Resources Tracking the Trend in Letting Corporations Off the Hook
Last updated: 5/29/25
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.
As the authors conclude:
“Prosecutions for various criminal case types reflect what behaviors a state prioritizes for enforcement. Long-term trends suggest that after FY 2011, successive administrations of both U.S. political parties have deprioritized enforcing white-collar crimes. Unlike drug and weapons offenses where state and local law enforcement agencies often prosecute these types of crimes under their statutes, if white-collar offenses are prosecuted the federal government statutes alone typically must be relied on. Admittedly, white-collar crimes are complex and involve plaintiffs who frequently have access to highly experienced teams of attorneys than plaintiffs in other types of cases can afford.
Neither of these explanations provides an adequate excuse. In fact, it suggests the opposite that more attention to white-collar crimes is due. A lack of enforcement against crimes of fraud or anti-trust activities raises serious questions about constitutional guarantees and the bedrock principle that no one is above the law in the United States.”
We couldn’t agree more. Recently, we released a new tracker—Cuts to Corporate Enforcement Capacity—recording cuts the Trump-Musk regime has made at federal agencies charged with investigating and initiating enforcement actions against corporations for wrongdoing. We hope the tracker, which will be updated monthly, can serve as a resource to understand the damage done so far to the federal government’s ability to address white-collar crime.
Even before the onset of Trump 2.0, we routinely criticized the lax approach to corporate crime under Biden and Garland. Just in the last year of the Biden Administration we published these critiques:
- April 2024 – “Justice’s Slow Prosecution of Trump Is Just the Start of Their Sluggishness”
- May 2024 – “Merrick Garland’s Delay May Mean Justice Denied”
- July 2024 – “A Window Opens”
- August 2024 – “The Trump Administration Made a Mockery of the Law. Why Hasn’t Biden Tossed its Cases?”
- Nov 2024 – The Biden Administration Completely Failed to Address Corporate Crime. Can We Blame Voters for Noticing?
- Dec 2024 – “As the Biden Admin Winds Down, Will They Take Stands To Protect The Public?”
- Dec 2024 – Corporate Crime Reporter Interview on the Biden Administration’s Failure to Address Corporate Crime
In my November 2024 piece on the Biden administration’s lax enforcement of the law against corporations, I included an analysis of TRAC data:
“TRAC’s analysis of the latest available DOJ records (through September 2024), released last week, demonstrates that there was barely an increase in prosecutions over 2023, with 4,332 prosecutions—fewer than in all but the final year of the first Trump administration.
In addition to the sliding number of prosecutions—which seem to suggest that the Biden administration was even less motivated to prosecute corporate wrongdoing than corporate scam artist Donald Trump himself—the first three years of the Biden DOJ saw a continued reliance on leniency agreements when addressing the crimes of murderous corporations like Boeing.
As we’ve worked with allies to highlight this year, Boeing’s 2018 and 2019 737 Max crashes killed 346 people. Nevertheless, Boeing received yet another “sweetheart deal” and slap-on-the-wrist fine from DOJ in July of this year after violating their 2021 deferred prosecution agreement. (What’s the deterrence impact of “deferred” prosecution if it never actually arrives?)”
Our concern over Biden and Garland’s soft approach to holding Boeing accountable was, unfortunately, borne out last week. On Friday, Trump and AG Pam Bondi’s DOJ announced that they would drop the felony case against Boeing–the one that already offered Boeing said “sweetheart deal” in exchange for a guilty plea to reflect the reality that their greed and negligence killed 346 people.
Our analysis of the decline in corporate crime enforcement has also benefitted greatly from the committed work of our friends and collaborators at Public Citizen. They have kept the spotlight on the Biden administration’s willingness to all but ignore corporate wrongdoing, and are continuing to track the de-facto legalization of corporate crime under Trump.
Public Citizen resources include:
- Ongoing: Corporate Enforcement Tracker – “ a resource for watchdogging ongoing federal investigations and cases against alleged corporate wrongdoing that are at risk of being dropped, weakened, or otherwise modified by the Trump administration.”
- March 2025: Corporate Clemency: How Trump Is Halting Enforcement Against Corporate Lawbreakers
- April 2025: Corporate Crime Reporter – Rick Claypool on Trump Pardoning a Corporation and the Decline of Corporate Enforcement
- 2018-2025: Annual reports analyzing DOJ data on corporate prosecutions and plea deals, as far back as the first Trump administration (in this format)
- April 2025 – During Biden’s Final Year, Prosecutions of Corporate Criminals Fell to a Record Low
- March 2024 – Enforcement Uptick: In 2023, DOJ Corporate Crime Prosecutions Increased Slightly
- October 2023 – Corporate Prosecution Doldrums: Corporate Crime Prosecutions Remain Near Record Low in 2022
- April 2022 – Enforcement Abyss: As Corporate Prosecutions Plunge, Biden’s Department of Justice Pledges Corporate Crime Enforcement Surge
- May 2021 – Corporate Criminals Above The Law: Corporate Prosecutions Plunged to Their Lowest in a Quarter Century while Corporate Leniency Agreements Rose to the Highest in Trump’s Term
- September 2019 – Soft on Corporate Crime: Justice Department Refuses to Prosecute Corporate Lawbreakers, Fails to Deter Repeat Offenders
- July 2018 – Corporate Impunity: “Tough on Crime” Trump Is Weak On Corporate Crime and Wrongdoing
- April 2025 – During Biden’s Final Year, Prosecutions of Corporate Criminals Fell to a Record Low
Additionally, this week, our friends at The American Prospect launched a series highlighting the rampant opportunities for fraud and abuse that the at turns precipitous and steady decline in corporate crime enforcement under Trump, Biden, and Trump again has unleashed.
5/27/25 – “The Golden Age of Scams” – How Trump’s second term will unleash dishonesty and abuse across the economy
5/28/25 – “Predatory Lenders in the Operating Room” – Medical credit cards have gone mainstream, preying on sick people at their most vulnerable.
5/29/25 – “Sunburnt” – How door-to-door solar salespeople can scam homeowners, and what the government could do to stop it.
5/30/25 – “Usury in the Water” – There’s never been a better time to be a loan shark for small businesses.
We’ll continue to update this resource list as more work is released, as the situation is likely to continue accelerating under Trump’s shamelessly corrupt and pro-corporate regime.
Image: “U.S. Department of Justice headquarters, August 12, 2006.jpg” is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.