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New Tracker Spotlights Corporate Criminals Trump Could Let Off the Hook
Out of nearly 200 companies currently facing federal investigations and cases, a third of them have connections to President-elect Donald Trump, according to a Public Citizen analysis.
Jan 08, 2025
The progressive advocacy group Public Citizen on Tuesday launched a new project aimed at tracking the incoming Trump administration's approach to corporate crime, an effort the watchdog said is particularly urgent given that many of the companies currently under federal investigation have connections to the president-elect.
Public Citizen found that of 192 individual corporations currently facing federal probes or cases, a third "have known ties with the Trump administration."
"They or their executives have either contributed to his inauguration, or Trump has nominated their former employees, investors, and lobbyists," the group noted.
Public Citizen said its new Corporate Enforcement Tracker will serve as "a resource for watchdogging ongoing federal investigations and cases against alleged corporate wrongdoing that are at risk of being dropped, weakened, or otherwise modified by the incoming Trump administration."
Corporate prosecutions plummeted to a 25-year low during Trump's first term, and Public Citizen's Rick Claypool—who is heading the new project—predicted that "it's likely Trump's second term will see a similar or worse dropoff in enforcement."
"Corporate crime enforcement fell during Trump's first term," Claypool noted, "even as his administration pursued 'tough' policies against immigrants, protestors, and low-level offenders."
"The five corporations with the most federal investigations or cases against them are Tesla (7), Amazon (6), Pfizer (5), Wells Fargo (4), and SpaceX (4)."
Four of the companies listed on Public Citizen's tracker—Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and X—are helmed by billionaire Elon Musk, who donated heavily to Trump's presidential campaign and is set to co-lead a new advisory commission tasked with identifying spending and regulations to eliminate.
Tesla is facing investigations by the Justice Department, Securities and Exchange Commission, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and other agencies—probes that could be shut down by the incoming administration, which is set to be packed with lobbyists and billionaires.
Reutersreported last week that "Musk's potential to have extraordinary clout with the new administration raises questions about the fate of federal investigations and regulatory actions affecting his business empire, of which at least 20 are ongoing, according to three sources familiar with SpaceX and Tesla operations and the companies' interaction with the U.S. government, as well as five current and former officials who have direct knowledge of individual probes into Musk's companies."
"The inquiries include examinations of the alleged securities violations; questions over the safety of Tesla's Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD) systems; potential animal-welfare violations in Neuralink's brain-chip experiments; and alleged pollution, hiring-discrimination, and licensing problems at SpaceX," the outlet noted.
Public Citizen also highlighted 16 companies that have donated to Trump's inaugural fund as they face federal investigations or enforcement actions: Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Bank of America, Coinbase, Ford, Goldman Sachs, Kraken, Meta, OpenAI, Pfizer, Ripple, Robinhood, Stanley Black & Decker, Toyota, and Uber.
"The five corporations with the most federal investigations or cases against them are Tesla (7), Amazon (6), Pfizer (5), Wells Fargo (4), and SpaceX (4)," the group said in a statement.
Concerns about the fate of investigations into major U.S. companies were amplified by Trump's choice to lead the Justice Department. Public Citizen noted Tuesday that Amazon and Republic Services, two lobbying clients previously represented by Trump attorney general pick Pam Bondi, are among the corporations currently facing federal cases or investigations.
In a separate report published Wednesday, Public Citizen said that Bondi's record as a lobbyist raises "serious questions about potential conflicts of interest" and provides "sufficient grounds for senators to deny her confirmation."
"We depend on the DOJ to vigorously enforce our laws, hold corporate wrongdoers accountable, and protect the rule of law," said Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert. "Pam Bondi is simply inappropriate for this post."
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Exposed: Elon Musk's Real Reasons for Going Full MAGA for Trump
"As eccentric and provocative as Elon Musk wants people to think he is, he's really just another corporate billionaire who wants to avoid accountability."
Oct 22, 2024
Tesla founder Elon Musk has spent his career cultivating the image of a provocateur who's driven by a passionate commitment to free speech and technological innovation—but a new report by consumer advocacy group Public Citizen makes the case that when it comes to Musk's political priorities, there's nothing unique or trailblazing about him.
Musk, said Public Citizen research director Rick Claypool, is galvanized by the same concerns that lead oil executives to pour money into the campaigns of pro-fossil fuel politicians like Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump: self-preservation.
Claypool published research cataloguing the numerous business-related incentives Musk has for supporting Trump, whose rallies the billionaire has spoken at recently and for whose campaign he has created a super political action committee.
At least three of Musk's businesses—electric car maker Tesla, space exploration company SpaceX, and social media platform X—face a total of at least 11 criminal and civil investigations over alleged fraud, labor violations, and other accusations.
"Enforcement priorities can shift significantly when administrations change," wrote Claypool. "Musk's self-serving desire to thwart the numerous civil and criminal investigations into his businesses seems a likely reason for the billionaire's increased involvement in electoral politics."
"Trump has promised to put Musk in charge of government efficiency. Since Musk's companies receive billions in government contracts every year—and often clash with government regulators—Musk would in effect be given the power to trim the very agencies that regulate him."
The report points to federal investigations into Tesla's claims about the "self-driving" capability of its vehicles, with the Department of Justice (DOJ) examining whether the claims constitute criminal fraud, and a case at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) charging that Tesla retaliated against Black workers who reported being subjected to racist harassment at work.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is also investigating Musk's $44 billion takeover of X and the Federal Trade Commission has received reports that Musk gave orders to employees that would have breached an FTC consent decree which the company, formerly called Twitter, entered in 2011 as part of a settlement for alleged deceptive practices and privacy violations.
