Phil Mattera

Looking for Fraud in All the Wrong Places

Elon Musk and his DOGE marauders claim that fraud is rampant in federal agencies ranging from USAID to the Social Security Administration, yet they can never seem to prove it. The Wall of Receipts website, which purports to document savings DOGE has achieved, is now a laughingstock because of its repeated errors and falsifications.

DOGE would have us believe it is the first effort to address federal fraud. In fact, a variety of groups inside and outside the government have been combatting the phenomenon for decades. For example, in the 1980s, when Musk was still a teenager in South Africa and his DOGE staffers where not yet born, the Pentagon was found to be a hotbed of procurement fraud.

Unlike now, when federal staffers are being falsely accused of misconduct, the main culprits back then were recognized to be the big military contractors cheating Uncle Sam out of millions.

When the DOGE effort first took off, many observers assumed that major contractors would be targeted. Booz Allen and Leidos, which rake in billions each year from federal contracts for management consulting and technology services, saw their stock price plunge.

Leidos seemed to be in the DOGE crosshairs when the Wall of Receipts posted an item claiming a savings of $231 million from a $1 billion contract with the Social Security Administration. But that turned out to be one of DOGE’s blunders: the cancellation involved only a $560,000 sliver of the contract.

Now there is a growing sense that the contractors have little to worry about. A recent article in the New York Times headlined (in the print edition) “Budget Ax May Benefit Contractors” reported that the Veterans Administration, which had been planning to cancel 850 contracts with companies such as Leidos, has dropped that idea. In fact, in the wake of moves to eliminate 80,000 VA staff positions, experts interviewed by the Times said it was likely the agency would have to make greater use of contractors to maintain essential services.

In other words, DOGE’s purported promotion of government efficiency may very well result in an acceleration of outsourcing, which tends to raise rather than lower costs. Increased reliance on contractors will also make agencies more, not less, vulnerable to fraud.

Those 1980s abuses are not just a thing of the past. Since 2010, the Department of Justice and other federal agencies have collected $35 billion in fines and settlements from contractors using the False Claims Act and related laws. Booz Allen, for example, has been hit with $393 million in penalties, including a $377 million case in 2023 and $15 million one earlier this year.

Apart from the consulting companies, healthcare corporations account for a large share of the penalty total. The cases involve false billing by hospital chains and other providers to federal programs such as Medicare as well as drug company payment of illegal kickbacks to doctors to get them to prescribe expensive medications.

Pentagon contractors also continue their old tricks. Last year, aerospace companies Sikorsky and Derco, subsidiaries of Lockheed Martin, paid $70 million to resolve allegations they overcharged the Navy for spare parts and materials needed to repair and maintain the primary aircraft used to train naval aviators.

If DOGE were serious about fighting fraud, it would be looking at contractors such as these rather than hunting down supposed DEI abuses and eliminating federal employees whose job it is to prevent corruption.

Slandering Social Security

Having used spurious claims of fraud to justify an assault on scores of federal grants, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are now taking the same approach in targeting entitlements.

In his recent address to Congress, Trump recited a long list of bogus statistics about large numbers of supercentenarians supposedly receiving Social Security benefits. Musk has taken to describing that program as a Ponzi scheme.

Attacks on the legitimacy of Social Security from the Right date back decades, but for a long time they were limited to fringe groups such as the John Birch Society. Public support for the program was strong, even among those who had misgivings about other parts of the social safety net. Social Security was accurately seen as a benefit people had earned through a lifetime of hard work. It made no difference that the system was set up so that payments to current retirees are supported by taxes paid by those still in the labor force.

Starting in the 1990s, a new form of criticism emerged based on the argument that the system was unsustainable, given demographic changes affecting the ratio of workers to retirees. Conservatives began to claim that the program would eventually collapse, even though Congress had the power to adjust taxes and benefits to shore up the system.

Thus emerged the effort to transform Social Security from a social insurance program into something more akin to a private pension plan. In the 2000 presidential race, George W. Bush advocated partial privatization in the form of individual retirement accounts that could be invested in stocks and bonds.

Pounding away at the idea that Social Security was headed toward bankruptcy, Bush ramped up the effort after he was reelected in 2004. The public resoundingly rejected privatization, and Republicans paid a significant price in the 2006 mid-term elections.

