Regulation

A Company’s MAGA-Style Attack on a Regulatory Agency

Normally, when a company reaches a settlement with a regulatory agency, that is the end of the matter. Gemini Trust, a cryptocurrency exchange, has another idea.

In January, Gemini agreed to pay a $5 million fine to resolve a case brought by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission alleging the company made false statements during an investigation relating to its exchange and futures contracts. Gemini neither admitted nor denied the misconduct.

Now Gemini is attacking the CFTC by filing a pugnacious complaint with the agency’s inspector general. The 13-page document alleges that the CFTC’s Enforcement Division is “out of control and that its culture is toxic.” It claims that agency staffers were “not motivated by a principled application of the law or desire to protect the commodities markets. Rather, these lawyers were driven by a selfish desire to advance their careers by misusing their offices to obtain a high-profile ‘win.’”

Gemini’s complaint criticizes by name the lead CFTC lawyer on the case, who is accused of making false statements about the matter in the bio posted on the website of the law firm he joined after leaving the agency.

The facts of the Gemini case are complicated. I will not attempt to summarize them or assess the validity of the CFTC’s case.

What concerns me is whether Gemini’s move is a sign of things to come as companies feel emboldened by the anti-regulatory rhetoric of the Trump Administration to assail regulators in unprecedented ways. The Gemini complaint incorporates MAGA-style rhetoric by accusing the CFTC of seeking to “weaponize and tilt the scales of justice in its favor” and engaging in “trophy-hunting lawfare.”

It is worth noting that the CFTC case is not the only time Gemini, which was founded by the Winklevoss brothers, known for their legal disputes with Mark Zuckerberg, has run afoul of regulators.

Last year, in a settlement with the New York Department of Financial Services, Gemini agreed to return at least $1.1 billion to customers and pay a $37 million fine to resolve allegations it failed to conduct due diligence on Genesis Global Capital, an unregulated third party that allowed Gemini customers to loan their virtual currency and receive interest payments. Genesis defaulted on its loans and declared bankruptcy in 2023.

Also last year, Gemini agreed to pay $50 million to resolve allegations it misled thousands of investors on the risks associated with one of its investment programs.

Given the way the Trump Administration and Congressional Republicans are boosting cryptocurrency, it is not surprising that a company such as Gemini would feel confident in going after one of the main agencies involved in oversight of the business.

It is unclear what Gemini expects to accomplish with its complaint. The CFTC has already been weakened by the departure of many staff members since the new administration took office. The man Trump has nominated to head the agency is Brian Quintenz, who served as a commissioner during the first Trump administration and who has close ties to the cryptocurrency industry. On his X social media page he describes himself as a “financial freedom advocate.” An analysis published in the National Law Review said that his nomination “portends a potential shift towards a more business-friendly regulatory approach.”

Perhaps Gemini is paving the way for Quintenz, who would initially run the commission single-handledly, to rescind the settlement and return the $5 million. This would be another unfortunate step in the Trump Administration’s effort to rewrite the history of enforcement at the same time that it undermines its future.

Removing the Wrong Shackles

Over the past decade, Wells Fargo has been a poster child for corporate greed and misconduct. In 2016 the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau revealed that the bank had been ordering its employees to create unauthorized accounts for existing customers in order to generate illegitimate fees.

The CFPB fined Wells Fargo $100 million in what would be the first in a series of enforcement actions and lawsuits that have cost the bank more than $8 billion in penalties for the bogus accounts and other offenses such as improper foreclosures and overdraft fees. Along with those monetary punishments, in 2018 the Federal Reserve took the unusual step of putting a limit on the bank’s ability to increase its assets until it improved its governance and internal controls.

Now, in 2025, the CFPB has effectively been dismantled by the Trump Administration’s anti-regulatory steamroller, while the Fed just announced it is removing the asset limit. According to the bank regulator, “the removal of the growth restriction reflects the substantial progress the bank has made in addressing its deficiencies.”

