Week 23: Appointees Trade Power for Perks as Trump’s Financial Regulators Refuse to Do Their Jobs

Welcome to week twenty-three of the Revolving Door Project’s Corruption Calendar, where we highlight examples of corporate corruption shaping the Trump administration’s agenda and their material impact on everyday people. Read our first twenty-two issues here and follow us on Bluesky and X for updates.

In this week’s installment, we look into Scott Turner’s demands for palatial accommodations, Stephen Miller’s plans to profit from mass deportations, and the administration’s enforcement agencies’ redefinition of their roles as corporate protection agencies.

TRUMP APPOINTEES COLLECT PERKS AND PAYOUTS WHILE DISMANTLING PROTECTIONS FOR THE REST OF US

Kicking Out Scientists To Make Room For HUD Secretary Scott Turner’s “Palatial” Demands.

This week, the Trump administration announced that the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) will move its offices into a building in Alexandria that is currently occupied by over 1800 employees of the National Science Foundation (NSF)—with no plan or indication of where the NSF will go next.

HUD Secretary Scott Turner has reportedly requested luxury amenities, including “a dedicated executive suite on the 19th floor, construction of an executive dining room [...], reserved parking spaces for his five cars [...], exclusive use of one elevator and space on the 18th floor to host his executive assistants. Plans potentially include a gym for Turner and his family.”

The NSF employees union said in a statement, “While Secretary Turner and his staff are busy enjoying private dining and a custom gym, NSF employees are being displaced with no plan, no communication, and no respect.” The union also criticized “the timing of the takeover, noting it comes after the administration cut NSF’s budget, staff, and science grants while forcing employees back into office work.”

Cruel Profits: Stephen Miller’s Conflict of Interest

Also this week, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) reported that Trump’s Deputy Chief of Homeland Security Stephen Miller disclosed owning over $100,000 worth of stock in Palantir. Palantir is the notorious defense contractor that has been criticized for its contracts with DHS and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), “providing artificial intelligence tools that the IDF uses in drone and air strikes on Gaza.” As DHS deputy chief, and architect of the administration’s cruel immigration policies, Miller’s policy decisions materially affect Palantir. This appears to be a significant conflict of interest as Miller stands to personally gain from an uptick in contract awards for Palantir

Palantir has numerous close ties to the executive branch, and to the Trump administration in particular. As POGO reported this week, “Since the Obama administration, Palantir’s technology has given ICE the ability to draw together sources of information to more easily identify immigrants as targets for arrest, detention, and removal from the U.S. — ICE has described its services as ‘mission critical.’”

Palantir is also connected to the White House through its billionaire founder Peter Thiel, who backed Vice President JD Vance’s political rise. We called out these connections in April, and again this month, noting a DOGE effort to grant Palantir access to mine IRS data, to create a “mega API” to access taxpayer data. As we wrote then:

“DOGE [...] features at least three Palantir alumni and a Thiel Fellow, at a Treasury Department helmed by Palantir investor Scott Bessent (the hedge fund Bessent founded is invested in Palantir), all under the authority of an administration featuring Vice President JD Vance, Peter Thiel’s personal pick for VP. The Palantir-connected DOGE agents in question are Clark Minor, Gregory Barbaccia, Akash Bobba, and Luke Farritor; see more on their DOGE work and their Palantir and Thiel connections in our DOGE Agent Profiles.”

Further, as POGO reports, “This month, Palantir’s chief technology officer and three other executives from tech firms were sworn in as Army lieutenant colonels to, as the Army put it, ‘fuse cutting-edge tech expertise with military innovation.’” Additionally, “ICE recently announced it would award a contract to Palantir without competition, claiming no other company could meet its needs in a timely way.”

Given Palantir’s high-level connections to the Trump administration, Miller’s investments are perhaps not surprising, but remain concerning—nothing says fascist corruption like the president’s white nationalist advisor reaping dividends from the company his agency has hired to better track, surveil, and attack immigrant communities.

ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES GIVE CORPORATIONS FREE PASSES TO DEFRAUD CONSUMERS

New SEC IG Loves Corporate Lawbreakers

The SEC announced this week that its new Inspector General will be Kevin Muhlendorf, who has spent the past decade defending individual and corporate plaintiffs in white collar crime cases for Big Law firm Wiley Rein LLP. It’s hard to imagine that a man who has spent almost ten years representing those being targeted by SEC and DOJ enforcement efforts has had a sudden change of heart that will lead him, as he steps into this new role, to center the SEC’s best interests.

As my colleagues rightly pointed out, Muhlendorf’s appointment represents yet another reason to be wary of the Trump SEC’s efforts to robustly police financial markets or even inform the public of the president’s market manipulation schemes.

FTC Chair Ferguson Declines to Punish Walmart for Scamming Consumers

Also this week, FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson let Walmart off the hook with less than a slap on the wrist, after it allowed scammers to steal hundreds of millions of dollars using the company’s wire transfer services. The $10 million fine, which the FTC accepted to settle the case, is barely a drop in the bucket for a company worth almost $800 billion. It’s the latest example of Ferguson’s disinterest in consumer protection. Just this May, he dropped a case looking into Pepsi and Walmart’s collusive practices. The beverage giant had been offering Walmart “pricing advantages unavailable to smaller competitors.”

Our Newly Fashioned Corporation Protection Bureau

Completing the trifecta of now-captured corporate regulators, the CFPB also made news this week by failing to protect consumers from corporate greed and wrongdoing.

Advocacy organizations reported this week that between rescinding caps on credit card late fees; dismissing 22 enforcement cases; and “scrapp[ing] or revi[sing]” a concluded settlement with Toyota, Trump’s CFPB has declined to reclaim a whopping 18 billion in pilfered consumer dollars. The ongoing effort to permit, and by extension, encourage corporations to continue defrauding and exploiting consumers is a blatant betrayal of the CFPB’s mission. It’s a stark reminder that the public interest is an afterthought in MAGAworld.

Chatbot, Are We Cooked?

It’s too damn hot, and Big Tech is turning up the heat.

A closed public pool and an open fire hydrant in Manhattan on June 24 as temperatures broke records—but voters weren’t deterred. Photos by the author.

On Tuesday, as New Yorkers headed to the polls for the primaries—hours before Zohran Mamdani’s joyous triumph over Andrew Cuomo would be apparent—it was 100°F, the outdoor public pools were closed to the public, and my neighbors were barefoot in the spray of a fire hydrant. “Opening fire hydrants without spray caps is illegal, wasteful, and dangerous,” read the 12:34 pm email I received from the city. Also wasteful and dangerous was failing to open the city’s public pools in time for a record-breaking heat dome.

A climate-resilient city would offer, as Johanna Bozuwa has persuasively written, abundant opportunities for “low-carbon leisure” like public pools, which can double as life-saving means of cooling off during extreme heat events. On Tuesday the pools were closed but the polls were open, air conditioning wafting out of the open doors. The mailman passed by, a wet towel around his neck, blue shirt drenched with sweat.

The sweltering heat had barely abated by the time the news broke that the young and unabashedly progressive Mamdani had defeated the billionaire-backed disgraced former governor to clinch the Democratic mayoral nomination. (Revolving Door Project doesn’t make political endorsements, but after the fact, it’s safe to say this election has rattled the calcified Democratic establishment in important ways.)

This newsletter is not about the election, but about the heat dome that loomed over it, swamping much of the country. Still, I want to take a moment to acknowledge the all-too-rare feeling of political joy. While I was worrying and writing about the extreme heat, my phone was silently filling up with messages in the canvassing group chats, where volunteers were organizing pollsite visibility shifts and offering water to anyone who needed it. Perhaps this is a contradiction worth holding onto: how much can still be accomplished within the harsh parameters of our unequal, fast-warming world.

The Coldest Summer of the Rest of Your Life

Over the last forty-eight hours, more than 100 million Americans—a third of the country—have experienced dangerous temperatures across the eastern half of the United States. In Washington D.C., the capital approached record heat as Senate Republicans worked to accelerate the planet’s warming by dismantling the nation’s multibillion dollar investments in clean energy.