Although Bush made many mistakes in his attempt to reshape Social Security, he never questioned the legitimacy of the system. In his 2005 State of Union address, which was largely devoted to the issue, Bush described Social Security as “one of America’s most important institutions, a symbol of the trust between generations” and “a great moral success of the 20^th Century.” He emphasized that the current system was “sound and fiscally strong,” raising concerns only about its future condition.

Compare this to the slanderous comments of Trump and Musk, who are attempting to depict Social Security as being in complete disarray now. Especially preposterous is their claim that the Social Security Administration is rife with fraud and waste.

Although it is burdened with much aging technology, the SSA is well run. Administrative costs are only one half of one percent. A report published last year by the agency’s inspector general pointed out that less than 1 percent of its payments were improper. And much of that limited amount resulted from the failure of recipients of disability and Supplemental Security Income benefits to report changes in their eligibility status.

Moreover, the report discussed the ways in which SSA seeks to recover improper payments. It pointed out that systems modernization would help greatly in the process.

Instead of addressing the technology problem, Musk and his DOGE crew are moving to eliminate thousands of SSA jobs. This will only increase the level of improper payments and hinder recovery efforts.

It seems likely Trump and Musk are seeking to cripple both the SSA and Social Security itself to set the stage for their own privatization initiative. Chances are this will end as badly as Bush’s effort. The question is how much damage will be done in the process.

Toxic Gaslighting

Donald Trump loves gas. In his address to Congress he bragged about a natural gas pipeline project in Alaska that he claimed will involve trillions of dollars in investment.

Trump also loves gaslighting. His speech contained many statements divorced from reality, but perhaps the most egregious was his attempt to depict his administration as working “to get toxins out of our environment, poisons out of our food supply, and keep our children healthy and strong.”

This came not long after Trump boasted about freezing new regulations and declaring that no new rule could be adopted without eliminating ten existing ones.

When Trump chose Lee Zeldin to run the EPA there was a glimmer of hope the former Congressman who once worked with conservationists would respect the mission of the agency. Yet it turned out Zeldin is perfectly willing to be Trump’s hatchetman. He has gone along with the simultaneous attack on renewable energy and unleashing of fossil fuel projects.

Zeldin is also inviting numerous foxes into the henhouse. This threatens not only climate policies but also the EPA’s efforts to control the very same toxics Trump just vowed to eliminate. Two of those foxes were brought in from the American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry’s leading trade association. They are Nancy Beck and Ann Dekleva, both of whom were put in key positions in the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety. Dekleva, who worked for three decades at chemical giant DuPont, is known for her role in fighting EPA regulation of the carcinogen formaldehyde.

Zeldin has brought in a slew of other industry lobbyists through the reverse revolving door to take positions in which they will be overseeing policy affecting their former employers, especially those in the petroleum industry.

As the lobbyists are coming in, large numbers of career EPA employees are being forced out as part of the DOGE blitzkrieg. The Administration is also dismantling the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, which handles cases against polluters that end up in court. Meanwhile, DOJ is reportedly planning to drop a lawsuit alleging that a petrochemical plant in Louisiana operated by Denka Performance Elastomer endangers the residents of the neighboring majority-Black community with its releases of cancer-causing chloroprene.

Cases such as this one had been brought as part of efforts to promote environmental justice, which Trump is abolishing after demonizing it as a form of DEI.

Corporate capture is not limited to the EPA. As Trump was claiming to protect the food supply, the New York Times reported that the new director of the Food and Drug Administration’s food division is a corporate lawyer who represented Abbott Laboratories, a major producer of infant formula, in a lawsuit accusing the company of failing to adequately warn parents that its specialized formula for premature infants was associated with an elevated risk of a deadly bowel condition.

Trump’s far-fetched claims about environmental protection and food safety were not meant to be taken literally. They served as a segue to what came next in the speech: an exaggerated statement about the rise of autism among American children. Trump then vowed that his Administration would find the cause and that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would lead the effort.

At this point it became clear that the whole point of the passage about toxins was to signal that RFK Jr. was being given free rein to pursue his anti-vaccine agenda. While virtually all legitimate environmental and food/drug safety initiatives are being crippled, Trump seems willing to allow Kennedy to use the federal government to pursue his obsession. The measles outbreak in Texas is a sign of what is to come as regulation and public health are replaced by conspiracy theories.