There are two ways to view this decision. On the one hand, the Fed demonstrated that a penalty other than a fine can be quite effective. While Wells remained capped, its big competitors such as JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America experienced enormous asset growth. Being shut out of the expansion certainly made an impression on the new leadership installed at Wells as a result of the scandals.

On the other hand, the track record of Wells since 2018 has not been spotless. In 2022 the CFPB imposed a $1.7 billion fine on the bank and ordered it to pay $2 billion in consumer redress for a variety of illegitimate practices both before and after the Fed enforcement action. The practices included surprise overdraft fees and improper interest charges on auto and mortgage loans.

In 2021 the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency fined Wells $250 million for unsafe practices related to material deficiencies in its loss mitigation activities.

Wells has also been penalized for misconduct in its securities and trading operations. Since 2019 it has paid over $250 million in fines and settlements to the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as $89 million to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Regulators have punished Wells for its employment practices. The Occupational Safety and Heald Administration, which enforces the whistleblower protection provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, found that the bank had improperly fired a manager who complained about illegal practices and ordered that the manager be paid $22 million in damages. The U.S. Labor Department and state regulators in California and New York have cited Wells for wage and hour violations.

Along with government enforcement actions, Wells continues to face a steady stream of class action lawsuits. In recent years it has paid out large sums in settlements, including $185 million to resolve litigation alleging it improperly put mortgages of struggling customers into forbearance without informed consent during the Covid pandemic, damaging their credit rating.

Wells Fargo may no longer be defrauding customers through the creation of bogus accounts, but it appears unable to avoid numerous other types of misconduct. It thus does not deserve relief from the Fed’s restrictions.

If any shackles are to be removed, they should be the ones unjustly being imposed on CFPB rather than those properly put on Wells Fargo.

Weaponizing Regulation

Donald Trump has long presented himself as a foe of regulation, and since taking office for the second time he has gone to great lengths to eliminate existing rules, prevent the adoption of new ones, and dismantle entire agencies.

Yet now it appears he has discovered that regulation can be put to good use—not to control corporate misconduct but rather to advance his administration’s ideological aims and to weaken his perceived enemies.

The False Claims Act (FCA) is one of the primary tools used by the Justice Department to address fraud by federal contractors and healthcare providers. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, previously one of Trump’s criminal lawyers, recently sent a memo to DOJ prosecutors saying they should bring FCA actions against contractors or other recipients of federal funds that have diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

To promote such efforts, Blanche said he is creating a Civil Rights Fraud Initiative with teams of lawyers from the DOJ’s Fraud Division and the Civil Rights Division who would be expected to collaborate with both the U.S. Attorney Offices around the country and other federal agencies.

Blanche’s initiative is an escalation of the Trump Administration’s aggressive moves to depict DEI, which is meant to address racism and sexism, as its own form of discrimination. It is in keeping with a document issued in March by the DOJ and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission warning that DEI could be unlawful. And it goes along with the announcement by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs that it was looking for evidence of supposedly illegal practices in the plans submitted by federal contractors under the Biden Administration to address allegations of discrimination.

The Federal Communications Commission, which has a history of addressing employment discrimination by broadcast license holders, is also targeting DEI. FCC chairman Brendan Carr, an unabashed Trump supporter, has been pressuring companies such as Disney and Comcast over their diversity practices. Verizon won approval for its purchase of Frontier Communications by promising to abandon its DEI programs.

Carr is also using the FCC’s authority over media mergers to assist Trump’s dubious lawsuits against private media companies such as CBS parent Paramount Global. And he has used the power of the agency to try to influence the way the news gets reported. He has, for example, posted tweets suggesting that outlets owned by Comcast might be putting their licenses at risk by failing to depict deportee Kilmar Abrego Garcia as the violent gang member the White House claims him to be.

Carr and Blanche appear to be in the vanguard of an emerging effort by the Trump Administration to use the justice and regulatory systems to attack its perceived enemies in the business world.

Wholesale deregulation is troubling, but just as concerning is the warping of oversight into a weapon against corporations for no legitimate policy purpose. One might expect deep-pocketed companies to use their resources to defend themselves. But for now, it appears they are more likely to join many universities, law firms, and other institutions in giving in to the intimidation.

