Revolving Door Project | Cutting Crooks Some Slack

The administrative state’s Kafkaesque transmogrification into the mafia state

This article was originally published to Watchdog Weekly. Read it here.

This Saturday, December 20, will mark 11 months of the second Trump administration. It’s been less than a year and American cities are being patrolled by National Guard units, the president’s family has amassed roughly $5 billion in crypto wealth, we have thousands of soldiers deployed in an aggressive posture around Venezuela’s territorial waters, American citizens are being threatened with deportation, and our government has condemned millions of people to death through savage USAID cuts as part of a DOGE meme scheme that did not even save money.

Despite aiming for $2 trillion in cuts, DOGE itself only reported cutting $214 billion. Independent reporting from Politico estimated that it really saved less than 5 percent of that, which would put it somewhere around $10-11 billion. That’s a rounding error in a $7 trillion budget, and that’s before getting into how much time and energy was sapped from public servants doing their actual jobs or lost future revenue from issuing and collecting fines, fees, assessments, etc.

All of that has happened in less than a year. And yet, we are no closer to most of the administration’s stated policy goals. Tariffs have been oscillating between reckless abandon and running headlong into a painful wall of reality. Prices are not down, indeed the economy is weaker than it was a year ago; perhaps no president has ever squandered a healthy economy as rapidly and completely as Donald Trump. ICE is meeting stiff resistance across the country, with a majority of Americans disapproving of Trump’s cruel immigration policies. Viewed as a conservative ideological project, the Trump administration is an abject failure.

Viewed, however, as a mad dash to empower elite actors and reorient the economy towards a state-centered mafia, the administration has so far been a rousing success.

The pay-to-play nature of Trump 2.0 is staggeringly nonchalant. Even more than in his first term, Donald Trump has ushered in a pardon “cottage industry,” with wealthy lawyers and lobbyists employed to schmooze and solicit the president’s personal favor. Did I mention that his family had amassed about $5 billion in crypto, by the way?

The constant, lurid examples of elite impunity and grift from the Trump administration underscores the poor health of our republic and civic institutions. But it also helps to obscure the more systematic, methodical ways in which the capacity for American rule of law is being quickly whittled down.

To help keep you abreast of developments in the decline of democracy, the RDP team has been maintaining a number of trackers, including the administration’s attack on quality government data, lackadaisical responses to natural disasters, aviation crashes, the worsening state of public health and the rise in communicable diseases, and more. This week, we published an update to our Corporate Enforcement Capacity tracker, which overviews the disembowelment of several of the federal government’s most critical regulatory agencies. And things are bleak.

One estimate had at least a fourth of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) staff already out the door in September. As a reminder, these are the people responsible for protecting our air and water from dangerous pollution, and staffing was still a major concern, even with some welcome Biden-era hiring, after years of sustained attrition. These cuts come alongside a full assault on the Clean Air Act and a surge in fossil fuel pollution driven in part by energy-guzzling data centers. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is suffering from a “brain drain” and has lost 11 percent of its workforce.

Elsewhere, the Centers for Disease Control was set to lose a quarter of its staff as of the end of October, at a time when outbreaks in preventable disease are surging. The Department of Housing and Urban Development doesn’t have enough lawyers and is seeing its hands tied in enforcing fair housing laws. The Internal Revenue Service, one of the greatest success stories of the Biden administration, has lost 25 percent of its staff and is now relying on AI to fill the gap, so at least we all get to look forward to filing taxes via chatbot! The loss of staff capacity at the IRS is projected to cost at least $160 billion annually in lost revenue collection. $160 billion!! And that isn’t from ordinary people who pay primarily via income tax withholding…

Nothing, though, has been hit as hard as financial regulation.

Bank supervisory teams have been gutted at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, even though that staff is funded by premiums that banks pay for deposit insurance, along with fees and assessments. The FDIC has cut a little under a fifth of its total staff despite it not creating any cost-savings for the taxpayer.

As of May, the Securities and Exchange Commission had cut about 15 percent of its headcount and is targeting a return to 2010 levels, but don’t worry: it’s reducing workload by ending the requirement that companies file quarterly earnings reports! The SEC has also seen a chunk of its workload transferred to the usually smaller and weaker Commodity Futures Trading Commission, after the GENIUS Act (an oxymoron of Biblical proportion) moved significant crypto oversight out of securities regulation. Like its bigger cousin, the CFTC has lost 15 percent of its workforce. It is also down to a single commissioner, out of a usual five.

The federal government is now poorly positioned to protect Americans from disease, pollution, corporate exploitation, and financial collapse. The storm clouds are already gathering on the horizon: measles outbreaks, a rise in smog that has left half of Americans breathing unsafe air, and inflated asset markets that are increasingly being integrated into the main banking system. It’s only a matter of time until disaster strikes. When that happens, it’s important to understand just how culpable the Trump administration is for gutting the government’s capacity to enforce the laws. Without enforcement, our bedrock laws are barely more than pieces of paper.

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