Slush Fund Time Bomb

Among the many unorthodox features of the slush fund being created by the Justice Department is the fact that the beneficiaries are limited to the supposed victims of the Biden Administration. Nothing is being said about compensating those who have been unjustly treated during the Trump years.

Calls for such payments will undoubtedly arise once Trump is out of office, given the egregious way his administration has prosecuted individuals against whom the president has political grudges. There will also be calls for redress for the corporations that have been targeted.

The Trump Administration’s posture toward the corporate sector is complicated. In many respects, it has adopted a conventional pro-business anti-regulatory agenda, taking it even further than previous Republican presidents dared to do. Agencies such as the EPA are taking a meat cleaver to long-established environmental rules, while the entire Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been effectively dismantled. Trump and his family have developed close and ethically questionable ties to businesses such as cryptocurrency, profiting from light federal oversight.

At the same time, the Trump Administration has taken aggressive action against selected corporations, using regulatory powers in unprecedented ways. Here are a few examples.

False Claims Act. The Justice Department has taken a 150-year-old law widely used to prosecute contractors which cheat the federal government and turned it into a weapon in the Trump Administration’s war on diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace. In April, IBM agreed to pay $17 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the DOJ alleging that the company’s DEI hiring program amounted to a form of racial discrimination that supposedly harmed white candidates.

Broadcast licenses. Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr, a MAGA zealot, has made implicit threats to revoke the licenses of corporations such as Disney Entertainment, owner of the ABC Network, as another prong of the anti-DEI campaign. It is also widely believed he was using the technique to bolster Trump’s pressure on ABC to fire the outspoken late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel.

Merger Approvals and Antitrust. Last year, the FCC used its power over certain mergers to pressure Verizon and T-Mobile to disown their DEI practices in order to clear the way for several acquisitions. The Federal Trade Commission has also gotten involved in diversity issues. Earlier this year, chairman Andrew Ferguson sent a letter to dozens of major law firms, warning that DEI hiring policies could be construed as anti-competitive.

Reverse Discrimination. The anti-DEI fervor has spread to the very agency that is supposed to enforce workplace civil rights laws, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Chair Andrea Lucas has made it her mission to carry out Trump’s executive orders designed to undermine DEI. Earlier this month, the agency filed suit against the New York Times, accusing it of violating federal law by passing over a white male employee for promotion.

All these actions amount to misuse or distortion of government powers. Aside from the harms done to individual companies, these practices help to undermine the legitimacy of the entire regulatory system. Complaints about Trump’s politicization of certain rules will be exploited by those who seek to challenge oversight of business more broadly.

Claims brought under a future anti-weaponization fund will exacerbate the problem. Corporations will not only resist legitimate regulation but will also seek compensation. Regulators will then become more timid and businesses more brazen.

Ultimately, the current slush fund and future iterations will come to serve not as checks on government abuses but instead as restraints on the ability of government to protect the public.

Who Will Regulate the Prediction Markets?

A controversial new form of financial activity is on the rise, and a federal regulatory agency is aggressively asserting its oversight role. That sounds good, except for the fact that the head of the agency is a strong booster of the activity and seems mainly concerned with undercutting more aggressive state-level regulation.

Prediction markets run by companies such as Kalshi and Polymarket have exploded in popularity among people looking to bet not only on sports but just about anything else under the sun. Unfortunately, that includes things such as military actions, and there is growing evidence suggesting that government employees are among those placing the wagers and are collecting substantial winnings through illicit means.

Recently, a U.S. Army Master Sargeant was charged with using classified information to place successful bets on Polymarket about the timing of the U.S. military operation to capture Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. We are likely to see more cases targeting this new form of insider trading.

The Justice Department is responsible for bringing federal criminal cases, but it is unclear which agency has responsibility to regulate the prediction services. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is claiming that power for itself.

Congress created the CFTC in 1974 for the purpose of regulating futures contracts, which had long been used to trade agricultural commodities and later spread to a variety of financial instruments known as derivatives, which include options and swaps whose value derives from an underlying asset. The CFTC’s current mission statement says its role is “to promote the integrity, resilience, and vibrancy of the U.S. derivatives markets through sound regulation.”

Prediction bets have no connection to commodities of any kind and thus do not seem to qualify as derivatives. That has not stopped the CFTC, which for the past five months has been run by Michael Selig, who was nominated by Trump after working at a corporate law firm representing cryptocurrency industry clients.