The Other Corporate Restraints

Donald Trump thinks that young girls should get by with fewer dolls, but there is apparently no limit to the number of regulatory gifts he is offering Corporate America. Long-standing rules are being brushed aside, while laws such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act are not being enforced. Entire agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have been put in limbo. Investigations launched by the Biden Administration are being abandoned. Trump even pardoned a cryptocurrency company and its founders fined for anti-money-laundering deficiencies.

Big Business is not, however, escaping all oversight. That’s because there are two areas beyond Trump’s control that are still acting as checks on corporate abuses: state government regulation and private litigation.

The U.S. Justice Department may be focusing more on legitimizing Trump’s acceptance of a $400 million airplane from Qatar, but state prosecutors continue to go after misconduct in the business world. This is true even in red states. The Texas Attorney General’s office recently announced that it is collecting more than $1 billion from Google to settle allegations that the company unlawfully amassed private data on users regarding geolocation, incognito searches, and biometrics.

Hawaii’s AG negotiated a $700 million settlement with Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi, resolving long-running litigation over the safety and efficacy of the blood thinner Plavix.

New Jersey’s AG and its Department of Environmental Protection announced a settlement of up to $450 million with 3M to resolve litigation over the company’s role in contamination of drinking water supplies with toxic PFAS substances, also known as forever chemicals.

Meanwhile in the courts, drug distributors McKesson, Cardinal Health, and Cencora (formerly AmerisourceBergen) together agreed to pay $300 million to a group of employee benefit plans to settle class action litigation alleging they contributed to the opioid epidemic in their marketing of the dangerous drugs.

A state jury in Louisiana recently determined that oil giant Chevron should pay $745 million in damages for harm caused to the coastline over many years of drilling activity. In the latest of a series of antitrust settlements in the meat industry, Tyson Foods and two other companies agreed to pay $64 million to settle allegations they conspired to fix prices on pork products provided to food service providers.

Defying the Trump Administration’s campaign to prohibit any efforts to address systemic racism and sexism, private anti-discrimination lawsuits move forward. Google just agreed to pay $50 million to settle allegations that it paid thousands of black workers less than their white counterparts and limited their opportunities for advancement.

A federal judge in California just granted preliminary approval to a class action settlement in which Walt Disney Company agreed to pay $43 million to resolve allegations that the compensation given to women in middle management was substantially lower than what was received by men in substantially similar jobs.

These are but a few of the steady stream of cases being brought by AGs and class action lawyers. It is far from desirable for the federal government to retreat from its primary role in business oversight. But until that policy shift can be reversed, the states and the courts are making sure that corporate misconduct does not go unchallenged.

Antitrust Uncertainty

Tariffs are not the only area of Trump’s economic policy causing confusion in the business world. Corporate executives, investment bankers, and others are struggling to make sense of the administration’s stance on antitrust matters.

At first, it seemed that antitrust would come under assault as part of Trump’s broad offensive against regulation. Project 2025 included a plan for dismantling the Federal Trade Commission, which shares responsibility in this field with the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department. Trump wasted no time in naming Republican commissioner Andrew Ferguson to chair the agency, replacing Lina Khan, who had taken an aggressive approach toward enforcement. Trump subsequently fired the remaining two Democratic commissioners.

Trump’s choice to head the Antitrust Division, Abigail Slater, had earlier in her career been an FTC staff lawyer but then worked for the Internet Association, Big Tech’s trade group. During the first Trump Administration, she served on the National Economic Council and went on to become a policy adviser to JD Vance while he was in the Senate. She was presented as an antitrust hardliner.

Under Ferguson’s leadership, the FTC has seemingly gone in two directions. On the one hand, it seems to have cut back its enforcement activity and has announced only one significant penalty action. At the same time, it has been pursuing a lawsuit originally filed in 2021 accusing Meta Platforms of using unlawful means to crush competition to its social media services.

