Trump Treasury Is Deleting an Anti-Corruption Database

Donald Trump’s Treasury Department doesn’t want law enforcement to be able to “follow the money.”

The Treasury Department announced Friday that it would destroy the government’s registry on shell company ownership, a database law enforcement uses to investigate money laundering and corruption, The Bulwark reported.

In addition to scaling back requirements for shell companies to submit basic information to the federal government, the new rule will also destroy all the data it has already collected.

The Corporate Transparency Act, passed in the final days of Trump’s first administration, legally requires the Treasury Department to maintain this registry. Trump had previously exempted domestic companies and U.S. citizens—99 percent of the entities previously required to report—from data collection under the CTA. The Treasury Department’s latest move has made that decision permanent.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is already selling the decision as a favor to small businesses.

“Today’s action is a victory for common sense and American small businesses,” said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in a statement. “President Trump promised to cut red tape, and this final rule delivers. Treasury is eliminating a burdensome reporting requirement for millions of law-abiding business owners without compromising our national security.”

Before the CTA was passed, the United States stood at the center of the world of offshore finance, being the primary location where narco-traffickers, arms dealers, and others chose to wash their illicit money clean. Now, Trump wants to bring all that back.

Trump isn’t alone in delivering a massive gift to grifters, cartels, and kleptocrats. Republicans are in on it, too. In April, Trump’s allies on the House Financial Services committee pushed through a measure that would repeal the requirement that U.S. shells divulge their true owners. In May, Senate Republicans introduced similar legislation, aiming to attach it to the broader defense bill set to be passed later this year. Neither bill has passed a full vote.

Since reentering office, Trump has only made it harder for law enforcement to crack down on certain financial crimes. In addition to eliminating the task forces on kleptocrats, pausing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and gutting the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the president has also pardoned dozens of white collar criminals.

Politicians from both parties are crossing the aisle to voice their opposition to President Trump’s bulldozing of Big Bend National Park to make way for more wall along the southern border.

Big Bend is a sprawling, 800,000 acre park within Texas’s Rio Grande Valley that’s been frequented by hikers and campers since it opened in 1944. The park is so beautiful and so significant that even the most pro-border wall conservatives are setting aside their views to defend it.

“I believe in border security 100%,” Terrell County Republican Sheriff and former Border Patrol agent Thaddeus Cleveland said to Fox San Antonio. “Believe in even installation of barriers where they’re needed. But I can tell you that specific area ... even just what they’ve done, unnecessary.”

The Trump administration has been bulldozing to place 17 miles of barriers, surveillance, and sensors along the mouth of the Santa Elena Canyon. The plan was initially “a bold line of wall structure along the floodplain of most of the Rio Grande in the high desert region of Far West Texas,” as laid out in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. But that was shelved after local protest.

Another thing both Democrats and Republicans agree on is that Big Bend’s mountains already function as a natural deterrent for migrants.

“My constituents believe that the 1,000-foot riverbank cliffs and remote Big Bend terrain offers its own source of deterrence for any illegal migrants crossing into the United States,” Republican Senator John Cornyn wrote in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin last week. “Many residents that live and work around the parks are also concerned that a physical wall, which would be accompanied by lighting systems, access roads, and maintenance corridors, would (1) ruin the beauty, landscape, and wildlife of the park, (2) threaten culturally significant Native American sites, (3) disrupt wildlife migration, (4) limit access to the Rio Grande River, and (5) significantly harm the local economy as tourism is a major economic driver for the region.”

“God already built a wall through Big Bend—it’s called the Chisos Mountains,” Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico added. “We don’t need to give billions of our tax dollars to out of state vendors. We don’t need to desecrate this sacred land. We don’t need this useless, disgraceful, corrupt Big Bend border wall.”

“We have an obligation to secure our border, but Big Bend’s rugged, unforgiving terrain already serves as a natural, God-given barrier that deters illegal crossings. The border crossing data already confirms this,” Texas Representative Drew Darby said. “The federal government has immediate access to smart barrier technologies that increase interdiction rates without bulldozing through Texas’ most scenic and irreplaceable landscapes. DHS can and should use these alternative methods and stop the bulldozing now.”

Republicans still seem to have a (Theodore) Rooseveltian sense of justice when it comes to National Parks and lands, which might cause problems for President Trump as he continues to attack America’s defining landscapes, removing protections from over 86 million acres of public lands to free it up for drilling and wall-building.

Donald Trump is once again freaking out about vandals at a national monument. Here’s why you shouldn’t take his outrage seriously.

The president took to Truth Social Friday morning to rave about an incident at the World War II Memorial, which had been covered in red and green graffiti and soapy bubbles.

“Our beautiful World War II Memorial was just hit by Spray Painting Vandals,” Trump wrote. “THERE CAN BE NO GREATER INSULT TO THOSE AMERICAN HEROES WHO DIED IN WORLD WAR II. First the Reflecting Pool, now this. We are on their trail! Where do these animals come from???”

Beneath the memorial’s arch, red graffiti spelled out the message “Clean hands dirty $,” and the memorial’s fountains were also filled with soapy bubbles.

Shortly after Trump’s post, U.S. Attorney Jeannine Pirro announced that one alleged vandal was already in custody, and included photographs of the suspect.

