Regulation

Thrown Out of Court

The conservatives on the Supreme Court are fervent in the promotion of religious freedom, but they seem to be even more ardent in their efforts to protect corporate power. This is once again clear in a new ruling in a case involving tech giant Cisco Systems.

Cisco has been the defendant in a lawsuit brought on behalf of a group of Chinese nationals who accused the company of building a surveillance system used by the Chinese Communist Party to assist in the persecution of members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement.

The Chinese plaintiffs filed their case under the Alien Tort Statute, which for several decades has been used by foreign citizens to hold corporations and other parties accountable in U.S. courts for alleged human rights violations around the world, including cases involving torture and genocide. It has been employed by groups such as EarthRights International to bring suits on behalf of individuals and communities against companies such as Unocal, Chevron, Shell, and Chiquita.

It has not been an easy task. Although the law was originally enacted in 1789, the supposed originalists on the Court have treated it with disdain, repeatedly narrowing its application. The new ruling continues that trend by effectively overruling a 2004 decision.

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett literally said the ruling closes the door on the ability of plaintiffs to sue for violations of international norms. While acknowledging Alien Tort Statute cases often involve “heinous and inhumane acts,” she claims that such transgressions should be addressed by the political branches of the U.S. government.

It is impossible to imagine the current executive branch taking on that responsibility. In fact, the SCOTUS ruling comes only days after the Trump Justice Department urged a federal court in Mississippi to throw out an environmental lawsuit brought by the NAACP to stop Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence business xAI from operating dozens of natural-gas-burning turbines in the state without having a permit.

In doing so, the DOJ made the far-fetched argument that the turbines are essential to U.S. national security and took the outrageous position that the federal government should have unchallenged authority to block environmental lawsuits brought by private groups or individuals.

It is not surprising to see the Trump Administration or the right-wingers on the Supreme Court side with corporate interests. What is alarming is the extent to which they are trying to prevent citizen groups from bringing suits against corporate abuses at all.

At a time when the regulatory system is swinging sharply in favor of business, NGOs should be able to turn to the courts for some measure of relief. As that option is increasingly unavailable, large companies will become untouchable.

That trend is exacerbated by the inclination of many large companies to ingratiate themselves with an administration that is perfectly willing to provide special favors to those it regards as allies. A combination of corporate legal immunity and unabashed cronyism does not bode well for the future of democracy.

Zombie CFPB

Until recently, it appeared that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was all but defunct. Soon after Trump returned to office last year, his administration removed Rohit Chopra as director of the agency and replaced him, first, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and then with OMB Director Russell Vought.

The CFPB, which had built a reputation for aggressive enforcement against predatory lending practices, was told to suspend that activity. That included dropping numerous pending cases that had been initiated under Biden. Elon Musk, seeking to obliterate the agency through his DOGE onslaught, tweeted “CFPB RIP.”

After a federal judge prevented the administration from completely pulling the plug, Vought focused on weakening what remained of the agency. Last November, he ordered investigators to abide by a “humility pledge” requiring them to take a less aggressive stance toward corporate miscreants.

Now the CFPB is being used in a novel and pernicious way. The Trump Administration is turning it into a political weapon. The Washington Post reported recently that the agency is looking for ways to prosecute smaller, mostly non-profit community lenders characterized by Vought as unduly “woke.”

That apparently means that they provide financial services to immigrants. A recent executive order from the White House calls on the CFPB to advise lenders that they can consider the possibility of deportation in assessing credit eligibility. Other financial regulators were directed to advise banks to “be attentive to the credit risks posed by the extension of mortgage and auto loans, credit cards, and other consumer credit to the inadmissible and removable alien population.”

Vought is also undoing policies that encouraged banks to improve access to credit in underserved communities. The CFPB has just withdrawn an advisory that was sent to lenders in 2020 in the wake of unrest over the killing of George Floyd to guide them on how to establish special purpose credit programs. This came after the agency changed what is known as Regulation B of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act so that it no longer allows lenders to take factors such as race and national origin into account when designing credit programs to address special social needs.

To cap off all this, Trump has just nominated an executive at Capital One, a major bank and credit card issuer, to be the new director of the CFPB. Brian Johnson served in a high-level position at CFPB during the first Trump Administration and has been a frequent critic of the agency. Law360 writes that his background places him “squarely in the world of Republican lawmakers, regulators and academics [who] look on the CFPB as too powerful and a danger to the financial industry.”

