President Donald Trump has not been coy about reshaping what he considers to be an unfair justice apparatus in the United States. Whether for retribution or for reform, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and America’s definition of what warrants prosecution is changing rapidly—and the world will feel the effects.
Last month Trump issued an executive order to halt the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) for 6–12 months while his newly appointed attorney general, Pam Bondi, reviews the structure of the act and takes “remedial measures” on past applications of the FCPA.
In 1977, the House of Representatives and the Senate passed the FCPA, and President Jimmy Carter signed it into law. The act’s aim was straightforward: Stop US citizens and companies from bribing foreign governments. It was the first law in the world to penalize severely (up to 20 years imprisonment) bribery of officials in foreign countries.
Carter, when signing the law, made clear his view that “bribery is ethically repugnant and competitively unnecessary.” Born out of the Watergate investigation, FCPA was a response to the uncovering of hundreds of US businesses and entities bribing foreign governments for personal and corporate gain.
The law also reflected a growing concern for business morality among evangelicals. It’s more than coincidental that 1977 was also the year of publication for Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, Ron Sider’s book that sold 400,000 copies and made Christianity Today’s list of the hundred most influential 20th-century books on religion.
Sider complained about “bribes to top government officials” in other countries. He criticized Chiquita Brands International for allegedly bribing Latin American government officials in exchange for preferential treatment that allowed the company to exploit local workers.
Evangelicals on both the right and the left supported FCPA. More than two dozen antibribery Bible verses bulwarked their views. Ecclesiastes 7:7, one of the most succinct, says, “A bribe corrupts the heart.” In 2018, theologian Wayne Grudem, who would support Trump in 2020, wrote that “many wealthy nations have rightly outlawed the payment of bribes by companies with headquarters located within their jurisdictions.”
Some advocates of the act also offered a financial rationale: that a strict prohibition on bribery requests from foreign governments would help shield companies from the pressure to dole out bribery fees. Opponents complained that US companies would lose some business to competitors from other countries that could offer bribes, but FCPA cosponsor Rep. John Moss countered, “That is the small price we must pay to return morality to corporate practice.”
The Trump administration is updating the position of those opponents from almost a half century ago. Minimizing bribery to “routine business practices in other nations,” the executive order argues FCPA has been “overexpansive” in enforcement “actively harm[ing] American economic competitiveness.”
The executive order shelves “any new FCPA investigations or enforcement actions”—including what might be a bribery-facilitated, multibillion-dollar renewable energy scheme.
That’s no exaggeration. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has charged Adani Green Energy with paying hundreds of millions of dollars from American investors to bribe the Indian government to alter the energy market in the company’s favor. Adani Green Energy allegedly tried to hide the bribes from investors.That investigation seems over, at least for now.
Taken by itself, the FCPA freeze could merely be a messy attempt to limit the authority of the DOJ and the SEC. But halting FCPA in tandem with limiting enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and disbanding the Foreign Influence Task Force poses a shift in American policy likely to affect not just American oversight of American bribery abroad but also the US government’s ability to monitor foreign agents in America.
Limiting the enforcement of FARA—the very law many believe Hunter Biden violated—increases America’s vulnerability to corrupt foreign influence in business dealings, policymaking, and elections.
But instead of viewing FARA as a tool to root out foreign interference and corruption in American institutions, Bondi is tamping it down based on another Trump administration executive order aimed at correcting what it claims is the previous administration’s “weaponization of the federal government.”
Bondi said FARA should only be used for instances “of alleged conduct similar to more traditional espionage by foreign governments.”
Crippling FARA, which requires foreign agents of other governments to register their activity in the US, significantly hinders America’s ability to track the movement and intentions of foreign governments in America. The change may also lead to an overturning of existing convictions.
For example, rapper Pras Michel, convicted of illegally raising millions of dollars on behalf of a Malaysian financier for former president Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, now hopes the law’s changes will allow him to appeal or even be pardoned, since his crimes fall outside Bondi’s new definition of FARA.
As with the FCPA pause, Bondi’s process for limiting FARA has also thrown into doubt pending legal cases against agents illegally lobbying on behalf of authoritarian governments.
Former US congressman David Rivera and his associate allegedly received secret payments of nearly $25 million to lobby the US government to improve its relationship with the Maduro regime in Venezuela, previously sanctioned for human rights abuses, violence against political opponents, grand corruption, and other crimes.
Rivera allegedly lobbied for Maduro without registering that his efforts were on behalf of the regime. That violates FARA, but the corruption charges against Rivera, including alleged conspiracy to commit money laundering, may be dropped due to the changes with FARA.
In addition to regulating bribery abroad and at home, the US also regulates the behavior of Americans overseas. The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) is the primary means by which the US government polices Americans’ financial behavior abroad. FATCA is also famous for encouraging other countries to develop their own safeguards against corruption and financial crimes.
For example, just four years after the US adopted FATCA in 2010, the intergovernmental Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) opted for a similar provision, the Common Reporting Standard. More than 100 countries have now adopted it.
Additionally, FATCA prompted intergovernmental agreements with 115 countries to share financial information with the US government regarding Americans’ financial behavior in their countries.
FATCA helped the US crack down on money laundering and other financial abuse abroad, but the Trump trajectory suggests it might be on life support. Arguing that countries should fight endemic corruption becomes much more difficult in the wake of stripping America’s own internal corruption controls.
These changes open the door for Americans to normalize bribery as merely the cost of doing business. Reshaping tools for prosecuting corruption amounts to reshaping American values and abandoning biblical concepts of justice.
In his 1999 book, How Now Shall We Live?, Charles Colson reflected, “The Bible teaches that there is a holy God whose law constitutes a transcendent, universally valid standard of right and wrong. Our choice has no effect at all on this standard; our choice simply determines whether we accept it, or reject it and suffer the consequences.”
Luke Waggoner is an international political and governance consultant.
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