Not everything President Donald Trump does is new. Amid the spree of boundary-breaking if not anti-constitutional actions that define the second Trump administration, one form of executive malfeasance stands out for its familiarity. Following earlier business-friendly administrations, the Trump administration has simply declined to enforce the law against its allies and resolved allegations of serious wrongdoing through sweetheart settlements that trade protection from the law for inconsequential relief.
Where earlier administrations simply took a light touch to corporate crime, however, this one has made non-enforcement a policy — disabling entire DOJ offices, dispensing pardons to individuals who hire politically-connected fixers, and concentrating authority over major cases in a handful of senior DOJ appointees who see themselves instruments of the president’s will. By the spring of 2026, the Financial Times reported that the administration had brought fewer white-collar prosecutions than in any year since at least 1986. One veteran trial lawyer advised his colleagues to start “developing in other practice areas.”
Thankfully, the problem of executive non-enforcement is well known to policymakers.
To protect against the very executive branch slacking and sabotage we are seeing today, a large number of federal statutes provide for enforcement by states. From the Clean Air Act’s citizen-suit provision to the Dodd-Frank Act and CAN-SPAM law, Congress has repeatedly authorized state officials to enforce federal law themselves, ensuring that the law retains its force even when the executive branch declines to enforce it.
Live Nation
The benefits of state enforcement have been especially apparent in antitrust, where the Clayton Act has long given state officials standing to sue for injunctive relief and damages. Trump took office promising that the antitrust laws would be enforced “vigorously,” but in practice, his administration has been a feeble enforcer.
In May 2024, the Justice Department, joined by 39 states and the District of Columbia, sued to break up Live Nation, the world’s largest concert promoter. Through Ticketmaster, the company controls the bulk of primary ticketing at major venues. Trial opened on March 2, 2026. Within days, the Department settled.
The Wall Street Journal has since reported that the settlement came following Trump’s personal intervention, after Live Nation hired the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, which represents him in his appeal from New York felony convictions for falsifying business records. Under the settlement, the company kept Ticketmaster and its amphitheaters, making only modest changes to its booking arrangements and establishing a $280 million fund for states that participated in the deal. (For context, Live Nation reported revenues of $25 billion in 2025.) The Department’s lead trial lawyer only learned of the deal the morning it was announced in court.
Most of the plaintiff states, including Republican-led ones, refused to sign on to the settlement and took the case to verdict. On April 15, 2026, a Manhattan jury found for them on every count submitted — monopolization of primary ticketing and of the market for large amphitheaters, and unlawful tying of amphitheaters to concert-promotion services — and fixed the overcharge at $1.72 per ticket. The states have asked Judge Arun Subramanian to order Ticketmaster sold.
Paramount and Warner Bros.
The same pattern played out in litigation over Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, announced in February 2026. The deal would join two of Hollywood’s five major film distributors and two of the five largest basic-cable programmers, and place HBO and CNN under David Ellison, whose father Larry — the Oracle co-founder and a Trump ally — is bankrolling the purchase. In June, senior DOJ leadership closed the Department’s investigation before the career antitrust staff could file a recommendation on whether to oppose it. The Department then issued an effusive statement touting the transaction’s supposed benefits to competition, which career investigative staff reportedly had no hand in drafting.
It thus fell to the states to develop the case that the merger threatened competition. On July 13, a coalition of attorneys general led by California’s Rob Bonta sued in the Northern District of California to block the merger, alleging it would harm competition in the markets for the production and distribution of Hollywood blockbusters and for cable channel licensing. The Writers Guild of America sued the next day, alleging harms to markets for scriptwriting and development. A week later, Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín froze the transaction, finding that the states had raised “serious questions going to the merits.” Paramount agreed to hold off closing; trial is set for March 2, 2027.
David Ellison responded to the legal developments by claiming, implausibly, that ideology played no role in the merger and threatening to move Paramount out of California, with Tennessee, Texas, and Georgia on the shortlist. Bonta called it “blackmail.”
Is the system working?
In light of these examples, it is tempting to think that the system is working as intended and that states are successfully filling the vacuum created by the executive branch’s failure to vigorously enforce federal law. A third example from antitrust strengthens that impression. In March 2026, a bipartisan coalition of attorneys generals challenged Nexstar’s $6.2 billion acquisition of Tegna after the Justice Department and the FCC had approved it. In April, Chief Judge Troy Nunley ordered the companies to hold Tegna separate pending trial.
But the states’ success in a handful of prominent cases does not mean they can be counted on wherever federal enforcement fails. The range of federal enforcement agencies that the White House has hollowed out is staggering. According to recent reporting, the administration has cut the federal workforce by 12 percent since Trump reassumed office and paid $9.5 billion to employees not to work. Rebuilding even a fraction of the capacity lost in the administration’s slapdash attacks on federal law agencies will take years.
While statutes like the Clayton Act invite state enforcement, building strong cases requires significant resources. Cases like Live Nation and Paramount require states to assemble teams of lawyers and economists to go head-to-head with corporate law firms at a moment when state budgets are strained. Multistate coalitions are assembled case-by-case, while federal enforcers operate within a single, unified hierarchy. And as pressure on Bonta to settle the Paramount case illustrates, state attorneys general are elected officials, exposed to an array of local political pressures.
Despite these challenges, state enforcement is worth the investment even when it is expensive and politically costly. When states enforce the Clean Air Act, the CAN-SPAM Act, or the Clayton Act, they ensure a baseline level of federal law enforcement, regardless of what the executive branch does or refuses to do. That not only helps ensure the country continues to be governed by law; it upends the bargain between the administration and its corporate allies. Every enforcement action, every damages award, every consent decree obtained by a state attorney general makes regulatory relief harder for the White House to deliver to those counting on the executive branch to ignore the law — and therefore worth less to the people trying to buy it.
The takeaway for state policymakers is simple. Continue to build capacity for state enforcement of federal law — by building out AG offices, formalizing inter-state coalitions, tracking federal non-enforcement, and intervening when the federal government turns a blind eye to serious wrongdoing. In doing so, states help ensure that the United States remains governed by law, not favor or whims.
