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Weeks 44-55: The Swamp Is Now A Corporate Bazar
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 thirty-seven issues here, and follow us on Bluesky and X for more updates on this work.
The Antitrust Charade is Over
According to recent reporting from Bloomberg Law, law firms are now openly advising corporate clients that the key to merger approval isn’t legal argument, but hiring lobbyists to pressure political appointees at the White House.
The Take You’ll Hear: “This is just savvy corporate strategy” and “The White House is taking a more ‘holistic’ view of deals.”
The Reality: This isn’t savvy; it’s the corruption of a legal process.
The signal moment was the firing of senior DOJ officials Roger Alford and Bill Rinner after they criticized the lobbying blitz for the Hewlett Packard Enterprise-Juniper Networks merger. The message was clear: the “adults in the room” are gone, replaced by political operatives. Law firms like Sidley Austin have gotten the memo, ditching the law for political influence peddled by the likes of Trump ally Mike Davis. When the DOJ’s leadership overrides its career staff as a matter of course, you don’t have an enforcement agency, you have a political rubber stamp.
CFPB’s Empty Promises to Synapse Victims
The CFPB pledged to use its Civil Penalty Fund to help victims of the Synapse collapse recover their frozen funds. Don’t hold your breath. The fund is filled by fines on financial institutions, and the CFPB hasn’t issued a single penalty since January. Under Acting Director Russell Vought, the bureau is being deliberately weakened, leaving the fund depleted and consumers out to dry.
HUD’s Cruelty-by-Bureaucracy
HUD is planning to slash guaranteed funding for permanent housing from 90% to 30%, pushing “self-sufficiency” over basic human dignity. Secretary Scott Turner calls this reducing “government dependency,” but leaders of homelessness response networks at the local level are warning that “people are going to die” as a result of this action. The new rules also disadvantage agencies with DEI policies, making this a culture-war assault timed to cause maximum suffering to the most vulnerable.
Trump’s AI Preemption Gift to Big Tech
A leaked draft executive order shows Trump’s plans to nullify state AI regulations. The order would create an “AI Litigation Task Force” for the sole purpose of punishing California, Colorado, or any other state with so-called “onerous” laws regulating AI. The administration claims it’s fighting “fear-driven” rules, but this is nothing more than an a16z-sponsored handout to Marc Andreessen and his Big Tech pals. And this is no esoteric matter–many of the laws that AI magnates seek to foreclose would protect ordinary consumers and Americans from being collateral damage from acts reflecting either the intentional or negligent greed of our tech oligarchs.
A Gold Bar for a Tariff Cut
President Trump granted Switzerland a massive tariff reduction shortly after receiving lavish gifts—including a gold Rolex desk clock and an engraved gold bar—from Swiss billionaires. Negotiations had stalled until this “great new dynamic” (read: bling) was established. Cartoonish pay-to-play deals continue to be a theme of this administration, but remember that there are real material impacts of Trump’s corrupt trade policy.
Trump’s Personal Stake in a Media Merger
President Trump holds a personal financial stake of up to $1 million in Warner Bros. Discovery bonds, purchased just as Oracle billionaire and Trump ally Larry Ellison was preparing a bid for the company. Days later, Trump signed an order boosting Oracle’s position. If the merger succeeds, Trump will profit handsomely.
RDP Work Roundup: A Turkey of a Month
While you’re bracing for political arguments across the Thanksgiving table, we’ve been documenting the elite corruption and corporate capture that should give everyone indigestion. From a fallen technocrat’s embarrassing emails to the Supreme Court’s ethically-challenged justices, here’s a helping of the accountability work we’ve served up this month.
The Larry Summers Shame-Spiral
Turns out, asking a convicted sex offender to help you pick up women is bad for your brand. The release of emails detailing Larry Summers’s long-term correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein has triggered a long-overdue collapse of his credibility. Our Dylan Gyauch-Lewis details how Summers’s entire career—from pushing deregulation that crashed the economy to shilling for crypto and predatory lenders—has been shielded by a system that values his brand over his integrity.
Likewise, as Dylan Gyauch-Lewis and Henry Burke reported, the stampede to disassociate has been a masterclass in hypocrisy. Firms that paid Summers for the “serious credibility” of his elite brand are now quietly scrubbing him from their websites. It’s a transparent attempt to protect their own reputations from the stink of his—proving the whole arrangement was a sham to begin with.
Environment: Polluters & Profiteers
The climate crisis is bad enough without corrupt courts and greedy insurers making it worse. Our
Hannah Story Brown exposed Exxon and Suncor running to a Supreme Court that’s practically in their pocket. With Justice Alito holding ConocoPhillips stock, Justice Gorsuch invested in oil-heavy funds, and Chief Justice Roberts collecting Exxon dividends, the Court’s joke of an ethics code is all that stands between polluters and the accountability they so richly deserve.
Kenny Stancil also revealed how private insurers like Neptune Insurance popped champagne as the federal flood insurance program shut down. Their stock soared by 24% during the crisis—exactly the kind of “individual initiative” the Project 2025 pushers love. Privatization means profits over people, leaving homeowners high and dry while execs get rich.
DOJ Conflicts & HHS Hypocrites:
Andrea Beaty revealed that Chad Mizelle, a Trump-era DOJ Chief of Staff, just disclosed that he held up to a quarter-million dollars in stocks—including in Apple and Visa—while his department was actively suing them. He conveniently completed the paperwork after leaving his post, a brazen end-run around ethics rules that let him oversee his own portfolio from the public bench.
Toni Aguilar Rosenthal and Julian Scoffield explained that RFK Jr.’s HHS is stuffed with corporate soldiers. The agency is now run by a McKinsey alum, an FDA deputy who defended Abbott during the infant formula crisis, and a Peter Thiel protégé with no medical background who wants to let drug companies do whatever they want. It’s a perfect tableau of how populist rhetoric is used to mask a corporatist agenda.
Follow the Revolving Door Project’s work on whatever platform works for you! You can find us on that website formerly known as Twitter, Bluesky, 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:
DOJ’s RealPage Settlement Doesn’t Achieve The Corporate Crackdown Tenants Deserve
Larry Summers has long seemed unstoppable. Then came the Epstein emails.
Why Elites Never Die In America
NATO and EU: instruments for the military-industrial complex
Companies Are Trying to Hide Their Ties to Larry Summers
Larry Summers, Liberalism’s Milton Friedman
Larry Summers, ‘Ashamed’ Over Epstein Ties, Steps Back From Public Commitments
Image Credit: “Larry Summers” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
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