In the spring of 1871, the Ku Klux Klan ruled York County, South Carolina. The overwhelming majority of white men in the county had joined, and Klansmen had committed at least eleven murders and more than 600 whippings. On March 7, a mob of night riders led by Dr. J. Rufus Bratton, a physician from one of the county’s most prominent families, dragged Jim Williams from his home and hanged him from a tree. Williams had escaped slavery during the Civil War to join the Union Army and returned to captain a Black militia organized to protect the rights of formerly enslaved people.
From its founding in 1866, the Klan and groups like it waged a campaign of terror across the South. In Louisiana alone, they killed roughly 1,000 people, most of them Black, in the months before the 1868 election. Targets were Black men who voted or held office, teachers in freedmen’s schools, families who acquired land or livestock, and anyone who refused the deference white Southerners demanded. The purpose was to restore by force the racial order that emancipation and the Reconstruction Amendments had formally abolished.
The Republicans who controlled the federal government responded with vigorous enforcement. Congress passed the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871, making it a federal crime to conspire to deprive citizens of their constitutional rights and authorizing the president to use the military and suspend the writ of habeas corpus against organized terror. Congress created the Department of Justice in 1870, and President Grant appointed Amos Akerman as the Attorney General, who made subduing the Klan his central task. In October 1871, to prevent biased judges from releasing the perpetrators before they could be tried, Grant suspended habeas corpus in nine South Carolina counties, including York. Akerman traveled to oversee the crackdown himself. Federal marshals and soldiers arrested hundreds of Klansmen, and as many as 2,000 others fled the state.
What the historian Eric Foner calls “the legal offensive of 1871” reached across the South. Federal prosecutors indicted 220 Klan leaders in South Carolina. They indicted hundreds of men in North Carolina and nearly 700 in Mississippi. By the end of 1871, prosecutors had brought more than 3,000 indictments against Klan members and won more than 1,000 convictions.
By 1872, the federal government had broken the Klan. Racial terrorism dropped sharply. The 1872 election was the most peaceful of Reconstruction, with half a million Black voters casting ballots.
Within a few years, Northern political will ran out. Federal troops left the South, the Supreme Court gutted the Enforcement Acts, and the former Confederate states ended Black enfranchisement and reestablished white rule. But for a moment, the country saw what real enforcement could accomplish.
Today, President Donald Trump understands the potential of federal enforcement. He has used it more aggressively than any modern president—but lawlessly. He has directed obliging DOJ attorneys to prosecute his political opponents, stripped universities and nonprofits of billions in funding based on unsupported legal claims, and punished law firms and media outlets for First Amendment activity. At the same time, his administration has dismantled enforcement that protects ordinary people from the powerful—gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), contorting DOJ’s Civil Rights Division to target diversity programs and suppress the vote, and sidelining the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
When Trump leaves office, the next administration might approach enforcement warily, in an attempt to distance itself from this period of flagrant abuse. But overcorrection would be a mistake. The right response is to reject the current administration’s mob tactics and vendetta-driven prosecutions, while leaning into enforcement as a strategy to advance fairness, justice, and the rule of law. A range of federal statutes—across civil rights, consumer protection, labor rights, antitrust, banking, tax, and environmental law—exist for these purposes.
We need more of this kind of enforcement, not less, against those who use their power to cheat, exploit, dominate, and discriminate against others in violation of U.S. law.
The Problem: Decades of Neglect
Before Trump and outside the context of immigration, recent presidents of both parties have mostly treated enforcement as a technical function, something to leave to the agencies while the White House focuses on other policy strategies for advancing social and economic inclusion—legislation, rulemaking, grants, and benefits delivery. As a result, enforcement has lacked the political direction, interagency coordination, and public communications priority that other policy approaches receive. The costs have been significant.
