Right to Honest Governance Institute

The Right to Honest Governance Institute

A nonpartisan research and education institute studying how enforceable duties of honest government service can improve public decisions.

Introducing

The Right to Honest Government Initiative

A permanent American effort to make honest government service enforceable and increasingly effective.

The Institute leads the initiative’s design work in the open: the legal research, the adversarial stress-testing, and the preregistered national studies, with lawyers, scholars, and everyday Americans challenging every draft.

We’re not incapable. We’ve just never been given a real chance to fix the broken system that holds us back. This is that chance. All it takes is us deciding we refuse to accept anything less from a government we grant authority to solely to serve us.

Advocacy for the proposed law is conducted separately by The Right to Honest Government Action, a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization. The two organizations are legally distinct.

A century of American ingenuity, from the Moon landing to modern science

The American method

We are the country that does the impossible

We split the atom.

We put twelve Americans on the Moon and brought every one of them home.

We read all three billion letters of the human genome.

We measured a ripple in space ten thousand times smaller than a proton, proving Einstein right a century later.

We taught sand to think. Then we taught it to reason.

None of it happened by luck. We solve hard problems the same way every time: build, test, break, fix, and repeat until it works.

This is what it means to be American. We are a nation of problem solvers and innovators. We have never accepted “that’s just how it is.” Why should we start now?

Honest government is a hard problem. It is not a harder problem than these. Now we apply that method to the problem that shapes every other.

This is something we can and will do. It’s not a matter of if. It’s a matter of when, and how fast we decide to build it.

An open invitation to America’s scholars, universities, and everyday citizens: help refine the framework before it reaches its first ballot.

After two years of legal design, adversarial testing, and preregistered public research, the Institute is opening the design of an enforceable right to honest government service to the public. Around mid-October, together with the results of a nationally representative replication study fielded by an independent research firm, the design process opens to everyone.

“This is not an invitation to agree with everything we have designed. Agreement isn’t what we need from experts. We need their expertise.”David Jones, Founder and Executive Director

The goal is fixed: government service that is honest with the public it serves. How that standard is incentivized and enforced is flexible, and it is exactly what this process exists to refine.

Choose a way to contribute

Why This Is Worth Your Time

Two findings, each preregistered, each independently verifiable:

95.5%

of 1,000 US adults in a nationally representative Verasight sample agreed: “The American people have a right to honest government service.” Mean 6.69 of 7 (September 2026, weighted).

73.3%

said they would vote the proposed framework into law on the final vote, after reviewing the complete design including enforcement (September 2026, preregistered at osf.io/x5ve6, Wilson 95% CI 70.4 to 75.9%). 8.1% opposed; the rest were undecided.

Support for the law crosses party lines in the representative sample: on the final vote, 83.1% among Democrats, 69.4% among Republicans, and 70.4% among independents (weighted), with opposition at 4.3%, 7.8%, and 10.0% respectively; most of the remainder was undecided, not opposed. We also report the full sequence: right after the ballot text, before the enforcement review, support was 77.1%. Reviewing the detailed enforcement design settled it at 73.3% (mean shift −0.33 on a seven-point scale). 85.4% of initial supporters stayed supporters, most movement was into the neutral middle, opposition rose less than one point, and 32.5% of initial skeptics converted to support after seeing the mitigations.

Samples are online panels recruited through Prolific and Verasight, not random draws of all US adults. Full instruments, exclusion rules, de-identified data, and analysis code are published for verification (see Methods & Materials below).

The Framework Under Study

The framework under study is an accountability standard for public power. It would require officials to place honest, evidence-based reasons for major decisions on the public record, and it would make those reasons reviewable in court under defined standards. It does not authorize courts or citizen panels to choose policy outcomes, with a for repeated obstruction. It requires government to show the evidence, alternatives, and reasoning behind the outcomes it chooses.

It draws on legal foundations courts already apply: fiduciary duty, administrative law, and judicial review.

How the Work Is Done

DesignTest adversariallyMeasure with the publicLearnImprovePublish everything

The method is to design with the American people rather than for them. Constitutional lawyers probe each draft for failure modes and abuse paths. Every revision returns to the public in preregistered studies to see whether support survives the details. Instruments, methodology, de-identified data, and preregistrations are published so results can be independently verified.

The Public Design Process

The framework is not finished, and finishing it is not a small-team job. Around mid-October, together with the results of the independent replication study, the Institute plans to open the design process to the public.

Two invitations go out at once. Scholars, lawyers, universities, and researchers are invited to examine the framework and how it would be implemented and enforced the way they examine any hard problem: question it, model it, test its assumptions, and help make it stronger. And everyday Americans are invited to do what no expert can do for them: say what is clear, what is confusing, what is convincing, and what is not.

The goal is fixed: government service that is honest with the public it serves. The way that standard is incentivized and enforced is flexible, and it is exactly the part the public process exists to refine. When an attack on the design gets through, the design changes until the attack fails, and the fix goes on the public record. Agreement is not what we ask for. Expertise is.

How the design process works, and your role in it →

Get Involved

Pick the role that fits how you want to contribute. Every submission is read by the team.

Where the Work Stands

  • 2024The research effort begins: legal design and adversarial testing of an enforceable honest-service framework.
  • April 2026The preregistered confirmatory study locks: 90.3% support after detailed review (N = 392 after preregistered exclusions; osf.io/br3u2).
  • August 2026The replication is preregistered (osf.io/x5ve6) before any confirmatory fielding.
  • September 2026Verasight fields the nationally representative replication (September 1 to 9, 2026, N = 1,000). Final-vote support is 73.3%, and the topline is reported above.
  • NowThe replication's frozen de-identified dataset and analysis package are being prepared for publication. Until that snapshot is posted, the April wave remains the archived packet that reproduces end to end.
  • Mid-October (aim)The replication package publishes and the public design process opens: scholars, universities, and everyday Americans refine the framework together, on the public record.

Leadership

David Jones, Founder. A technology entrepreneur and engineer with five patents. His 2014 Kickstarter for the Micro 3D printer raised $3.4 million from 11,855 backers, and the company he co-founded grew past 100 employees. He began the research effort in 2024 and founded the Institute in 2026 to formalize and publish the work.

Ian Heller, Legal Analysis. A former federal appellate attorney and constitutional law professor. He guides the Institute’s independent constitutional analysis and convenes the legal reviewers who stress-test each framework.

Methods, Data, and Materials

Anyone can verify the findings. Everything below is public on honestgovernmentresearch.org, the Institute’s methods site (audit, not advocacy).

Contact

For research inquiries, methods questions, or media.

Advocacy for the proposed law is conducted separately by The Right to Honest Government Action, a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization. The two organizations are legally distinct.