The Trump administration has busied itself in the past six months by abandoning prosecutions and investigations into corporations at an unprecedented rate. According to a new report from Public Citizen—a nonprofit government watchdog—the Trump administration has dropped one third of all pending enforcement actions against tech companies. Those same companies collectively spent $1.2 billion on political contributions since 2024, most of it going to Republicans. Some of it went to Trump directly.
According to the report, Trump’s White House has withdrawn or halted enforcement actions against 165 different companies, a quarter of those are tech firms. The administration halted nine of the investigations outright, including a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) investigation into Meta’s alleged misuse of customer financial data. It dismissed or withdrew an additional 38 enforcement actions against big tech, including 13 charges against the crypto exchange Binance for operating as an unlicensed securities exchange.
Everyone with eyes knows that Big Tech has gotten cozy with Trump during his second administration. Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos were at his inauguration. Elon Musk spent millions to help Trump get elected and Trump rewarded him by giving him direct control of much of the government by allowing him to spearhead DOGE.
“In a way I think the cumulative picture is the most shocking thing, because it reveals a clear pattern of these corporations going to great lengths to both ingratiate themselves with and enmesh themselves within the administration, and Trump’s agencies rewarding those corporations by treating them as if the laws do not apply to them,” Rick Claypool, a research director at Public Citizen’s President’s Office and the author of the report, told 404 Media.
Musk has been one of the big winners. The Department of Labor halted an investigation into Tesla and the Department of Justice dismissed a civil rights case against SpaceX. All it cost him was an estimated $352 million in political spending.
Claypool said that corporate enforcement plummeted during the first administration, and he knew it would happen again during the second term. “But this massive retreat from enforcement and dropping categories of cases involving corporate misconduct is something I’ve never seen before,” he said. “Many of these cases being dropped now originated in the first Trump administration. They were, correctly in my view, pursuing crypto scams.”
One of the more shocking cases involved crypto billionaire Justin Sun. The Securities and Exchange Commission filed charges against Sun for manipulating the market in 2023. After Trump’s election, he purchased $75 million worth of tokens from Trump’s crypto currency company as well as $18.6 million of $TRUMP meme coins. After the inauguration, the SEC sent a letter to the Federal Judge overseeing the case asking for a stay. The Judge granted it.
For Claypool, the signal dropping enforcement against Big Tech sends to the public (and more importantly to corporations) is simple. “It’s not illegal if a tech company does it,” he said, paraphrasing President Richard Nixon’s famous off-the-cuff remark about his crimes during the Frost/ Nixon interviews.
“The big winners are instances when the industry wins policy that serves as pretext for a retreat from whole categories of enforcement,” he said. “This is crypto corporations winning the total retreat of the SEC, fintech corporations winning the near-complete shutdown of the CFPB, and—coming soon—the retreat from FTC enforcement against AI corporations signaled in the admin’s AI Action Plan.”
Claypool said that this kind of massive retreat from corporate enforcement will have long term effects on society. “It distorts the incentives. It gives companies that are willing to risk pushing the limits of the law an unfair advantage over law abiding companies,” he said. “Members of the public are so much more at risk of falling prey to a whole range of scams, privacy invasions, and manipulations. At a societal level, it puts us at much greater risk for the next corporate catastrophe.”
The years leading up to the 2008 Financial Crisis coincided with an unprecedented increase in what Claypool called “questionably legal so-called innovations” such as credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations on subprime mortgages.
We’re seeing a similar kind of innovation happen in the tech space where billionaires use crypto and AI to spin value out of thin air and curry favor with the Trump administration to avoid the consequences of hurting normal people. It’s only a matter of time before something terrible, on a grand scale, happens again.
“In many ways, what’s happening now is the culmination of years of lax enforcement against corporate lawbreakers. Democratic and Republican administrations for decades have been far too open to striking deals with corporate offenders to help them avoid the full consequences of accountability,” Claypool said. “So now we have this class of corporations and executives that believes it is entitled to escape the consequences of their misconduct. They don’t believe the laws should protect consumers and the public, and they don’t seem to mind risking widespread harms and violations if it means they might grab another billion. And the apparently corrupt way it’s going now, with dropped enforcement seeming to be a reward for insiders and donors, risks leading to a full retreat from federal authority to protect the public from corporate lawbreaking.”