There has also been ambiguity at the Antitrust Division. It has also announced little in the way of penalties, yet it continued a major lawsuit against Google and recently won a major court ruling that the search engine company has maintained an illegal monopoly over online advertising technology.

The FTC and the DOJ also have the power to block mergers that would improperly limit competition. Surprisingly, the agencies said in February that they would continue to follow the merger guidelines adopted during the Biden Administration. Yet the application of those guidelines have been uneven.

The DOJ sued to block Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s acquisition of Juniper Networks. Capital One’s $35 billion takeover of Discover Financial Services was allowed to proceed. It is unclear whether there will be objections to Google’s proposed $32 billion purchase of the cloud security company Wiz.

The uncertainty over merger policy, together with the tariff chaos, has led to a drop-off in deals. This is bad news for investment bankers and transaction attorneys but not the worst thing for the country.

Overall, the Trump Administration’s antitrust policy has been a lot less harmful than the slash and burn approach to regulatory agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Environmental Protection Agency.

It is notable that the more aggressive actions are directed against a single sector: Big Tech. The efforts of tech executives such as Mark Zuckerberg to ingratiate themselves with the Trump Administration have not paid off.

Although some MAGA figures have promoted the tough-on-tech approach for policy reasons, when it comes to Trump himself, the motivations are probably more personal. He has long harbored resentment against Facebook for banning him in the wake of the January 6 riots. And he complained that Google search results supposedly favor his critics.

Since Trump’s antitrust policies may depend on his whims, they are ultimately unreliable. As with trade, uncertainty will likely remain the order of the day.

Enforcement Inaction

The Trump Administration has declared war on business regulation, both overtly and covertly. Most visible has been the barrage of executive orders that cripple or eliminate rules without going through the normal review procedures. Since the beginning of this month, Trump has put his Sharpie to orders that instruct agencies to unilaterally repeal regulations they deem unlawful and to insert sunset provisions into others.

There is also a quiet form of deregulation stemming from the fact that many agencies have scaled back their enforcement activities. It is difficult to determine how much of this is being caused by operational disruptions linked to DOGE-instigated layoffs and how much stems from deliberate decisions to abandon cases, but the result is a sharp drop-off in the number of announced fines and settlements.

Let’s focus on the agencies that normally handle the biggest cases. Not surprisingly, the most dramatic decline has come at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which Elon Musk has targeted for elimination. Since Trump took office, the agency has announced only one new resolved case. On January 30 the payment service Wise was ordered to pay a $2 million fine for misleading customers. Since then, instead of new penalties, the agency has issued press releases about “regulatory relief” as well as a remarkable statement which criticized an anti-redlining action brought by the agency during the Biden Administration. In November, the CFPB had fined Townstone Financial $105,000 to settle allegations that the firm discouraged African Americans from applying for mortgages. Calling that case “abusive” and “unjust,” Acting CFPB Director Russ Vought vacated the settlement and returned the $105,000 to Townstone.

Since the inauguration, the Securities and Exchange Commission has announced only about a dozen resolved cases against companies. During the same period (January 20-April 16) of last year, the SEC announced more than 40 penalties. There is also a disparity in the amounts recovered. During that period last year, the average penalty was above $8 million; this year it has been about $2 million. Last year’s defendants included major companies such as Volkswagen and U.S. Bancorp; this year’s list includes much smaller firms.

The caseload at the Federal Trade Commission has also been low. Since January 20 it has announced only two penalties—one for $193,000 and another for $17 million. During the same period last year, the agency announced 11 penalties totaling more than $350 million. These are only cases with monetary sanctions, unlike the current lawsuit being pursued by the FTC against Meta Platforms, which, if successful, would likely result in structural changes at the company.

The situation at the Justice Department is more mixed. Combining both main Justice and the U.S. Attorneys Offices around the country, there have been nearly 70 announcements of penalties against businesses.

More than 50 of these actions were brought under the False Claims Act, the law designed to combat cheating by federal contractors, including healthcare companies dealing with Medicare and other Medicaid. Very few cases were brought in many of the other categories DOJ normally covers.