During the financial crisis, the Obama administration bailed out the banks, let executives keep their bonuses, and sent only a single Wall Street banker to jail while millions of victims of predatory lending lost their homes in foreclosure. For four decades, the antitrust agencies stood aside as big corporations consolidated industry after industry. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) long underused its power to seek temporary injunctions during organizing drives, for example to reinstate a fired worker while the Board decides the case. Employers are charged with breaking federal law in more than 40% of union elections and with illegally firing workers in one of every five union election campaigns.
The causes of such neglect vary, from competing priorities and concerns about the appearance of political interference to industry capture and decisions to narrow and underfund enforcement.
Presidents might see enforcement as small compared to, say, passing new legislation or strengthening the social safety net. Fair enough. But without strong enforcement, statutory protections are just words on a page. Moreover, enforcement has unique advantages, such as the potential to deliver tangible results quickly and to show the American people that their government is fighting for them.
Presidents have also kept their distance to avoid the suggestion of improper influence. Most modern administrations, including Trump’s first, have restricted White House contact with enforcement agencies to keep politics out of investigative and charging decisions. That policy makes sense when it comes to specific criminal and civil cases. But over time, the policy has served to box presidents out of enforcement strategy too, as if deciding which harms deserve the government’s attention were as dangerous as deciding whom to prosecute. That’s a policy matter and in fact a core presidential responsibility.
Meanwhile, some agencies have absorbed a deregulatory culture that treats vigorous enforcement as hostile to growth. Recall the now-abolished Office of Thrift Supervision, whose director posed with a chainsaw beside a stack of bank regulations a few years before the financial crisis. Agencies have been weakened by revolving-door hiring practices or captured by the industries they oversee.
Presidents and Congress have also made specific choices that have constrained enforcement of civil rights and economic justice statutes. Beginning in the Reagan administration, the leaders of the Civil Rights Division and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) moved away from strategic cases with wide impact and toward processing individual complaints. Over the years, Congress starved the agencies of resources. As the political scientist Robert Lieberman has documented in a forthcoming paper for the ANNALS, inflation-adjusted funding for the six major federal civil rights agencies was flat between 1981 and 2024—about $1 billion in 2024 dollars in both years—while the agencies were given more statutes to enforce and the number of people they serve (employees, students, tenants, patients, etc.) grew enormously. For example, the EEOC’s staff fell by a third over that period, even as the agency added the Americans with Disabilities Act and other laws to its mandate and as total employment grew by roughly 60%.
Yet history offers useful models of robust enforcement since Reconstruction. In 1938, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) took up an aggressive antimonopoly agenda, arguing that excessive corporate concentration and private economic power threatened democracy. His appointee to lead DOJ’s Antitrust Division, Thurman Arnold, quintupled the number of antitrust lawyers on staff and brought more cases in three years than the government had in the previous half century (though World War II cut these efforts short).
In the 1960s, the federal government intervened throughout the South to integrate public schools and protect Black voters through lawsuits, threats to cut off federal funds, and federal troops. The share of Black students attending majority-white schools in the South rose from 2% in 1964 to 33% in 1970. In Mississippi, Black voter registration rose from less than 7% to almost 60% between 1964 and 1967, as federal examiners bypassed local registrars. This period also saw landmark cases in employment discrimination. In 1973, the EEOC, the Labor Department, and the Justice Department forced AT&T, then the nation’s largest private employer, to pay $15 million to 13,000 women and 2,000 men of color and raise pay for 36,000 workers held back by discrimination. A year later, a consent decree with nine steel companies and the steelworkers union delivered $31 million in back pay and opened better jobs to women and workers of color across the industry.
These efforts had presidential commitment, resources that matched the ambition, and strategies aimed at systemic change.
The next administration will have to rebuild under dire conditions. An estimated 70% of the Civil Rights Division’s lawyers have left, many replaced by people selected to execute the current leadership’s goals of undermining civil rights. The Education Department issued layoff notices to all but 60 of the 575 employees in its Office for Civil Rights and closed more than half its regional offices. The EEOC’s staff is at its lowest level since at least 1981. The current administration has tried repeatedly to fire everyone at the CFPB and shut the agency down. Many of the career staff who remain are demoralized.
