Compliance One Year Into Trump 2.0

As 2025 draws to a close, I’ve been pondering this first year of the Trump 2.0 Administration and what its arrival has meant for corporate ethics, compliance, and governance. 

That’s not easy to do. Over the last 12 months we’ve seen an endless stream of tweets, policy pronouncements, lawsuits, and threats from the Administration — but to what end? Where does the Trump Administration want to go with all this? Or, more to the point for corporate compliance professionals, where will it leave us? 

Well, consider all the things that the Trump 2.0 Administration has come out against in the last year: 

• Anti-inspector general, seen in the illegal firing of inspectors general across the government in January.
• Anti-law firm, seen in the executive orders filed against law firms that have represented Democrats in the past and in deputy attorney general Todd Blanche’s complaints about law firms in December.
• Anti-shareholder, in the various attacks against shareholder power by SEC chairman Paul Atkins this year.
• Anti-auditor, evidenced by the Administration’s attack against the Government Accountability Office, which audits the executive branch.
• Anti-European Union, seen in the Administration’s threat to use tariffs and sanctions against the EU (and specific EU officials) for enforcing the region’s technology laws against U.S. companies.
• Anti-whistleblower, in repealing whistleblower protections for senior government officials. 
• Anti-judge, in the steady stream of attacks against federal district and appellate court judges that have ruled against the Administration this year.
• Anti-higher education, seen in the legal fights with Harvard, the University of California, the University of Virginia, and elsewhere. 
• Anti-state, either against Democratic states specifically by trying to withhold federal funds or against U.S. states broadly such as trying to block all states from enforcing laws against artificial intelligence.

It’s an astonishing list once you see it altogether. The Trump Administration is using every tool at its disposal — policy pronouncements, lawsuits, enforcement actions, budget cuts, sanctions threats, angry tweets — against a wide range of targets. 

And if you step back and ponder the list long enough, a common theme does emerge.

All these attacks serve the broader purpose of undermining the ability to hold organizations accountable. More precisely, they undermine the ability for any group other than the Trump Administration to hold organizations accountable.

That is, the Administration wants no other group to have the ability to say, “Nope, you’re doing it wrong.” Not inspectors general, who might fault an agency action; not the EU, which might impose regulations against a Trump-favored business; not researchers at a university, who might find that vaccines really do work; not shareholders, who might decide they want their company to embrace diversity goals; not law firms, which might tell clients an executive order violates the law; not federal judges who might confirm that an executive order is wrong.

The act of telling someone “You’re doing it wrong” is the act of enforcing accountability. The Trump Administration certainly wants that power for itself (I mean, it just spent the whole year telling everyone we’re doing it wrong) but the Administration does not want others to exercise that ability independently — because then others might use it to declare that the Administration is doing something wrong.

The Trump 2.0 Administration wants the power of accountability to exist solely within its own hands. Nobody else, anywhere, should have independent power to hold others accountable, except at the discretion of the Administration and ultimately at the discretion of Trump himself. 

That’s what Year 1 has been all about.

Why Should Compliance Officers Care?

I get it; some compliance officers will say, “Look, even if you’re right, that’s all moral-political theory stuff and I’m buried in the daily minutiae of hotline complaints and data integrations and board reports. How does any of this intersect with me and my job?” 

My answer is this: If accountability can only exist within the hands of one person or institution, then all the other gestures we make towards accountability — the investigations, the audits, the annual reports, the shareholder resolutions, the mission statements, the lists of ethical values, and everything else — those things all become performative rather than substantive. They will, in the long run, cease to have value.

A company can still go through those motions if it wants, and the law might even require you to do so; but it’s not like those exercises will truly matter — because in the final analysis, the Trump Administration’s version of accountability will always supersede yours. 

We’ve seen this already in a few specific ways. Take Trump’s pardons of convicted fraudsters as one example. If Trump pardons fraudsters simply because they’re paying him or his cronies to do so, then what’s the point of prosecuting them at all? What’s the point of a whistleblower risking his or her career to hold that fraudster accountable, or a company investigating that complaint? 

That’s the world that awaits us if Trump succeeds in yanking the power of accountability away from others and hogging it all for himself. Nothing will matter unless the Trump Administration says it matters. Nothing will be truly wrong unless the Trump Administration says it’s wrong, because nobody else will have power to say, “Nope, you’re doing it wrong” and make that stick.

Good luck being taken seriously by management and employees in that world. We as a country will become one giant paper-based compliance program: big and extensive, with lots of theatrics — but ultimately feckless, because nobody other than the Dear Leader has the power to declare that something is wrong. When others (shareholders, whistleblowers, auditors, lawyers) do try to insist that ethical behavior matters, cynical managers will always know they can say, “Eh, f—k it, nobody’s ever going to punish us for this” and ignore those pleas to do better.

That’s nothing new in the world, of course. It’s how countries like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea have worked for ages. Those countries have extensive laws and regulations and audits too, but it’s not like people take any of those gestures at accountability seriously. Why would they? Everyone knows that the gestures are subordinate to the whim of the leader. No mechanisms for accountability exist separate from what the leader allows, because those mechanisms might some day become checks on his whim. 

That’s what Trump is trying to do now: to tear down those mechanisms that enforce accountability, so he can govern by whim. And like I said before, good luck running a corporate ethics and compliance program in that world.

For the record, I don’t believe Trump will succeed. I believe the ethical values of this country — above all, the rule of law — are too deeply and widely ingrained for him to dislodge them root and branch. But he’s going to try his hardest, and that’s going to test our commitment to ethics like never before.