On Feb. 25, 2025, Foreign Affairs published my piece on the Trump administration’s decision to suspend the implementation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). The Trump administration defended the decision as part of a broad effort to reprioritize and streamline work at the Department of Justice. But, for many of us who had worked in the U.S. government’s anti-corruption system, this was an alarming way for the Trump administration to commence.
I asserted at the time that, unless corrected, the result would be:
1. U.S. citizens, banks, and companies would be subjected to bribe solicitation and without the cover created by FCPA to say no;
2. U.S. standing in international bodies, such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), would be diminished, possibly resulting in a future deliberation on whether the United States itself should be subject to additional scrutiny by banks and companies as a risky jurisdiction; and,
3. China could take advantage of the U.S. departure from the global anti-corruption scene to advance its own interests, both in the use of corrupt practices and in casting whatever the United States does in those lights.
So, what’s happened since then?
In many ways, the situation is far worse than I warned. The tone set by the president shapes how forcefully corruption laws are applied, and how companies and foreign officials and intermediaries assess the likelihood that bribe solicitation will be investigated. Barely a day goes by where there is not a credible allegation of corrupt practices, sometimes involving the president’s companies and family directly. It has effectively stopped being news that the president’s family is seeking to capitalize on his public office for private gain. Even setting aside new ventures, such as the creation of his own cryptocurrency, the President has not denied these reports. Instead aides have returned to a long-held argument that he’s sufficiently wealthy to be uncorruptible, and he’s clung to an interpretation that his interests are the American people’s interests, especially as he is not seeking to hide the existence or nature of these ventures. Moreover, there are reports of similar behavior taking place at lower levels in the cabinet and appointed bureaucracy, and within Congress.
Still, these examples of corruption – while pernicious, grotesque, and damaging to the institution of the presidency and integrity of the U.S. government – are analytically distinct from FCPA enforcement, but they are not unrelated: A president who openly monetizes his office sets the tone for how corruption risks are perceived throughout the system, including by the foreign officials and intermediaries that FCPA targets. Put simply, the above reports indicate corruption of U.S. institutions; whereas the main objective of the FCPA is corruption of foreign institutions by U.S. actors.
So, what of the FCPA itself? We can apply three levels of analysis to whether my prognostics were correct: (1) what we are seeing; (2) what we are hearing; and (3) what we can reasonably fear.
What We Are Seeing
On seeing, the Department of Justice’s Fraud Section, which is responsible for FCPA enforcement, continued to obtain convictions and fines as a result of FCPA prosecutions, but the numbers are down significantly when compared to the last ten years.
Over at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which also has a significant role to play in FCPA enforcement, there were zero civil enforcement actions brought in all of 2025 and the unit responsible for FCPA enforcement was effectively disbanded with the departure of its leadership and delisting as a specialized unit under Chairman Atkins. Notably, a variety of cases that had been brought under the Biden administration in response to a variety of frauds (including those involving cryptocurrencies) were dismissed thereafter.
Overall, the picture is of significantly less enforcement over the past year. Some of this probably reflects the 118-day pause in enforcement of the FCPA itself. But, given that the culmination of the review was the termination of approximately half of the active FCPA investigative docket, it is reasonable to view the result as being a deliberate narrowing rather than procedural delay. Gibson Dunn and other law firms have also reported that some investigations were dropped, which suggests that the overall trajectory of criminal resolutions will remain lower. This trend is compounded by the absence of SEC civil enforcement actions, which historically complemented DOJ’s criminal cases. s. The overall picture is one where the U.S. enforcement agencies have taken their foot off the gas, at a minimum.
The resolution of the pause itself gives credence to the theory that U.S. government is pulling back from enforcement. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche issued “Guidelines for Investigations and Enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act” on June 9, 2025, that ordered prosecutors to focus investigations on criminal cases that (1) involve cartels or transnational criminal organizations, (2) show direct economic harm to identifiable American companies, (3) threaten U.S. national security, or (4) show clear evidence of individual corrupt intent.
As a set of priorities, there are still ample opportunities in these guidelines to undertake significant investigations and it is not an objectively bad idea to try to focus limited prosecutorial resources in some fashion, as is done in almost every change of administration. But time will tell if what this administration says their priorities are actually match what cases they bring.
However, more disturbing than the dismissal of existing cases, is that the sections responsible for these investigations cut their number of prosecutors, matching cuts in personnel and operations at the FBI and other enforcement bodies. The cumulative effect, as seen already in the numbers, is likely to be a smaller enforcement posture overall especially since the prosecutions undertaken in 2025 began in truth under the Biden administration.
Likewise, the United States has been signaling broader disinterest in corruption that takes place abroad unless it directly and materially affects U.S. persons. For example, the United States has reversed several sets of sanctions against corrupt actors that helped to complement FCPA by imposing costs on those who engage in bribery and other corrupt acts abroad.
Throughout 2025, the State and Treasury Departments reversed sanctions on corrupt actors from Paraguay (where former president Horacio Cartes saw his sanctions lifted) to Hungary (where Antal Rogan, an aide of Viktor Orban, had been sanctioned by the United States in late 2024.) Perhaps the biggest removal was on Milorad Dodik and 47 other individuals and entities who had been sanctioned for corruption under the Western Balkans program. For none of these did the U.S. government articulate a specific reason for sanctions removal beyond the incompatibility of continued sanctions for the foreign policy of the United States. Although this is the bare minimum legal step that the U.S. executive branch must take to remove sanctions, it suggests less a resolution of the corrupt acts for which these individuals were sanctioned and more a decision to set them aside for other exigencies.
