DONALD TRUMP PROMISED Americans a new golden age. Unfortunately, it turns out to be a golden age for diarrhea and white-collar crime.

Biological, social, and financial parasites are all flourishing, because the Trump administration has destroyed the institutional capacity necessary to detect and eradicate them.

In the latest (non-GI-related) development, the Department of the Treasury announced this week that it would destroy the government’s registry of shell-company ownership. This is an anti-corruption database that Treasury is by law required to maintain, so that law enforcement can more easily “follow the money” when investigating crimes.

Even worse, the Trump administration will also destroy all the data it has already collected, so that no future presidential administration or local police department can use it, either.

“It’s like Trump ordering the deletion of the FBI’s entire fingerprint database,” former congressman Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), a champion of the 2021 law that created the corporate registry, told The Bulwark.

They’re effectively salting the earth, so that sex traffickers, scam artists, drug lords, money-launderers, and tax cheats can roam free not only through the end of Trump’s time in office but long after he’s out, too.

Gimme shelter

“Shell companies” are companies that exist only on paper to hold other assets or businesses. Their existence is entirely legal and they are usually used for legitimate business activity. But ownership structures of these entities are often opaque, with shell companies buried within other shell companies within other shell companies, like a Russian nesting doll. The opportunities for complexity, subterfuge, and misdirection can make them useful in obscuring the identities of those engaging in illegal activity.

Massive data leaks such as the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers have helped shed light on how some of these front companies work and what they were hiding—and the blind spots in U.S. law that allowed international criminal organizations to thrive.

“It became clear that the U.S. was actually a key node in the global money-laundering network,” Malinowski said. “We thought we were clean, that it was just Swiss banks and Virgin Islands and places like that. But actually the U.S. had some of the most lax laws in the world when it comes to registering companies.”

The result was that Russian oligarchs trying to hide their assets, or drug and human-trafficking cartels trying to shield their identities, or terrorists trying to funnel money to cells, could create an anonymous shell company in, say, Delaware. The Delaware company might in turn have twenty shell-company subsidiaries in tax havens around the world, making the funds flowing through them virtually untraceable—and thus harder for investigators to intercept.

So Malinowski and his colleagues introduced the Corporate Transparency Act, which mandated that shell companies report basic information about the names and contact info of their owners to a bureau within the Treasury Department.¹ This information is kept confidential—it is not available to the public in any form—but could be used by law enforcement agencies around the country.

The bill became law in the very last days of Trump’s first term as part of a defense funding bill, which passed over Trump’s veto.² It had broad bipartisan support. Besides Malinowski, one of the law’s cosponsors and greatest champions was Marco Rubio, then a Republican senator from Florida. Rubio, now Trump’s secretary of state, touted it at the time as “the most significant anti-corruption & money laundering law in decades.”

Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t prosecute

Then Trump got re-elected. Suddenly cracking down on corruption and money-laundering was no longer so appealing to the federal government.

One of Trump’s earliest actions upon returning to office last year, for instance, was to pause enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. He claimed that punishing companies for bribing foreign officials put U.S. firms at a competitive disadvantage.

Which could well be true; if nothing else, this president probably has a decent understanding of how helpful palm-greasing might be for real-estate developers in, say, Azerbaijan.

He also understands how annoying it is to have a corporate account flagged for possible money laundering, given recent statements from Capital One about why it “de-banked” him.

And he has extensive experience dealing with shell companies, including for some less than