These included: new priorities for the DOJ; a temporary pause and then a significant shift in its approach to enforcing the FCPA; a return to basics at the SEC’s Enforcement Division and other regulatory agencies; and a complete turnaround on oversight and enforcement in the crypto industry. These changes, coupled with the unprecedented personnel turnover and reduction in resources, mean 2025 saw the biggest pullback in white-collar and regulatory enforcement in the U.S. in decades.
Changes in practices and priorities have not, however, been accompanied by changes to actual laws, meaning that businesses should be wary of drawing too much comfort in the slowdown. And the Trump Administration has made clear that it will be quick to bring new actions and use its broad array of power against any businesses that it concludes engage in wrongdoing that harms Administration priorities. So, in some ways, the seismic shifts of 2025 have made compliance and care in U.S. investigations practices more important.
A reduction in force causes a slowdown in activity
While the Administration has been slow to release exact numbers since President Trump’s inauguration, there is no doubt that there has been a major reduction in the number of prosecutors, agents, and enforcement attorneys focused on white-collar crime at all levels of seniority. Beginning with actions of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and continuing through the longest government shutdown in U.S.. history in October and November 2025, there has been a raft of departures at all levels of seniority-both voluntary and involuntary-from the U.S. DOJ and other regulatory agencies. Even with some state regulators making more proactive efforts to be seen as filling the void in the wake of these departures, the significant personnel turnover directly translates to fewer investigations and enforcement actions.
New DOJ priorities
On May 12, 2025, Matthew Galeotti, the Head of the DOJ’s Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, issued a memorandum titled “Focus, Fairness, and Efficiency in the Fight Against white-collar crime,” announcing significant changes to the DOJ’s white-collar crime enforcement priorities intended to align those priorities with the Trump Administration’s “America First” agenda.
The memo emphasized the substantial threats posed by white-collar crime and the impact of such crimes, including the exploitation of government programs, the erosion of public trust in financial markets, and threats to national security, while at the same time cautioning against overly aggressive enforcement that burdens legitimate business and harms U.S. economic interests.
Galeotti observed that the “vast majority of American businesses are legitimate enterprises working to deliver value for their shareholders and quality products and services for customers,” and instructed prosecutors in the DOJ’s Criminal Division to “strike an appropriate balance between the need to effectively identify, investigate, and prosecute corporate and individuals’ criminal wrongdoing” with “avoid[ing] overreach that punishes risk-taking and hinders innovation… [and] minimize[s] unnecessary burdens on American enterprise.”
More specifically, Galeotti announced that the DOJ’s Criminal Division would prioritize ten specific areas for its white-collar enforcement:
- Fraud and abuse of government programs, including fraud related to government contracts and health care.
- Trade and customs fraud, including tariff evasion.
- Fraud perpetuated through Variable Interest Entities (VIEs), including offering fraud, “ramp and dumps,” elder fraud, securities fraud, and other market manipulation schemes.
- Fraud that victimizes U.S. investors, individuals, and markets, including Ponzi schemes, investment scams, elder fraud, investment fraud, service member fraud, and fraud that threatens the health and safety of consumers.
- Conduct by financial institutions and their insiders that threatens U.S. national security, including sanctions violations or enabling transactions by Cartels, transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), hostile nation-states, or foreign terrorist organizations.
- Material support by corporations to foreign terrorist organizations.
- Complex money laundering, including Chinese Money Laundering Organizations.
- Violations of the Controlled Substances Act and the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, including in connection with counterfeit pills and unlawful distribution of opioids by medical professionals and companies.
- Bribery and associated money laundering that impact U.S. national interests, undermine U.S. national security, harm the competitiveness of U.S. businesses, and enrich foreign corrupt officials.
- Crimes that involve digital assets and willful violations that facilitate significant criminal activity.
In addition to these specific priority shifts, Galeotti also announced certain policy shifts away from multi-year compliance-focused investigations and monitorships, including re-evaluation of all existing monitorships, and an emphasis on more attention-grabbing investigations and prosecution of individual bad actors rather than their employers. While those collective shifts should generally result in reduced risks for companies-particularly U.S. companies-it largely makes the enforcement approach less predictable, thereby hardly eliminating the risk of white-collar enforcement.