Under Selig, the CFTC has sought to muscle out state governments, some of which have taken the sensible position that prediction markets are really a form of gambling and thus should be overseen by state agencies that regulate casinos, horse racing, and lotteries. Selig is fighting against what the CFTC calls “state encroachment” by filing lawsuits against Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, Minnesota, New York, and Wisconsin. The agency recently submitted an amicus brief supporting Kalshi in a dispute with regulators in Ohio.

These disputes over jurisdiction are more than a turf war. The CFTC seems to want to assert its authority so that it can exert a mild form of regulation on the prediction markets. In fact, the agency is putting more emphasis on leniency across its activities.

The CFTC has just issued an advisory document indicating it plans to depend more on voluntary self-reporting of misconduct, which suggests that investigations will take a back seat.  It is difficult to believe that aggressive new companies such as Kalshi and Polymarket are going to be quick to report wrongdoing.

When parties do self-report, the CFTC is offering generous rewards, including big reductions in fines and the possibility of a declination, an arrangement in which the agency does not file charges against the cooperating company.

It appears that the CFTC has already been scaling back enforcement. Since Selig took office, the agency has announced only a handful of penalty actions, and those cases appear to have been initiated before he arrived—and before the second Trump Administration began.

We are only beginning to recognize the perils posed by the new prediction services. Letting a regulatory agency that is not interested in robust enforcement is not the way to guard against those dangers.

The Fix is In

Conventional economics teaches that wages are determined by labor supply and demand. There is, in fact, a lot more at play—and not all of it is legal.

Growing evidence has emerged of a practice that has come to be called wage fixing. This is what happens when companies in an industry coordinate compensation practices for certain jobs, making it difficult for workers attain higher earnings by switching employers. Sometimes the companies agree on actual caps; other times they simply share salary data so that a firm can avoid paying more than its competitors.

Federal prosecutors have been slow to investigate the practice, so the main legal challenges have come from private litigation filed by class action lawyers. Their latest success has just emerged from a federal court in Maryland, where utility company NextEra Energy and its subsidiary Florida Power & Light have agreed to pay $9.5 million to settle wage-fixing allegations.

NextEra is just one of two dozen companies sued by lawyers representing both hourly and salaried workers at nuclear power plants around the country. In a complaint filed last year, the plaintiffs alleged that the companies “engaged in a multi-faceted conspiracy to align, fix, and suppress Class Members’ compensation.” NextEra is the first defendant in the case to settle.

As documented in Violation Tracker, wage-fixing lawsuits have been brought on behalf of various types of workers. One of the biggest actions targeted the poultry industry. A dozen major producers have paid out over $270 million, with the largest individual settlements coming from Tyson Foods ($115 million) and Perdue Farms ($60 million).

A group of Detroit-area hospitals paid more than $50 million to resolve allegations they conspired to depress the wages of nurses.

Wage-fixing lawsuits are closely related to no-poaching cases in which employers are accused of secretly agreeing not to hire each other’s employees, thus exerting downward pressure on wages. The first major action of this sort was resolved a decade ago, when tech giants Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe Systems together agreed to settle the matter for $415 million.

In 2017  Walt Disney and its subsidiaries Pixar and Lucasfilm agreed to pay $100 million to settle litigation accusing them of engaging in a no-poach agreement with other studios with regard to the hiring of animators.

Two years later, Duke University agreed to pay more than $54 million to settle litigation alleging it entered into an improper no-poach agreement with the University of North Carolina not to try to hire medical school faculty members from each other.

In 2024, Jackson Hewitt agreed to pay over $10 million to settle litigation alleging its franchisees entered into a non-poach agreement regarding the hiring of tax preparers.

Last year, the Pratt & Whitney unit of RTX Corporation agreed to pay $34 million to settle litigation alleging it participated in an improper no-poach agreement among federal contractors not to hire one another’s aerospace engineers.

State attorneys general have begun to get in on the action. For example, the New York AG got Stewart Title Guaranty Corporation to pay $2.5 million to settle allegations it participated in a no-poach arrangement with competing title insurance firms.

It used to be common for unions to negotiate with major corporations in an industry to raise wage and benefit levels across the sector. Now employers collude among themselves to depress compensation rates. That’s a far cry from a free market.

Worms in the Apple

For years, Apple has commanded top prices based on the idea that its devices were of the highest quality. That mystique has persevered despite a series of major lawsuits alleging that the company deceived consumers about the features and performance of its products.