It is difficult to decide whether it was worse when CFPB was dormant or now as it is being transformed into another tentacle of Trump’s anti-DEI and immigrant intimidation crusades.

We can only hope that, amid this MAGA weaponization, the CFPB is still doing some legitimate work. If that is the case, the agency is keeping it quiet. Its website hasn’t reported a new resolved enforcement action in more than a year.

The ICE-ification of Financial Regulation

For more than half a century following the passage of the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, financial institutions have been required to monitor certain customer transactions to thwart money laundering. The USA PATRIOT Act, passed in response to the 9/11 attacks, created additional rules designed to thwart terrorist financing.

Now the Trump Administration is starting to enlist banks in a more questionable form of information gathering involving the immigration status of their customers. For months, there have been reports that the administration is planning to require banks to determine whether customers are U.S. citizens.

That has not yet happened, but a recent executive order from the White House takes a step in that direction by advising banks to “be attentive to the credit risks posed by the extension of mortgage and auto loans, credit cards, and other consumer credit to the inadmissible and removable alien population.” The order calls on the Treasury Department and financial regulators such as the Fed and the FDIC to develop changes to the Bank Secrecy Act to address this supposed risk.

This sounds like a prelude to more explicit rules that would bar banks from doing business with undocumented immigrants.

It was surprising to see a reference in the executive order to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency that the administration appeared to have demolished as part of the DOGE onslaught last year. The CFPB was urged to tell banks that they should consider immigration status in assessing a borrower’s ability to repay a loan.

Now the agency, headed by OMB Director Russell Vought, has sprung back to life with guidance that does exactly that. The Washington Post reports that the CFPB is also beginning to investigate smaller, non-profit lenders, which tend to operate in communities with higher percentages of immigrant residents.

All this is part of an expanding effort by the Trump Administration to make life more difficult for immigrants by restricting their access to financial services, among other things. By raising the misery level, Trump hopes that more of the undocumented will self-deport.

It is ironic that the administration is pushing more people out of the banking system at the same time it is dialing up its campaign against debanking, the baseless claim that financial institutions have been denying services based on ideological or religious considerations. It has just come to light that Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney in DC, has sent subpoenas to the likes of JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America to look for evidence of the purported practice.

This effort, which stems from Trump’s ongoing resentment at banks that dissociated themselves from him and his family businesses in the immediate wake of the January 6 insurrection, will probably go nowhere.

The administration’s own debanking efforts against immigrants are a more serious problem. These moves will increase the financial insecurity of families headed by non-citizens, pushing them out of more stable jobs into precarious employment.

This, in turn, will have consequences for the population at large. When people turn to off-the-books work, they stop contributing payroll taxes that support the Social Security and Medicare programs. Social Security’s trustees have just issued a new report that lists the shrinking of the immigrant population as one of the factors weakening the financial condition of the system.

At the same time, the weaponization of agencies such as the CFPB against immigrants will serve to undermine the legitimacy of financial regulation. The Bureau, which used to play a vital role in identifying and punishing predatory lending, has abandoned that mission and is now, in effect, being turned into an arm of the much-reviled ICE. The scammers could not be happier.

Reputation Be Damned

Federal bank regulators are normally concerned with getting financial institutions to reduce their risk level, but the Trump Administration has a different idea. The major agencies—the Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency—jointly announced they have revised key guidance documents to remove references to what is known as reputation risk.

This is the latest in a series of moves by the bank examiners to discourage banks from taking steps to limit potential harm to their business stemming from an association with controversial activities. More specifically, it is part of an effort pushed by Trump to ban what he and his supporters in Congress claim is a widespread practice of debanking.

The controversy stems in large part from reported steps taken by several major banks to dissociate themselves from Trump and his family businesses in the immediate wake of the January 6 insurrection. At that time, outrage about the siege of the Capitol was high, and the Trump name was toxic. It thus made sense that banks, along with other institutions, would want to sever their ties.

Trump is obsessed with rewriting the history of January 6, and part of that is to delegitimize actions such as those taken by the banks. It has now become part of MAGA doctrine that banks acted out of unjustified political discrimination.

This claim has been broadened beyond Trump to include supposed prejudice against other individuals and companies for ideological reasons. Based on this dubious premise, the bank regulators have been moving to obliterate the idea that financial institutions should be judged on potential risks to their reputation.

Reputation risk is far from a contrived issue. All of the major commercial and investment banks have severely compromised reputations. Some of this stems from their own misconduct, but numerous institutions have compounded the problem by doing business with disreputable parties.