In addition, Americans who have watched Trump turn enforcement into a weapon could be skeptical of aggressive approaches from the next president. Finally, future enforcement targets, such as companies that cut pay-to-play deals with the current administration, might allege that they are the victims of political payback.
The Goals: Four Principles for Enforcement
A new approach to enforcement should serve four ends.
First, enforcement should shift power, not just remedy harm. After all, the laws at the center of this agenda were written to advance equality, dignity, and opportunity by correcting power imbalances that had enabled abuse, exploitation, and discrimination. For example, the National Labor Relations Act names the “inequality of bargaining power” between workers and employers as the problem it exists to fix. Antidiscrimination laws were passed to change oppressive political and economic dynamics, by arming people of color, women, people with disabilities, and others with new legal rights to assert. When violators can count on sporadic enforcement or absorb penalties as a cost of doing business, nothing really changes. The best test of a successful case is whether the party that abused its position can still do so afterward. Stopping one scheme is good. Removing the market dominance, undue positional leverage, litigation capacity advantage, and information control that made the abuse possible is better.
Second, enforcement should make rights real in ways people can see. When rights go unenforced, it tells people that the law is a game, or worse, that it belongs to someone else. Enforcement that puts money back in workers’ pockets, opens lending in redlined neighborhoods, and holds executives personally accountable demonstrates that the law has meaning.
Third, enforcement should be distributed and durable. Federal enforcement has proven too easy to switch off. More enforcement capacity should rest with state attorneys general, private litigants, and organized communities that have a role in implementing remedies.
Fourth, enforcement should be trustworthy. Presidents should set priorities—in public. But investigators and prosecutors should decide which charges or civil claims to pursue based on the facts and the law. And there should be clear protocols in place to ensure White House officials do not direct selective actions against the president’s perceived enemies or undue lenience for the president’s allies.
The Solution: Muscular and Fair Enforcement
The next administration will not have the luxury of rebuilding the old enforcement system before putting it to work. Agencies will have fewer real experts on staff, a good many people who never should have been hired, data and workflow systems that were sabotaged to enable politicized action, and a sullied reputation. But an administration that sets clear priorities in the public interest, coordinates across agencies, chooses cases for maximum impact, demands strong remedies, and explains its work in resonant plain language can accomplish a great deal even in these circumstances.
Executive Action
Set an Enforcement Agenda. Presidents have coordinated rulemaking priorities from the White House for nearly half a century. Jimmy Carter first required agencies to publish notice and provide the White House analyses of their significant planned rules in 1978, a process that evolved into the modern Unified Regulatory Agenda. Ronald Reagan centralized review, effectively giving the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) the power to stop agency proposals and using it to drive deregulation. Bill Clinton kept that machinery, used it to pursue his goals, and enhanced presidential influence by issuing directives to regulatory agencies and announcing proposed and final rules as his own. Presidential leadership over the regulatory agenda has only increased since then.
The next president should take a page out of the regulatory book and launch an Enforcement Agenda in the first days of the administration. That agenda should name the harms the government will go after, defined by conduct and sector: for example, price gouging, including based on AI-enhanced surveillance; wage theft and employee misclassification in high-violation industries; discrimination in housing and lending; monopolization in health care; and public corruption. Doing so would tell every agency that such enforcement is a presidential priority and set expectations for results. Agencies would make responsive department-level commitments immediately. They would be expected to map their authorities to the president’s enforcement priorities, design practical implementation strategies (e.g., intergovernmental strike forces, portals to gather evidence from the public, whistleblower protections), and allocate resources accordingly.
This is not a call to replicate the cumbersome bureaucratic processes of regulatory review or to expand the mandate of OIRA, which has no enforcement expertise. Nor should enforcement be directly “run out of the White House,” as Vice President JD Vance said of the work of the new Assistant Attorney General for nationwide fraud enforcement, operating “under the supervision of me and the President of the United States.” Notwithstanding the metastasis of the unitary executive theory, the president should not order specific prosecutions, whether face-to-face or by social media blast. Decisions about whom to investigate and charge should stay with agency personnel, rooted in apolitical application of the law to the facts.