In the latest case, Apple recently agreed to pay $250 million to resolve allegations that it misled customers into thinking its iPhone 16 would include new artificial intelligence Siri features. The lawsuit had charged that the company falsely promised those features even though they had not yet been created.

Apple initially argued that its claims were not deceptive because the features were to be released over time, yet it ultimately decided it was prudent to settle the consumer class action while not admitting fault. The settlement does not end the matter for Apple, which is also facing litigation brought on behalf of investors claiming that the failure to deliver the Siri features caused the company’s stock price to tumble for a period of time last year.

Apple’s previous legal entanglements documented in Violation Tracker include a 2023 settlement in which it agreed to pay out at least $310 million to resolve allegations that it distributed iPhone software updates that degraded their performance. The suit claimed that the software problems prompted many users to purchase new phones, thus benefitting the company financially. Three years earlier, Apple had paid $113 million to settle related litigation brought by more than 30 state attorneys general.

In 2022 Apple agreed to pay $95 million to settle a class action alleging it violated its customer warranties by replacing broken iPhones and iPads with deficient remanufactured units.

In 2023 Apple agreed to pay $50 million to settle litigation alleging it knowingly sold laptops with defective butterfly-type keyboards.

In 2024 Apple agreed to pay $35 million to settle litigation alleging it knowingly sold its iPhone 7 with an audio defect.

In 2025 Apple agreed to pay $20 million to settle litigation alleging that some of its watches had battery defects that could cause serious injuries.

These settlements are, of course, drops in the bucket for a company that has been piling up around $100 billion a year in profits. The same dilemma applies to Apple’s rivals, some of which have paid out even more in settlements and fines in consumer protection cases.

For example, in 2019 Meta’s Facebook unit paid a whopping $5 billion fine to the Federal Trade Commission in connection with allegations it deceived users about their ability to control the privacy of their personal information.

The tech giants are not the only companies that have faced such allegations. For instance, in 2019 AT&T Mobility agreed to pay $60 million to settle litigation with the Federal Trade Commission over allegations that the wireless provider misled millions of its smartphone customers by charging them for unlimited data plans while reducing their data speeds. And of course, Volkswagen has been penalized billions of dollars for deceiving customers about the level of emissions produced by their vehicles.

Until fines and settlements are high enough to jeopardize their financial survival, large corporations will be tempted to deceive their customers in the pursuit of ever-higher profits.

Today’s Queen of Hearts

During her interview with Donald Trump, Norah O’Donnell of 60 Minutes mentioned that the man accused of trying to assassinate him had attended a No Kings rally. Trump responded: “I’m not a king…If I was a king I wouldn’t be dealing with you.”

Trump’s kingliness, especially in contrast to a real monarch such as Charles, is open to debate. But it is hard to ignore Trump’s similarity to a different royal figure, namely the Queen of Hearts. Like that foul-tempered character from Alice in Wonderland, Trump lashes out at those who displease him, calling for punishments that echo the Queen’s famous command: “Off with their heads.”

While the Queen never succeeds in getting anyone decapitated, Trump, unfortunately, has filled his administration with lackies who are eager to satisfy his whims. These days, that seems to be the main function the Justice Department, whose acting head, Todd Blanche, just succeeded in getting a North Carolina grand jury to indict former FBI director James Comey for a social media posting of seashells that supposedly constituted a death threat against the president.

That case is unlikely to go anywhere. More serious is the announcement by the Federal Communications Commission chair, led by MAGA zealot Brendan Carr, that it intends to review the TV station licenses held by ABC. The unusual step is purportedly connected to the agency’s review of ABC’s diversity practices.

It is likely no coincidence that this move comes just as Trump and the First Lady are demanding that ABC fire late night host Jimmy Kimmel for making a joke that Kimmel says was a reference to the age difference between POTUS and FLOTUS but which the Trumps insist was a call for assassination.

A move by the FCC to threaten a license holder to silence a Trump critic is just as pernicious as doing so to punish a company for having sought to promote diversity. The first is an egregious violation of the First Amendment. It appeared that Carr had learned that lesson after he caused an uproar by making a similar threat against ABC for a comment Kimmel had made about the man accused of assassinating rightwing activist Charlie Kirk.

Carr’s crusade against DEI flies in the face of the FCC’s long history of policies to combat discrimination and promote diversity in the communications industry.

Those policies came about primarily through the efforts of non-profit groups with close ties to the civil rights movement. Chief among these was the Office of Communications of the United Church of Christ, now known as the UCC Media Justice Ministry. In the 1960s, the UCC effort, led by Dr. Everett C. Parker, began to research the way in which television and radio stations in the South covered the campaigns for racial justice.

