Donald Trump is shutting down law enforcement across the country.

That’s according to a front page article in the May/June issue of the Capitol Hill Citizen titled – Pardon me? Trump lets the corporate criminals off the hook. 

His first move was to put all foreign bribery law enforcement on hold. 

Then he started shutting down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and firing almost all of its staff. 

Then Trump offered $50,000 to all staff at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), perhaps the premiere corporate law enforcement agency, to retire early. 

About 600 SEC employees, twelve percent of the 4,400 staff, took him up on the offer.

“With growing concern, we fear that we are watching the SEC face a death by a thousand cuts,” the Shadow SEC, a group of prominent securities law professors said in a statement last week. “No, we do not mean that the SEC is likely to be abolished by either executive or legislative action. Rather, we mean that the SEC is on the verge of being shrunk by both budget cuts and mandated staff reductions, while it is losing its traditional independence – as an Executive Order now requires any policy decision to be approved in advance by the Office of Management and Budget. The end result might be a shell of its former self, as the SEC becomes an agency with little power, capacity, or independent judgement.” 

Then, for the first time in history, Trump fired commissioners at multiple independent agencies, denying them quorums and the ability to perform core agency functions. 

“This breathtaking power grab is a slap in the face to Congress, which deliberately designed these agencies to be independent of the president,” Public Citizen’s Rob Weissman said. Public Citizen claims that Trump unlawfully fired the Federal Trade Commission’s two Democratic commissioners. At the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), Trump’s deadly deregulation is putting at risk thousands of American workers. An estimated 140,587 U.S. workers died from hazardous working conditions in 2023. This amounts to roughly 385 workplace-related deaths a day. While mourning these lives lost, there is also reason to fear this death toll will only rise due to aggressive Trump administration attacks on basic health and safety protections long taken for granted in most U.S. workplaces.” 

According to the Economic Policy Institute, Trump has issued dozens of executive orders to roll back or review existing regulations, including an order directing agencies – including the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) – to eliminate ten existing protections before enacting any new guidelines. 

He has also effectively eliminated the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), the sole agency responsible for research that informs OSHA policymaking with evidence-based assessments of injury and fatality risks and actionable guidance for employers to use to improve safety, and closed down eleven OSHA offices in states with the highest workplace fatality rates. And he has eliminated 34 offices of the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), which protects coal miners from hazards like black lung disease, and paused a new rule on silica exposure to prevent coal miner disease and death from silicosis. 

Now Trump wants to zero out the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB). That’s the industry funded agency that regulates the accounting industry. The big four auditing firms – Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KMPG, and PriceWaterhouse- Coopers – are not happy with the PCAOB, because sometimes it does its job and fines the firms for their defective audits of public companies. 

And twenty-five years ago, a wave of defective audits across the country culminated in the bankruptcies of Enron and WorldCom, rocking the financial markets, destroying tens of thousands of jobs, and decimating the retirement savings of millions of Americans. 

Why wouldn’t it happen again? Like clockwork, it will happen again unless the PCAOB is allowed to do its job. In early May, a group of former SEC officials, PCAOB advisory committee members, and former auditors wrote to Congressional leaders asking them to sink the legislation that would merge the PCAOB into the SEC. 

Then the group said that the bill “would eliminate the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), purportedly by folding its functions into the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), but without ensuring any increase in funding or staffing at the SEC to fulfill those vital functions.” 

“If adopted, the bill would have a devastating impact on the accuracy and reliability of financial reporting on which investor protection and the health and integrity of our financial markets rely,” they wrote. 

Along the way, Trump has been pardoning a slew of white collar criminals. But not only is Trump pardoning individual white-collar criminals, but in a first, he has pardoned a corporation that was convicted of a crime. Earlier this year, BitMEX was fined $100 million for violating the Bank Secrecy Act by willfully failing to establish, implement, and maintain an adequate antimoney laundering and knowyour- customer program. 

While the mainstream press reported that Trump pardoned the three founders of crypto exchange BitMEX and another executive, they didn’t report the historic first – Trump pardoned the corporation – BitMEX. 

“When I look at the pardon of BitMEX, I see an opening for an opportunity for a lobbying frenzy for pardons for corporate criminals,” said Public Citizen’s Rick Claypool. “There is a new reward for them on the table. They can have their criminal records totally wiped out.” 

In a report Public Citizen released earlier this year – Corporate Clemency: How Trump Is Halting Enforcement Against Corporate Lawbreakers – Claypool finds that “the Trump administration has dropped or halted more than one out of five prominent investigations into and enforcement actions against corporations in just its first six weeks in office.” 

Whole categories of corporate crime enforcement have come screeching to a halt just weeks into President Donald Trump’s second term. 

“Trump is handing out ‘get out of jail free’ cards to corporate lawbreakers,” the report found. “The consequences for the public when corporations face a diminished threat of enforcement are disastrous. Meanwhile, honest businesses that are not Trump administration insiders – or those who refuse to play along with the MAGA agenda – may face serious disadvantages from Trump’s politicized approach to enforcement.” 

The Trump administration has already halted or moved to dismiss enforcement investigations and cases against more than 100 corporations, Claypool said. 

These include all 42 cases at the CFPB, at least 20 investigations and cases under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, at least 15 cases brought by the Civil Rights and Environment and Natural Resource divisions at the U.S. Department of Justice, at least seven cases at the SEC against cryptocurrency corporations, and at least 34 corporations facing enforcement actions that collectively contributed more than $34 million to Trump’s inaugural festivities.