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With the National Guard haunting the streets of Washington, D.C., it’s been an ominous week. DC takeover aside, the most immediately visible expressions of Trump’s efforts to consolidate and expand his power are: the administration’s ongoing multi-pronged efforts to let corporations break the law with impunity while raking in record profits; a new shakedown tactic to secure a cut of technology sales to China; and an attack on the research grant process, which is critical to scientific pursuits across the country. 

As we’ve been documenting every week of Trump 2.0 in our Corruption Calendar newsletter, the second Trump administration has been egregiously corrupt. Many key appointees, as well as Trump himself, have blatant conflicts of interest and are using their positions to enrich themselves and their friends. Indeed, Trump’s cabinet contains a historic number of billionaires. Every week, more news breaks on the way corporations and the wealthy are lining their pockets due to Trump’s policy decisions, at the expense of the rest of us.

As the Trump administration continues to expand the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in its operations, we are cataloguing examples of how AI is being deployed by federal agencies to replace human workers and undermine transparency and due process.

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.

According to a new report out from TRAC this week, federal prosecutions of corporate crime have continued to decline under the second Trump administration, after hitting a 30-year low under Biden’s Attorney General (and shameless Big Law revolver) Merrick Garland and his Deputy AG Lisa Monaco. 

Surprising no one, Trump’s 2026 budget proposal reads as a nakedly self-interested list of his priorities. It attacks his favorite targets—DEI and climate programs, social services, and non-billionaires—while directing funds to his favorite pet projects: building the border wall, violent mass deportation efforts, privatizing healthcare, enriching defense contractors, and making more and more data available to be mined by tech companies (see the VA section below), including Trump’s allies in Silicon Valley.

While national security adviser Michael Waltz’s Signal chat security breach debacle has dominated headlines this week, it’s not the only act of reckless disregard for the safety and security of Americans in the news. This week also saw projections that Trump-Musk cuts to the IRS could lead to a $500 billion tax revenue shortfall this year, with a slump already in effect at this point in tax season.

Over the past couple months, the Trump administration has fired approximately 2500 people at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which provides lifelong healthcare services and non-healthcare benefits such as disability compensation, home loans and life insurance to veterans. There has been widespread outrage among veterans in response to the administration’s actions thus far, but Trump and VA Secretary Doug Collins remain set on tightening the screws. 

After a week of rumors that the Trump administration was planning to implement severe cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), it happened—though the White House reportedly denied that it would. This past Friday, senior officials were informed that 5200 relatively recent hires would be fired across multiple agencies at HHS, with 1300 at the CDC specifically.