Paying them nothing comes attached to removing their power. The problem is the power to just pay out trillions of dollars to any arbitrary program. If there is no power to buy, then it won’t be corrupt. And if there’s extremely little power to buy, and it IS corrupt, who cares?

End govt subsidies entirely. End govt programs. Require any program that still has to happen to have a 80%+ LOCAL vote in the area to actually get through. Make the politicians irrelevant, not rich.