It is encouraging that DOJ is still paying attention to contractor abuse, but it is ironic that this is happening at the same time DOGE has been largely ignoring that abuse in its purported campaign to combat fraud at federal agencies. Perhaps the remaining righteous prosecutors at DOJ should teach Elon Musk where to look.

From Pro Bono to Pro Malo

When lawyers do pro bono work, it is assumed they are helping a worthy cause. Donald Trump has twisted this concept and made it part of his effort to punish law firms he views as enemies while furthering his retrograde environmental policies. He has created what amounts to pro malo publico—an activity that that promotes a public evil.

At a White House event during which Trump signed several executive orders promoting greater domestic coal production and consumption, he announced plans to pressure law firms to provide free legal services to coal companies to assist in leasing and other issues.

The firms involved would include those that have made deals with Trump to avoid punitive measures he threatened to impose on them because they represented Trump’s perceived enemies. As part of those deals, firms such as Paul Weiss and Skadden Arps agreed to provide pro bono services worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It was widely assumed these services would go to non-profit organizations, presumably with an emphasis on those with a pro-MAGA orientation.

Now Trump is taking the outlandish position that the recipients should include for-profit corporations. There is perhaps no industry less deserving of special assistance than coal. Much of the world is moving away from the black rock because of its outsized contribution to global warming and other forms of pollution.

Trump, who had made coal a centerpiece of his 2016 presidential campaign but was not able to do much to stem the industry’s decline, is now trying again. In doing so, he is seeking to prop up a sector whose harms are not limited to exacerbation of the climate crisis.

Among the largest producers is Core Natural Resources, the result of the 2024 merger of Arch Resources and CONSOL Energy. In Violation Tracker these companies account for more than $230 million in fines and settlements from some 800 enforcement actions relating to environmental and workplace safety infringements.

Another repeat offender is James C. Justice Companies, whose namesake is now a U.S. senator from West Virginia. While Jim Justice was still in charge, the company racked up hundreds of safety violations and resisted paying millions of dollars in federal and state safety fines. In 2016 an NPR investigation concluded that Justice’s company was “the nation’s top mine safety delinquent.” Sen. Justice was one of the attendees at Trump’s signing event.

At that event, Trump vowed “to identify and fight every single unconstitutional state or local regulation that’s putting our coal miners out of business.” It seems likely that the law firms being dragooned into serving the coal producers will end up helping to challenge these rules.

We need not express any concern for the lawyers. Skadden and other firms that have made deals with Trump have represented coal clients in the past. The bigger problem is that a group of companies doing great harm will be receiving an indirect subsidy in the form of free legal services—and the result could be a weakening of environmental and workplace safeguards. In other words, pro malo publico.

The Other U.S.-EU Economic Conflict

Tariffs are not the only economic arena in which the United States and Europe are at loggerheads. The Trump Administration and the European Union are coming to blows with regard to the oversight of business.

Trump, of course, is on a rampage against corporate regulation, especially when it comes to the environment and cryptocurrency. Rules are being slashed and enforcement is being reduced to the bare minimum. The one way in which Trump is coming down hard on business is his move to get companies to abandon anything that smacks of diversity and equity.

Now the administration is trying to export its anti-DEI crusade to Europe. The French newspaper Le Figaro recently reported that the American embassy in Paris sent letters to local companies demanding that they renounce DEI as a condition of doing business with the U.S. government. It later came out that similar letters were issued by the U.S. embassies in countries such as Belgium, Italy, and Spain.

European government officials have condemned the effort, accusing the Trump Administration of trying to impose its domestic culture war values on other countries. This critique of ideological imperialism is strong even in France, which tries to ignore race and has largely shunned DEI.

While the U.S. is promoting this frivolous oversight of foreign companies, Europe is getting tougher in its serious regulation of American corporations, especially the tech giants. The French antitrust authority just fined Apple 150 million euros for using a privacy feature in an anti-competitive manner. Last year the European Commission fined the company 1.8 billion euros for abusing its dominant position in the market for the distribution of music streaming apps and ordered Apple to repay 13 billion euros in improper tax breaks it received from Ireland.