Note: For more on Trump’s abandonment of enforcement actions against polluters and other corporate miscreants, see this new report from Public Citizen.

The DOGE Charade

Donald Trump and Elon Musk keep claiming that their scorched-earth approach to remaking the federal government is made necessary by the prevalence of fraud and waste. Musk’s DOGE attack-squad tabulates its progress on a Wall of Receipts that currently purports to have saved Uncle Sam $65 billion.

That number appears to have been plucked out of thin air. The savings for the 2,300 individual contracts listed on the site add up to only $9.6 billion, and even that amount is shaky. For example, the single biggest savings, $1.9 billion, is attached to a Treasury Department contract that is reported to have ended during the Biden Administration.

DOGE gives no details of any fraud it may have found in the contracts. That is not surprising, since it is impossible to have done a careful examination of that many contracts in such a short amount of time.

Large numbers of the contracts are linked to agencies the Trump Administration is in the process of dismantling. USAID accounts for 246 contracts with total purported savings of $4.2 billion. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has 404 listings with savings of $109 million. The Education Department, reported to be headed for the chopping block, has 119 contracts with supposed savings of $659 million.

It seems clear DOGE targeted those contracts because of the agency involved, not any evidence of misconduct. Among the remaining 769 contracts, there are many that seem to be targeted for ideological reasons. They include numerous awards whose descriptions refer to now-taboo areas such as DEI or environmental justice.

There are more than 100 listings for subscriptions, especially for expensive services such as Politico, Bloomberg Law, and Lexis Nexis. Those may not always be worth the cost, but there is nothing corrupt about the need for an agency to have good access to information.

Then there are listings for contracts that have not gone into effect. The second biggest saving amount, $318 million, is attached to an Office of Personnel Management pre-award. How can there be fraud when there is no contractor yet?

DOGE’s list also contains numerous entries with obvious errors. These include instances in which there are two links pointing to different contract awards, making it unclear which one is meant to be included. For example, there is a $149 million savings connected both to a contractor called Advanced Automation Technologies Inc. (for three assistants) and to Airgas USA for refrigerated liquid gases.

By pointing to DOGE’s sloppy work, I do not mean to deny the existence of contract fraud. The problem is that Musk’s people, whether through ignorance or design, are looking in the wrong places. They seem to be ignoring the types of large contractors that have repeatedly been found to have cheated federal agencies.

The classic examples are the big weapons producers. As of now, DOGE lists only $8 million in savings from Defense Department contracts—and those are mainly from DEI awards and subscriptions. The same is true for the Department of Health and Human Services, even though healthcare is a major source of contractor fraud.

What gets forgotten in the claims about fraud coming from Trump and Musk is that the federal government already had a robust system for fighting contractor misconduct. Audits were done by agency inspectors general—who have now been fired by Trump—and prosecutions were launched by the Justice Department using the False Claims Act. Over the past decade, the DOJ has collected about $30 billion in fines and settlements.

That is serious fraud fighting. What we see in DOGE is instead the illusion of an attack on corruption that serves as a smokescreen for the Trump Administration’s scheme to dismantle large portions of the federal government. It remains to be seen how long they can keep up the charade.

Behind the Chaos

Donald Trump and Elon Musk seem gleeful about the chaos they have unleashed on the federal workforce. Claims that the onslaught is designed to root out fraud and waste while promoting efficiency are spurious. The examples of waste offered by DOGE are usually erroneous or trivial, and there is nothing efficient about the way agencies are being ravaged. Nor does it make sense to fire inspectors general, the professionals most skilled at addressing corruption.

Is there any method to the madness? Behind the noise there seem to be two objectives. The first is a new form of deregulation. In the past, corporate-friendly administrations sought to diminish oversight of business by rescinding rules and changing laws.

Trump and Musk are instead trying to achieve those objectives by crippling regulatory bodies. This is happening in part by asserting full control over independent agencies and installing loyalists to oversee them. Even more aggressive is the effort to prevent the agencies from functioning by decimating their staff. Regulations don’t mean much if no one is available to investigate non-compliance and take enforcement action. The administration also seems to be testing whether it can get away with unilaterally closing entire agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau without the consent of Congress. This is brute force deregulation.

