The federal government under President Joe Biden prosecuted fewer corporate crime cases than at any point in the last three decades. White-collar criminal prosecutions hit a thirty-year low in recent years, according to data shared exclusively with the Lever.
A new
report by consumer advocacy group Public Citizen shows that under President Joe Biden, the Justice Department successfully prosecuted just eighty cases of corporate crime in 2024, down from 300 in 2000 during Bill Clinton’s administration.
In 2022, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco — a former corporate consultant who lobbied on behalf of Boeing and then oversaw the Biden administration’s now-defunct sweetheart deal with the plane manufacturer — said that the Justice Department needs “to do more and move faster” when it comes to cracking down on corporate crime.
Instead these prosecutors oversaw one of the most lenient eras in modern history for corporate crime, with the Biden Justice Department bringing “fewer prosecutions against corporations than any of the previous four US presidents,” Public Citizen notes in its report.
On its way out the door, the Biden administration gave corporate criminals a gift by allowing firms to avoid punishment and keep significant profits if they self-report their own wrongdoings. Depending on how it is implemented, the self-reporting policy “effectively affirms that corporations are above the law,” Public Citizen said.
Even with dwindling enforcement rates, since 2000, corporations have been forced to return more than $1 trillion to citizens and the government in penalties, fines, and settlements for breaking the law. Now thanks to Biden, they’ll get to hang on to even more of their record profits.
With his predecessor laying the groundwork, Donald Trump has directed his administration to
drop or pause more than one hundred enforcement actions against corporate misconduct. “Now the Trump administration is in power, and the message that corporate lawbreakers will be off the hook is clear — especially when those corporate lawbreakers are in favored industries or are administration insiders,” Public Citizen notes.
Freddy Brewster is a freelance reporter and has been published in the Los Angeles Times, NBC News, CalMatters, the Lost Coast Outpost, and other outlets across California.