The point is to drive more strategic and robust use of enforcement throughout the government, in service of struggling Americans. As legal scholar Kate Andrias has written, “presidential oversight of administrative enforcement is a core constitutional responsibility and has roots in early historical practice.” And there are several ways to catalyze agency commitments without politicizing enforcement. The president could issue an executive order laying out the Enforcement Agenda and requiring agencies to assemble implementation strategies by a given deadline. The president could issue specific directives to each agency, as President Biden did with his 2021 competition order. That order predated the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States that the president has “exclusive authority over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department” and its ruling in Trump v. Slaughter bringing independent agencies under the president’s control, so Biden used circumspect language (e.g., agencies “are encouraged to enforce the antitrust laws”). But his order set out his priorities in detail, naming industries with a record of anti-competitive conduct and charging agencies to collect evidence, document legal violations, and pursue enforcement. Another approach is to create non-White House task forces but with more robust coordination, meeting, and reporting obligations. The Attorney General could lead, as in President Obama’s 2009 financial fraud task force. Agencies with a track record of aggressive enforcement, like recent incarnations of the CFPB and Federal Trade Commission (FTC), could also be good choices.
Whatever the model, presidential prioritization would put a premium on speed, ambition, impact, and interagency cooperation. Agencies should be directed to collaborate to leverage the full authority of the government against corrosive practices. The same industry might be rampant with wage theft, price fixing, consumer scams, discriminatory hiring, and union busting. Traditionally, those practices likely would be investigated by four or five different agencies, or not at all. Under an Enforcement Agenda, they would plan together, share evidence as permitted under law, and rely on each other’s authorities to collectively advance the public interest. For agencies short on staff, or whose statutes have been eviscerated by the Supreme Court, pooling efforts this way will be a necessity.
Agencies would report consistently to the president, and the public, on their progress. Meanwhile, White House staff would work to empower, not restrain, enforcers. The policy councils and OMB would need to prioritize enforcement offices when developing the president’s budget and negotiating with appropriators. They would champion legislation expanding those offices’ jurisdiction and giving them stronger investigative and remedial tools. And the communications team would elevate enforcement wins for workers, consumers, and families from the White House, rather than leaving them to the smaller platform of agency public affairs offices.
Pursue cases that can provoke systemic change. With fewer investigators, agencies cannot afford to spend their time processing complaints one at a time. They should choose cases for their deterrent reach. During the Obama administration, the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD) went after the fast-food chains, hotel companies, and general contractors whose business models pushed cost pressure onto franchisees and subcontractors and bred wage theft at the bottom. WHD sought to hold those companies responsible for the violations they caused throughout their networks under joint employment liability. The agency also shifted toward proactive investigations in the industries with the worst violation rates. The idea was that one case against a large and egregious law-breaking firm could change practices at thousands of workplaces. Proactive investigations grew from 24% of WHD’s docket in 2008 to over 50% by 2017.
Agencies can also use data to surface violations that victims may not even be aware of. For example, the Biden administration’s Combating Redlining Initiative ran analytics on mortgage lending data to identify lenders that were avoiding Black and Latino neighborhoods, in violation of fair housing and fair lending laws. The Justice Department worked with the CFPB and other banking regulators to pursue a slate of cases, achieving 16 resolutions in less than four years—more than in the previous quarter century—and securing $153 million in relief for communities of color that had suffered discrimination.
Use every tool already on the books. Agencies hold authorities they have allowed to lie dormant. During the Biden administration, the NLRB revived a doctrine from 1949 to make bargaining orders the default remedy when employers break the law during union campaigns. The Department of Labor leveraged the Fair Labor Standards Act’s “hot goods” provision, which lets the government stop the shipment of goods made in violation of labor rules, to crack down on child labor. Biden’s appointees to the FTC revived the Robinson-Patman Act’s ban on suppliers charging dominant retailers less than their smaller competitors.