For example, in 2014 JPMorgan Chase paid $1.7 billion to the Justice Department to settle criminal and civil charges stemming from its business dealings with fraudster Bernard Madoff. In 2020 the New York State Department of Financial Services fined Deutsche Bank $150 million for failing to properly monitor account activity conducted on behalf of sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.

There are many more instances of banks being penalized in connection with suspicious activities by customers that were likely signs of money laundering. For instance, in 2024 TD Bank pleaded guilty to criminal charges of anti-money-laundering deficiencies and paid a penalty of $1.9 billion to the DOJ.

Major banks have also been penalized for doing business with parties that may be violating economic sanctions. In 2023 Wells Fargo paid $30 million to settle allegations by the Office of Foreign Assets Control that it provided a foreign bank located in Europe with software that the bank then used to process trade finance transactions with U.S.-sanctioned jurisdictions and persons.

In short, there are numerous ways in which financial institutions can damage their reputation by doing business with disreputable parties. At a time when banks should be more careful about the parties with whom they do business, the Trump regulatory agencies are pushing them in the opposite direction.

By removing reputation risk as one of the factors used in evaluating bank performance, the administration is making it more likely banks will abandon prudence in the pursuit of higher profits. As financial history shows, at some point this will not end well.

Slush Fund Time Bomb

Among the many unorthodox features of the slush fund being created by the Justice Department is the fact that the beneficiaries are limited to the supposed victims of the Biden Administration. Nothing is being said about compensating those who have been unjustly treated during the Trump years.

Calls for such payments will undoubtedly arise once Trump is out of office, given the egregious way his administration has prosecuted individuals against whom the president has political grudges. There will also be calls for redress for the corporations that have been targeted.

The Trump Administration’s posture toward the corporate sector is complicated. In many respects, it has adopted a conventional pro-business anti-regulatory agenda, taking it even further than previous Republican presidents dared to do. Agencies such as the EPA are taking a meat cleaver to long-established environmental rules, while the entire Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been effectively dismantled. Trump and his family have developed close and ethically questionable ties to businesses such as cryptocurrency, profiting from light federal oversight.

At the same time, the Trump Administration has taken aggressive action against selected corporations, using regulatory powers in unprecedented ways. Here are a few examples.

False Claims Act. The Justice Department has taken a 150-year-old law widely used to prosecute contractors which cheat the federal government and turned it into a weapon in the Trump Administration’s war on diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace. In April, IBM agreed to pay $17 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the DOJ alleging that the company’s DEI hiring program amounted to a form of racial discrimination that supposedly harmed white candidates.

Broadcast licenses. Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr, a MAGA zealot, has made implicit threats to revoke the licenses of corporations such as Disney Entertainment, owner of the ABC Network, as another prong of the anti-DEI campaign. It is also widely believed he was using the technique to bolster Trump’s pressure on ABC to fire the outspoken late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel.

Merger Approvals and Antitrust. Last year, the FCC used its power over certain mergers to pressure Verizon and T-Mobile to disown their DEI practices in order to clear the way for several acquisitions. The Federal Trade Commission has also gotten involved in diversity issues. Earlier this year, chairman Andrew Ferguson sent a letter to dozens of major law firms, warning that DEI hiring policies could be construed as anti-competitive.

Reverse Discrimination. The anti-DEI fervor has spread to the very agency that is supposed to enforce workplace civil rights laws, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Chair Andrea Lucas has made it her mission to carry out Trump’s executive orders designed to undermine DEI. Earlier this month, the agency filed suit against the New York Times, accusing it of violating federal law by passing over a white male employee for promotion.

All these actions amount to misuse or distortion of government powers. Aside from the harms done to individual companies, these practices help to undermine the legitimacy of the entire regulatory system. Complaints about Trump’s politicization of certain rules will be exploited by those who seek to challenge oversight of business more broadly.

Claims brought under a future anti-weaponization fund will exacerbate the problem. Corporations will not only resist legitimate regulation but will also seek compensation. Regulators will then become more timid and businesses more brazen.

Ultimately, the current slush fund and future iterations will come to serve not as checks on government abuses but instead as restraints on the ability of government to protect the public.

Who Will Regulate the Prediction Markets?

A controversial new form of financial activity is on the rise, and a federal regulatory agency is aggressively asserting its oversight role. That sounds good, except for the fact that the head of the agency is a strong booster of the activity and seems mainly concerned with undercutting more aggressive state-level regulation.

