With Liberty For Rich Criminals Above All
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Welcome to Week Seven of the Revolving Door Project’s Corruption Calendar, where we highlight examples of corporate corruption shaping the Trump administration’s agenda and their material impact on everyday people. Read our first six issues here and follow us on Bluesky and X for #CorruptionCalendar updates.
The seventh week of Trump’s presidency was a stark reminder of how little the public’s wellbeing factors into his administration’s decisions. This week, the administration reiterated its position that it’s open season for corporate predators, RFK Jr. moved to abolish public input into public health regulations, co-president Elon Musk found new ways to exploit the federal contracting system, banking regulators chose Wall Street over Main Street, and a corporate lobbyist stepped in to facilitate the sale of precious public lands to lumber companies.
Surely, amidst these assaults on ordinary people, Representative Al Green’s ardent defense of Medicaid is the last thing that should have merited Congressional attention, let alone censure.
The Trump Administration’s Dogged Determination To Ensure An Open Season For Corporate Crime
- Trump administration invites criminals to park their dirty money in the United States. This Monday, the Treasury Department announced that it would no longer enforce the Corporate Transparency Act, a groundbreaking anti-corruption law passed in 2021 which aims to curb “the use of anonymous shell companies to conduct illegal financial activity in part by recording and maintaining a list of the true owners of certain U.S. businesses.”
As the FACT Coalition notes, Treasury’s decision “reopens the floodgates to dirty money in the U.S.” Nonenforcement of this critical accountability measure, which was actually supported by the first Trump administration, will likely unleash a flood of various kinds of criminal activity, including money laundering, drug trafficking, tax evasion, and more.
- The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau extended its recent streak of lawsuit reversals, dropping its probe into JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo over Zelle fraud. This past Tuesday, the CFPB dismissed its lawsuit against Early Warning Services, the operator of the Zelle payments network, and three large banks that own it. The agency initially sued the service last December over its failure to “to protect consumers from widespread fraud on America’s most widely available peer-to-peer payment network.” It had found that due to the absence of effective safeguards, consumers had lost over $870 million while using Zelle. The reversal is a bitter loss for hundreds of thousands of consumers who had filed fraud complaints and the latest reminder of the agency’s abdication of its responsibility to protect everyday people.
- Wealthy individuals already employ all sorts of tricks to evade taxes, but their mission will be made much easier by plans to cut more than 50 percent of the IRS workforce. The New York Times reported earlier this week that Trump plans to slash the Internal Revenue Service’s staff by 50 percent. As the Times notes, a weakly staffed agency would be unable to effectively handle a busy tax season or conduct complex audits, ensuring reduced scrutiny of corporations and wealthy individuals.
- Our friends at Public Citizen found that the “Trump administration has already halted or moved to dismiss enforcement investigations and cases against 89 corporations” in a new report into Trump’s ‘corporate clemency’ program. Per the report, “at least 34 corporations facing enforcement actions collectively contributed more than $34 million to Trump’s inaugural festivities. These 34 corporations are facing a total of 60 separate federal investigations and lawsuits.” Read more from the report here.
- Per Marisa Kabas, the Securities and Exchange Commission recently closed major regional offices in Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. This followed an email order from the Musk-infiltrated General Services Administration to terminate office space leases. The intended impact is obvious: to further ease fraud and financial crimes.
Public Health And Food Safety Take A Backseat To Corporate Interests As RFK Jr. Proves His Promised Transparency Is A Sham
- RFK Jr. Seeks To Conduct Major Health Policy Decisions In the Shadows. Late last week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. issued a new rule that would eliminate public input in the Department’s rulemaking process. HHS’s new policy statement abandons the Department’s longtime commitment to a notice and comment period when considering rules and regulations “relating to agency management or personnel or to public property, loans, grants, benefits, or contracts.” It’s another dagger to the heart of accountable government that would ensure corporations are the only entities able to influence health policy regulations. Moreover, it frees HHS to secretly make wholesale changes to benefits programs like Medicaid, as well as grants tied to NIH funding.
- Revolving door alert at the FDA, as lawyer who defended infant formula maker Abbott Laboratories joins as new director of the food division. Last year, Abbott Laboratories faced lawsuits over its failure to “adequately warn parents that its specialized formula for premature infants was associated with an elevated risk of a deadly bowel condition.” Its representative in those cases was former Jones Day attorney Kyle Diamantas, who is now the director of the Food and Drug Administration’s food division, which regulates infant formula. In one of the cases, the jury found Abbott liable for “$95 million in compensatory and $400 million in punitive damages.” It’s a truly revolting episode of a corporate villain being handed the responsibility to ensure 80 percent of our food supply is safe. An oversight regime that favors Diamantas’ former clients would undoubtedly endanger all of us.
Co-President Elon Musk Unearths New Ways To Potentially Enrich His Businesses
- Senior Federal Aviation Administration officials to staff: Please take no notes of our latest conspiracy to funnel public money to Mr. Musk. In last week’s edition, we flagged that Elon Musk’s satellite company Starlink was in line to take over Verizon’s $2.4 billion contract with the Federal Aviation Administration to modernize US air traffic communications systems. This past Sunday, Rolling Stone followed up that story with reports that “FAA officials ordered staff to begin finding tens of millions of dollars for a Starlink deal, according to a source with knowledge of the FAA and two people briefed on the situation.” Sources informed Rolling Stone that these directives were unusually given verbally, likely to avoid leaving a paper trail. (We’re continuously tracking how Trump and Musk’s FAA attacks affect air safety.)
