Week 21: Trump Cuts the Corruption Cops
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
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.