Extreme heat is one of the most deadly routine consequences of climate change, deadlier than hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes combined. But experts say that people chronically underestimate its dangers. News stories often default to images of people sunbathing and frolicking in fountains and on beaches to “beat the heat,” but on Monday and Tuesday afternoon, when temperatures reached their peaks, more people were at work and school, some without air conditioning.

Agriculture, construction, delivery, landscaping, and oil and gas workers suffer the highest rates of heat-related illness. During the Biden administration the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) proposed a rule requiring employers to offer water and rest breaks under extreme temperatures, which fossil fuel trade groups opposed. Now the Trump administration is considering sabotaging this rule. David Keeling, Trump’s pick to lead OSHA, previously worked for companies that opposed federal worker protections, including UPS and Amazon, whose workers frequently face heat-related illness.

Power outages during heat waves exacerbate the risk of life-threatening consequences for those left without power. Over the last few days, sporadic outages were reported in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut and elsewhere. As the heat wave approached last week, I was struck by how little coverage I was seeing on the risk of blackouts in major cities; most of the relevant stories warning of that possibility were from 2023 and 2024. After PJM, the nation’s largest grid operator, issued a “Maximum Generation Alert” for Tuesday June 24, Wired elevated its excellent story from 2023 on how a grid collapse would make extreme heat far more deadly. But in general, it seemed that if any major blackout were to hit during this heat dome, it would catch people by surprise.

I’d argue that this is a serious political failure. It’s other kinds of failures, too (including a media failure). But in a country where climate change is so politicized that the political party which holds the White House, both chambers of Congress, and a majority on the Supreme Court is working energetically to ensure that we don’t address it, it’s essential that the opposition party connect the dots for the public between the climate disasters we’re suffering, the policies that could remedy them, and the politicians and powerful corporate interests who are sabotaging those policies at every turn. A functional opposition would loudly draw attention to the governing regime advancing policy to line the pockets of their fossil fuel benefactors while leaving the rest of us to fry like an egg.

“Weather is already political, because weather today is increasingly shaped by political choices,” I wrote two years ago for this newsletter. Since then, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased from 421 to 431 parts per million. We are rocketing far beyond the “safe” limit of 350 ppm.

Last year, climate disasters cost the United States nearly one trillion dollars, or about 3 percent of the country’s GDP. “This mainly comes from skyrocketing home insurance premiums, which have doubled since 2017, as well as expensive weather disasters, like the one-two punch of Hurricanes Helene and Milton ($113 billion) and the Los Angeles fires ($65 billion),” Ryan Cooper wrote for The American Prospect. Climate change is so costly that “the economic cost of policy to fix climate change is actually negative.” But DOGE thinks that firing firefighters ahead of fire season is a better way to save money. We’re moving backwards, fast, and at an incalculable cost.

We’re Paying Big Tech’s Energy Bills

Electricity bills are rising steeply for people around the country. There are many factors behind this increase, including the volatile price of gas and the skyrocketing quantities of gas being exported abroad. Another lesser known source of these price hikes is the rapid buildout of data centers for artificial intelligence.

Utility customers are paying for some of the costs associated with altering grid infrastructure to serve tech companies’ voracious–and rapidly growing–demand, a recent report from Wood MacKenzie found. In March, a paper from the Harvard Electricity Law Initiative explored how “the public is paying the energy bills of some of the largest companies in the world,” including Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft. And in April, a report from Good Jobs First revealed that states across the country are endangering their budgets by offering massive tax exemption programs to tech companies, with at least ten states already losing more than $100 million per year in revenue.

Local communities around the country are increasingly vocalizing their opposition to these massive data centers. Some states, like Minnesota and Indiana, are looking to tighten guardrails to ensure that residential customers don’t foot the bill for data centers’ needs. Other states continue to offer incentives and loopholes to Big Tech, including West Virginia, where a new law offers data center operators “fast-tracked permitting, special tax treatment, and access to fossil-fuel-powered microgrids.”

AI is rapidly cementing itself as a “disaster multiplier.” The consequences of its unchecked expansion range from exacerbating water shortages and increasing pollution to emboldening the surveillance state and spreading misinformation. And the text of the GOP budget bill currently includes a ten year ban on states regulating AI, emboldening Big Tech’s harmful excesses. If you read one thing about AI, a good option is the latest report from AI Now Institute, which reckons with “the ways in which today’s AI isn’t just being used by us, it’s being used on us.”