SpaceX has been accused by the Environmental Protection Agency of pollution that violated the Clean Water Act, and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) last month accused the company of safety violations in its rocket launches in Florida.
Musk, who is the richest person in the world with a net worth of nearly $250 billion, has attempted to fight federal investigations and cases against his companies by threatening a lawsuit against the FAA alleging "regulatory overreach" and challenging the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board and a DOJ case.
Last October, as the DOJ was expanding its probe of Tesla and just after the EEOC sued the company over racial discrimination, Musk called for "comprehensive deregulation."
"As eccentric and provocative as Elon Musk wants people to think he is, he's really just another corporate billionaire who wants to avoid accountability," said Claypool. "Nobody—not government officials or massive corporations or billionaire executives—is above the law. But if self-serving campaigns to the contrary succeed, the injustice of America's two-tiered justice system will only deepen."
The Public Citizen report comes days after Musk urged his followers to sign his petition supporting "free speech and the right to bear arms," promising a random $1 million payment each day to one registered voter who signs—a scheme legal experts say amounts to illegal vote-buying for Trump.
At The Nation on Monday, Jeet Heer noted that Trump has pledged to put Musk in charge of a “government efficiency commission” that could help eliminate federal regulations and advised Democrats to fight Musk's attempts to influence voters by calling attention to what he really is: "an oligarch threatening democracy."
"Musk's eagerness to elect Trump is clearly rooted in a squalid quid pro quo," Heer wrote. "Trump has promised to put Musk in charge of government efficiency. Since Musk's companies receive billions in government contracts every year—and often clash with government regulators—Musk would in effect be given the power to trim the very agencies that regulate him."
"Musk," wrote Heer, "is the perfect face of the new American robber barons."
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How US Taxpayers Helped Elon Musk Become the Richest Man on Earth
Now it's time to tax it back to where much of it came from.
Oct 19, 2024
Once upon a time, here in the United States, we taxed the rich. Significantly. Today, by contrast, we’re actively enhancing their fortunes. Including the biggest personal fortune of them all, the quarter-trillion-dollar stash that belongs to Elon Musk, the current numero uno on the Forbesreal-time list of the world’s largest fortunes.
Musk owes a hefty chunk of his own personal fortune to the taxes average Americans pay. He just happens to be, notes a just-published Politico analysis, “the single biggest beneficiary of U.S. government contracts.”
Two of Musk’s commercial operations, Tesla and SpaceX, have received billions in American taxpayer support. The federal government, Politico points out, has essentially “outsourced its space program” to SpaceX, and Tesla, a shaky electric vehicle company when Musk bought it, only “took off after receiving $465 million in subsidies from the Obama administration in 2010.”
All the tax dollars that Musk has collected from the Defense Department, NASA, and the U.S. intelligence community — coupled with the “generous government subsidies and tax credits to the electric-vehicle industry” that have so boosted Musk’s Tesla — have Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Max Boot fairly fuming.
Taxpayers like himself, Boot notes, are subsidizing the “fire hose of falsehoods” that now appear on X, the former Twitter, the social media app that Musk bought for $44 billion two years ago. Our tax dollars have essentially supersized our world’s single wealthiest individual.
Back in the middle of the 20th century, the United States took quite a different approach to the money pouring into rich people’s pockets. From the early 1940s through the mid-1960s, the incomes of America’s richest faced a tax bite that would be unimaginable today.
In 1942, then-president Franklin Roosevelt proposed a 100 percent tax rate on income over $25,000, the equivalent of about $484,000 today. Congress wouldn’t go along with that 100 percent top rate. But lawmakers did give the okay to a 94 percent top tax rate on 1944 income over $200,000.
In the 1950s, under the Republican president Dwight Eisenhower, the federal tax rate on top-bracket income never dipped below 91 percent.
Today’s top-bracket federal income tax rate? That stands, on paper, at 37 percent on income over $693,751 for a couple filing jointly. But assorted loopholes have left the tax rate the rich face on their actual annual gains enormously lower.
In 2021, a joint report from the Biden administration’s Office of Management and Budget and Council of Economic Advisers calculated that America’s wealthiest 400 billionaire families, between 2010 and 2018, “paid an average of just 8.2 percent of their income” — counting the gains in the value of their investments — in federal individual income taxes.
“That’s a lower rate,” the report noted, “than many ordinary Americans pay.”
Could we ever get back to anything close to Eisenhower-era tax rates on the richest among us? This past March, the Biden administration proposed a 25 percent minimum tax on the total income — including unrealized capital gains — of the nation’s top 0.01 percent, households worth at least $100 million.
About the same time, progressive lawmakers — led by U.S. senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and representatives Pramila Jayapal from Washington State and Brendan Boyle from Pennsylvania — introduced the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, legislation that would impose a wealth tax on America’s 100,000 wealthiest households, our richest 0.05 percent.
Under this proposed legislation, wealthy households worth up to $1 billion would face an annual tax of 2 percent on their wealth over $50 million. Richer households would face an additional 1 percent tax on wealth over $1 billion.
One of the Senate co-sponsors of that legislation, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, has also gone a step further and called for a 100 percent tax on wealth over $1 billion.
“I think people can make it on $999 million,” Sanders told journalist Chris Wallace last year.
Sanders and one of America’s most famous deep pockets, Bill Gates, have actually had a friendly podcast discussion over whether our tax rates should allow billion-dollar fortunes to even exist. The Sanders proposal, noted Gates, would tax away over 99 percent of his personal fortune. Gates would be willing to let the IRS take 62 percent, about $100 billion.
For a better America, that certainly might make a good place to start.
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