In the case of Cartes, this is doubly surprising because his designation coincided with significant reporting about his relationship with Hezbollah, a bête noire of the Trump administration especially in the Western Hemisphere. Indeed, this is one of the primary charges laid at the feet of Cuba to justify an executive order targeting the country with tariffs associated with its purchases of crude oil. To remove sanctions against Cartes given his designation criteria and without comment on this relationship is highly questionable.
What We Are Hearing
With that background, what are we hearing? Have corporations or banks gotten more corrupt during the last year and have they taken advantage of the opportunity created by DOJ’s decisions? It is impossible to say with any certainty, though anecdotally some companies have indicated more bribe solicitations from foreign officials since Trump took office. More time will need to pass for firm data to point to this as a systemic issue.
In my various meetings with compliance officials and professionals in the private sector, they have taken pains to note that they view corruption as a tax on their operations and a hindrance to their business activities. More than one noted that the statute of limitations under the FCPA is five years, meaning that any FCPA violations that they might undertake during the Trump administration could be enforced under a subsequent one. This is not a dispositive argument; after all, some may also assume that a future administration will have to prioritize as well among many potential cases, but – for the moment – it is possible that private sector actors will continue to exercise appropriate restraint and compliance.
Still, the problems associated with U.S. actors engaging in corruption abroad was seldom about those companies prepared to staff and maintain compliance departments that would attend sessions of other compliance professionals; the problem is with those that don’t take compliance seriously unless presented with real risk of being caught. It is these companies that, even when faced with a long statute of limitations timeframe, may be prepared to test their luck.
One indicator to watch will be the number of voluntary self-disclosures by U.S. companies. Under the Biden administration, companies were encouraged to self-report corruption-related issues and promised more lenient terms for doing so. The Biden administration’s intention in offering this option was to incentivize cooperation and improve compliance standards within companies; and for companies, although they may still pay a penalty, it would be less than if the government found out about these allegations first. Of the three FCPA corporate resolutions in 2025, two were from voluntary self-reports made in prior years.
Companies could very well decide to keep implementing their corporate compliance programs, at least for the time being, but halt active cooperation with the DOJ out of an expectation that there is no real risk of the DOJ finding out about this misconduct otherwise. But it will be interesting to watch if this pipeline of self disclosure to resolution matches with what compliance professionals say about continuing to abide by the laws.
Where the Danger Lies
But the real danger isn’t captured in enforcement statistics alone — it’s in what the overall picture signals about whether the United States takes bribery seriously, and how that signal changes the risk calculus for companies deciding whether to comply. In my view, this is the most serious area of danger for the United States, its business integrity, and its reputation, and it is still too early to tell. When the President of the United States is accepting a gold bar as a gift, it is reasonable to ask whether similar gifts given to other foreign heads of state will be seen as grounds for investigations, much less prosecutions. A year on, we may lack substantive details of such arrangements abroad but, given the murky nature of corruption, absence of proof cannot be reasonably taken to be the same as absence of illicit conduct. The very act of pausing implementation of the FCPA before restarting it with a trimmed caseload, fewer prosecutors, and diminished resources to pursue charges gives a strong indication of the administration’s actual priorities.
Although the United States has not disappeared from the global anti-corruption stage, it has substantially withdrawn from it. The United States is still a member in good standing at the FATF and has continued to be represented at some global anti-corruption events, such as the Conference of the States Parties to the UN Convention against Corruption held in Doha in December 2025. However, this obscures what has been an irrefutable diminution in the U.S. anti-corruption position internationally, especially combined with the reduction in U.S. participation in more routine anti-corruption fora (such as the March 2025 OECD working group on bribery, which DOJ did not attend). Perhaps the most significant rupture came with the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and termination of many of its international programs. Other steps – such as the elimination of the position of Coordinator on Global Anti-Corruption (CGAC), a position I held from 2022-2024, and reduction of U.S. staffing in anti-corruption work – augur against an active anti-corruption agenda abroad.
Of course, we are still only a year into the Trump administration. There are other spaces that I am watching carefully, such as support given to the OECD in its anti-corruption reform agenda, the U.S. relationship with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime that manages the UN Convention Against Corruption, and regional fora for anti-corruption support.
It is into this breach that China and other actors can step, both in demonstrating international leadership that the United States has abandoned and in engaging in activities that are themselves corrupt. There is insufficient information to support the contention that China is utilizing these practices more now, even if the opportunity is available to it. Instead, it seems that China’s strongest argument in advancing its economic interests has been to contrast its business practices against those of the United States, especially in areas related to international trade and tariffs. A similar story can be told about other countries where corruption has long been an issue, such as India, Brazil, and South Africa. At the same time, the UK, France, and Switzerland agreed to stand up a new International Anti-Corruption Prosecutorial Task Force that would normally have involved the United States but now is intended to address U.S. absence.
While corruption may itself remain a major issue in these countries and as relates to foreign business activities, the broader dimensions of global economic policy may be more significant determinants of their behavior today than corruption.
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A year on, we have an incomplete picture. On the one hand, there are some indications of continued engagement in international anti-corruption and the FCPA is still in effect. In fact, in mid-February 2026, DOJ won a case against an individual charged with FCPA violations, a case that had been paused in 2025 no less. But, this damns U.S. efforts with faint praise: FCPA is a law that the Trump administration is obliged to implement and nominal involvement in anti-corruption fora does not obscure the sea change in U.S. prioritization and effort. Across every measurable dimension – enforcement actions, staffing, sanctions, institutional capacity, and international engagement – the United States has drawn down its anti-corruption posture.
We do not have enough information to fill in the picture completely as to the effects these policies will have on the private sector and foreign countries. But, given that corruption thrives in precisely the conditions of reduced scrutiny and enforcement that now prevail, the uncertainty itself is cause for serious concern and data lags offer no consolation.