The authors point out that it isn’t widely understood yet that the AI industry is “fundamentally incentivized to hurt the interests of working people and families.” High profile stories on the risks of AI often focus on the existential risks, rather than its material impacts. But AI intersects with people’s lived experiences in many ways which need to be made more visible, and connected to a bigger story—a story about power. In coming months, we’ll be diving deeper into how AI is being wielded against the public interest, whether that’s DOGE eliminating public servants from government and replacing them with chatbots, or data centers increasing planet-warming pollution and straining the grid in an era of dangerous heat.

Want more? Check out some of the pieces that we have published or contributed research or thoughts to in the last week:

Trump’s War on Public Data

Attacks on Federal Climate Data Will Accelerate a Financial Crisis

Mapping the Home Insurance Crisis: A Closer Look at North Carolina

Why Is a Former Obama Official Attacking the Left on Climate?

Trump Cracks Down on Undocumented People as Corporate Harms Continue Unabated

Revolving Door Project Launches Corporate Crime Enforcement Capacity Tracker

Don't Let Polls Poison Your Brain

How To End Democrats’ Civil War

Labor Unions Are a Driver of Abundance, Not an Obstacle

Trump Cracks Down on Undocumented People as Corporate Harms Continue Unabated

The last two weeks saw the Trump administration continue to ramp up racist anti-immigrant rhetoric, raids, and deportation quotas, balancing the whims of industry with the demands of fascist political appointees.

First, on June 12th, Trump suggested a policy shift to limit or stop targeting employees of farms, meatpacking plants, hotels and restaurants for arrest and deportation, reportedly after a phone call with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. Just three days later, June 15th, Trump reversed course, reiterating his calls for “the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History,” reportedly in response to pushback from Deputy Chief of Staff (and white nationalist) Stephen Miller, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

Miller and other officials have been calling for a daily quota of 3,000 immigration arrests, which would require more than tripling the current average of 750 immigraiton arrests per day for the start of Trump’s second term. There are also reports that ICE is close to running out of funding to carry out the current spate of raids and make these arrests. Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” would increase ICE funding substantially in order to support these efforts, if passed by Congress.

Notably, defense contractors like GEO Group, who build facilities where ICE arrestees are sent and regularly abused and mistreated, stand to profit from this increased push. We’ve long raised alarms about the ties to GEO Group among Trump’s appointees, most notably Attorney General Pam Bondi, who lobbied for the corporation for years.

Posturing vs. Reality

Trump’s current push for immigration raids has sparked widespread mass protests, and have involved particularly egregious techniques—ordering ICE to abduct people who are leaving immigration court hearings even after having their cases dismissed; criminalizing more people’s immigration status; and targeting largely Democrat-run “sanctuary cities” for immigration raids which amount to kidnapping people from their communities. The administration’s rhetoric has also been particularly racist and dehumanizing, devaluing people’s lives based on their immigration status and promoting white nationalist beliefs and policies.

But it’s important to remember that brutal and widespread immigration enforcement efforts have long been a bipartisan American tradition. President Obama, dubbed “deporter-in-chief” by many immigrants rights activists, ramped up removals, the more active enforcement form of deportation, which involves a court order and criminal charges to discourage people from attempting to re-enter the US after being deported.

Indeed, the Obama Administration removed over a million more people than the Bush administration. As many have pointed out, despite his grandiose goals of carrying out the “largest Mass Deportation Program in History” and the Department of Homeland Security’s public exaggeration of how many arrests and deportations have occurred, Trump would have to significantly increase the rate of deportations under his administration so far to match Obama’s numbers. While the average number of daily ICE arrests between 2015 and 2024, from the tail end of the Obama administration through the first Trump and the Biden administrations, hovered around 350 arrests per day, the average number of ICE arrests over President Obama’s first term did not dip below 790 arrests per day, hitting a peak of 882 per day in 2011. As The Independent reported last week, “To break Obama’s [2013 record number of deportations], Trump would need to double the current number of people his administration is deporting, but it’s unclear if that could be done.”