The UCC found that stations such as WLBT-TV in Jackson, Mississippi mostly ignored the protests while frequently airing pejorative comments about African-Americans. The UCC petitioned the FCC to deny the station a license renewal because it was not serving the public interest, as broadcasters were required to do under federal law. After a lengthy legal battle, the UCC won a landmark court ruling.

Around the same time, the UCC successfully pressured the FCC to adopt equal employment regulations for license holders. Those rules were modified by a 1998 court ruling, but the agency continued not only to prohibit discrimination but also require broadcasters to take positive steps to promote the hiring and promotion of minorities and women. Operations with larger staffs were expected to engage in more initiatives than smaller ones.

The current FCC’s policies turn this tradition upside down. By embracing the wrong-headed idea that efforts to address discrimination are themselves discriminatory, the agency is starting to turn back the clock to a time when people of color were largely absent from the staffs of media companies.

It remains to be seen whether the “off with their heads” pronouncements of the Trump Administration are any more successful than those of the Queen of Hearts.

Coercive Price Fixing

In its early days, Amazon.com cultivated a reputation for low prices, which helped put a lot of small booksellers out of business. That eventually gave way to a business model based on a wide product selection and speedy delivery. Its Prime subscription system was designed to make customers focus on the benefits of free shipping and overlook the fact that the prices of the products were not much of a bargain.

Now the giant e-retailer is facing allegations that it not only abandoned the low-cost approach but actually conspired to raise the prices charged on its own platform as well as those of its competitors.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta brought a price-fixing lawsuit against Amazon in February and has just provided new details of the alleged conspiracy in a motion filed in state court in San Francisco. The document claims that when a competing platform is offering a product at a price lower than it is charging, Amazon demands that the supplier intervene to get that price increased: “Vendors, cowed by Amazon’s overwhelming bargaining leverage and fearing punishment, comply—agreeing to raise prices on competitors’ websites (often with the awareness and cooperation of the competing retailer) or to remove products from competing websites altogether. The scheme is neither subtle nor complex. It is price fixing, and it should be immediately enjoined.”

The pressure exerted by Amazon is said to be a part of a system called Can’t Realize a Profit, or CRaP, in which it cuts off orders from suppliers that don’t comply with the company’s demands.

What is notable about the California AG’s motion is that it include details on specific vendors that were said to have gotten caught up in the price fixing. For example, it quotes an email from GlobalOne Pet Products, a producer of premium pet treats, to the big pet supplies website Chewy urging it to coordinate a price increase with Amazon.

In another example, Amazon was said to have threatened to stop ordering goods from a home décor vendor called All the Rages until it arranged for price increases on the Home Depot website.

Amazon’s alleged pressure tactics were not limited to small suppliers. The motion accuses the company of leaning on Levi Strauss to get Walmart.com to boost the prices of Easy Khaki Classic pants.

The California AG obtained many communications by Amazon employees alluding to these practices. But the motion claims that those documents do not reflect the true extent of the conspiracy, given that the discovery process is said to have yielded materials advising staffers to arrange things with vendors on the phone rather than in writing.

Among the nearly 200 entries Amazon has in Violation Tracker representing nearly $3 billion in penalties, there is only one case involving price fixing—a 2022 action brought by the Washington AG which Amazon settled for $2.25 million.

Given the impressive evidence collected by the California AG, it seems likely that Amazon’s price-fixing rap sheet will soon be much more substantial.

Bizarro World at the Justice Department

Normally, my colleagues and I are happy to include a new multi-million-dollar penalty paid by a Fortune 100 company to the Justice Department in our Violation Tracker updates. This month, however, we are reluctantly creating an entry for a $17 million settlement reached with IBM.

Our hesitation stems from the fact that the case is less a legitimate enforcement action than a salvo in the Trump Administration’s ongoing crusade against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. DOJ is making an example of IBM to intimidate Corporate America into eliminating whatever vestiges remain of conventional policies designed to address systemic racism and sexism in the workplace.

Turning decades of public policy on its head, this administration has decided that those efforts to rectify discrimination are themselves discriminatory and should be the main focus of DOJ’s civil rights enforcement.

What makes the IBM case especially pernicious is that DOJ brought it under the guise of a False Claims Act action. The FCA is normally used against contractors found to have been cheating the federal government. It is most commonly applied against healthcare providers and suppliers to the Pentagon.

