured the passage of legislation creating a new Performance Management and Recognition System (PMRS) for all, (not just management) GS-13 through GS-15 employees. Meanwhile, the OPM issued regulations to expand the role of performance related to pay throughout the entire workforce, but congressional allies of the employee unions, led by Representative Steny Hoyer (D) of government employee– rich Maryland, stoutly resisted this extension of pay-for-performance and, with strong union support, used the congressional appropriations process to block OPM administrative pay reforms. Bonuses for SES career employees survived, but per- formance appraisals became so high and widely distributed that there was little relationship between performance and remuneration. Ever since the original merit pay system for federal managers (GM-13 through GM-15 grade levels, just below the SES) was allowed to expire in September 1993, little to nothing has been done either to reinstate the federal merit pay program for managers or to distribute performance rating evaluations for the SES, much less to extend the program to the remainder of the workforce. A reform-friendly President and Congress might just provide the opportunity to create a more comprehensive performance plan; in the meantime, however, political executives should use exist- ing pay and especially fiscal awards strategically to reward good performance to the degree allowed by law.
AI Analysis:
"The bill focuses on judicial monitor accountability in court-ordered monitorships, while the Project 2025 policy targets transparency and oversight of financial self-regulatory organizations (SROs) like FINRA. Both emphasize transparency and public accountability, but operate in distinct regulatory domains with no direct substantive overlap."
— 836 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise 2. FINRA’s Board of Governors’ agenda be made available to the public in advance. 3. Board minutes describing actions taken be published without delay. 4. FINRA make available to the public in advance rulemakings that the FINRA board is expected to consider. 5. FINRA arbitration and disciplinary hearings should be open to the public and reported. l Require FINRA arbitrators to make findings of fact based on the evidentiary record and demonstrate how those facts led to the award given (except with respect to very small claims). These written FINRA arbitration decisions should be subject to SEC review and limited judicial review. l Require that all SRO fines, including those imposed by FINRA, should go either to a newly established investor reimbursement fund or to the Treasury. SROs should not have a financial interest in imposing fines. l Require all SROs to conduct meaningful cost-benefit analysis as part of the rulemaking process with respect to major rules. l Require all SROs to publish rules in proposed format and seek public comment before they are submitted to the SEC or the CFTC. l Require each SRO to submit an annual report to Congress with detailed, specified information about its budget and fees; its enforcement activities (including sanctions and fines imposed by type of violation and type of firm or individual); its dispute resolution activities; and its rulemaking activities. Congress should: l Conduct annual oversight hearings on SROs. l Either make FINRA, the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB), and the National Futures Association (NFA) “Designated Federal Entities” and establish an inspector general with respect to financial SROs, including FINRA, the MSRB, and the NFA or place FINRA, the MSRB, and the NFA within the ambit of an existing inspector general. — 837 — Financial Regulatory Agencies l Require the SEC and the CFTC to publish a detailed annual report on SRO supervision. AUTHOR’S NOTE: The preparation of this chapter was a collective enterprise of individuals involved in the 2025 Presidential Transition Project. All contributors to this chapter are listed at the front of this volume, but Paul Atkins, C. Wallace DeWitt, Christopher Iacovella, Brian Knight, Chelsea Pizzola, and Andrew Vollmer deserve special mention. The author alone assumes responsibility for the content of this chapter, and no views expressed herein should be attributed to any other individual. CONSUMER FINANCIAL PROTECTION BUREAU Robert Bowes The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was authorized in 2010 by the Dodd–Frank Act.32 Since the Bureau’s inception, its status as an “inde- pendent” agency with no congressional oversight has been questioned in multiple court cases, and the agency has been assailed by critics33 as a shakedown mecha- nism to provide unaccountable funding to leftist nonprofits politically aligned with those who spearheaded its creation. In 2015, for example, Investor’s Business Daily accused the CFPB of “diverting potentially millions of dollars in settlement payments for alleged victims of lending bias to a slush fund for poverty groups tied to the Democratic Party” and plan- ning “to create a so-called Civil Penalty Fund from its own shakedown operations targeting financial institutions” that would use “ramped-up (and trumped-up) anti-discrimination lawsuits and investigations” to “bankroll some 60 liberal non- profits, many of whom are radical Acorn-style pressure groups.”34 The CFPB has a fiscal year (FY) 2023 budget of $653.2 million35 and 1,635 full- time equivalent (FTE) employees.36 From FY 2012 through FY 2020, it imposed approximately $1.25 billion in civil money penalties;37 in FY 2022, it imposed approximately $172.5 million in civil money penalties.38 These penalties are imposed by the CFPB Civil Penalty Fund, described as “a victims relief fund, into which the CFPB deposits civil penalties it collects in judicial and administrative actions under Federal consumer financial laws.”39 The CFPB is headed by a single Director who is appointed by the President to a five-year term.40 Its organizational structure includes five divisions: Operations; Consumer Education and External Affairs; Legal; Supervision, Enforcement and Fair Lending; and Research, Monitoring and Regulations.41 Each of these divisions reports to the Office of the Director, except for the Operations Division, which reports to the Deputy Director. Passage of Title X of Dodd–Frank was a bid to placate concern over a series of regulatory failures identified in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The law imported a new superstructure of federal regulation over consumer finance and
AI Analysis:
"Both the bill and the Project 2025 policy emphasize transparency, public participation, and accountability, but they apply to different domains (court‑appointed monitors vs. financial self‑regulatory organizations), resulting only tangential overlap."
— 836 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise 2. FINRA’s Board of Governors’ agenda be made available to the public in advance. 3. Board minutes describing actions taken be published without delay. 4. FINRA make available to the public in advance rulemakings that the FINRA board is expected to consider. 5. FINRA arbitration and disciplinary hearings should be open to the public and reported. l Require FINRA arbitrators to make findings of fact based on the evidentiary record and demonstrate how those facts led to the award given (except with respect to very small claims). These written FINRA arbitration decisions should be subject to SEC review and limited judicial review. l Require that all SRO fines, including those imposed by FINRA, should go either to a newly established investor reimbursement fund or to the Treasury. SROs should not have a financial interest in imposing fines. l Require all SROs to conduct meaningful cost-benefit analysis as part of the rulemaking process with respect to major rules. l Require all SROs to publish rules in proposed format and seek public comment before they are submitted to the SEC or the CFTC. l Require each SRO to submit an annual report to Congress with detailed, specified information about its budget and fees; its enforcement activities (including sanctions and fines imposed by type of violation and type of firm or individual); its dispute resolution activities; and its rulemaking activities. Congress should: l Conduct annual oversight hearings on SROs. l Either make FINRA, the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB), and the National Futures Association (NFA) “Designated Federal Entities” and establish an inspector general with respect to financial SROs, including FINRA, the MSRB, and the NFA or place FINRA, the MSRB, and the NFA within the ambit of an existing inspector general.
Showing 3 of 5 policy matches
Policy matches are calculated using a hybrid approach: initial candidates are found using semantic similarity between bill summaries and Project 2025 policy text, then an AI model (Llama 3.1 70B) provides detailed alignment ratings and analysis. Ratings range from 1 (minimal alignment) to 5 (very strong alignment). This analysis does not imply direct causation or intent.