It's Open Bribery Season in Washington!

Interested in political corruption? Have I got an administration that works for you!

Photo by Viacheslav Bublyk on Unsplash

One of the darkly amusing elements of the Trump administration’s blitz on the federal government has been their claim that all they are interested in is finding waste, fraud, and abuse. No doubt, the federal government possesses all three of those things. But the simple truth is that most of what the DOGEbros have found is, at best, penny ante waste. Their cost-saving “cuts” are primarily coming from illegally freezing payments and firing civil service employees. No matter what Elon Musk says, there simply is not enough fat in the federal budget to cut the $2 trillion he claims he wants to cut. Furthermore, the next round of cuts will be more politically painful.

Honestly, however, the expensive destruction of the administrative state is not the point of today’s newsletter. The point is that an administration that performatively claims to be interested in rooting out fraud has taken a series of steps to enable the mother of all corruption seasons to start inside the Beltway.

Consider what the Trump administration did on Monday:

• Trump issued an executive order pausing any enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for 180 days and halting any new investigations or prosecutions. Trump has long wanted to eliminate this law; in his executive order claimed that the FCPA “actively harms American economic competitiveness and, therefore, national security.” As my colleague Sarah Bauerle Danzman explained, however, “Prohibiting such practices was a benefit to US firms rather than a drag [because] they could credibly tell foreign governments they couldn’t bribe, which saved them money!” Anyway, the message this sends to U.S. businesses is that bribing public officials is cool now.

• Trump fully pardoned former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, who was “convicted of corruption in 2011 in a scheme to sell a Senate seat being vacated by Barack Obama,” according to the New York Times’ Julie Bosman.

• Trump’s Department of Justice also ordered federal prosecutors to drop their prosecution of New York mayor Eric Adams for receiving illegal campaign payments. The order claimed that the indictment “restricted” Adams’ capacity to address “illegal immigration and violent crime.”

• According to CBS News, “President Trump on Monday removed the director of the Office of Government Ethics, the independent agency responsible for overseeing ethics rules and financial disclosures for the executive branch.”

• Marisa Kabas reports that, “the White House fired Cathy Harris, a Biden-appointed member of the bipartisan Merit Systems Protection Board…. It's an Executive branch agency that ensures other agencies properly remove/discipline employees in accordance with due process protections.”

All of the actions listed above transpired within 24 hours. During this same time period, there have been multiple instances in which the Trump administration has either ignored or defied federal court orders constraining their actions, egged on by a vice president who seems super-eager to defy the judicial branch.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s ability to direct his DOGE team to disrupt federal regulators provide an opportunity to enrich himself further. He has tamed federal aviation regulators who imposed constraints on SpaceX’s ability to launch rockets that, you know, blow up. According to CNN’s Matt Egan, Musk’s attacks on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, “is alarming consumer advocates and ethics experts, who say there is a glaring conflict of interest between the world’s richest person simultaneously presiding over the shutdown of the CFPB while also owning businesses that would benefit from weakened financial regulation.”

These are just the tip of the iceberg. The New York Times’ Eric Lipton and Kirsten Grind report that with Trump’s election, Musk has :

Mr. Musk has also reaped the benefit of resignations by Biden-era regulators that flipped control of major regulatory agencies, leaving more sympathetic Republican appointees overseeing those lawsuits.

At least 11 federal agencies that have been affected by those moves have more than 32 continuing investigations, pending complaints or enforcement actions into Mr. Musk’s six companies, according to a review by The New York Times.

The events of the past few weeks have thrown into question the progress and outcomes of many of those pending investigations into his companies.

The inquiries include the Federal Aviation Administration’s fines of SpaceX for safety violations and a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit pressing Mr. Musk to pay the federal government perhaps as much as $150 million, accusing him of having violated federal securities law.

On its own, the National Labor Relations Board, an independent watchdog agency for workers’ rights, has 24 investigations into Mr. Musk’s companies, according to the review by The Times….

Mr. Trump, speaking with reporters before he attended the Super Bowl on Sunday, said Mr. Musk is “not gaining anything” in the role. White House officials last week added that it is up to Mr. Musk to police his own actions.

“If Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with the contracts and the funding that DOGE is overseeing, then Elon will excuse himself from those contracts,” the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said.

The idea that Musk can self-police his own conflicts of interest is hilariously funny, as is the fact that Musk will not be required to publicly file a financial disclosure form.

Back in November I warned about “the inevitable corruption that will compromise U.S. policies” in Foreign Affairs. To repeat myself:

It will not be surprising if foreign benefactors approach Trump’s coterie of advisers with implicit and explicit promises of lucrative deals after their time in office—as long as they play ball while in power. Combine this with the expected role that billionaires such as Elon Musk will play in Trump 2.0, and one can foresee a dramatic increase in the corruption of U.S. foreign policy.

Three months later, I must admit that I was wrong: foreign and domestic benefactors might be willing to bribe U.S. officials while they are still in office. I have never seen a presidential administration care less about real or perceived conflicts of interest. They are operating in an environment in which Congress is quiescent and the Supreme Court is also corrupt friendly. They don’t care if they are violating the law, because they don’t care about the rule of law.

The combined signal of these Trump measures is clear: ethics are for haters and losers. It’s a rough world out there, and if you need to bribe or be bribed to get ahead, that is a-okay so long as you support president Trump.

Corruption for me — waste, fraud, and abuse for thee!