Two hundred and fifty years ago, America’s founders did something rare: They audited power. They gathered facts, named abuses, and concluded that government is legitimate only when it answers to the people, not the other way around.
Their example still matters because the habits that protect liberty are the same habits that protect any institution: accountability, transparency, evidence, and limits on authority. As Utah’s state auditor, I read the Declaration of Independence the way I read a serious report. It is more than a soaring speech. It is history’s most consequential audit.
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That is the first lesson. Good government starts with moral clarity. Before there was a Constitution, there was a simple statement about who we are and what we are owed as human beings. “We hold these truths to be self-evident” is not just beautiful language — it is a statement of the “tone at the top” for a free nation. The founders understood that if leadership loses its compass, rules alone will not save the enterprise.
The second lesson is evidence. Auditors do not work on rumors, and free citizens should not either. The Declaration of Independence says, in effect, that facts must be submitted to the world. The colonists listed specific abuses, from taxation without representation to the denial of jury trials and the suspension of local self-government. They were building a record. They did not merely shout that things felt unfair. They showed their work so that others could see the pattern.
The third lesson is control. In public life, danger grows when one person gathers too much power and overrides every safeguard around him. Auditors call this “management override,” and it is as dangerous in a small town as it is in a sprawling empire. The founders recognized that unchecked authority is not a temporary problem. It becomes a system. Their answer was a framework of checks and balances, with power divided among separate branches so that no single hand could control everything, and each part of government would answer to the others and, ultimately, to the people.
The fourth lesson is consent. Governments do not become righteous because they are old, large, or self-important. They are legitimate only when the people consent to their authority. That idea was revolutionary then, and it remains revolutionary now. We the People are not side notes in the American story. We are the source of its legitimacy.
That is why the last paragraph of the Declaration of Independence reads less like a historical flourish than a recommendation section in a hard-fought audit. The founders did not just identify weaknesses in the British system. They proposed a new one. After weighing the risks and the evidence, they declared that the colonies “are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States,” and they were willing to stake their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor on that conclusion. They did not pretend their new framework would be perfect, but they believed it would be accountable, adaptable, and rooted in the rights of the people.
AMERICA’S 250TH BIRTHDAY GIFT SHOULD BE CIVIC VIRTUE
As Americans in Utah and throughout the nation gather with family this summer and enjoy the freedoms so many before us defended, it is worth remembering what those signatures meant. They represented more than separation from a king. They represented a commitment to accountable government, individual liberty, and the stubborn idea that power must answer to principle. The Declaration of Independence was not the end of a story — it was the beginning of an ongoing assignment.
That commitment is not inherited automatically. It is renewed every generation. If we want to keep the blessings the founders secured, we have to keep doing what they did: ask hard questions, demand proof, resist overreach, and remember that government exists to serve the governed. Today, and for all the tomorrows we hope to celebrate under these same fireworks, the recommendation they wrote is now ours to uphold and defend.
Tina M. Cannon serves as the auditor of the state of Utah.