The second objective is to create opportunities for government contractors. Despite the attempt to depict many government functions as redundant or unnecessary, many of the activities being targeted for large-scale staff reductions are not really expendable. By drastically reducing head count, Trump and Musk are creating conditions under which agencies will have no choice but to outsource more work to the private sector.

It is telling that amid all its fabricated charges about waste and abuse, DOGE focuses very little on the major source of fraud in the federal government: dishonest contractors. When it is functioning normally, the Justice Department spends a good portion of its time going after these companies. Violation Tracker documents 4,000 cases brought under the False Claims Act resulting in more than $60 billion in penalties. And those are just the cases in which the contractor got caught.

At times, Musk targets contracts, but they are usually small outlays related to now-taboo areas such as DEI and environmental justice. If he were serious about addressing fraud, he would be singling out large corporations such as Booz Allen and Centene that have been involved in major false claims cases. Companies such as these are presumably being shielded because they are the ones to which agencies will turn for help in performing the functions their diminished staffs can no longer handle.

In some cases, the DOGE offensive may be paving the way not just for outsourcing but for complete privatization. Among the functions said to be candidates for private sector takeover are FEMA disaster relief, NOAA’s National Weather Service, and the Education Department’s student loan program.

There is nothing new, of course, about presidential efforts to reduce business oversight and increase outsourcing. What’s different is the lawless way Trump and Musk are pursuing these aims. And then there’s the added scandal in the fact that Musk personally stands to gain so much from weakened enforcement and expanded contracting.

It is not yet clear how the DOGE juggernaut can be stopped, but for now it is helpful to look behind the theatrics and see whose interests are being served.

A Boon for Bribery

The new Trump Administration has eliminated another significant form of corporate oversight through an executive order suspending enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. With a stroke of his Sharpie, Trump has in effect decriminalized bribery by multinational corporations.

A statement accompanying the order claimed the step was needed to “save our country” and that “every policy must be geared toward that which supports the American worker, the American family, and businesses, both large and small, and allows our country to compete with other nations on a very level playing field.”

This is classic MAGA double-speak, trying to make the case that a policy benefiting large dishonest corporations serves the interests of workers, families, and small firms.

That reference to a level playing field is also misleading. Trump tries to give the impression that the U.S. is the only country that prosecutes bribery. In fact, other countries are also active in policing the practice.

In Violation Tracker Global, we document dozens of cases brought by authorities outside the United States. For example, in 2020 Airbus agreed to pay over 2 billion euros to resolve allegations brought by French prosecutors relating to foreign bribery. In 2017 Rolls-Royce paid over 500 million pounds to resolve a bribery case brought by the UK’s Serious Fraud Office. The Brazilian government has collected the equivalent of several billion dollars through an anti-corruption campaign known as Operation Car Wash.

In numerous large FCPA cases, the U.S. Justice Department worked in concert with prosecutors in other countries. That’s true of the Airbus and Rolls-Royce cases mentioned above as well as investigations of other companies such as ABB Ltd, BAE Systems, and Goldman Sachs.

What Trump also seems to be ignoring is that the Justice Department and the SEC have brought many cases against foreign companies. In fact, of the 122 FCPA cases in the U.S. version of Violation Tracker linked to a large parent, more than half involve firms headquartered abroad. Fifteen of the 20 largest penalties were paid by foreign defendants. By suspending FCPA enforcement, Trump is helping foreign corporations much more than domestic ones.

The final fallacy is the idea that the FCPA has been a substantial burden on corporations. Although the DOJ handles foreign bribery cases as criminal matters, it routinely allows companies to sign deferred prosecution and non-prosecution agreements—leniency arrangements under which they pay a penalty but do not have to enter a guilty plea. More than 80 percent of all FCPA cases have included one of these agreements.

The theory is that leniency deals will incentivize companies to clean up their practices to avoid a future conviction, yet in some cases DOJ has allowed repeat offenders a second leniency agreement rather than lowering the boom.

In some cases, the DOJ takes the leniency process a step further and resolves FCPA cases through a process called declination. This typically occurs when prosecutors want to reward a company for cooperating with an investigation. The firm agrees to disgorge the profits it received from the illegal activity, and the DOJ essentially drops the case. The most recent example of this occurred in August, when the Boston Consulting Group agreed to disgorge about $14 million related to profits from contracts received as the result of improper payments to government officials in Angola.