- Commerce Department clears path for Musk’s Starlink to tap into Biden-Era broadband funding program. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week about Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s plans to ease restrictions placed on the $42.5 billion Biden-era program to expand internet access across the country, specifically to allow Musk and Starlink to get their hands in the honey jar. According to the Journal, “the potential new rules could drastically increase the share of funding available to Starlink. Under the BEAD program’s original rules, Starlink was expected to get up to $4.1 billion, said people familiar with the matter. With Lutnick’s overhaul, Starlink, a unit of Musk’s SpaceX, could receive $10 billion to $20 billion, they said.” That’s a potential fourfold increase for Musk’s company.
- For The American Prospect, David Dayen provided additional context, noting that the move to include wireless companies like Starlink could also allow Republicans in Congress to pass tax cuts for wealthy individuals like Musk, securing a “double victory” for Trump’s chief cost-cutter. As Dayen smartly explains, Congress manages the Federal Communications Commission’s authority to hold auctions to sell spectrum, which are “public airwaves that are used in all manner of telecommunications.” Notably, the FCC’s authority is currently expired so industry lobbyists and allies are looking to design the reauthorization process to benefit wireless options such as Starlink, while also booking the revenue from those sales as offsets for the planned extension of the Trump tax cuts.
Trump’s FDIC Sides With Wall Street…And Trump Organization Lawyer Steps In To Defend Big Real Estate From The Trump Justice Department
- Trump banking regulators rolled out the red carpet for further consolidation in the banking industry. This Monday, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) rescinded a Biden-era policy which scaled up scrutiny of large bank mergers. The prior policy subjected bank mergers leading to assets over $50 billion to public hearings and feedback, while also requiring deals that would have resulted in banks with assets over $100 billion to be intensely examined. The reversal eliminates the public’s role in a process that aimed to strengthen financial stability and protect consumers from documented harms, including reduced access to credit, increased costs of bank services and branch closures.
- Trump Organization lawyer represents NAR as the realtors face potential renewed antitrust investigation. This week the Capitol Forum reported that William “Bill” Burck, “the lawyer overseeing conflicts of interest screens” for the Trump Organization, is also representing the National Association of Realtors in front of the Trump Justice Department’s Antitrust Division.NAR has been under scrutiny from the Justice Department for years. During the first Trump administration, the Antitrust Division settled with the group over allegations NAR “violated antitrust laws and had conspired to fix rates real estate agents charge consumers.” But in January, the Biden administration successfully reopened the investigation despite NAR’s yearslong attempt to seek relief from the Supreme Court. Now, Trump 2.0 has to decide whether to pursue the antitrust investigation or let NAR off easy. With a key figure playing for both Trump’s business interests and NAR, the odds aren’t looking good for consumers.
Lumber Companies Set To Make A Killing Off Killing Our Private Lands With The Appointment Of Former Idaho Forest Group Lobbyist To Head The US Forest Service.
- Former corporate lumber lobbyist sits at the center of Trump administration plans to dangerously expand logging in our national forests. Last week, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the appointment of Tom Schultz as new head of the U.S. Forest Service. This past weekend, President Trump ordered the Forest Service and other federal agencies to sidestep the Endangered Species Act and engage in an immediate and massive expansion of logging in our national forests.
Schultz, who is now tasked with implementing this order, will be coming straight from a seven year stint leading Idaho Forest Group’s own government affairs team, which routinely lobbies the very same Forest Service Schultz is now set to head. (The Idaho Forest Group (IFG) is one of the largest lumber companies in the United States.) This Executive Order, the mass layoffs already impacting USFS programs, and the consequences generally of a corporate lobbyist helming the USFS, will inevitably devastate public access to FS land, scar delicate ecosystems, worsen wildfire risk, and more. The only people it will benefit are Schultz and his former corporate colleagues, who stand to make a killing off of killing our public lands.
Trump Adds Another Carriage To The Crypto Gravy Train
- Last night, President Trump announced an executive order “to establish a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and a U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile.” The order, which authorizes the federal government to hold onto bitcoin federal law enforcement seizes, is the latest ploy to reward the cryptocurrency industry for its generous support of Trump and his fellow Republicans. Prior to this order, the Treasury Department was free to sell Bitcoin it had recovered from criminal proceedings. While the order does not authorize the federal government to freely purchase additional Bitcoin or other crypto tokens as some proponents demanded, the intent remains the same: induce an inflation of cryptocurrency prices for earlier investors. Later today, major crypto industry figures will meet at the White House to surely provide input on how implementation of the order could best serve their interests.
- Troublingly, multiple Democrats are on board with the legislative element of the crypto enrichment scheme. Rather than completely dissociating themselves from the Trump administration’s lawlessness, electeds such as Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) have opted for appeasement, offering support for Trump’s cabinet picks and co-sponsoring crypto-friendly legislation.
We are continuously updating resources to keep you up to date on Trump and Musk’s all-out assault on everyday people and the Constitution.
This includes:
No Corporate Cabinet, a central hub documenting corporate corruption and conflicts of interest among those jockeying for power in the Trump administration. We’ve published profiles on Trump nominees like Paul Atkins, Linda McMahon and Chris Wright – check back for more profiles in the days to come.
Our tracker of the Trump administration’s failure to comply with court orders, and the programs and services being disrupted by its non-compliance. We are also tracking the actions judges take to attempt to enforce their orders.
A list of all of the individuals who have ever been reported to be affiliated with Elon Musk’s DOGE, with links to the original reporting.
Profiles of the agents behind DOGE attacks, including conflicts of interest that might make their unfettered access to the federal government dangerous to the public.
A list of the agencies that DOGE has visited, keeping you up to date on what Elon Musk is looking to illegally gut.
An aviation tracker of administration attacks on air safety.
Agency Spotlight—Our tracker of appointments to leadership positions at thirty-nine federal independent agencies.