This piece is part of a series on luck, structure, and money. The companion on fraud is about how the programs that raise people's floors get looted. This one asks the next question: who is still watching. White-collar prosecutions are at a multi-decade low, the foreign-bribery law spent much of 2025 on pause, and the public-corruption unit went from thirty-six lawyers to two. Here is what the Justice Department has pulled back from, what it kept, and what its own record says the pullback is worth. I have kept this to the documented trend data and the department's own filings, and flagged where a number is contested or where a motive is interpretation rather than fact.
Start with the plainest number, because it does not depend on anyone's politics. In the mid-1990s the federal government brought around ten thousand white-collar prosecutions a year. It peaked at 10,909 in fiscal 1995 and hit a second high of 10,162 in 2011. By fiscal 2022 the figure had fallen to 4,180, the lowest in the four decades the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University has tracked case-by-case data, and it has stayed there, with 4,332 in 2024 and a projection of 3,862 for 2025 (TRAC). Corporate defendants have all but vanished from the docket: of those 4,332 cases in 2024, exactly 44 were filed against a corporation. The share of referred white-collar matters that prosecutors actually chose to charge slid to 24 percent, against a historical range of 30 to 50 percent.
Two honest caveats before we go further. The Justice Department has long disputed how TRAC classifies cases from court records, so treat these counts as directional rather than as the department's own accounting. And the long slide is bipartisan. The two peaks came under a Democratic president; the troughs have continued across administrations of both parties. This is not a story about one White House. It is a story about an enforcement mission that has been quietly shrinking for a generation, with a sharp additional turn in 2025.
The retreat from white-collar crime
The clearest way to feel the decline is to set two financial disasters side by side. After the savings-and-loan collapse of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Justice Department won more than a thousand felony convictions of bankers and insiders, including senior executives who ran the failed institutions. After the far larger 2008 financial crisis, essentially no top executive at a major bank was criminally charged for the conduct that caused it. The contrast is the centerpiece of a widely read 2014 essay by the federal judge Jed Rakoff, who asked why (New York Review of Books). The department's own answer, from then Attorney General Eric Holder, was that prosecutors "simply didn't have the proof." Critics answered that it was a failure of will, and a fear of destabilizing a fragile economy. Both readings are contested. The absence of the prosecutions is not.
In 2025 the department made the shift explicit. On May 12, the head of the Criminal Division, Matthew Galeotti, issued a memo titled "Focus, Fairness, and Efficiency in the Fight Against White-Collar Crime" (WilmerHale summary of the DOJ memo). It tells prosecutors to move quickly, to keep investigations from dragging on and burdening legitimate businesses, to narrow the use of outside corporate monitors, and to concentrate on the most serious conduct: senior individual wrongdoing, demonstrable loss, obstruction. It revised the corporate self-disclosure policy so that a qualifying company that turns itself in "will" receive a declination rather than merely being presumed to, and it added a "near miss" track offering leniency. The memo says, in as many words, that "not all corporate misconduct warrants federal criminal prosecution."
Read that memo as the department wants it read and it is a promise of restraint and efficiency, a correction to years of sprawling investigations that punished cooperative companies and their innocent employees. Read it the way its critics do and it is a narrowing of corporate accountability at exactly the moment the numbers were already at record lows. The text and the date are facts. The meaning is the argument.
The foreign-bribery law that spent a year on pause
The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, passed in 1977, makes it a crime for companies with a U.S. footprint to bribe foreign officials to win business. For two decades it was one of the most aggressive tools in the federal white-collar arsenal. The turning point was the 2008 Siemens case, which ended in roughly $800 million in combined U.S. penalties, then the largest foreign-bribery sanction ever levied (DOJ, 2008). By the late 2010s, billion-dollar, multi-country resolutions were routine, from Goldman Sachs and the 1MDB scandal to Airbus and Ericsson.
Then, on February 10, 2025, the President signed Executive Order 14209, "Pausing Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Enforcement" (the order). It ordered the Attorney General to stop opening new foreign-bribery cases for 180 days, extendable by another 180, to review every existing case, and to write new guidelines, with all future cases requiring the Attorney General's personal sign-off. The pause ran 118 days and ended on June 9, when the Deputy Attorney General issued fresh guidelines restarting enforcement on a much narrower and more centralized basis (Harvard Law corporate governance forum): prosecutors are now told to weigh whether a bribery scheme is tied to drug cartels or transnational criminal groups, whether it harmed specific American companies or U.S. competitiveness, and whether it touches national security. The measurable result was one of the lightest enforcement years since 2010, with roughly seven Justice Department actions, only two of them corporate and together worth about $123 million, against nine corporate resolutions worth about $1.1 billion the year before, and zero new cases from the Securities and Exchange Commission (WilmerHale year in review).