All these forms of leniency have not satisfied large corporations, which have complained about the FCPA ever since it was enacted in the wake of widespread revelations of foreign bribery in the 1970s. Now they have finally gotten their wish from a president who serves the interests of big business while pretending to be an economic populist.

Putting Military Families at Risk

I don’t recall Donald Trump saying during the presidential campaign that he planned to make his supporters helpless against predatory lenders and financial scam artists, but that is apparently what he is about to do at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Trump has ousted CFPB director Rohit Chopra, a zealous champion of consumer protection, and given control of the agency to Scott Bessent, the former hedge fund manager who is already serving as Treasury Secretary.

Bessent’s first act was to order a halt to all activities at the CFPB, including rulemaking and enforcement. He issued a statement saying: “I look forward to working with the CFPB to advance President Trump’s agenda to lower costs for the American people and accelerate economic growth.” Translation: I will slash regulation and perpetuate the myth that reduced oversight works to the benefit of consumers.

The firing of Chopra and freezing of CFPB activities come as welcome news to major financial institutions and fly-by-night operators, both of which have sought to neutralize the agency ever since it began operation in 2011. The agency was also a frequent target of criticism from Congressional Republicans, who hated the fact that the law creating the CFPB provided that the director could only be removed for cause. In 2020 the conservative majority of the Supreme Court threw out that provision, meaning that the director could be removed at will by the President.

As shown in Violation Tracker, the CFPB has over its life collected more than $17 billion in fines and settlements, much of which has gone to affected consumers in the form of restitution. The cases, numbering more than 250, have involved a wide range of financial misconduct, from the Wells Fargo bogus account scandal to the deceptive practices of for-profit colleges.

Let’s focus on one subset of cases in which the CFPB has been especially active: cases brought against lenders that prey on military families. The agency has collected more than $146 million in penalties in a dozen such cases. A big share of that total comes from a $92 million settlement reached in 2014 with Colfax Capital and Culver Capital, also known as Rome Finance. The case, brought in cooperation with 13 state attorneys general, accused Rome Finance of luring servicemembers with the promise of instant financing on expensive electronics but then masked the finance charges with inflated prices in marketing materials and later withheld key information on monthly bills. Richard Cordray, CFPB’s director at the time, stated: “Rome Finance’s business model was built on fleecing servicemembers.”

In 2023 the CFPB found that TMX Finance, known as TitleMax, violated the Military Lending Act by extending prohibited title loans to military families, often charging nearly three times more than the 36% annual interest rate cap. The agency said TitleMax tried to hide its unlawful activities by, among other things, altering the personal information of military borrowers to circumvent their protected status. The CFPB also found that TitleMax increased loan payments for borrowers by charging unlawful fees. The agency ordered the company to pay more than $5 million in consumer relief and a $10 million civil money penalty.

Large financial institutions have also been called out by the CFPB for cheating military families. U.S. Bank and one of its nonbank partner companies, Dealers’ Financial Services, were required to return about $6.5 million to servicemembers for failing to properly disclose all the fees charged to participants in the companies’ Military Installment Loans and Educational Services auto loans program, and for misrepresenting the true cost and coverage of add-on products financed along with the auto loans.

Those who would eliminate or defang the CFPB—especially those who take every opportunity to express their support for the troops–should be made to made to acknowledge that their actions will make military families, as well as millions of others, more vulnerable to financial predators.

Attacking DEI, Enabling Discrimination

The early days of Trump 2.0 have been marked by a preoccupation with rooting out every last trace of DEI policies. Many programs are being abolished, and diversity officials are being terminated. The administration even tried to bring all federal grants and loans to a halt in order to make absolutely sure nothing was going out the door that promoted what the Office of Management and Budget called “Marxist equity.” Newly minted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to regard DEI as a bigger threat than ISIS.

What was originally a response by the Right to the supposed excesses of wokeness is now starting to resemble a new Red Scare, complete with calls for federal employees to inform on colleagues who try to conceal DEI activities.

