Trump Paused Enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act — the First Suspension of the Anti-Bribery Law Since 1977

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On February 10, 2025, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14209, "Pausing Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Enforcement to Further American Economic and National Security." The order directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to stop opening new investigations and enforcement actions under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) for 180 days — extendable by another 180 — while DOJ reviewed every existing matter and issued revised enforcement guidelines. It was, by the consensus of every law firm that analyzed it, the first time the statute's enforcement had been paused since its enactment in 1977.

The FCPA, passed in the wake of the post-Watergate corporate-slush-fund scandals, makes it a crime for U.S. companies and individuals (and foreign issuers of U.S. securities) to bribe foreign government officials to win or keep business. It also requires public companies to keep accurate books and to maintain internal accounting controls. For nearly two decades it has been the most aggressively enforced foreign-bribery law in the world, generating billions of dollars in penalties and serving, in the words of Transparency International, as the global "gold standard" against which other countries built their own regimes.

What the Order Actually Says

The text of the order frames current enforcement as the problem. Since 1977, it asserts, the FCPA "has 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," impeding foreign-policy objectives and implicating the President's Article II authority over foreign affairs. It argues that "overexpansive and unpredictable FCPA enforcement against American citizens and businesses — by our own Government — for routine business practices in other nations" wastes prosecutorial resources and undermines American competitiveness and, therefore, national security.

Operationally, during the review period the order directs the Attorney General to: (i) cease initiating any new FCPA investigations or enforcement actions, unless she grants an individual exception; (ii) review in detail all existing matters and "take appropriate action" to "restore proper bounds on FCPA enforcement and preserve Presidential foreign policy prerogatives"; and (iii) issue updated guidelines prioritizing "American interests, American economic competitiveness with respect to other nations, and the efficient use of Federal law enforcement resources." Critically, even after the pause ends, any new or continued case "must be specifically authorized by the Attorney General" — moving the decision to open an FCPA matter out of the hands of career prosecutors and into political leadership. The order also instructs the AG to consider "remedial measures with respect to inappropriate past FCPA investigations and enforcement actions," a provision lawyers immediately read as an invitation for previously sanctioned companies to reopen old resolutions.

The accompanying White House fact sheet argued the pause would protect America's "strategic commercial advantages" and ensure U.S. companies are not disadvantaged in markets where bribery is "common among international competitors." Trump has criticized the FCPA for more than a decade, once calling it a "horrible law" that makes the United States "the policeman for the world."

The Bondi Memo Precursor

The order did not arrive in a vacuum. Five days earlier, on February 5, 2025, Attorney General Bondi issued a memorandum titled "Total Elimination of Cartels and Transnational Criminal Organizations," which redirected the DOJ's FCPA Unit away from traditional corporate bribery cases and toward bribery connected to drug cartels and transnational criminal organizations (TCOs). The Bondi memo also briefly loosened internal controls — empowering local U.S. Attorney's Offices to bring certain cartel-related FCPA actions without sign-off from Main Justice's Fraud Section. The February 10 executive order superseded that piece of the memo, pulling authority back to Washington and requiring the Attorney General herself to approve any new case.

The Key Unknown, Resolved: The June 2025 Guidelines

The central question when the order issued was what would happen once the review concluded — whether a permanent policy would emerge, and what it would permit. That question was answered on June 9, 2025, roughly four months in, when Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche issued the "Guidelines for Investigations and Enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act," formally ending the pause. Criminal Division head Matthew Galeotti explained the new approach in a June 10 speech at the American Conference Institute's anti-corruption conference.

The guidelines did not end FCPA enforcement; they narrowed and politicized it. Prosecutors are now directed to weigh four non-exhaustive factors: whether the conduct is tied to cartels or TCOs; whether it deprived "specific and identifiable U.S. entities" of fair competition or caused them economic injury; whether it threatens U.S. national security (for example, in critical minerals, deep-water ports, or other key infrastructure); and whether it involves "serious misconduct" — substantial bribes, sophisticated concealment, fraud, or obstruction — by culpable individuals rather than "routine business practices" or "de minimis" courtesies. Galeotti summarized the "throughline" as the vindication of U.S. interests: conduct that "does not implicate U.S. interests should be left to our foreign counterparts or appropriate regulators." Notably, the guidance disclaimed any focus on a company's nationality, leaving the door open to prosecuting foreign firms that bribe to beat American competitors — which foreign jurisdictions have long complained turns the FCPA into a protectionist tool. FCPA enforcement also still appeared on Galeotti's May 2025 list of the Criminal Division's top white-collar priorities.