An Italian court recently ordered Google to pay 326 million euros to resolve allegations it failed to pay proper taxes on its earnings. The company is still fighting a 4 billion euro fine imposed by the EU in 2018 for placing illegal restrictions on Android device manufacturers and mobile network operators to cement its dominant position in internet search market.

Last year the EU fined Meta Platforms nearly 800 million euros for imposing unfair trading conditions on other online classified ads service providers. Microsoft’s LinkedIn service was fined 310 million euros by the Irish Data Protection Commission for improper processing of personal data for the purposes of behavioral analysis and targeted advertising. Numerous other cases can be found by searching Violation Tracker Global.

Trump has taken note of such cases, and his new tariffs on EU countries are likely in part a form of retaliation. Yet there are no signs Europe is being cowed. In fact, the EU is expected to include regulatory measures against U.S. tech and financial companies in its response to Trump’s trade offensive.

While they may have misgivings about tariffs, U.S. companies seem inclined to seek help from the Trump Administration with their EU regulatory problems. The Wall Street Journal just reported that Mark Zuckerberg is lobbying U.S. officials to respond strongly to an expected EU ruling against Meta Platforms.

Zuckerberg is wasting his time. The Trump Administration is in no position to thwart EU enforcement actions. Everything it does only hardens Europe’s resistance.

A Gift to Money Launderers

Donald Trump wants to be seen as a law and order president. He is riding roughshod over due process to send purported Venezuelan gang members to a supermax prison in El Salvador, and he muses about doing the same with those who vandalize Tesla dealerships.

Yet when it comes to another group of miscreants, the Trump Administration turns softhearted. During the past two months, the federal government has adopted various kinds of leniency for corporate and white collar lawbreakers. The Justice Department has suspended enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. DOJ and the SEC have abandoned numerous investigations of corporate misconduct. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is being dismantled. The EPA is being neutered.

Most recently, the Treasury Department announced it would not enforce the beneficial ownership reporting provisions of the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) with regard to domestic companies. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called the move “a victory for common sense.”

Actually, it is a victory for money launderers. The CTA was enacted to address the problem of illicit money flows around the world. Opponents have been seeking to undo the CTA since its enactment in 2021. Their legal challenges appeared to be succeeding until the Supreme Court upheld the law earlier this year. Now the Treasury Department’s Financial Crime Enforcement Network (FinCEN) is using administrative procedures to severely restrict the scope of the law. As a result, the number of entities expected to report beneficial ownership will plunge from an estimated 32 million to about 20,000.

By exempting domestic entities from the CTA’s reporting requirements, FinCEN would have us believe that money laundering is primarily a problem outside the United States. One has only to look at the cases brought by FinCEN itself to see this is false.

As Violation Tracker documents, FinCEN has collected hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and settlements from U.S. financial institutions for offenses related to money laundering. For example, in 2021 Capital One paid $290 million to resolve allegations that its check cashing group failed to establish and maintain an effective anti-money laundering (AML) program.

U.S. casinos have also been penalized by FinCEN. One of those was the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. In 1998 the property, then still controlled by Trump, was fined $477,000 for currency transaction reporting violations. The Taj Mahal subsequently received numerous warnings about such issues, and in 2015, by which time it was controlled by Carl Icahn, the casino was fined $10 million for willful and repeated violations of the Bank Secrecy Act.

Scores of other AML cases have been brought against U.S. companies by the Justice Department. These include a $586 million settlement paid by Western Union on charges of willfully failing to maintain an effective AML program and aiding and abetting wire fraud. This case and numerous others involved criminal charges that were usually resolved with a non-prosecution or deferred prosecution leniency agreement.

Many other domestic AML enforcement actions have been brought by bank regulators—including the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation—as well as the SEC, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and state attorneys general.

In other words, money laundering and AML deficiencies are very much a domestic problem which will now grow only worse with the undermining of the Corporate Transparency Act.

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.