To make the most of limited time and resources, an incoming administration should have an inventory of every enforcement agency’s underused authorities before it takes office. Congressional committees of jurisdiction, former agency officials, and other legal experts can help catalogue these authorities over the next two years.
Demand structural remedies. Too often, enforcement ends with a company promising to behave better. When the Justice Department approved Live Nation’s merger with Ticketmaster in 2010, it relied on the company’s commitment not to retaliate against venues that used rival ticketing services. Nine years later, the Department found Live Nation had repeatedly broken that commitment, and in 2024 DOJ and state attorneys general sued the company for antitrust violations. Behavioral remedies leave the underlying power in place, require years of monitoring that agencies cannot sustain, and eventually expire. In September 2026, twelve states settled their challenge to Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, accepting only commitments of this kind, most lasting five years. The combined company will keep its size and reach long after those commitments lapse.
When a company repeatedly or egregiously abuses its position, the government should seek structural remedies that curtail or eliminate its ability to continue violating the law. In severe cases, this should include breaking up monopolies through divestiture, revoking a bank charter or other business license, and debarment from federal contracting. Remedies should also empower those outside government to prevent harm from recurring in the future. Consent decrees should require public reporting of data on hiring, lending, pricing, and so on, so that workers, advocates, and journalists can hold companies to their obligations after the government moves on.
Name bad actors and show the public their government is fighting for them. An Enforcement Agenda should not direct agencies to go after specific targets in advance of fact gathering. That’s vital to the rule of law and to public confidence that enforcement is not payback. But once the evidence is in, the government should name names, loudly. The president and agency heads should explain in plain language which companies stole from which workers, which lenders shut which neighborhoods out of credit, and which monopolies squeezed which families.
Last month, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a record $131.5 million settlement with DoorDash for more than 260,000 delivery workers. He cited the DoorDash CEO’s own words that companies should “take the greedy algorithm and keep going,” and declared, “City Hall will not sit idly by while a megacorporation that made nearly a billion dollars in profits last year rips off the working people who keep our city moving.” The city’s consumer and worker protection agency took the enforcement action, and the mayor, appropriately, told New Yorkers what it meant for them.
In fairness, federal enforcers should exercise caution when a case is still pending, to avoid prejudicing a jury pool or disclosing information that could compromise the integrity of the case. But the idea that federal enforcement agencies should speak only through their court filings, or that technical press releases with bloodless allusions to the rule of law will do the job, ignores how the modern media environment works. Effective enforcement has to break through. Moreover, people who have felt the outrage of being ripped off or the sting of discrimination deserve to experience vindication just as deeply.
Communication of this kind can deter others in the industry and rebuild public faith that the law protects ordinary people. It is also the best answer to the payback charge. Retaliation begins with an enemy and goes looking for a violation. Legitimate enforcement begins with the violation and shows the public who was harmed: the dishwasher shorted her pay, the family denied a mortgage, the patient overcharged for insulin. An administration that announces its priorities in advance, applies them across an industry, calls out the perpetrators, and puts the victims at the center of its story will make that difference plain.
Rebuild the federal enforcement workforce, and collaborate with state and private enforcers. The administration should use direct hire, reinstatement, excepted service, and other rapid hiring mechanisms to bring back experienced career staff and recruit new enforcement personnel quickly. The legal nonprofit Governing for Impact recently inventoried these authorities, many of which are well tailored for surge enforcement hiring. For example, federal law allows agencies to expedite hiring into the competitive service when “there is a critical hiring need” occasioned by an “unanticipated or unusual event or mission requirement” or “to conform to the requirements of law, a Presidential directive or Administration initiative.” Restaffing gutted civil rights and consumer protection offices to enforce neglected statutes and implement a new president’s Enforcement Agenda would seem to qualify. The authority to reinstate prior employees would permit rapid onboarding of enforcers who felt forced to leave. The Intergovernmental Personnel Act allows agencies to bring on experts from state and local government as well as nonprofits for up to four years. Attorneys, meanwhile, are exempt from the standard competitive examination process and can be hired quickly.