The administration's stated reason, which belongs in any fair account, is that the statute had been "stretched beyond proper bounds" in ways that hurt American firms competing for strategic business abroad. The important limit, which the defense bar itself stresses, is that a pause is not a repeal. The law is still on the books, its five-year clock keeps running, and conduct that went uncharged during the pause can still be prosecuted later. Reduced enforcement, the lawyers warn their clients, is not reduced risk.
The narrowing of public corruption
Two separate things happened to public-corruption enforcement, and it is a mistake to blur them, because one is a set of non-partisan court rulings spread across a decade and the other is a change in staffing that happened in a single year.
The first is the Supreme Court. In a line of decisions, all of them either unanimous or lopsided, the Court steadily shrank the reach of the anti-corruption statutes. McDonnell v. United States (2016) narrowed what counts as an "official act," overturning a Virginia governor's conviction (opinion). Percoco and Ciminelli, decided together in 2023, struck down two theories federal prosecutors had leaned on for years (Ciminelli opinion). And in Snyder v. United States (2024), the Court held that the main federal bribery statute reaches bribes agreed to before an official act but not "gratuities" handed over as a thank-you afterward, throwing out the case of an Indiana mayor who took $13,000 from a company after steering it more than a million dollars in contracts (opinion). Each ruling rested on the text of the statutes, on fair-notice concerns, and on a reluctance to let federal prosecutors police every state and city hall. To the defense bar these were overdue checks on vague, sprawling laws. To many former prosecutors they opened gaps that make real corruption harder to charge. Both views are about the same, undisputed holdings.
The second thing is institutional. The department's Public Integrity Section was created in 1976, in the wake of Watergate, to centralize the prosecution of corrupt officials "without regard to those officials' political views or allegiances" (DOJ). In February 2025 department leadership ordered the pending federal corruption case against the mayor of New York dismissed, prompting the acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and several career corruption prosecutors to resign rather than sign the motion, the largest such revolt in decades (NBC News). By that fall, reporting put the Public Integrity Section at two career lawyers, down from thirty-six earlier in the year, with its longstanding requirement that U.S. Attorneys consult it before bringing a corruption case marked suspended (NOTUS). The department casts these moves as re-tasking rather than retreat. Critics call it a dismantling. The headcount and the resignations are documented; some of the internal detailing figures come from anonymously sourced reporting and should be read as such.
The units that were stood down in 2025
Beyond the flagship areas, a cluster of specialized enforcement teams was shut or curtailed in a matter of months, each through a dated department memo.
On April 7, 2025, the Deputy Attorney General disbanded the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team in a memo titled "Ending Regulation by Prosecution," and told prosecutors to stop charging digital-asset firms for most regulatory violations unless they could prove the defendant knew of the rule and broke it willfully (Covington summary). Two months earlier, on February 5, the Attorney General's memo "Total Elimination of Cartels and Transnational Criminal Organizations" disbanded Task Force KleptoCapture, the team set up in 2022 to seize sanctioned Russian oligarchs' assets, which had restrained or forfeited nearly $700 million and charged more than seventy people, along with the older Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative and the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force (PBS). That same memo pared back criminal enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act to cases resembling traditional espionage (Mayer Brown), though a later national-security directive redirected FARA toward domestic-terrorism cases rather than shelving it. Environmental enforcement was never formally abolished, but the division that handles it lost roughly a third of its lawyers over twelve months and its civil penalties collapsed to about $15 million over eleven months, against roughly $1.88 billion the year before (E&E News).
Here the crucial distinction is one the department itself makes. Disbanding a task force does not repeal a law. The securities, sanctions, foreign-agent, and environmental statutes all remain in force, the conduct they cover is still illegal, and civil regulators still hold their own authority. The department frames these moves as ending "regulation by prosecution" and shifting scarce lawyers to cartels and violent crime. Whether that is a sensible reprioritization or a retreat that lets a category of wrongdoing run is the contested part. That the infrastructure came down is not.
What sustained enforcement actually produced
It is worth remembering what the vigorous version looked like, because the department's own press releases are the record. In the years after the Enron collapse, a dedicated corporate-fraud task force put the chief executives of Enron and WorldCom in federal prison, Jeffrey Skilling for what began as a twenty-four-year sentence (DOJ, 2006) and Bernard Ebbers for twenty-five (DOJ). Bernard Madoff drew 150 years and a $170 billion forfeiture order (DOJ); Allen Stanford, 110 years for a $7 billion Ponzi scheme (DOJ, 2012). After the 2008 crisis, a separate working group extracted the largest civil fraud settlements in the country's history, $16.65 billion from Bank of America (DOJ, 2014), $13 billion from JPMorgan (DOJ, 2013), and $7 billion from Citigroup (DOJ, 2014). Those cases were produced by standing task forces built for the purpose, and the mortgage-fraud vehicle finished its work and wound down around 2016 to 2018. No comparable wave of top-executive fraud convictions has followed, which may reflect the absence of a comparable systemic blowup as much as any change in appetite. That, too, is a fair point, and it belongs in the ledger.