IBM was accused of violating its responsibilities as a federal contractor by taking race, color, national origin, or sex into account when making employment decisions, including by using a diversity modifier that tied bonus compensation for managers to achieving demographic targets.

In a press release announcing the settlement, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward proclaimed: “Merit drives promotion and opportunity. Not someone’s sex or race.” He continued: “Today’s settlement proves this Department’s commitment to ensure companies are not using taxpayer funded work to further woke unconstitutional practices in American workplaces.”

Woodward managed both to ignore the long history of exclusion and bias in U.S. corporations and to give the misleading impression that the Trump Administration’s anti-DEI efforts regarding contractors are based on a solid legal foundation. That foundation actually consists of a controversial executive order Trump issued in March and highly questionable interpretations of existing civil rights laws.

The IBM case is also troubling because the company’s supposedly illegal practices were put in place well before the Trump Administration announced its new policies. Although IBM did not admit liability, it cooperated with the DOJ in the investigation and voluntarily terminated or modified the practices in question. Like various law firms and universities targeted by Trump, IBM decided to pay off the administration to be done with the matter.

DOJ’s decision to pervert the False Claims Act to pursue bogus discrimination cases is problematic not only for companies such as IBM that will have to respond to the allegations. It also raises a question about what genuine contract fraud and bias situations are not being investigated.

At a time when the DOJ has been hollowed out by the departure of many career prosecutors, the department can ill afford to devote resources to spurious cases. The fact that it is doing so is good news only for those companies eager to adhere to the lowest ethical standards.

Taking Pride in Doing Less

Regulatory agencies used to brag about how much enforcement they did. After all, that is their job. Under Trump 2.0 agencies such as the EPA and the Justice Department’s Criminal Division Fraud Section have continued this practice, even when it meant greatly exaggerating what they had actually accomplished.

Now the Securities and Exchange Commission is taking a very different tack: It just issued a press release boasting about cutting back on its enforcement. The motivation is ideological: the current SEC leadership wants to be less aggressive in its oversight of the financial industry.

In typical Trumpian manner, the release begins with a swipe at the previous Administration, which is accused of having used the SEC “to pursue media headlines and run up numbers,” creating “misguided expectations on what constitutes effective enforcement.”

SEC Chairman Paul S. Atkins  is quoted as saying: “Over the past year, the Commission has put a stop to regulation by enforcement and recentered its enforcement program on the Commission’s core mission by prioritizing cases that provide meaningful investor protection and strengthen market integrity.”

The phrase “regulation by enforcement” seems to be meant as a critique of the prior leadership’s attempt to exercise oversight over newer sectors such as cryptocurrency, which is favored under Trump 2.0, due in no small part to the fact that the President’s family business is heavily involved in the business.

Atkins’s claim to be focusing on serious fraud cases has yet to become evident in the SEC’s announcements of case resolutions. According to data collected for Violation Tracker, total penalties collected by the agency during the first 12 months of Trump 2.0 were $298 million, down from $1.6 billion during Biden’s final year. The average penalty sank from $25 million to $5 million.

This year the SEC has announced only half a dozen resolved cases against companies with a penalty of $1 million or more.

A sign of things to come can be seen in the appointment of a new director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement. David Woodcock had been a partner in the corporate law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and before that was a senior staff attorney at Exxon Mobil.

Meanwhile, another easing of financial regulation was announced by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.  FinCEN is proposing a rule that would give banks much more responsibility to assess their own exposure to illicit activity such as money laundering.

This approach is justified in the usual anti-regulatory rhetoric. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is quoted as saying: “Our proposal restores common sense with a focus on keeping bad actors out of the financial system, not burying America’s banks in more red tape.” Not surprisingly, banks are thrilled with the proposal.

FinCEN and the SEC are trying to give the impression they are making enforcement more effective by focusing on the more serious cases. What is more likely is that there will be less enforcement of cases of all kinds and financial miscreants will enjoy greater impunity.

Crackdown or Anomaly?

The Trump Administration leaves no doubt where it stands on street crime and drug trafficking: it supports the harshest punishments for perpetrators. When it comes to corporate crime, the stance has generally been quite different. Trump has used his pardon power to benefit a slew of convicted businesspeople, and the Justice Department is finding new ways to offer leniency to corporate defendants.

The past two months, however, have seen a burst of case resolutions in which corporations are paying fines and settlements of $100 million or more, which could be called mega-penalties. These have included cases in areas such as environmental protection for which the Trump Administration has not usually engaged in aggressive enforcement.