That said, Trump’s focus on targeting people who are already complying with immigration enforcement, and sending ICE officers in plainclothes to abduct people from their communities, underscores the reckless, fear-mongering, and authoritarian bent of this current deportation push. The administration seems to want to demonstrate that it makes the rules, acting on its own whims, rather than taking the Obama approach of making and enacting policies that have cruelty baked into a relatively orderly system.

White Nationalism Wins Out Over Corporate Greed (Rhetorically, Anyway)

The administration’s flip-flopping around pausing and then un-pausing deportation raids due to the concerns of certain industries also highlights the internal tensions afflicting an administration with fascist aims that also sustains itself on corrupt dealings with corporations. Trump was faced with a choice—should he prioritize ruthlessly targeting any and all undocumented people to serve the narratives of his white nationalist advisors, or make an exception so that farms and factories could continue to exploit, mistreat, and underpay undocumented employees to turn a larger profit?

This time, judging by his public proclamations at least, Trump seems to have chosen the former, though one can imagine there might be differences in enforcement priorities behind the scenes to keep industry voices happy—time will tell.

Interestingly, the back-and-forth led Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security, to issue a threat to corporations who might prioritize their profits over the Trump administration’s deportation program. Last week, she said in a statement, “there will be no safe spaces for industries who harbor violent criminals or purposely try to undermine ICE's efforts."

It’s an uncommon framing from an administration that has actively dismantled the DOJ’s ability to enforce the law against corporations, and has signaled clearly that white collar crime enforcement will be even more lenient under Trump than it was under Biden-era Attorney General Merrick Garland’s egregiously lax approach. (The DOJ even published a flowchart demonstrating how corporations can avoid prosecution through “self-disclosure” after breaking the law.)

Clearly, the Trump administration only cares about enforcing the law against corporations (or at least, threatening to) when they’re challenging his administration’s fascist political priorities.

Real vs. Imagined Threats

Ironically, corporations present astronomically more risk to people in the US and worldwide, as compared to the individuals being scapegoated as “criminals,” “rapists,” and “murderers” by a racist administration. Corporate crime (and legal but incredibly harmful corporate conduct) claims far more lives every year than individual crime and harmful acts.

Professor Donald Braman spoke to this trend in a recent interview for Corporate Crime Reporter, noting that the annual death toll from corporate crime and misconduct (and from perfectly legal but abhorrent corporate behavior) far outpaces the death toll from homicides committed by individuals. Totaling up the annual death tolls from the opioid epidemic, particulate pollution from fossil fuels, and tobacco deaths, the comparison is roughly 20,000 to 30,000 deaths from “violent crime” by individuals, vs. 930,000 deaths resulting from corporate harm.

Beyond comparing individual and corporate homicide rates, we can note that wage theft vastly outpaces individual property crime in the US. As the Economic Opportunity Institute has reported,

“Each year, employers steal a whopping $15 billion annually from workers across the country. Property loss through stolen wages surpasses property loss from criminal offenses by a landslide, which totals around $500 million yearly. Put another way: The total value of property stolen through robberies, burglaries, and carjacking is not even 4% of what employers steal from workers each year.”

What’s more, all the statistics tell us that undocumented people have a higher rate of compliance with the law than US citizens. So, even those concerned about being harmed by individuals should be more concerned about citizens than undocumented people.

These arguments shouldn’t have to be made, because undocumented people shouldn’t be guilty until proven innocent in the public imagination. This work is only necessary in order to unwind the web of racist and white nationalist lies that all US presidential administrations tell about immigration, which the Trump administration has ramped up rhetorically in recent weeks.

Those opposing the Trump administration’s targeting and scapegoating of immigrants should make sure to redirect fear and anger toward its proper target—the billionaire executives and corporations exploiting and killing all of us to serve their greed.

Follow the Revolving Door Project’s work on whatever platform works for you! You can find us on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Want more? Check out some of the pieces that we have published or contributed research or thoughts to in the last week:

The Empire Strikes First Part II — ‘Abundance’ Pablum as Counter to Left Populism

The Abundance Debate Is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It.

