About one year in, we have a pretty good understanding of the white-collar enforcement priorities of the second iteration of the Trump Department of Justice (DOJ). In many ways, the sequel could have been predicted by the President’s first term, but there have also been areas where the administration has sharpened its focus.

No discussion of the DOJ’s realigned priorities is complete without a discussion of what the Trump administration has de-emphasized. Trump’s DOJ has dramatically rolled back corporate enforcement in favor of expanding corporate self-disclosure programs, calling it a means to create a more business “friendly” environment. The administration has also gutted the Internal Revenue Service, ensuring that IRS-initiated tax enforcement will precipitously decline and likely stay that way for the foreseeable future.

The administration’s corporate enforcement rollback started with a recalibrated approach to Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) enforcement. The FCPA was enacted in 1977 in the wake of Watergate in response to revelations of widespread foreign bribery schemes involving U.S. companies and remains on the books to this day. One of this administration’s first actions in the white-collar crime arena was to pause new enforcement activity under the FCPA. Attorney General Bondi later “lifted” the pause with a policy memorandum that directs DOJ to focus its use of the FCPA on “[a]chieving total elimination of Cartels and…[Transnational Criminal Organizations].”

The administration clearly believes that FCPA enforcement—once believed to be one of the most powerful tools to level the playing field for U.S. companies participating in the global economy—presents too many hurdles for U.S. companies competing with China and other foreign adversaries. In the process, DOJ abandoned a significant number of pending FCPA prosecutions, seemingly overnight, including dropping a couple of high-profile cases on the courthouse steps as criminal trials were about to begin.

That shift has set the stage for other rollbacks in traditional DOJ white-collar enforcement. The administration’s narrowing use of FCPA enforcement through an Attorney General policy memorandum exemplifies a dramatic turn away from certain types of corporate enforcement over the course of the President’s first year in office. However, much of the rest of the administration’s shift away from corporate compliance has come through the “sword,” not nuanced policy shifts.

The administration has eliminated once-active units and other organizational components at DOJ focused on emerging areas of corporate enforcement, such as Task Force KleptoCapture, the Foreign Influence Task Force, and the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team. Seemingly overnight, entire segments of the career DOJ workforce have been forced to decide whether to resign, retire, or face reassignment. To put it mildly, it has been a year of significant restructuring at DOJ in once-active segments of the nation’s white-collar enforcement apparatus.

Coupled with some unconventional political appointments to critical posts throughout DOJ, there can be no mistaking that the administration has dramatically and rapidly overhauled DOJ to meet its policy objectives.

Despite that, there are clear signs that white-collar enforcement is not entirely dead under Trump 2.0. By examining the administration’s announced enforcement priorities and reading the proverbial tea leaves, one can ascertain emerging areas of emphasis by DOJ that may signal what is in store for the next three years.

New Frontiers for FCA Enforcement and Doubling Down on Traditional Priorities

Since the end of the Civil War, the False Claims Act (FCA) has been a tool for policing fraud and abuse in government contracting. This has expanded into the health care space in recent decades, with the FCA being used as a powerful mechanism to claw back billions in federal health care program dollars. This administration has expanded these traditional uses of the FCA. For example, despite a shift away from other customary DOJ white-collar objectives, we have seen the renewal of the joint DOJ—Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) False Claims Act Working Group.

It has expanded, with a focus that goes beyond traditional overbilling cases to “barriers to patient access,” medical device safety, and pricing abuses. This means Trump’s DOJ is not just going after run-of-the-mill overbilling but also using the FCA to combat perceived structural problems in the health care system.

The DOJ is also using the FCA as a lever to compel federal funding recipients such as universities to adopt the administration’s vision for cultural and social policy.

This has principally come in the form of enforcement based upon alleged mis-certifications of compliance with civil rights laws. Under this administration, this does not mean just traditional notions of civil rights, but also diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs that the administration has railed against for much of its first year in office. While these novel approaches by the administration to FCA enforcement are still in their infancy and relatively untested in the courts, they are certainly something to watch in the months ahead.