The harmful effects of this extend beyond the career prospects of diversity bureaucrats. One example can be found at a federal agency called the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. The mission of the OFCCP is to ensure that employers doing business with the federal government comply with laws and regulations regarding workplace discrimination. Given that the feds pay out some $750 billion a year to an estimated three million contractors, the OFCCP is responsible for preventing unfair treatment of a large portion of the workforce.

OFCCP’s ability to do its job has been hampered by a Trump executive order that rescinds legal authority the agency has had since 1965 to investigate discrimination and promote affirmative action (the old name for DEI). The thrust of Trump’s order is to bar the agency from pursuing the DEI portion of its mission, but it is unclear whether it will still be able to hold contractors accountable for discriminating against groups of workers based on gender, race, national origin, or sexual orientation. Instead, the order commands the OFCCP to focus on eradicating DEI, which is depicted as the real discrimination.

Trump’s action seems to put an end to decades of enforcement activity in which the OFCCP pressured companies to change their hiring, promotion, and pay practices. In Violation Tracker we document more than 500 OFCCP cases dating back to 2000. Among the largest settlements are the following:

In 2017 Qualcomm paid $19.5 million to resolve allegations that it paid female engineers less than their male counterparts.

In 2019 Goldman Sachs paid just under $10 million to settle allegations it engaged in pay discrimination against Black, Hispanic, Asian, and female employees.

About 40 other companies have paid settlements of $1 million or more. Food distributors Sysco and US Foods have been involved in the largest number of cases, with nine each. Scores of Fortune 500 corporations are among those penalized by the OFCCP.

Now the Trump Administration has in effect pardoned these companies for their mistreatment of workers. This is a significant retreat from the principle that taxpayer dollars should not go to the bad actors of the business world—and it is another sign that, despite the populist trappings, MAGA policy ends up serving the interests of corporations.

The Inaugural Rogues Gallery

A news photograph on the inaugural ceremony that ran on the front page of the Wall Street Journal showed Elon Musk right behind Trump and his family members as Chief Justice Roberts administered the oath of office. It came awfully close to the recent New York cover cartoon depicting Musk putting his hand on the bible along with Trump’s.

Other photos revealed that Musk was not the only corporate figure given a prominent position in the limited confines of the Capitol Rotunda. Prime spots went to a line-up of tech moguls, including Mark Zuckerberg of Meta Platforms, Sundar Pichai of Alphabet/Google, Tim Cook of Apple, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com. A presidency that purports to be about economic populism began by seeming to signal that corporate CEOs and billionaires will have an outsized role.

What makes the deference shown to those business figures all the more unseemly is that they head companies with checkered regulatory compliance records. Here are some of their transgressions, as documented in Violation Tracker.

Meta Platforms has racked up more than $7 billion in penalties since 2000. The bulk of that comes from a $5 billion penalty imposed on Facebook in 2019 by the Federal Trade Commission for deceiving users about their ability to control the privacy of their personal information. Last year, Meta had to pay more than $1 billion to settle allegations by the Texas Attorney General that it captured personal biometric data without authorization.

Alphabet, parent of Google, has amassed $2.7 billion in penalties largely from antitrust, privacy, and other consumer protection cases. Its biggest payout was a $700 million settlement in 2023 with state attorneys general to resolve allegations of monopolistic practices in its app store. The year before, it paid out $391 million to state AGs to settle a case alleging it misled users about the collection and use of their personal data.

Apple has accumulated $1.4 billion in penalties, mainly from cases involving anti-competitive practices and consumer protection violations. For example, in 2020 it paid $113 million to settle a case brought by over 30 state attorneys general in connection with its decision to throttle the performance of iPhones to avoid addressing a problem with battery performance. In 2014 it paid $32 million to resolve FTC allegations it unfairly charged consumers for in-app purchases incurred by children without their parents’ consent.

Amazon has managed to avoid any ten-figure penalties, but it has been penalized much more often than the other tech giants, with 173 entries in Violation Tracker. The largest portion of these involve workplace safety, given the high level of ergonomic injuries in the company’s distribution centers. Recently, OSHA pressed Amazon to sign a corporate-wide agreement to try to improve conditions.

Tesla, SpaceX, and other businesses owned by Musk have accumulated “only” about $100 million in penalties but they are involved in numerous current regulatory controversies, including some related to their extensive contracts with the federal government.

It is also worth noting that all these companies have been involved in regulatory offenses outside the United States and may be hoping that the Trump Administration can pressure the European Union, for instance to ease up on the oversight.

