by David B. Anders, Sarah K. Eddy, Kevin S. Schwartz, Randall W. Jackson, Ralph M. Levene, Michael W. Holt, Aline R. Flodr, and John F. Savarese

Top left to right: David B. Anders, Sarah K. Eddy, Kevin S. Schwartz, Randall W. Jackson.
Bottom left to right: Ralph M. Levene, Michael W. Holt, Aline R. Flodr, John F. Savarese. (Photos courtesy of authors)

As we write this memorandum, President Trump’s second administration is forming in Washington, with new leadership teams being appointed at DOJ, the SEC and across other regulatory and law-enforcement agencies.  In 2017, when President Trump first took office, we avoided predicting what the administration’s significant white-collar and regulatory enforcement priorities and policies might be in the absence of noteworthy signals from President Trump or his nominees and in light of the then slow pace of leadership confirmations. Eight years later, however, the lessons from President Trump’s first administration, as well as the track record and statements from his recent nominees and closest advisors, offer some insights into the new administration’s likely enforcement priorities.  Given that, we have some thoughts on what to expect from President Trump’s second term:

• At DOJ, we likely will see a narrower set of enforcement priorities, focusing on “core fraud” cases rather than novel white-collar enforcement actions.  Moreover, we expect DOJ will have fewer resources as a whole, and those resources may be shifted away from white-collar prosecutions to cases involving illegal immigration or violent crime as they were during the first Trump administration.
• DOJ, along with other agencies, will likely face a severe resource crunch as a result of the efforts of President Trump’s highly-publicized Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”), which is tasked with cutting government spending.  Whether through hiring freezes, increased resignations by ending remote work, or large-scale layoffs, the impact of DOGE and other executive branch actions on federal regulatory agencies’ resource-intensive white-collar enforcement cases could be significant.       
• With respect to the SEC, we expect some scaling back of the agency’s more novel and aggressive enforcement practices, with a renewed focus on cases involving conventional securities fraud and misleading disclosures that result in direct investor harm.  Some areas where the SEC may pull back include pursuing internal accounting and disclosure controls violations in circumstances where the agency has found no substantive violation of the securities laws and charging cryptoasset companies for allegedly selling or facilitating the sale of unregistered securities. 
• We expect the Trump Administration to continue close scrutiny of major technology platforms, particularly in connection with antitrust enforcement.  In nominating Andrew Ferguson to lead the Federal Trade Commission and Gail Slater to lead DOJ’s Antitrust Division, President Trump explicitly called out each nominee’s mandate to rein in “Big Tech.”

Although we can expect a pullback in some federal regulatory and law enforcement agencies’ more novel areas of enforcement, this shifting landscape should not lead to complacency when it comes to maintaining robust compliance policies and procedures. State Attorneys General and private whistleblowers will no doubt try to fill the void. Indeed, even in areas of federal enforcement, with fewer resources available, federal regulators and prosecutors may rely even more on private whistleblowers, incentivized by the wide array of federal whistleblower programs, to do the work of investigating and reporting corporate crime. Whether prompted by federal agencies, state authorities, whistleblowers or private plaintiffs, companies will likely continue to face a wide array of white-collar and regulatory enforcement risks in the coming year.

Finally, if past is prologue, we can expect companies to receive tangible benefits when they self-report wrongdoing and undertake remedial measures as a result of their compliance systems and policies. As we noted during President Trump’s first term, one of the salutary contributions of the prior Trump Administration was providing greater transparency, predictability, and proportionality when resolving investigations with corporations. We hope and expect this legacy to continue in the second term, with the administration incentivizing corporations to create and maintain robust corporate compliance programs and providing more generous treatment to those corporations who self-report wrongdoing, cooperate with the government, and undertake prompt remedial measures. In the sections below, we provide our more detailed views on the main developments we saw in 2024 and the likely changes companies can anticipate in 2025.

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David B. Anders, Sarah K. Eddy, Kevin S. Schwartz, Randall W. Jackson, and Ralph M. Levene are Partners, Michael W. Holt and Aline R. Flodr are Counsel, and John F. Savarese is Of Counsel at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz LLP. This post first appeared as a client alert for the firm.

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