| Paige Cognetti has a record of taking on corruption in order to make government work for the people it’s supposed to serve. People are taking notice.
A new profile from the New York Times takes a deep dive into how Paige has “spent the past decade working various jobs to clean up her corner of Northeastern Pennsylvania, a region long known for public graft, grift and mismanagement.”
They report that Paige’s “anticorruption moxie” is more than just rhetoric – she has a track record of reform that includes “unglamorous-sounding achievements” such as turning down the city car and gas card, ending cash payments, and paying for her own stamps.
Paige has taken on the machine, and “some of her fiercest fights have been with her own party.” Now, Paige is running to hold stock trading Rep. Rob Bresnahan accountable and clean up a broken Washington.
Read the profile of the “scrappy mayor” for yourself:
- Representative Rob Bresnahan is in a sticky political spot. A Pennsylvania Republican, he ran for the House in 2024 on a vow to end congressional stock trading, only to spend his freshman year becoming one of Congress’s most prolific traders — fifth in terms of the number of trades, as of the end of 2025.
- Worse, several of his trades appear to have benefited from some of his congressional votes.
- Mr. Bresnahan’s go-to defense has been that impropriety is impossible because a financial adviser independently handles all his trades. Last week, Politico called attention to a 2025 radio interview in which he mentions talking with his financial adviser about “what different positions are coming up.”
- Which brings us to possibly the stickiest problem for Mr. Bresnahan: He is running for re-election in Pennsylvania’s swingy Eighth Congressional District against the Democrat Paige Cognetti.
- Currently in her third term as the mayor of Scranton, Ms. Cognetti knows government corruption. She has, in fact, spent the past decade working various jobs to clean up her corner of Northeastern Pennsylvania, a region long known for public graft, grift and mismanagement.
- Notably, some of her fiercest fights have been with her own party. She first ran for mayor as an independent in 2019, to replace a Democratic incumbent who had pleaded guilty to extortion, bribery and conspiracy. Pitching herself as a scourge of the local Democratic machine, she vowed to clean up City Hall. Her unofficial slogan became “Paige against the machine,” a play on the band Rage Against the Machine.
- Cheesy but effective. Ms. Cognetti carried the crowded field to become Scranton’s first female mayor, then (mere weeks after giving birth to her first child) got to work overhauling how the city operated, in areas such as contractor hiring and data tracking. Voters were impressed. She cruised to re-election in 2021 and again last November on essentially the same reform platform — the one she is now counting on to take her to Congress.
- “We’ve been running this same campaign from 2019 to date,” she said in a recent interview. “Make government work for the people. Public service is to serve others, not yourself.”
- Ask Ms. Cognetti what reform she is most proud of as mayor, and you’ll get a list of unglamorous-sounding achievements. Under her, the city put in place systems to improve financial accountability. It did away with cash payments for city business. Its code-enforcement department was professionalized. A whistle-blower hotline was set up. Nepotism in hiring, a long-running tradition, was rooted out. “Hiring on merit” is something that “breaks through” with the public, she told me.
- Ms. Cognetti has refused a government car and a gas card. She pays for her own travel, even for job-related trips, and she pays for her own stamps for correspondence like sympathy cards.
- I asked whether such small-bore efforts really matter or if they might risk seeming a little gimmicky. “It matters because the previous folks had enriched themselves,” she insisted. With her mayoral predecessor having been found with stacks of cash in his home and ultimately sentenced to seven years in prison, Ms. Cognetti felt she needed to “draw a contrast,” she stressed. “You have to build trust back. And part of that is doing some things that sometimes is an overcorrection.”
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