For example, in a case brought by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Justice Department, a federal court in Michigan ordered utility DTE Energy to pay a $100 million penalty for Clean Air Act violations at its coke battery in River Rouge.

PacifiCorp, owned by Berkshire Hathaway, agreed to pay $575 million to resolve U.S. government claims relating to wildfires in Oregon and Washington. The government argued that the company’s electrical lines negligently started all six fires.

Walmart agreed to pay $100 million to settle a case brought by the Federal Trade Commission and a group of states alleging that the retailer caused delivery drivers to lose tens of millions of dollars’ worth of earnings, by deceiving them about the base pay, incentive pay and tips they could earn.

Aetna, owned by CVS Health, agreed to pay $117 million to resolve DOJ allegations that it violated the False Claims Act by submitting or failing to withdraw inaccurate and untruthful diagnosis codes for its Medicare Advantage Plan enrollees in order to increase its payments from Medicare.

Adobe Systems agreed to pay $150 million, including a $75 million penalty and $75 million in free services to customers,  in a case brought by the Justice Department alleging that the company’s subscription practices violated the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act by failing to clearly disclose important subscription information and provide subscribers with simple ways to cancel.

The Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) announced that Applied Materials Inc. would pay a $252 million penalty for illegal exports of U.S. semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China.

If the Trump Administration maintains this pace, it will end up with 36 mega-penalties for the year, nearly twice the number announced during the first year of Trump 2.0, according to the data collected for Violation Tracker.

That figure would give the administration a mega-penalty annual tally comparable to that of the past two Democratic presidencies. Biden’s annual total averaged 36.5 and Obama’s average was 43. For Trump 1.0 the figure was 32.

It remains to be seen whether the spate of mega-penalties of the past two months is an indication that enforcement is ramping up or is just an anomaly. In any event, it is encouraging to see that at least some federal regulators and Justice Department prosecutors are taking their job seriously.

The New Senator from the Fortune 500

Parts of MAGA world are up in arms over the decision by Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt to name Alan Armstrong to fill the Senate seat vacated by Markwayne Mullin, Trump’s new Secretary of Homeland Security. The fact that Armstrong made a political donation to Adam Kinzinger, who voted to impeach Trump while in Congress, is viewed as evidence he is insufficiently loyal to the president.

What these MAGA zealots don’t seem to care about is the fact that Armstrong spent more than a decade running a Fortune 500 energy company with a checkered regulatory record. Williams Companies, whose core business is natural gas processing and transportation, has annual revenues of about $12 billion and nearly $3 billion in profits. Armstrong received $18 million in compensation from the company last year.

As shown in Violation Tracker, Williams has paid out over $160 million in fines and settlements stemming from 120 regulatory infractions and class action lawsuits since 2000. This period closely coincides with Armstrong’s career as a top executive of the company.

Antitrust cases account for the largest portion of the penalty total, $61 million. In 2023, for example, Williams and several affiliates agreed to pay $12 million to Wisconsin natural gas buyers to settle a class action suit alleging the company was part of a price-fixing conspiracy in the early 2000s. In 2019 Williams agreed to pay $4.5 million to settle its role in litigation involving a conspiracy to raise the price of natural gas in Missouri and Kansas.

Environmental violations account for the most cases, 88 of the 120, with total penalties of $25 million. The largest of these in dollar terms is a 2023 case involving Clean Air Act violations caused by excessive emissions of volatile organic compounds, methane, and other pollutants at 15 natural gas processing plants. Williams and related entities agreed to spend an estimated $8.5 million to reduce emissions, and Williams paid a civil penalty of $3.75 million.

Williams has also been fined two dozen times for safety-related infractions, including 13 cases brought by OSHA. One of these involved the death of a worker at a facility in Wyoming.

Back in 2005, Williams paid $55 million to settle a lawsuit alleging it mismanaged an employee pension plan.

Armstrong is unlikely to accomplish much during his nine months in office, but he has made it clear his priorities will be to serve the interests of the industry to which he devoted his career. As the Washington Post put it: “Armstrong said his goal during his short stint in the Senate will be to drive ‘better policies that allow us to take advantage of our natural resources around the country,’ particularly through the passage of permitting reform legislation to speed up energy projects.”

Whether Armstrong turns out to be a total MAGA loyalist remains to be seen, but there is little doubt he will use his office to advance the pro-corporate agenda at the core of Trump’s policies.