/>iIn February of 2025, President Trump signed an executive order declaring that the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) had “been systematically, and to a steadily increasing degree, stretched beyond proper bounds and abused in a manner that harms the interests of the United States.” The order called for a 180-day moratorium on initiating new FCPA enforcement actions and for the Attorney General to review and update enforcement procedures. Leading attorneys immediately spoke out about the dangers of this shift, highlighting the US’s historical global leadership role in prosecuting transnational corrupt practices and the void it would leave by sharply decreasing its FCPA enforcement.
In June, the DOJ released its revised enforcement guidelines pursuant to the order. While it is too early to observe the DOJ’s complete new FCPA enforcement strategy in action, activity in a few ongoing FCPA actions provides some clues to the future of litigation under the new enforcement scheme. Overall, legal developments around the FCPA in 2025 point to a prioritization of autonomy for domestic companies that threatens to harm US economic interests and decrease global respect for US anti-corruption efforts. Other nations are responding accordingly, both critiquing the US and strengthening their own anti-corruption initiatives.
Policy Changes
The DOJ’s new FCPA enforcement guidelines align closely with the priorities detailed by President Trump and the DOJ when the executive order was originally released. The guidelines stress the importance of protecting US business interests, require the DOJ to focus on large-scale prosecutions (particularly those involving cartels or transnational criminal organizations), and mandate that senior DOJ officials authorize any new investigations or enforcement actions.
Some of the changes made in the guidelines will have little impact in practice. For example, the guidelines require the DOJ to deprioritize cases involving “de minimis or low-dollar, generally accepted business courtesies.” However, the DOJ had not been pursuing those types of cases in the first place. Other changes are likely to harm the US financially. The shift to targeting cartel and TCO activity requires the DOJ to focus its efforts on cases that are extremely difficult to prosecute (and often poorly suited to the FCPA as an enforcement tool). Additionally, a decrease in FCPA investigations means a reduction in a type of litigation that has been highly profitable for the US. Over $31 billion in sanctions have been imposed under the FCPA since 1993, with over $1.6 billion in 2024 alone.
In a May 12 speech by Head of the Criminal Division Matthew Galeotti, the DOJ announced two other policy changes related to its FCPA enforcement efforts. The first shift, a revision to the DOJ’s policy on selecting independent monitors in its criminal investigations, will likely have minimal impact on FCPA enforcement initiatives. The primary goal of this shift is to decrease the DOJ’s use of monitors, but as reported by Stanford Law School’s FCPA Clearinghouse in their 2025 Q2 Report, “the DOJ imposed a monitor in only three out of 25 FCPA Matters involving corporate defendants” between 2020 and 2024. With the use of monitors already being extremely rare in FCPA investigations, a further mandate to decrease their use is unlikely to have any significant effect.
The second change is more significant. Galeotti announced in the same speech that the Criminal Division’s Corporate Enforcement Policy would be updated to make it significantly easier for companies that voluntarily disclose misconduct to avoid prosecution by the DOJ. Companies that fully disclose and remediate misconduct with no aggravating circumstances will now receive an automatic declination from the DOJ (meaning they will not be prosecuted), where previously they would only have received a presumption of a declination. Companies that partially cooperate with the DOJ are also eligible for non-prosecution agreements and substantial reductions in fines.
“Excessive enforcement and unfocused corporate investigations stymie innovation, limits prosperity, and reduces efficiency,” Galeotti said while announcing this policy. This view closely aligns with the rationale behind Trump’s executive order, which states that “overexpansive and unpredictable FCPA enforcement against American citizens and
businesses… not only wastes limited prosecutorial resources that could be dedicated to preserving American freedoms, but actively harms American economic competitiveness and, therefore, national security.”
This fear that anti-corruption enforcement will harm US economic interests ignores the other side of the coin: scaling down FCPA enforcement, especially when over 57% of companies that faced sanctions between 2014 and 2024 were headquartered outside the US, actually harms US business interests by forcing companies to compete in corrupt, poorly regulated international markets. Less than a third of FCPA sanctions levied in the last decade targeted US companies; the enforcement efforts decried by the Trump administration as wasteful have in fact been highly protective of US interests.
Both the new FCPA enforcement guidelines and the changes to the Corporate Enforcement Policy also have the potential to decrease global trust in US anti-corruption efforts by suggesting that the US is unwilling to hold its own companies accountable for corrupt behavior. “Since the passage of the FCPA in 1977,” leading whistleblower attorney Stephen Kohn wrote in a recent working paper, “the United States has played the leading role in advancing transnational anti-corruption policies and prosecuting enforcement actions against bribery and other forms of corruption.” But as the US limits its overall enforcement actions and explicitly prioritizes foreign targets instead of, not in addition to, domestic actors, its position as an effective and fair leader in the global fight against corruption weakens.
Litigation Updates
While the moratorium on initiating FCPA investigations was officially lifted on June 10 when the DOJ released its new guidelines, no new actions have been initiated so far in 2025. Once actions are brought (or not brought) under the new enforcement guidelines in the next few months, the public will have a better understanding of the types of cases the DOJ intends to pursue under its new policies. That being said, there have been several updates in ongoing enforcement actions in 2025, which shed some early light on the future of FPCA litigation.
First, some ongoing FCPA investigations and prosecutions have been halted. As reported by Stanford’s FCPA Clearinghouse, “Media reports indicate that the DOJ has closed half of its FCPA-related investigations since the release of Trump’s February 10 Executive Order. If that is true, then company disclosures either have not yet reflected those closures or the closed investigations were never publicly disclosed in the first instance.” Five publicly disclosed investigations have been closed by the DOJ in this period, with two being against US companies and only one explicitly crediting the executive order as a reason for the closure. In short, some ongoing investigations ended as a result of these recent shifts. However, there is not yet enough publicly available data to gain much information from these closures.
