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treasury department
'This Is Grim': Trump Admin Moves to Gut Anti-Money Laundering Law
The U.S. Treasury Department will no longer enforce a "beneficial ownership" reporting requirements that are aimed at curbing money laundering and shell company formation.
Mar 03, 2025
The Trump administration announced Sunday it will cease to enforce penalties and fines on businesses that fail to adhere to beneficial ownership financial reporting requirements under the Corporate Transparency Act, an anti-money laundering law passed by Congress in 2021. The announcement was panned by advocates, economists, and other critics who called the move an on-ramp for corruption.
The Corporate Transparency Act, a bipartisan effort, includes a rule that requires many corporations and limited liability companies to disclose information on who owns and controls a business entity (also known as the beneficial owner) to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a bureau of the U.S. Treasury Department.
"Exciting news!" wrote Trump on Truth Social when announcing that the Treasury Department would no longer enforce the reporting rule, which he called "invasive and outrageous."
Garbiel Zucman, a professor of economics, reposted Trump's message on X, and wrote: "Exciting news for tax evasion and money laundering!"
Economist and author Anders Åslund reacted to the update writing, "to oppose corporate transparency is to favor corruption."
Supporters of the Corporate Transparency Act, which has face court challenges, argue that the policy is an important step toward reining in anonymous companies, which are the preferred vehicle for moving around illicit funds.
"God, this is grim," weighed in author Oliver Bullough, who has written a book about global wealth and corruption. "The White House has killed the Corporate Transparency Act, which was itself a tiny first step in the marathon journey of stopping U.S. companies from being the most egregiously opaque shell structures on the planet."
In a Monday statement, Ian Gary, executive director of the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition, called the move a "hollowing out" of the Corporate Transparency Act that runs counter to years of bipartisan work to "end the scourge of anonymous shell companies."
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, for his part, said ceasing enforcement is a "victory for common sense," according to a Sunday statement. "Today's action is part of President Trump's bold agenda to unleash American prosperity by reining in burdensome regulations, in particular for small businesses that are the backbone of the American economy," he said. In response, Bullough, argued that Bessent doesn't recognize that fraud "suppresses prosperity, rather than enables it."
According to the announcement, the Treasury Department will issue a proposed rulemaking with the aim of narrowing the scope of the rule so that it solely applies to foreign reporting companies.
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Let's Be Very Clear: The Real Fraud Is DOGE
The Musk-led effort is neither a money-saving nor fraud-finding operation—it's an ideologically driven assault by far-right libertarians who seek to destroy a functioning government for their own greedy ends.
Mar 03, 2025
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.
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 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.
This piece was originally published in the Dirt Diggers Digest newsletter.
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'Full-Scale Authoritarian Takeover': Vance and Musk Take Aim at Federal Judges
"We must push back hard against these next leaps down the pathway to tyranny," said one Democratic in the House.
Feb 09, 2025
Facing a string of judicial rulings in recent days that have struck down or at least put on hold a variety of efforts by the Trump administration that appeared to overstep its executive authority, both Vice President JD Vance and billionaire oligarch Elon Musk on Sunday took aim at the power of judges by saying their powers—despite being the recognized co-equal and third branch of the U.S. government—should be curbed or disregarded.
"If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal," Vance tweeted Sunday morning, in a legally dubious post. Despite the claim, military generals are not free—either from laws of war, international human rights treaties, or chains of command—to do anything they please.
"If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that's also illegal," Vance continued. "Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power."
Shortly before Vance's tweet, Musk, the world's richest person and who has been tasked by Trump to run the Department of Government Efficiency( DOGE) effort to dismantle key government agencies and programs, floated the idea that life-time appointed judges should, based on a set annual quota, be subject to termination by the political party in power. Currently, both chambers of Congress and the White House are controlled by Republicans.
"I'd like to propose that the worst 1% of appointed judges, as determined by elected bodies, be fired every year," Musk said on Sunday morning. "This will weed out the most corrupt and least competent."
Over the last week, federal judges have intervened to block DOGE efforts to have unfettered access to a key Treasury Department payment system and also blocked the so-called "Fork in the Road" offer to federal workers put forth by the unsanctioned Musk-led team at DOGE.
After a U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer responded to a suit brought by 18 state attorneys general on Friday by blocking DOGE access to the Treasury system, Musk retweeted a message suggesting that the best thing to do might be to ignore the order.
Musk also called for Engelmayer's specific ouster. "A corrupt judge protecting corruption," Musk tweeted. "He needs to be impeached NOW!"
Outside critics, Democratic lawmakers, and legal experts responded with grave concern to the comments about judges by both Vance and Musk, arguably President Donald Trump's closest advisors.
After initial litigation losses for their illegal actions, Trump Admin now begins intimidating/attacking judiciary. Vance—ignore court orders. Musk—impeach “corrupt” judges. We must pushback hard against these next leaps down the pathway to tyranny.
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— Rep. Lloyd Doggett (@doggett.house.gov) February 9, 2025 at 3:19 PM
In an email to CNBC on Sunday, Duke Law School professor Marin K. Levy explained that the state attorneys general and the judge in the Treasury case "were all acting well within their authority. What we saw here was the judicial system working as it is supposed to."
Mondaire Jones, a former congressman from New York and now a commissioner on the U.S. Commission for Civil Rights, characterized Vance's comments as being part of the Trump-led "fascist movement in American politics."
In a Sunday morning appearance on "Face the Nation," Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said what the nation is witnessing with Trump allowing people like Musk to run roughshod over federal agencies—and now attacking the judiciary—is nothing short of a "constitutional crisis" and "full-scale authoritarian takeover."
"We are seeing an executive branch," said Omar, "that has decided they are no longer going to abide by the Constitution in honoring Congress' role in the creation of the agencies, in their role deciding where money is allocated. And so the only recourse we have—since our congressional leadership, the Speaker [of the House Mike Johnson], will not stop the executive—is through the judiciary."
We're witnessing a constitutional crisis and a full-scale authoritarian takeover.
The executive branch has decided they’re no longer going to abide by the Constitution.
However, our judiciary system is fighting back. One-by-one, we will stop this illegal government takeover. pic.twitter.com/MMFgrLlXVV
— Rep. Ilhan Omar (@Ilhan) February 9, 2025
"When you think about the checks and balances we have," Omar continued, "the courts are the only recourse we have at the moment. And when we talk about the illegality of what the executive branch is doing, we have seen every single executive order that has been challenged in the court we found to be illegal."
Omar said that fact, hopefully, will offer some solace to the "American people that our courts are working as they should. The checks and balances are working, but what is not working is the way the executive is behaving and the congressional leadership that is failing the American people."
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