(BONUS) WelcomeFest w/Alex Bronzini-Vender

'Why Are People Cynical About Politics'? Ex-Obama Adviser Joins Pro-Trump Crypto Giant Coinbase

Abandon “Abundance”

Come One, Come All!

Fact Sheet: Visualizing the Home Insurance Crisis in Nebraska

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez’s Quiet Radicalism

How To End Democrats’ Civil War: Abundance liberals and populists can together combat scarcity — but one side has to come clean.

Don't Let Polls Poison Your Brain: What both centrists and progressives too often misunderstand.

Revolving Door Project Launches Corporate Crime Enforcement Capacity Tracker

Tracking State-Level DOGEs

Corruption Calendar Week 21: Trump Cuts the Corruption Cops

How Crypto Is Buying DC One Revolver At A Time

Attacks on Federal Climate Data Will Accelerate a Financial Crisis

Mapping the Home Insurance Crisis: A Closer Look at North Carolina

Why Is a Former Obama Official Attacking the Left on Climate?

Corruption Calendar Week 22: Another Week In The Circus Of Destruction

President Donald Trump gestures to the crowd after delivering remarks at Fort Bragg, North Carolina on Tuesday, June 10, 2025, during a visit to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)

It’s week twenty-two of the Revolving Door Project’s Corruption Calendar, where we highlight the latest slate of corporate corruption that’s shaping the Trump Administration, its agenda, and the material impacts of that corruption on real people. Our first twenty-one issues can be found here, and follow us on Bluesky and X for more updates on this work.

We are just over ten percent of the way through Donald Trump’s second term, an ongoing project of destruction, destabilization and self-enrichment for the president and his gaggle of sycophants.

MAKING AMERICA HEALTHY AGAIN…BY LETTING CORPORATIONS POISON YOU

What’s So Bad About Chemical Explosions Anyway? The chemical industry’s main regulator, the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, is being closed by the Trump Administration even while the board pursues crucial investigations into devastating petrochemical explosions.This includes its examinations of explosions like one that resulted in poisonous gas spewing from a Dow chemical plant in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 2023. Beth Rosenberg, a public health expert who was a member of the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board from 2013 - 2014, told Grist that “closing the CSB will mean more accidents at chemical plants, more explosions and more deaths.”

Yummy! Toxic Chemicals Are Now On The Menu. Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency announced this week that it will push back its own deadline for making public the safety information for sixteen toxic chemicals, including those “linked to cancer or developmental problems in babies.” The delay has been celebrated by the chemical industry and decried by environmentalists, and may well “stall future decisions that could limit exposures to harmful chemicals and require new protective measures for workers.”

The U.S. Forest Service Is Selling Sacred Lands To Notoriously Destructive International Mining Conglomerates. Brooke Rollins and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) this week announced the release of a Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) that paves the way for the construction of the Resolution Copper Mine at Oak Flat in Arizona. The site would be owned by international conglomerates BHP and Rio Tinto, both companies notorious for international environmental disasters. Oak Flat is itself sacred to the Apache Tribe and other Indigenous nations, but was added to Donald Trump’s permitting priority list in April, putting it on a fast track (regardless of Indigenous or environmentalist objection) for approval.

The mine has long been a protested entity since 2014 when the original land transfer was approved by Congress, and then the original EIS (published in 2021) was withdrawn by President Joe Biden in order to pursue “further tribal consultation.” Sandy Bahr, the Director of the Sierra Club’s Grand Canyon chapter told Arizona Central that “We are reviewing the environmental impact statement now, but think it is highly unlikely the Forest Service addressed the significant issues with the prior document or corrected its deficiencies…[this mine will] provide enormous financial benefits to these mining companies and cause significant harm to Oak Flat and to the public that cannot be mitigated.”

THE SEEMINGLY SOLE PURPOSE OF THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY: ENRICHING TRUMP

Coming Soon To Markets Near You: Trump’s Gaudy $500 Cell Phone. This week the Trump Organization, which is led by his sons, announced its launch of a $499 smartphone that is supposed to debut in September. The deal is a licensing agreement, meaning the phone is not directly “developed, manufactured, distributed or sold by The Trump Organization or any of their respective affiliates or principals,” but “critics have raised ethics concerns about the flurry of licensing deals and other branded-merchandise agreements surrounding Trump.” Indeed, Trump himself reported that he made more than $8 million in 2024 from licensing agreements, and is likely to make even more now that he has resumed the office of the presidency.

