Politics & Law
NewsOnScale Staff
October 17, 2026
The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act was signed into law in 1970. Its stated purpose was to give federal prosecutors a powerful tool to dismantle organized crime — the mob, criminal enterprises, corrupt networks operating across state lines.
Fifty-six years later, the federal government uses RICO to prosecute street gangs, drug cartels, and political corruption. State prosecutors use it against local crime rings. Civil plaintiffs use it against corporations engaged in fraud.
The government uses RICO against Americans every day.
Americans cannot use RICO against the government.
How the exclusion was created
The federal RICO statute — 18 U.S.C. § 1961 — defines an enterprise as "any individual, partnership, corporation, association, or other legal entity, and any union or group of individuals associated in fact although not a legal entity."
The plain text does not exclude government. It says any entity. A city government, a county commission, a state agency — all fit the plain text definition of an enterprise.
Courts created the exclusion anyway.
Most federal circuits have held that government bodies were not the type of enterprise Congress intended to target when it wrote RICO. The reasoning is that RICO was designed to fight organized crime infiltrating legitimate businesses, not to be used as a tool against government itself. That interpretation is read into the statute despite not being written into it.
The people who benefit from the exclusion are the people whose courts interpret the law.
Sovereign immunity
Beyond RICO specifically, government entities are shielded by sovereign immunity — a doctrine inherited from English common law holding that the king cannot be sued without his consent. In the United States that became: government cannot be sued without its permission.
Congress has waived sovereign immunity in limited, carefully defined circumstances. Federal tort claims. Civil rights violations under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for individual officials acting under color of law. Constitutional claims in narrow circumstances.
RICO is not on that list.
What government meets the definition of
A pattern of racketeering activity requires at least two predicate acts within ten years from a list that includes bribery, extortion, fraud, obstruction of justice, and mail and wire fraud.
Local governments across the United States engage in conduct that meets those definitions regularly. Zoning decisions made in exchange for campaign contributions. Contracts awarded to connected vendors. Public funds diverted. Evidence suppressed. Whistleblowers retaliated against. The conduct is documented in federal prosecutions of individual officials — but the institution itself remains shielded.
When a county commissioner takes a bribe to award a data center contract, the individual may face prosecution. The county government that benefited from the arrangement faces nothing.
The individual official exception
Individual government officials can face civil RICO claims when acting in their personal capacity rather than their official capacity. This is a narrow opening. If an official personally profits from a corrupt enterprise, they may be individually liable even if the government entity they work for is not.
In practice this distinction is difficult to establish and expensive to litigate. Officials are typically represented by government attorneys at taxpayer expense. Plaintiffs bear their own costs.
The result
The legal system designed to fight organized corruption explicitly excludes the most powerful organized institutions in the country from its reach. Government can deploy RICO against citizens. Citizens cannot deploy RICO against government. Courts built that asymmetry through interpretation rather than legislation, which means it was never debated publicly or voted on by elected representatives.
Americans who watch their local governments engage in conduct that would constitute racketeering if done by a private party have limited legal recourse against the institution itself. They can vote. They can sue individual officials in narrow circumstances. They can file complaints with oversight bodies staffed by officials appointed by the same government they're complaining about.
The law that was supposed to fight corruption has a carve-out for the most institutionalized corruption of all.
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