Trump EO Tries To Destroy Whatever Corporate Regulatory Oversight Hasn’t Been Already Killed By DOGE And The Supreme Court

Policy

from the dunning-kruger-the-country-to-death dept

Welcome to the golden age of corruption.

Last year I warned repeatedly how a concussive series of Supreme Court rulings like Loper Bright were poised to dismantle already shaky regulatory authority and corporate oversight, turning most U.S. regulators into the legal and policy equivalent of decorative seasonal gourds. It was the ultimate victory in a generational war on accountability by consolidated corporate power and rich assholes.

Falsely framed as some sort of “noble rebalancing of constitutional authority” by bad faith lobbyists and think tankers, the goal wasn’t “balanced regulation” or “reining in out of control regulators,” it was the dismantling of nearly all meaningful corporate oversight. So even before Trump won the election, labor rights, consumer protection, environmental law, and public safety were already in very serious trouble.

Now Trump has come out with an Executive Order that attempts to finish the job. The misleadingly named “Ensuring Accountability For All Agencies” effectively tries to declare that no U.S. regulatory agency can do much of anything without the explicit approval of a mad king.

An accompanying “fact sheet” proclaims that “so called” agencies like the FCC and FTC will not be able to take any actions that contradict the will of the President:

“No employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes the President or the Attorney General’s opinion on a matter of law, including but not limited to the issuance of regulations, guidance, and positions advanced in litigation, unless authorized to do so by the President or in writing by the Attorney General.”

The EO requires that all U.S. regulatory agencies must “submit for review all proposed and final significant regulatory actions to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the Executive Office of the President before publication in the Federal Register.” It also declares the President will “adjust so-called independent agencies’ apportionments to ensure tax dollars are spent wisely.”

It basically ensures that even if our captured regulators did somehow come up with a coherent proposal that challenges corporate power (already a rarity thanks to the corrupt, revolving door nature of most agencies), the President has the exclusive right to kill it, regardless of whether or not it’s within the confines of Congressional approval, or broadly, democratically popular.

Corporations last year had already lobbied successfully for the Supreme Court reversal of the Chevron Doctrine, which declared that regulatory agencies (with the kind of specific subject matter Congressmen like Ted Cruz usually lack) were free to interpret, craft, and enforce rules governing their sectors — so long as they’re within the confines of the law.

The axing of Chevron had already made it so regulators can’t do much of anything without the explicit approval of Congress. Proponents wanted you to ignore that Congress and our court system are too corrupt to function, ensuring that pretty much anything that challenges corporate or billionaire power will be declared radical and simply a bridge too far.

Companies all over the U.S. were quick to use the Supreme Court’s latest rulings to basically declare that regulators no longer have any authority to do anything, whether that’s imposing tougher pollution standards on energy companies, ending discrimination in healthcare, or trying to force your wireless carrier to keep your cellphone unlocked.

These efforts will steadily have disastrous downstream impacts that will kill people at scale across countless sectors. But most of the media coverage I read about it has a bizarre, clinical detachment that puts the reader to sleep by the fourth paragraph, and fails to convey any sense of the dire stakes at play.

Despite what big companies and billionaires might tell you, U.S. regulators have already been on the ropes for years. They’re generally understaffed, under-funded, stocked with only the kind of dull careerists that can survive the corrupt congressional nomination process (see: what happened to Gigi Sohn), and boxed in by industry lobbying, a very broken Congress, and a steady parade of shitty court rulings.

I’ve covered the FCC for decades. The agency rarely actually tries to seriously protect consumers. And when it does try (net neutrality, privacy), those efforts routinely never last long in the face of corruption. Real consumer protection almost uniformly fails. Still, somehow in Republican and Libertarian circles a narrative has long been entrenched that agencies like the FCC have been “running amok.”

That narrative persists because of its value in selling a lie: what most of these billionaires and companies want isn’t reasonable regulation, or sensible, well crafted oversight: it’s no oversight whatsoever. Freedom to rip off consumers, to pollute, to violate labor law, and to generally misbehave in the quest for improved quarterly earnings with zero accountability. Freedom to “innovate” and acquire and consume and expand with zero concern about the downstream impact of bad choices.

As I saw these efforts unfolding last year I got increasingly vocal about it, but was often met by an arched eyebrow by cocksure policy tut-scolds, drunk on normalization bias, confident that the system would hold. Well, the system is not holding. We’re entering the golden age of fraud and corruption.

As with everything Trump, this is extremely legally dodgy and will indisputably see a court challenge. But collectively between this, DOGE, and the Supreme Court’s locked-in majority, it’s hard to believe U.S. regulators will coherently function with any sort of independence from corporate power and petulant billionaires for a very, very long time.

Even under the best case scenario where the electorate tires of the coming cascading system failures and puts an end to our dipshit kakistocracy, reversing the damage in a system now specifically designed to prevent progressive reform will be a very steep uphill climb.

That’s not to say we can’t survive and build better things. The destruction of coherent federal governance shifts most battles to the local and state level. The country can still function as a loose assortment of fractured nation states each with their varying degrees of labor protection, consumer rights, and environmental protection. Which state you live in suddenly matters more than ever.

But for now, any dream of unified, federal coherence or corporate oversight has been murdered by a loose collection of sociopaths and self-serving Dunning Kruger hustlebros, keen on stripping and selling the American experiment for scrap off the back loading dock.

Filed Under: chevron, consumer protection, corporate oversight, executive order, fcc, fraud, independent agencies, loper bright, public safety, regulators