The severe capacity deficit facing a new administration should also awaken it to the need to partner more fully with state attorneys general, city attorneys, district attorneys, and the private bar. These actors possess overlapping authority with federal agencies, and several states have increased their resources for enforcement in arenas abandoned by the current administration. The federal government should collaborate with them through joint investigations and lawsuits, evidence sharing, and amicus support for meritorious private cases. Indeed, such collaboration should become a standard federal strategy to magnify impact, not just a stopgap. Cases brought by states, local governments, and private plaintiffs also have a virtue federal cases lack: a future administration cannot simply drop them.
Congressional Action
Provide missing tools. An agency can enforce only the laws Congress has passed and conferred to its jurisdiction. Many of those authorities are missing, incomplete, or toothless, and many have been hollowed out by the courts or Congress itself. The Supreme Court has narrowed federal bribery law so much that officials can take payments for official acts with little fear of prosecution. There is no federal equivalent of Section 1983 for constitutional violations by federal officers. The NLRB can’t impose civil penalties, Title VII’s damages caps have not moved since 1991, and the FTC lost its power to recover money for defrauded consumers in 2021. Congress should close each of these gaps—potentially in one omnibus enforcement statute, given that the window for new legislation will likely be narrow—and expand authority for structural remedies.
Make enforcement harder to switch off. Congress has already authorized states to enforce over twenty federal statutes, such as Dodd-Frank’s consumer finance protections, the Clayton Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act. It should extend that model to protect workers, defend civil rights, and stop corruption. As an example, the recently introduced Anti-Corruption Bureau Creation Act would empower state attorneys general to sue the president, senior government officials, and federal contractors when officials use their positions to enrich themselves. Congress should also stimulate private enforcement of a range of federal statutes by reversing court-imposed limits on private rights of action and ending forced arbitration of civil rights and employment claims.
Fund enforcement at the scale of the problem. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had an annual budget of $10 billion in fiscal year 2025. Since Trump took office, Congress has given ICE $113 billion more. Federal civil rights, labor rights, and consumer protection agencies combined are a fraction of ICE’s pre-Trump budget. A Congress that lavishes funds on an agency that has deported and killed American citizens can find the money to ensure workers are paid what they’re owed and families aren’t cheated out of their homes. Congress should multiply these budgets several times over and tie the new money to the kind of enforcement described here: strategic, coordinated, and aimed at the abuses that hurt Americans the most.
Create stronger guardrails against abuse. The headwinds facing an aggressive enforcement agenda will be fierce. In particular, cases involving the corruption being perpetrated now or involving companies that have allied themselves politically with the current administration are likely to be characterized in the distorted terms of payback and retaliation. To promote public faith in legitimate enforcement, and to prevent abuse, Congress should legislate new guardrails against politicized enforcement. Potential reforms include easing the legal burden to establish malicious and selective prosecution claims; allowing expedited discovery into the government’s motivations upon a threshold showing that a defendant was targeted for protected speech; and reforming grand jury rules, such as by requiring the presentation of exculpatory evidence and routinely providing transcripts in full to a judge and in part to the defendant.
Conclusion
Of the period immediately after emancipation, Frederick Douglass observed: “The law on the side of freedom is of great advantage only where there is power to make that law respected.” His words apply with continuing force today. A robust enforcement agenda, communicated publicly and wielded responsibly but aggressively, should be understood as vital to the rule of law and an America that works for everyone. This Blueprint illustrates how a new administration can leverage the force of its broad enforcement authority to make federal rights real, hold those who violate them accountable, and give the American people a reason to trust that their government’s institutions are working for them. The staff and funding shortages will take time to fix. But if the next president makes enforcement a priority, the reinvention can begin on day one.
The post Reinvention Blueprint No. 5: Reinvigorating Federal Enforcement to Fight for the Public appeared first on Just Security.
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