Prediction markets run by companies such as Kalshi and Polymarket have exploded in popularity among people looking to bet not only on sports but just about anything else under the sun. Unfortunately, that includes things such as military actions, and there is growing evidence suggesting that government employees are among those placing the wagers and are collecting substantial winnings through illicit means.

Recently, a U.S. Army Master Sargeant was charged with using classified information to place successful bets on Polymarket about the timing of the U.S. military operation to capture Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. We are likely to see more cases targeting this new form of insider trading.

The Justice Department is responsible for bringing federal criminal cases, but it is unclear which agency has responsibility to regulate the prediction services. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is claiming that power for itself.

Congress created the CFTC in 1974 for the purpose of regulating futures contracts, which had long been used to trade agricultural commodities and later spread to a variety of financial instruments known as derivatives, which include options and swaps whose value derives from an underlying asset. The CFTC’s current mission statement says its role is “to promote the integrity, resilience, and vibrancy of the U.S. derivatives markets through sound regulation.”

Prediction bets have no connection to commodities of any kind and thus do not seem to qualify as derivatives. That has not stopped the CFTC, which for the past five months has been run by Michael Selig, who was nominated by Trump after working at a corporate law firm representing cryptocurrency industry clients.

Under Selig, the CFTC has sought to muscle out state governments, some of which have taken the sensible position that prediction markets are really a form of gambling and thus should be overseen by state agencies that regulate casinos, horse racing, and lotteries. Selig is fighting against what the CFTC calls “state encroachment” by filing lawsuits against Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, Minnesota, New York, and Wisconsin. The agency recently submitted an amicus brief supporting Kalshi in a dispute with regulators in Ohio.

These disputes over jurisdiction are more than a turf war. The CFTC seems to want to assert its authority so that it can exert a mild form of regulation on the prediction markets. In fact, the agency is putting more emphasis on leniency across its activities.

The CFTC has just issued an advisory document indicating it plans to depend more on voluntary self-reporting of misconduct, which suggests that investigations will take a back seat. It is difficult to believe that aggressive new companies such as Kalshi and Polymarket are going to be quick to report wrongdoing.

When parties do self-report, the CFTC is offering generous rewards, including big reductions in fines and the possibility of a declination, an arrangement in which the agency does not file charges against the cooperating company.

It appears that the CFTC has already been scaling back enforcement. Since Selig took office, the agency has announced only a handful of penalty actions, and those cases appear to have been initiated before he arrived—and before the second Trump Administration began.

We are only beginning to recognize the perils posed by the new prediction services. Letting a regulatory agency that is not interested in robust enforcement oversee this activity is not the way to guard against those dangers.

Today’s Queen of Hearts

During her interview with Donald Trump, Norah O’Donnell of 60 Minutes mentioned that the man accused of trying to assassinate him had attended a No Kings rally. Trump responded: “I’m not a king…If I was a king I wouldn’t be dealing with you.”

Trump’s kingliness, especially in contrast to a real monarch such as Charles, is open to debate. But it is hard to ignore Trump’s similarity to a different royal figure, namely the Queen of Hearts. Like that foul-tempered character from Alice in Wonderland, Trump lashes out at those who displease him, calling for punishments that echo the Queen’s famous command: “Off with their heads.”

While the Queen never succeeds in getting anyone decapitated, Trump, unfortunately, has filled his administration with lackies who are eager to satisfy his whims. These days, that seems to be the main function the Justice Department, whose acting head, Todd Blanche, just succeeded in getting a North Carolina grand jury to indict former FBI director James Comey for a social media posting of seashells that supposedly constituted a death threat against the president.

That case is unlikely to go anywhere. More serious is the announcement by the Federal Communications Commission chair, led by MAGA zealot Brendan Carr, that it intends to review the TV station licenses held by ABC. The unusual step is purportedly connected to the agency’s review of ABC’s diversity practices.

It is likely no coincidence that this move comes just as Trump and the First Lady are demanding that ABC fire late night host Jimmy Kimmel for making a joke that Kimmel says was a reference to the age difference between POTUS and FLOTUS but which the Trumps insist was a call for assassination.

A move by the FCC to threaten a license holder to silence a Trump critic is just as pernicious as doing so to punish a company for having sought to promote diversity. The first is an egregious violation of the First Amendment. It appeared that Carr had learned that lesson after he caused an uproar by making a similar threat against ABC for a comment Kimmel had made about the man accused of assassinating rightwing activist Charlie Kirk.

