Trump administration sets up protection plans for Big Tech and Polluters at the public’s expense.
This article was originally published on Watchdog Weekly. Read and subscribe here.
Welcome to Revolving Door Project’s Corruption Calendar, where we provide in-depth explanations of the material consequences—real and potential—of the Trump administration’s corrupt policymaking, with an emphasis on tangible harms to working people. Read our first 41 issues here, and follow us on Bluesky and X for more updates on this work.
Trump’s second year has started just like his first year ended, chaotically. The president carried his imperialist gospel to Davos, taunting allies with his designs for Greenland; he ultimately TACOed, which may yet be a temporary tactical retreat, but not before a rebuke from world leaders, including Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. Domestically, this past week immigration enforcement murdered another U.S. citizen in Minneapolis, prompting Senate Democrats to threaten a partial government shutdown over Department of Homeland Security funding. The American Prospect is keeping “A Running Count of How Many People ICE Has Killed and Injured.”
And yet, as the administration violates our First and Fourth Amendment rights, Trump continues to find time to push a corporate agenda, taking care of himself along the way.
Tech’s Government Protection Plan
Historically, our European counterpart regulators have more aggressively policed tech companies, with real potential upside for American consumers, especially considering the fact that the European market is large enough to blunt tech companies’ exit threats. What’s more, one set of practices in Europe and another stateside is costly, so tech firms are engineering a race to the regulatory bottom. This has taken the shape of an aggressive lobbying campaign in Brussels and financially lubricated engagement with the U.S. federal government to optimize a global regulatory framework that serves their bottom lines and predatory practices.
David Dayen recently reported on a Public Citizen analysis showing that the Trump administration has helped Big Tech change the laws in 64 other countries to be more favorable to the industry’s agenda. In December, the State Department barred European Union officials from entering the country, framing it as retaliation for what it claimed was censorship of U.S. tech platforms, i.e. imposing regulation that holds Big Tech accountable and promotes fair competition.
European leaders initially pushed back, but ultimately capitulated: new EU rules are decidedly more Big Tech friendly, and foreign governments have rolled back digital regulations, taxes, and other restrictions since Trump returned to the White House. Public Citizen also found that Trump’s tariffs and trade deals were repeatedly used as leverage to benefit U.S. tech firms, publishing a list of the foreign regulations targeted by these agreements.
Here’s a particularly alarming example: the Trump administration has stepped in to defend “free speech” rights on X. Why? Because Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok has been generating sexualized images of women and children. Last week U.K. officials threatened to ban X for failing to curb the proliferation of pornographic deepfakes, but instead of recognizing this practice as a problem, State Department officials threatened to punish the U.K. for taking action against X. First MechaHilter and white genocide, now this.
The Feds working for Big Tech is no accident. Once Trump won in 2024, Big Tech started buttering him up for this kind of service. NBC News reported that a Trump-aligned super PAC received major contributions from megadonors with government business after Trump won the 2024 election. Post-election donors include tech executives such as Open AI’s Greg Brockman ($12.5 million), who has partnered with the Trump administration to boost AI infrastructure, and Palantir’s Alexander Karp ($1 million) whose company received a $30 million contract to develop ICE surveillance tools. NBC’s analysis of Federal Election Commission records show that more than a dozen donors gave at least $1 million to the MAGA Inc. super PAC. None of these donors had given political donations of more than $100,000 previously, and for some, this was the first time donating to a Trump PAC.
Serving Cancer On A Plate
At the Environmental Protection Agency, a former agriculture industry lobbyist helped reinstate a previously banned and potentially fatal pesticide. Kyle Kunkler, a former American Soybean Association lobbyist, was exempted from recusal on pesticide regulation despite falling inside the mandatory “cooling off” period required of new government employees. The EPA ethics director offered a loose interpretation of ethics rules to justify allowing Kunkler to work on reinstating dicamba, a pesticide favored by soybean farmers.
A federal court banned dicamba in 2020 and again in 2024. Dicamba use is linked to the increased risk of certain cancers and is extremely harmful to nonmodified crops: its propensity to drift regularly leads to damage to neighboring farms. Despite these two court orders, the EPA announced plans to revive dicamba last July.
At the same time, two chemical industry vets, Nancy Beck and Lynn Dekleva, were appointed to head the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention. Both served in the first Trump administration and previously worked at the American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry’s main trade group. Beck, in particular, is “known for fighting strict chemical regulations and aligning policy with industry interests.” She pushed to reverse proposed bans on solvents linked to cancers and neurological disorders.
