Who Knew? Mindless And Corrupt Deregulation Apparently Kills People

from the this-must-be-the-innovative-utopia-we-were-promised dept

You might recall that a central pillar of the Trump administration during the last election season was that a second Trump term would “take aim at big tech,” protect the little guy, rein in corporate power, and even “continue the legacy of antitrust enforcers like Lina Khan.” The press was filled with endless stories credibly parroting these sorts of claims, all day, everyday.

More than a year later and it’s nothing but corruption and cronyism as far as the eye can see.

The Trump administration and its courts have effectively destroyed regulatory independence, federal consumer protection, U.S. cybersecurity standards, and public safety oversight. Massive, terrible mergers are rubber stamped with reckless abandon, provided companies show authoritarian leadership they’re racist and feckless enough.

A 2025 report by nonprofit consumer advocacy firm Public Citizen calculated that the Trump administration has frozen regulatory action for at least 165 corporations under investigation for a wide variety of abuses, crimes, and fraud. And a more recent study by the nonprofit watchdog Environmental Integrity Project has found that EPA environmental protection has effectively ground to a halt:

“By analyzing a range of federal court and administrative data, the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project found that civil lawsuits filed by the US Department of Justice in cases referred by the Environmental Protection Agency dropped to just 16 in the first 12 months after Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025. That is 76 percent less than in the first year of the Biden administration.”

Of course, this didn’t just begin with Trumpism. For the better part of the last fifty years years “free market Libertarians” and Republicans (often with help from corrupt Democrats) have waged a brutal war on the regulatory state, insisting repeatedly that the path toward innovative utopia in all industries required that we defund, understaff, and legally undermine regulators at every turn.

It’s worth noting the majority of these folks weren’t arguing for reasonable and modest regulation, they were arguing, repeatedly, for no meaningful oversight of corporate power whatsoever (see: telecom). When the reality of that unpopular policy choice surfaces in the form of mass suffering, financial hardship, and death, a lot of these very vocal opinion havers routinely get mysteriously fucking quiet.

When it comes to most regulatory agencies, including the EPA, the assault has been multi-pronged. Numerous rulings (like Loper Bright) by the extremist U.S. Supreme Court have utterly demolished regulatory autonomy. And if an enforcement action against a corporation for predatory behavior somehow is brought, Republicans at the 5th and 6th Circuits ensure it can’t go anywhere.

At the same time, you have clowns like Elon Musk waging open war on essential government employees under the pretense of innovative efficiencies, ensuring that agencies don’t have the staff to do their job even if they wanted to:

“Part of the decline in lawsuits against polluters could be due to the lack of staff to carry them out, experts say. According to an analysis from E&E News, at least a third of lawyers in the Justice Department’s environment division have left in the past year. Meanwhile, the EPA in 2025 laid off hundreds of employees who monitored pollution that could hurt human health.”

While authoritarians have taken this all to an entirely new level, the path to this point was paved by no limit of anti-governance propaganda by countless U.S. Libertarian “free market” types, who, from my vantage point, have faced zero reputational or financial harm from leading the country down the path to what will be some extremely bloody and ugly outcomes.

It’s not really possible to fathom the real-world impact of the complete collapse of the federal regulatory state across labor, consumer protection, environmental enforcement, and public safety is going to have in the decades to come. But fortunately for the individuals and companies that made all of this possible, our corporate press really doesn’t seem all that interested in covering the story with any zeal.

Even outlets that do cover this story tend to downplay the impact of the destruction of regulatory oversight structures that took generations to build, with explanations that lull the reader into a deep fucking slumber long before any serious point is made.

It will take decades to repair the damage this era of open corruption has caused, if we ever do. Some state enforcement will attempt to step in and fill the void, but that will prove erratic at best, and nonexistent in many MAGA-dominated states.

Even if we can dislodge ourselves from Trumpism, I suspect many of the most likely candidates for a Democratic Presidency (Gavin Newsom, Mark Kelly) somehow won’t find the time to ensure that restoring regulatory integrity is as big of a priority as restoring corporate research grants. Forcing boxed-in, understaffed, and underfunded regulators to take action on piecemeal issues only after large swaths of people have avoidably died in, once again, completely avoidable and terrible ways.

That’s all depressing as hell, but I’m bored of people normalizing or downplaying the real-world impact of some of the worst corruption this country has ever seen (which is truly saying something).

Filed Under: consumer protection, consumers, deregulation, environment, labor, regulatory state