Carr’s crusade against DEI flies in the face of the FCC’s long history of policies to combat discrimination and promote diversity in the communications industry.

Those policies came about primarily through the efforts of non-profit groups with close ties to the civil rights movement. Chief among these was the Office of Communications of the United Church of Christ, now known as the UCC Media Justice Ministry. In the 1960s, the UCC effort, led by Dr. Everett C. Parker, began to research the way in which television and radio stations in the South covered the campaigns for racial justice.

The UCC found that stations such as WLBT-TV in Jackson, Mississippi mostly ignored the protests while frequently airing pejorative comments about African-Americans. The UCC petitioned the FCC to deny the station a license renewal because it was not serving the public interest, as broadcasters were required to do under federal law. After a lengthy legal battle, the UCC won a landmark court ruling.

Around the same time, the UCC successfully pressured the FCC to adopt equal employment regulations for license holders. Those rules were modified by a 1998 court ruling, but the agency continued not only to prohibit discrimination but also require broadcasters to take positive steps to promote the hiring and promotion of minorities and women. Operations with larger staffs were expected to engage in more initiatives than smaller ones.

The current FCC’s policies turn this tradition upside down. By embracing the wrong-headed idea that efforts to address discrimination are themselves discriminatory, the agency is starting to turn back the clock to a time when people of color were largely absent from the staffs of media companies.

It remains to be seen whether the “off with their heads” pronouncements of the Trump Administration are any more successful than those of the Queen of Hearts.

Taking Pride in Doing Less

Regulatory agencies used to brag about how much enforcement they did. After all, that is their job. Under Trump 2.0 agencies such as the EPA and the Justice Department’s Criminal Division Fraud Section have continued this practice, even when it meant greatly exaggerating what they had actually accomplished.

Now the Securities and Exchange Commission is taking a very different tack: It just issued a press release boasting about cutting back on its enforcement. The motivation is ideological: the current SEC leadership wants to be less aggressive in its oversight of the financial industry.

In typical Trumpian manner, the release begins with a swipe at the previous Administration, which is accused of having used the SEC “to pursue media headlines and run up numbers,” creating “misguided expectations on what constitutes effective enforcement.”

SEC Chairman Paul S. Atkins is quoted as saying: “Over the past year, the Commission has put a stop to regulation by enforcement and recentered its enforcement program on the Commission’s core mission by prioritizing cases that provide meaningful investor protection and strengthen market integrity.”

The phrase “regulation by enforcement” seems to be meant as a critique of the prior leadership’s attempt to exercise oversight over newer sectors such as cryptocurrency, which is favored under Trump 2.0, due in no small part to the fact that the President’s family business is heavily involved in the business.

Atkins’s claim to be focusing on serious fraud cases has yet to become evident in the SEC’s announcements of case resolutions. According to data collected for Violation Tracker, total penalties collected by the agency during the first 12 months of Trump 2.0 were $298 million, down from $1.6 billion during Biden’s final year. The average penalty sank from $25 million to $5 million.

This year the SEC has announced only half a dozen resolved cases against companies with a penalty of $1 million or more.

A sign of things to come can be seen in the appointment of a new director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement. David Woodcock had been a partner in the corporate law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and before that was a senior staff attorney at Exxon Mobil.

Meanwhile, another easing of financial regulation was announced by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. FinCEN is proposing a rule that would give banks much more responsibility to assess their own exposure to illicit activity such as money laundering.

This approach is justified in the usual anti-regulatory rhetoric. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is quoted as saying: “Our proposal restores common sense with a focus on keeping bad actors out of the financial system, not burying America’s banks in more red tape.” Not surprisingly, banks are thrilled with the proposal.

FinCEN and the SEC are trying to give the impression they are making enforcement more effective by focusing on the more serious cases. What is more likely is that there will be less enforcement of cases of all kinds and financial miscreants will enjoy greater impunity.

Crackdown or Anomaly?

The Trump Administration leaves no doubt where it stands on street crime and drug trafficking: it supports the harshest punishments for perpetrators. When it comes to corporate crime, the stance has generally been quite different. Trump has used his pardon power to benefit a slew of convicted businesspeople, and the Justice Department is finding new ways to offer leniency to corporate defendants.

The past two months, however, have seen a burst of case resolutions in which corporations are paying fines and settlements of $100 million or more, which could be called mega-penalties. These have included cases in areas such as environmental protection for which the Trump Administration has not usually engaged in aggressive enforcement.