The Friends of the National World War II Memorial said it was “deeply disturbed by the reported vandalism,” and the Interior Department called the incident an “utter disgrace.”

While the recent vandalism is blatantly disrespectful to the memorial’s honorees and their families, Trump’s outrage is entirely disingenuous.

If anyone started a trend of “vandalism,” it was Trump and his hand-picked federal contractors. Not only were they responsible for the damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, but they left the monument drained and surrounded by chain-link fences. Trump’s federal contractors were also also responsible for cracking the fountain at the German-American Friendship Garden. Where is the president’s outrage about that?

Still, the president has used stories about alleged vandalism to stir up a frenzy of public outrage in order to antagonize his critics and increase surveillance in Washington, D.C. Notably, this high-profile vandalism has taken place more than a year after deploying the National Guard to literally clean up the nation’s capital.

If Trump wants to get personally involved in protecting America’s landmarks, maybe he should turn his attention to the bulldozers at Big Bend National Park—instead, he’s annoyed about graffiti.

President Donald Trump’s plan for moving Americans’ retirement investments into cryptocurrency and private equity got a boost of support—from dead people.   

The Department of Labor received public comments on the plan to fulfill Trump’s executive order pushing for the financial changes, and close to 12,000 of the comments, all in support, show signs of being fabricated, with several being attributed to people who aren’t alive. These comments don’t include email addresses, the commenter’s city and state, or signatures, Bloomberg reported Thursday. 

Bloomberg attempted to contact some of supporters on the list, many of whom had unique names identifiable through public records, and found people who said they never made the comments attributed to them, or were dead. One comment made in May and attributed to Danna Oderman was clearly fake, her son Heath Oderman told Bloomberg, not only because she died in December, but because “the language is nothing she would ever have used while on this Earth.”

Another May submission shows Lyngrid Rawlings supporting the president’s plan, but the educator and U.S. Foreign Service officer died in 2024, her daughter Lauren told the publication.

“It’s deeply disrespectful and dishonoring,” Lauren said. “Her life was about service, and to have her name misused in this way is the antithesis of everything she lived for.”

Living people also had comments falsely attributed to them, including Karl Gilberson, a retired Massachusetts professor, who said to Bloomberg that “those don’t reflect my sentiments, at all.” 

All of these comments followed just five templates and were submitted from April 29 to May 5. The names differed, but line breaks, length, and punctuation were all identical, according to Bloomberg’s findings. They also happen to make up the vast majority of supportive comments. In contrast, almost all 30,000 comments opposing the measure were spread out across the nine-week comment period and included differing language, email addresses, and signatures, as well as cities and states. 

The plan was submitted as a draft rule to the Employee Benefits Security Administration on March 31, and has support from the private equity industry as well as other private sector industries. It seems that some entity or person who really wants American retirement accounts diversified into the private sector decided to manufacture support. The Trump administration considers the measure a top priority, with acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling telling senators in July that “this is how President Trump is going to make America wealthy again.”

But they don’t seem that concerned about fake comments. The Department of Labor’s “focus when reviewing a comment is on the substance of the comment and not on the identity of the commenter or the number of commenters making the same point,” a spokesperson told Bloomberg.

President Donald Trump is about to waste billions of dollars to put old-fashioned technology on aircraft carriers.

Trump signed a memorandum Thursday directing the U.S. Navy to start installing old-fashioned steam catapults on its aircraft carriers, instead of electromagnetic launchers, U.S. officials told The Wall Street Journal.

The memo directs the Navy to redesign the Doris Miller, the newest Gerald R. Ford class aircraft carrier, and all remaining ships. The first three ships, the Ford, John F. Kennedy, and Enterprise, will keep their electromagnetic system.

Trump has been ranting about “goddamn steam” catapults since 2017, suggesting that the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System doesn’t work, while providing no evidence to support that claim. In January 2024, Trump baselessly claimed that magnets stop working when placed in water, and therefore were a stupid thing to put on a boat. In October 2025, he said he just loved the sight of “that beautiful steam pouring off the deck.”

As recently as last month, Trump called the electromagnetic launchers “not nearly as good, too complex.”

In reality, the Navy says that the electromagnetic launchers have allowed their Ford class carriers to launch and recover aircraft at a higher rate than previous classes of ships. Additionally, the maintenance on steam catapults is considered labor intensive and costly, compared to newer models.

Trump’s long-standing grudge against electromagnetic launchers seems to stem from his frustration about the production of the USS Gerald R. Ford, which cost roughly $13 billion to make and experienced delays and cost overruns. There’s no reason to think its launchers don’t work, however.

In a statement, the White House said that steam catapults were more “resilient and robust,” and that the move would reactivate parts of the maritime industrial base that are “easier to scale.”

Trump has long pushed for this senseless redesign, but top Navy officials and industry leaders have resisted the move to tear out such a complex system integral to the design of the Ford class. Bryan Clark, a naval expert with the Hudson Institute, told the Journal that replacing the electromagnetic launchers with steam catapults would likely cost billions of dollars.

Trump is not an expert in military asset design—but that hasn’t stopped him from inserting himself in its development.