The effects of the corporate takeover at the EPA are all encompassing. Now, for the first time since its inception, the seemingly pro-pollution EPA will no longer assign a dollar value to the human health impacts of deadly air pollutants. The agency will no longer estimate the monetary value of lives saved when setting limits for fine particulate matter and ozone, two air pollutants responsible for at least 53,000 American deaths per year, and 8.34 million deaths globally. The cost to companies for complying with pollution regulation will be the EPA’s only consideration when determining monetary value. The horrific change aligns the agency with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which pushed the EPA to fix “the problems with its cost-benefit analysis.”
Elsewhere, protections for groundwater and the environment were loosened elsewhere in the name of private interests. NPR obtained documents showing that the Department of Energy quietly overhauled nuclear safety rules without public disclosure, cutting hundreds of pages from existing safety requirements. According to the new language, environmental protections are no longer a “must,” but are now considerations to “avoid or minimize radioactive contamination.”
Just one-third of the original safety recommendations remain intact, with the changes intended to accelerate the development of small modular reactors, a new generation of nuclear technology backed by billions of dollars from private equity, venture capital, and tech giants Amazon, Google, and Meta. A May executive order called for three of these reactors to be operational by July 4, 2026, a little more than half the time it typically needed to build a new reactor.
Keep in mind: nuclear power’s recent run of good safety is noteworthy, but it has occurred under close regulatory scrutiny. There is no reason to extrapolate safety from the recent past into a present in which rapacious 21st Century American businesspeople know that the government is opposed to enforcing laws broken by the rich.
Relatedly…
Quick Corruption Hits
- Corporations were left off the hook big time in Trump’s first year back in the White House. Public Citizen’s Rick Claypool has been actively documenting the drastic pullback in executive branch enforcement against corporate crime and lawbreaking. In all, 159 enforcement actions against 166 corporations were either cancelled or stopped. Eighteen corporations avoided a combined $3.1 billion in fines and penalties. One-third of the corporations escaping punishment have ties to the Trump administration, either through donating to Trump’s inauguration, White House ballroom, or presidential campaign; relationships with Trump’s private businesses; or revolving door connections through lobbyists and former staffers.
- The Trump administration revoked a Biden-era rule requiring higher staffing levels at nursing homes to prevent patient neglect. The New York Times reported that the rule change came after nursing home executives donated $4.8 million to the MAGA Inc. super-PAC and a lunch with industry lobbyists at a Trump golf course, where they “urged the president to formally repeal the harmful minimum staffing mandate[…]” Soon after, Trump administration lawyers stopped defending the rule in court; within months after the meeting, the Department of Health and Human Services eliminated the rule entirely. Healthcare scholars warn that patients will die as a result; the staffing rule was estimated to save 13,000 lives per year.
Basically, a competent political opposition might be engaging an effort at getting people who love their parents or grandparents to care about this wildly irresponsible corruption. But we’re writing about America, alas. - U.S. District Judge Williams Young issued a blistering rebuke of the Trump administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian protests last year, accusing Cabinet officials of engaging in an “unconstitutional conspiracy” to deprive outspoken students of their First Amendment rights. Judge Young went further, explicitly labeling Trump an “authoritarian.” The remarks came during a hearing on the administration’s targeting of university students by immigration enforcement for their political views. Last September, Judge Young ruled that senior officials illegally arrested and deported students based on their activism.
- Immigration officials are escalating their attacks on Americans’ civil liberties. An internal ICE memo authorizes officers to enter homes using only an administrative warrant, sanctioned by an agency official but insufficient under Supreme Court precedent to permit home entry. The Court has ruled that, absent a judge-signed warrant, law enforcement officers are generally prohibited from entering a residence. Nevertheless, ICE officers have been observed forcibly entering homes during the administration’s deportation blitz, raising serious Fourth Amendment concerns.
- The New York Times editorial board reviewed the known sources of the Trump family’s new streams of income. In all, they estimate that Trump has amassed just north of $1.4 billion from the presidency, acknowledging this to be an undercount since many of his profits remain hidden from the public (more robust estimates place this figure closer to $5 billion).
Photo: President Donald Trump delivers remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Wednesday, January 21, 2026, at the Davos Congress Center. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)