What the department kept
The honest framing is not that the Justice Department stopped prosecuting fraud. In several categories it plainly did not. On June 30, 2025, it announced the largest health-care fraud takedown in its history, charging 324 defendants in schemes involving more than $14.6 billion (DOJ). Its elder-fraud strike force brought more than three hundred enforcement actions against transnational scam networks in a single year (DOJ). And prosecutors have charged more than three thousand people over pandemic-relief fraud, a program now winding down as the deadlines to charge approach (DOJ, 2024 task force report). Everyday fraud enforcement continues at a steady clip: bank-theft indictments, False Claims Act settlements, and unemployment-fraud pleas fill the department's news feed on any given week (Justice News).
So the accurate statement is narrower and more useful than a blanket complaint. Certain specific tools and case types have faded: the crisis-era bank-settlement apparatus is gone, large-cap executive accounting-fraud cases have thinned, foreign-bribery enforcement spent a year mostly idle, the kleptocracy and crypto units were disbanded, and public-corruption capacity was cut to a skeleton. Other categories, the ones where the victims are patients and the elderly and taxpayers directly, remain core and active.
Why the difference matters
The pattern in what stayed and what went is worth sitting with. Health-care fraud, elder fraud, and benefit fraud steal from identifiable, sympathetic victims, and they endure because the harm is immediate and easy to see. Foreign bribery, financial-institution fraud, public corruption, and sanctions evasion have diffuse victims, a competitor who lost a contract, a market that got distorted, a public that lost trust, and those are the categories that quietly contracted. That is not an accusation of bad faith. It is a predictable consequence of scarce resources meeting the harder, slower, more diffuse cases first.
The reason to care is deterrence, and the S&L-versus-2008 contrast is the cleanest illustration of it. When a thousand bankers went to prison in the early 1990s, the prosecutions were themselves a warning to the next cohort. When no senior executive was charged after 2008, the lesson the next cohort drew was different. Enforcement infrastructure is easy to take down and slow to rebuild: a task force can be disbanded in a one-page memo, but the institutional knowledge, the cooperating witnesses, and the appetite to bring a hard case take years to reassemble. Perennial harms do not pause when the enforcers do. The bribes, the shell companies, the looted programs continue on their own schedule, and the five-year clock that keeps a paused case alive also runs out.
None of this requires believing any single administration acted in bad faith, and the department's stated reasons, efficiency, competitiveness, reallocation to violent crime, are real arguments rather than obvious pretexts. The narrower and more durable point is the one the numbers make on their own. A generation-long decline in white-collar prosecutions, capped by a year of disbanded units and paused statutes, leaves a set of perennial frauds with fewer people watching them, in categories where the damage is real even when the victim is hard to name. Those are the cases a department that means to protect the public would want to keep bringing, in every administration, precisely because they are the ones easiest to let slide.
Read next
- Luck, Ladders, and Tolls: the complete series, all seven parts in one place
- When the floor-raisers get looted, the fraud inside the programs meant to help people
- Legal edges and lotteries, the structures this enforcement is supposed to police
- How much of success is luck, the series opener
- The working ledgers, the whole map
Sources and notes
This piece is built on documented enforcement data, the department's own filings and press releases, executive orders, and Supreme Court opinions. Where a figure is contested, or where a motive is a matter of interpretation, it is flagged in the text. The volume decline in white-collar prosecutions spans administrations of both parties; the 2025 policy changes are the actions of one; and the Supreme Court rulings are non-partisan judicial decisions spanning 2016 to 2024. These three lines should not be conflated. Primary anchors: TRAC (Syracuse) for the prosecution counts (directional, disputed by DOJ as to classification); Judge Jed Rakoff's 2014 essay for the S&L-versus-2008 contrast; the May 2025 Galeotti memo; Executive Order 14209 and the June 2025 restart guidelines; the McDonnell, Percoco, Ciminelli, and Snyder opinions; the NBC and NOTUS reporting on the Public Integrity Section; the Covington, PBS, Mayer Brown, and E&E News reporting on the disbanded units; and DOJ's own releases on Enron, WorldCom, Madoff, Stanford, the RMBS settlements, and the 2025 health-care takedown. Links are inline above.
This piece is informational and non-partisan. It describes documented enforcement trends and policy changes; it does not assert motive beyond what the cited sources state, and it presents the department's own stated rationales alongside its critics'.