For example, in a case brought by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Justice Department, a federal court in Michigan ordered utility DTE Energy to pay a $100 million penalty for Clean Air Act violations at its coke battery in River Rouge.

PacifiCorp, owned by Berkshire Hathaway, agreed to pay $575 million to resolve U.S. government claims relating to wildfires in Oregon and Washington. The government argued that the company’s electrical lines negligently started all six fires.

Walmart agreed to pay $100 million to settle a case brought by the Federal Trade Commission and a group of states alleging that the retailer caused delivery drivers to lose tens of millions of dollars’ worth of earnings, by deceiving them about the base pay, incentive pay and tips they could earn.

Aetna, owned by CVS Health, agreed to pay $117 million to resolve DOJ allegations that it violated the False Claims Act by submitting or failing to withdraw inaccurate and untruthful diagnosis codes for its Medicare Advantage Plan enrollees in order to increase its payments from Medicare.

Adobe Systems agreed to pay $150 million, including a $75 million penalty and $75 million in free services to customers, in a case brought by the Justice Department alleging that the company’s subscription practices violated the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act by failing to clearly disclose important subscription information and provide subscribers with simple ways to cancel.

The Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) announced that Applied Materials Inc. would pay a $252 million penalty for illegal exports of U.S. semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China.

If the Trump Administration maintains this pace, it will end up with 36 mega-penalties for the year, nearly twice the number announced during the first year of Trump 2.0, according to the data collected for Violation Tracker.

That figure would give the administration a mega-penalty annual tally comparable to that of the past two Democratic presidencies. Biden’s annual total averaged 36.5 and Obama’s average was 43. For Trump 1.0 the figure was 32.

It remains to be seen whether the spate of mega-penalties of the past two months is an indication that enforcement is ramping up or is just an anomaly. In any event, it is encouraging to see that at least some federal regulators and Justice Department prosecutors are taking their job seriously.

The New Senator from the Fortune 500

Parts of MAGA world are up in arms over the decision by Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt to name Alan Armstrong to fill the Senate seat vacated by Markwayne Mullin, Trump’s new Secretary of Homeland Security. The fact that Armstrong made a political donation to Adam Kinzinger, who voted to impeach Trump while in Congress, is viewed as evidence he is insufficiently loyal to the president.

What these MAGA zealots don’t seem to care about is the fact that Armstrong spent more than a decade running a Fortune 500 energy company with a checkered regulatory record. Williams Companies, whose core business is natural gas processing and transportation, has annual revenues of about $12 billion and nearly $3 billion in profits. Armstrong received $18 million in compensation from the company last year.

As shown in Violation Tracker, Williams has paid out over $160 million in fines and settlements stemming from 120 regulatory infractions and class action lawsuits since 2000. This period closely coincides with Armstrong’s career as a top executive of the company.

Antitrust cases account for the largest portion of the penalty total, $61 million. In 2023, for example, Williams and several affiliates agreed to pay $12 million to Wisconsin natural gas buyers to settle a class action suit alleging the company was part of a price-fixing conspiracy in the early 2000s. In 2019 Williams agreed to pay $4.5 million to settle its role in litigation involving a conspiracy to raise the price of natural gas in Missouri and Kansas.

Environmental violations account for the most cases, 88 of the 120, with total penalties of $25 million. The largest of these in dollar terms is a 2023 case involving Clean Air Act violations caused by excessive emissions of volatile organic compounds, methane, and other pollutants at 15 natural gas processing plants. Williams and related entities agreed to spend an estimated $8.5 million to reduce emissions, and Williams paid a civil penalty of $3.75 million.

Williams has also been fined two dozen times for safety-related infractions, including 13 cases brought by OSHA. One of these involved the death of a worker at a facility in Wyoming.

Back in 2005, Williams paid $55 million to settle a lawsuit alleging it mismanaged an employee pension plan.

Armstrong is unlikely to accomplish much during his nine months in office, but he has made it clear his priorities will be to serve the interests of the industry to which he devoted his career. As the Washington Post put it: “Armstrong said his goal during his short stint in the Senate will be to drive ‘better policies that allow us to take advantage of our natural resources around the country,’ particularly through the passage of permitting reform legislation to speed up energy projects.”

Whether Armstrong turns out to be a total MAGA loyalist remains to be seen, but there is little doubt he will use his office to advance the pro-corporate agenda at the core of Trump’s policies.