FCPA enforcement pause and restart
In February 2025, President Trump issued an Executive Order pausing the initiation of new FCPA cases and directing the DOJ to review its enforcement approach to better align with the Administration’s foreign policy objectives and to reduce what the Order characterized as “overexpansive and unpredictable FCPA enforcement against American citizens and businesses.” While some predicted that the Order might signal the end of FCPA enforcement, that was not the case.
On June 9, 2025, the DOJ issued new Guidelines for Investigations and Enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, setting forth an operative framework for all future FCPA actions that emphasizes a more targeted and strategic enforcement posture. The Guidelines direct DOJ prosecutors to focus on the following non-exhaustive factors when evaluating whether to pursue FCPA investigations and enforcement actions: (1) the total elimination of cartels and transnational criminal organizations; (2) safeguarding fair opportunities and ensuring the competitiveness of U.S. companies; (3) advancing U.S. national security interests by rooting out corruption in key strategic sectors, such as defense, intelligence, and critical infrastructure; and (4) prioritizing investigations of “serious misconduct.”
This makes clear that the U.S. will continue to prosecute the FCPA, but much more selectively and with an emphasis on different corporate entities and conduct than has historically been the DOJ’s focus.
Return to basics at regulatory agencies
Regulatory agencies announced similar shifts in policies throughout 2025. For example, in a series of speeches on May 19, 2025, the new SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins and others signaled a desire to “get back to our roots of promoting, rather than stifling innovation,” by focusing enforcement efforts on certain core areas, including protecting retail investors and pursuing conduct based fraud such as insider trading, disclosure fraud, market manipulation, and breaches of fiduciary duty. While the SEC will continue to pursue other areas, its leadership has been adamant that there will be a shift away from compliance-based investigations where there is no apparent investor harm.
A sea change for deFi and crypto
Nowhere has the impact of these shifts been felt more acutely than in the decentralized finance and cryptocurrency industry. Beginning with an Executive Order on January 23, 2025 titled Strengthening American Leadership in Digital Financial Technology, the Administration has charted a new path for crypto enforcement. While the government has continued to pursue traditional fraud involving digital assets, it has walked away from many of the signature cases of the Biden Administration, including those against various crypto exchanges and their leadership founded on claims that the exchanges were offering unregistered securities or for criminal violations of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), and vowed that it will instead focus efforts on establishing clear regulations to govern the industry going forward.
New focus areas
Finally, while less the focus of public policy announcements or filed actions, the DOJ and other agencies have begun to use their investigatory powers throughout 2025 to pursue certain politically charged areas, such as DEI efforts and political organizations promoting ideas disfavored by the Trump Administration. While these investigations generally have not led to formal actions yet, they signal a new area of serious risk for companies.
Legal reforms in 2025 and impacts on internal investigations
For all the changes in governmental priorities and trends listed above, there were few significant legal developments in the U.S. white-collar and internal investigations space.
Indeed, perhaps the most notable case was one that ultimately served to reinforce the strength of the attorney-client and work product protections under U.S. law. The case drew a great deal of attention from the U.S. investigations bar after a district court issued an order directing a U.S. company to produce to a private plaintiff various materials that had been prepared by outside counsel in the course of two internal investigations. The district court ruled that the company had not established that materials were privileged, or that any privilege was not waived, in part because the investigation findings were used for various non-legal business decisions and were disclosed to the company’s auditors. On October 3, 2025, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit issued a writ of mandamus vacating that order. The decision reaffirmed that under U.S. law materials prepared by outside counsel undertaking corporate internal investigations remain protected by the attorney-client privilege and the work-product doctrine notwithstanding later business uses, and that disclosures to auditors do not, without more, effect a waiver of work-product protection. And in so doing, it reemphasized the value of having outside counsel conduct internal investigations to respond to potential legal risks-read more about the Court of Appeal’s decision here.
Predictions for 2026 and beyond
The results of the many changes in enforcement policies and priorities this year will likely emerge in 2026. We expect that the coming year will yield cases in many of the Administration’s much publicized areas of focus; as the U.S.'s ongoing foreign policy and trade debates continue, there may be further shifts (announced and unannounced) that use governmental resources to target specific industries and regions. The bottom line is that it will be critical for in-house counsel in or with a nexus to the U.S. to stay close to trends and be hyper-aware of the unique risk profile of their own businesses.
Chambers USA 2025
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This article is part of the A&O Shearman Cross-border white-collar crime and investigations review 2026.