Donald Trump Is Making $600 Million In Income And Holds $1.6 Billion In Assets. Donald Trump reported over $600 million in income and $1.6 billion in assets in his required financial disclosures this past Friday, revealing holdings that include cryptocurrency, real estate, and “licensing deals with foreign developers.” Trump also reported making $1.3 million in royalties from a Bible he endorsed, along with “$2.8 million from Trump-branded watches, $2.5 million for Trump sneakers and fragrances, and $3 million for his book ‘Save America.’”

• Don’t Think That’s Enough? The Rich Are Using Trump’s Little Projects To Seemingly Pay Off The Administration. Don Wilson, a Chicago-based trader funneled $100 million into Trump’s bitcoin just nine weeks after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) dropped a probe into Wilson’s crypto company. Before that, Wilson’s investment company bought nearly 4 million shares of Trump Media & Technology, making Wilson one of the “biggest financiers of the group’s crypto bet.”

• Worried They Might At Least Might Pay Taxes On It? Don’t Be! Trump Is Destroying That Too. The Justice Department announced plans this week to eliminate its tax division, which is meant to encourage voluntary compliance with the tax code and to enforce penalties against tax cheats. The move serves the interest of Trump’s rich friends and donors, who famously don’t like paying taxes anyways, and will likely make it harder for normal people to dispute their returns, make it expeditiously through audit processes, and more.

Resource updates this week include:

A list of the key revolvers who have facilitated the crypto industry’s complete capture of our politics: How Crypto Is Buying DC One Revolver At A Time

Read our Hannah Story Brown in the American Prospect: Why Is a Former Obama Official Attacking the Left on Climate?

For more on our work tracking the Trump-Musk administration, visit TheRevolvingDoorProject.org/DogeWatch

And if you’ve got any tips on DOGE personnel or updates to any of our DogeWatch trackers, reach out to us at revolvingdoorproject@protonmail.com.

Week 21: Trump Cuts the Corruption Cops

President Donald Trump delivers remarks during a roundtable discussion with the Fraternal Order of Police Executive Board, Thursday, June 5, 2025, in the State Dining Room. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)

Welcome to week twenty-one of the Revolving Door Project’s Corruption Calendar, where we highlight examples of corporate corruption shaping the Trump administration’s agenda and their material impact on everyday people. Read our first twenty issues here and follow us on Bluesky and X for updates.

This week, nothing too unusual happened, which is to say that the Trump administration continued its crusade to further enrich the rich at the expense of everyone else.

CUTTING THE CORRUPTION COPS

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Makes Its Halfhearted Return. You may remember that in February, President Trump issued an executive order pausing enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act—which bars companies from bribing foreign officials—until the Attorney General reviewed the Department of Justice’s enforcement guidelines. Upon completion of the review this week, which significantly narrowed the guidelines, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that the DOJ had closed “approximately half of the open investigations initiated under the previous Administration.” Also cut in half was the DOJ unit tasked with the law’s enforcement, which went from 32 prosecutors in January to about 15 in June, according to reporting from Reuters.

Public Integrity, A Relic Of The Past. The DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, which prosecutes political corruption, has been “defanged,” according to an investigative report by Reuters. Among the bombshells in the article is that the Public Integrity Section “has lost its authority to file new cases,” and “its staff has been reduced from more than 30 attorneys to five.” Longstanding rules requiring the Public Integrity Section to consult, or even approve of, charges against public officials have been nixed, which “frees political appointees in the Justice Department to prosecute public officials without going through a review intended to prevent baseless or politically motivated prosecutions.” The full article is well worth your time.

For more on the Trump administration’s war on the parts of the government that protect us from corporate abuse and corruption, see our Cuts to Corporate Enforcement Capacity Tracker.