As shown in Violation Tracker Global, Apple has paid out more than $18 billion in penalties to foreign countries since 2010, including a case last year in which it was ordered by the European Commission to repay 13 billion euros to Ireland to make up for illegal tax breaks. Earlier last year, the Commission fined Apple 1.8 billion euros for abusing its dominant position in the market for the distribution of music streaming apps to iPhone and iPad users through its App Store.

Alphabet has paid out 7 billion euros to the Commission for anti-competitive practices and 965 million euros to French authorities for improper shifting of profits to evade taxes. Meta has paid over 2 billion euros in a series of cases brought by the Irish Data Protection Commission for privacy violations. Amazon was fined 746 million euros by the data protection agency in Luxembourg.

In short, the companies given a place of honor at Trump’s inauguration are serial regulatory violators that have apparently decided that cozying up to the new Administration may pay off at home and abroad.

The Two Faces of Pam Bondi

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on Pam Bondi’s nomination to be Attorney General was filled with talk of weaponization of the Justice Department. Republicans put that label on everything they dislike about the DOJ’s behavior during the Biden Administration, while Democrats used it to warn about what will happen if Donald Trump carries through with his vow to get the Department to exact revenge on his perceived enemies.

Nothing was said about the ways in which the DOJ has been substantially disarmed over the past eight years and will probably be further weakened in the next four. That is with regard to the prosecution of corporations, which are increasingly being treated with leniency rather than the iron fist commonly proposed for other types of offenders.

Bondi spoke repeatedly during the hearing about her intention to crack down on drug dealers, terrorists, human traffickers, and immigration violators. There were some oblique references to business malfeasance. She responded positively to comments on the False Claim Act offered by Sen. Grassley, who reminded us of his leading role in the 1986 updating of the Civil War-era law to enhance the role of whistleblowers. It was unclear, however, whether Bondi was signaling her interest in cases against major federal contractors or just ones targeting smaller fish such as individual healthcare providers.

Bondi also agreed with comments by Sen. Klobuchar about the importance of antitrust. Here it was unclear whether this indicated support for aggressive action against corporate concentration of all kinds or just cases against the Big Tech companies the Right likes to vilify. Bondi was evasive when asked about upholding legislation requiring Big Pharma to negotiate with the federal government on prescription drug prices.

While she sparred on several issues with Adam Schiff, the new Senator from California, she seemed to agree with him on the importance of preventing price-gouging in the wake of the disastrous fires in Los Angeles. Schiff, however, had referred to abusive practices by oil companies, while Bondi seemed to focus on gouging by local businesses.

The ambiguities in Bondi’s comments can also be found in her record as Attorney General of Florida from 2011 to 2018. On the one hand, Bondi’s tenure was tainted by accusations that she backed away from investigating misconduct by the for-profit Trump University because of a $25,000 contribution to a political action committee supporting her re-election campaign by a Trump family foundation.

Bondi initiated relatively few cases against large corporations, yet she was heavily involved in multistate rightwing legal initiatives to undermine the Affordable Care Act, to undo a ban on some semi-automatic weapons enacted by Connecticut in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, and to block a plan by the EPA and six states to improve water quality in the Chesapeake Bay by restricting pollution runoff by factory farms.

On the other hand, Bondi participated in numerous more enlightened multistate attorneys general lawsuits. These included major cases against BP for the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, against big banks for mortgage abuses during 2000s, against Wells Fargo related to the bogus accounts scandal, and against General Motors for selling vehicles with defective ignition switches.

There seem to be two sides to Pam Bondi. She was a rightwing partisan during and after her time as Florida AG and she may have allowed those beliefs to stand in the way of prosecuting allies such as Donald Trump. Yet she also was reasonably serious about carrying out the responsibilities of an AG to serve as a consumer champion and was willing to confront at least some powerful corporate interests.

If, as seems likely, Bondi is confirmed, she will serve in an administration headed by a man who has little regard for norms such as the independence of the DOJ and will probably be inclined to discourage investigations of companies which support him and encourage prosecutions of those he dislikes.

Which Pam Bondi will occupy the AG’s office: the partisan loyalist who carries out Trump’s illegitimate wishes or the upright law enforcement officer?