At least one case in active litigation has been dismissed as a direct result of Trump’s executive order. On April 3, the criminal case against Gordon Coburn and Steven Schwartz, who were accused of paying a bribe of over $2 million to the Indian government in exchange for a permit to construct an office building in Chennai, was dismissed with prejudice by the New Jersey District Court. The dismissal was “based on the recent assessment of the Executive Order’s application to this matter,” US Attorney for New Jersey Alina Habba wrote in the government’s motion to dismiss.
It remains to be seen whether this case will be representative of those canceled under the executive order and new guidelines. If it does turn out to be representative, it would confirm the US’s deprioritization of cases with relatively small dollar amounts involved, and of domestic actors as targets for prosecution. It would also confirm that the US is stepping away from straightforward, easier-to-litigate cases in favor of its stated interest in matters involving transnational criminal organizations, despite the FCPA Clearinghouse warning that the latter cases would be difficult due to a lack of definitive legal connections to the US and potential hostility from the (corrupt) states the US would have to cooperate with to prosecute these organizations.
These policy changes have also impacted cases the DOJ has chosen not to dismiss. On June 26, Carl Alan Zaglan, the defendant in a Florida case in which he is accused of paying bribes to Honduran government officials to obtain government contracts to supply law enforcement uniforms and accessories in Honduras, submitted a motion to dismiss to the Court, arguing that “as one of the existing enforcement actions under the FCPA subject to the President’s Executive Order, this action should be dismissed as contrary to public policy.” A hearing on the motion is scheduled for August 18. While all parties have acknowledged that the executive order and guideline updates do not provide defendants with any substantive rights that would support a dismissal, the simple fact that the argument was brought further demonstrates that some actors are hoping that FCPA policy changes will lead to an environment of increased leeway for domestic corporations.
International Attention
Beyond changes to the US legal landscape, there has also been a global response to Trump’s executive order and the DOJ’s policy changes. The day after the executive order was released, the UK Anti-Corruption Coalition released a statement calling it “a major blow to the international fight against corruption” that would lead to “a race to the bottom on corporate anti-corruption standards” and likely violate the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention, an international treaty to which the US is a signatory. Julien Chaisse, president of the leading financial research institute Asia Pacific FDI Network, published an op-ed in April that similarly critiqued the policy: “The official justification? National security and economic competitiveness. The practical effect? The risk of undoing decades of progress in tackling corruption in foreign direct investment (FDI), while leaving non-US companies even more exposed.” Chaisse warned that the policy shift had the potential to “damage the country’s credibility,” and explicitly accused the US of using the FCPA as “a tool for strategic advantage rather than a neutral enforcement mechanism.”
But countries responding to the new policies have done far more than criticize the US; they have taken it upon themselves to prosecute corruption if the US will not. The most significant policy shift following the executive order was the announcement of a joint anti-corruption task force between Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and France, three nations that are already heavily involved in global anti-corruption efforts and have frequently collaborated with the US on such efforts in the past (they are the US’s first-, second-, and fourth-most frequent foreign partners in FCPA enforcement actions since 2014, respectively).
While Nick Ephgrave, the director of the UK’s Serious Fraud Office, has stated that the establishment of the task force was “in no way a reaction to” the US’s pause in FCPA enforcement, he also said at a conference in April that his office was looking into opportunities to “pick up” UK investigations of corruption while US enforcement was paused. Head of the French Parquet National Financier Jean-François Bohnert has also spoken about the task force’s collaborative enforcement efforts, stating at a conference in May that the French prosecutorial office would hold French and foreign companies to the same anti-corruption standards – a stark contrast to the US’s current posture.
Anti-corruption experts are hoping that the task force marks the beginning of a global upsurge in anti-corruption enforcement, despite the US’s absence from the space. As outlined by Stephen Kohn in his paper, “A Reverse Marshall Plan for Anti-Corruption: Liberal Democracies Can Fill the Void Left by The Changes in U.S. Policies,” other countries (particularly Western liberal democracies) are fully equipped to prosecute international corruption themselves by following the model of the FCPA and the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention. While the US has historically led global anti-corruption efforts, modeling best practices and performing the lion’s share of investigatory work, there is no reason that other nations cannot take its place.
Conclusion
The Trump administration’s changes to FCPA enforcement policies have already had substantial impacts on the landscape of US FCPA litigation and international perception of the US’s anti-corruption efforts. Enforcement has decreased substantially, and actors at all levels of the litigation process are aware that the landscape they are working in has changed – including some defendants who hope to see leeway resulting from Trump’s explicit devaluation of anti-corruption prosecutorial efforts. It is also evident that global confidence in the US’s anti-corruption initiatives has been shaken by these changes. International anti-corruption experts are increasingly viewing the US as an unreliable, self-interested actor concerned with protecting US business interests at the expense of maintaining ethical behavior within the global economy.
On the other hand, the past six months have made it clear that US leadership is not the only path towards effective global anti-corruption work. Foreign anti-corruption actors, including international bodies like the OECD, understand precisely why the FCPA has been such an effective enforcement tool in the past and are increasingly committed to taking the baton of anti-corruption leadership as the US drops it. This trend further demonstrates that the only guaranteed loser from these policy changes is the US itself. If the DOJ’s new policies remain in effect, the global anti-corruption enforcement landscape may very well recover. The US’s reputation and enforcement revenue streams will not.