MUSKRATS BURROWED EVERYWHERE

Despite The Feud, Musk’s DOGE Continues To Be Musk’s DOGE. ProPublica this week continued its fantastic reporting on DOGE with a large update to its DOGE tracker, adding many DOGE staffers who hadn’t previously been reported. The outlet also reported that “at least 23 DOGE officials are making cuts at federal agencies that regulate the industries that employed them.” And Elon Musk continues to loom large, as the reporters found that “at least 38 DOGE members currently work or have worked for businesses run by Musk,” and “at least nine have invested in Musk companies or own stock in them.”

Similar analysis by RDP, which we will continue to update, has come to essentially the same conclusion: our tracker currently has at least 47 DOGE staffers with direct ties to Elon Musk and his companies. We are also tracking DOGE staffers with ties to Peter Thiel (there are at least nine), and we are keeping up to date with the DOGE staffers who have reportedly left the government.

BIRTHDAY BASHINGS

Trump Militarizes LA And DC In Very Different Ways. Tomorrow is Trump’s birthday, Flag Day, and the 250th anniversary of the creation of the US Army. For one or more of those three equally important holidays, Trump is set to receive a military parade in Washington, DC, a profound misuse of public dollars that will serve only to flatter his ego. It’s a stark contrast to the awful scenes coming out of Los Angeles, where the Trump administration has sicced the National Guard and active-duty Marines on people protesting the administration’s horrific deportation policy, in a (likely illegal) abuse of his power as commander in chief. The forcible removal and handcuffing of a sitting senator at a Department of Homeland Security press briefing yesterday was a natural, if utterly terrifying, development.

ORLANDO’S BOON: EASIEST WAY TO BREAK THE LAW IS TO MAKE TRUMP MONEY

Trump’s SPAC Guy Set To Catch A Break From Trump’s SEC. Patrick Orlando, an investor who helped take Trump’s media company public, was sued by the SEC last year over allegations that he misrepresented his company’s merger with Trump Media & Technology Group. In April, Orlando and the SEC came to an “agreement in principle” to resolve the charges, but Politico this week obtained more detail on the content of that “agreement”: the SEC has proposed to totally dismiss the case against Orlando.

PROMISES MADE, PROMISES KEPT AS POLLUTERS PROSPER

EPA Gives Oil Executives What They Paid For. Last year, the Washington Post reported on a dinner that Trump held with oil executives where he simply asked them to give him $1 billion in campaign money in exchange for a host of regulatory rollbacks that would benefit them. A new proposed rule from the Environmental Protection Agency makes good on that promise by “proposing to repeal all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants.” The agency further proposes “to make a finding that GHG emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants do not contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution,” which will be news to most scientists and anyone who actually lives near a power plant.

THE BILL IS STILL BAD, FOLKS

OBBBrother. One very pure expression of Trump’s corruption continues to be his “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which is essentially a direct transfer of income and wealth from the poor to the rich. The bill has a somewhat uncertain path in the Senate, where some Republicans have stated their opposition to the bill’s deep Medicaid cuts and others have expressed a desire to cut healthcare spending on low-income Americans even more.

In a telling series of events, the desire to cut spending on social programs in order to make room for tax cuts for the rich miraculously led Republicans to briefly consider a reasonable proposal last week: cracking down on “upcoding” in Medicare “Advantage,” a practice whereby private insurers improperly siphon money from public coffers by lying about the severity of the conditions of the people they cover. The savings here could be significant, but realizing them would require making insurers forgo some ill-gotten gains, so naturally, Republicans dutifully backtracked this week. (It should be noted that a crackdown on upcoding can occur to some extent without congressional action. Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Dr. Oz said he would go after upcoding in his confirmation hearing, but to actually do so he would have to reverse course from his previous gig shilling for Medicare Advantage.)

Resource updates this week include:

Polling Tracker: Americans’ Opinions on Oligarchy and Corruption

DOGE Staff Tracker

And see our Jacob Plaza in The American Prospect this week: “The Escalating, Bloody Exploitation of Meat Workers Under Trump”

For more on our work tracking the Trump-Musk administration, visit TheRevolvingDoorProject.org/DogeWatch.

And if you’ve got any tips on DOGE personnel or updates to any of our DogeWatch trackers, reach out to us at revolvingdoorproject@protonmail.com.