Enforcement Actions Against Over 100 Corporations Stopped by Trump

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Trump administration has dropped, withdrawn or halted investigations and enforcement actions against over 100 corporations in its first two months in office, Public Citizen has found.

The 109 thwarted enforcement actions represent one in five prominent cases. This count includes 68 investigations and cases the administration has frozen and 41 cases Trump officials have dropped, dismissed, or withdrawn. (See table below.)

The list of thwarted corporate enforcement includes:

• 45 of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) investigations and cases – that is, nearly every case about which public information is available,
• 30 investigations and cases being brought by the Department of Justice (DOJ), where the Trump administration ordered freezes on whole categories of enforcement, including foreign corruption cases, civil rights cases, and environmental cases
• 18 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigations and cases Trump has thwarted, including 14 cryptocurrency cases, and
• 7 dropped Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) cases, which had sought to defend transgender and gender non-conforming workers from workplace abuse and discrimination.

Among the corporations that have been rewarded with dropped enforcement are several Trump donors and allies, including the for-profit prison corporation GEO Group, Zelle network banks JPMorgan and Bank of America, crypto corporations Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken, OpenSea, Ripple, and Robinhood, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

“Trump’s corporate pardons show the president’s true base is the billionaire executives and corporate elites lining up to indulge their greed at the trough of Trump’s corruption,” said Rick Claypool, a Public Citizen research director who tracks corporate enforcement. “Trump’s soft on corporate crime approach invites a corporate crime spree and potentially catastrophic abuses for America’s consumers, workers, and communities..”

Public Citizen co-president Robert Weissman added, “The administration’s effective no-enforcement policy against corporations virtually guarantees more financial scams, more workplace discrimination, more poisoning of the air and water, more food contamination, more fraud, more disease and more preventable death.”

Table: 109 Halted and Dropped Cases, by Federal Agency*

*Agencies include: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Department of Justice, Securities and Exchange Commission, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Federal Trade Commission, Environmental Protection Agency, National Labor Relations Board, Customs and Border Protection, and the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control

Public Citizen’s full searchable database of nearly 500 investigations and cases against over 420 corporations with links to underlying sources is available on Public Citizen’s Corporate Enforcement Tracker.