Antitrust

DOJ’s Anticompetitive Regulations Task Force “advocates for the elimination of anticompetitive state and federal laws and regulations that undermine free market competition and harm consumers, workers, and businesses.” The early launch of this task force signals that the administration is focused on using antitrust laws to remove barriers to competition, support a “free market” approach to the economy, and promote its “America first” agenda. DOJ has also stood up a Procurement Collusion Strike Force aimed at targeting collusion through schemes like bid-rigging, price-fixing, and market allocation, all of which drive up consumer costs.

The real estate and technology industries have been those most severely impacted by the administration’s new antitrust priorities. DOJ has also been active with antitrust enforcement in all aspects of the food supply chain, from seeds and feed to packaging. These actions signal protectionism is at the forefront of the administration’s focus on eliminating barriers to American-made products and labor.

Tariff Evasion

Unless you have been living under a rock, you are aware of the significant tariffs being imposed by the administration on an array of foreign goods and services. These customs duties often inspire complex efforts to evade them, and the administration has struck early and often, using the full force of federal criminal law to enforce alleged violations of U.S. trade laws.

In May, the DOJ announced that its Criminal Division would prioritize “trade and customs fraud, including tariff evasion,” as a “high-impact” area of white-collar crime for investigation and prosecution. And DOJ has followed through, including with recent charges announced in the District of New Jersey against a company and three individuals in connection with a large-scale scheme to allegedly evade more than $86 million in customs duties and tariffs on more than $1.2 billion in jewelry imports. Expect similar headline-grabbing enforcement actions to continue for as long as the administration uses tariffs as its primary mechanism to attempt to move manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.

Immigration Fraud

While Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids by masked, heavily armed men continue to dominate cable news, DOJ is waging a quieter war against individuals engaging in “sham” marriages to obtain immigration benefits. There have been a number of high-profile operations over the past year that have resulted in arrests.

This has been achieved through the combination of tightening controls for the marriage-based citizenship applications and large-scale, well-resourced and coordinated law enforcement actions to prosecute parties accused of trafficking in false-pretense, marriage-based citizenship applications.

The administration continues to make reorientation of the immigration system in the U.S. a focal point, both for street-level and white-collar enforcement. For as long as illegal immigration is a focus, we can expect the full resources of the federal government to be brought to bear against suspected fraud.

An Uptick in Border Searches

The notion that the Trump administration has abandoned white-collar enforcement altogether is not at all accurate. Instead, DOJ has pivoted its priorities to align with the administration’s policy initiatives. Whether or not you agree with the administration’s policies, the president’s electoral victory in 2024 has allowed him to shape and mold DOJ and its priorities.

A word of caution is, therefore, warranted about border searches. With the current focus on immigration enforcement, expect to see a continued uptick. Under the border search exception to the Fourth Amendment, federal officers may generally conduct routine, warrantless searches of persons and items entering the United States without reasonable suspicion or probable cause of unlawful activity. 

According to recent reporting, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) conducted a record number of electronic device searches at the U.S. border between Oct. 2024 and Sept. 2025 — a roughly 17% increase over the previous year. That means that the government has a significant trove of data at its disposal to mine without traditional constitutional impediments. There is no reason to believe CBP will back away from its current data collection trends. This means that international travelers, including U.S. citizens, who do not heed this warning may continue to unwittingly make their data accessible to the government to use as it sees fit.

While these federal white-collar enforcement shifts are in progress, and statistics concerning enforcement trends will take some time to percolate through the system, it is undeniable that white-collar priorities are baked into the Trump administration’s top objectives for its second term. We can also expect a continued stream of health care enforcement, given the significant, measurable success such efforts have had in recent years.

The bottom line is that while it is true that the administration and DOJ have spent a year putting their imprimatur on the institutions of federal law enforcement, shifting priorities is not the equivalent of wholesale abandonment of white-collar cases.

Reprinted with permission from the December 12, 2025 issue of the New York Law Journal© 2025 ALM Media Properties, LLC. Further duplication without permission is prohibited. All rights reserved.