The Downstream Cases: What Got Dropped

The most concrete fallout was the dismissal of the long-running case against two former Cognizant Technology Solutions executives — Gordon Coburn (former president) and Steven Schwartz (former chief legal officer) — who had been indicted in 2019 on FCPA and other charges over a roughly $2 million bribe to officials in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu to ease permitting for a corporate campus. Days before a trial that had been six years in the making, interim U.S. Attorney Alina Habba moved to drop the charges, citing a "recent assessment of the Executive Order's application to this matter" and concluding that further prosecution was "not in the interests of the United States at this time." On April 3, 2025, Judge Michael Farbiarz dismissed the criminal charges with prejudice — making it the first case formally killed under the pause. The SEC followed in July 2025, stipulating to dismiss its parallel civil case "in the exercise of its discretion and as a policy matter," closing the Cognizant matter without any conviction. A lawyer for Coburn said the case "never should have been brought."

The climate the order created reached beyond cases charged under the FCPA itself. In May 2026, the Justice Department moved to drop its securities- and wire-fraud prosecution of Indian billionaire Gautam Adani — a case rooted in alleged bribery of Indian officials — with people familiar with the matter citing the administration's broader retreat from foreign-bribery enforcement. The Adani principals had never been charged under the FCPA, but, as the separate tracker entry on that case details, prosecutors' shift away from policing foreign bribery shaped the outcome.

The Counterpoint: What Survived Review

The strongest evidence that this was de-prioritization rather than abolition is that several cases survived the review and went forward. When the order issued, five FCPA cases were already set for trial. In April 2025, DOJ filed "Notices of Authorization" to proceed in several of them.

In September 2025, a Miami jury convicted Georgia businessman Carl Alan Zaglin — in the first FCPA trial after the pause lifted — on FCPA and money-laundering conspiracy counts tied to a scheme to bribe Honduran officials for uniform contracts; he was sentenced to eight years in prison in December 2025. And on February 18, 2026, a Pennsylvania federal jury convicted Charles Hunter Hobson, a former Corsa Coal vice president, on two FCPA counts plus conspiracy, money-laundering, and wire-fraud charges over a years-long scheme to bribe Egyptian officials at a state-owned coke company to win roughly $143 million in coal contracts. Hobson's defense had sought to delay the trial pending the EO review, but DOJ completed its review, decided to proceed, and opposed the delay. Prosecutors highlighted why the Corsa case fit the new priorities: the bribery disadvantaged other American companies competing in Egypt, Hobson skimmed kickbacks for himself, and Egyptian authorities had themselves prosecuted the intermediary — undercutting any "business as usual" defense. As DOJ's Assistant Attorney General put it, companies that bribe foreign officials "distort competition, which hurts American business interests worldwide."

DOJ also opened new fronts consistent with the guidelines: an October 2025 superseding indictment charging UK voting-machine company SGO Corporation (Smartmatic) with FCPA bribery and money laundering over alleged payments in the Philippines, and corruption charges tied to Mexico's state oil company PEMEX. The pattern that emerged, as one firm summarized it, was fewer cases but higher-stakes ones — more individual trials, selective corporate resolutions in strategically sensitive sectors, and deference to foreign regulators elsewhere.

The Numbers: A Steep Drop

The enforcement statistics show how much the apparatus contracted. According to the Stanford Law School FCPA Clearinghouse, the DOJ and SEC together brought 26 FCPA-related enforcement actions in 2024 — already below the ten-year average of about 36. The White House cited similar figures in arguing the law was being overused.

Then enforcement fell off a cliff. Per Paul, Weiss's 2025 year-end review, DOJ resolved only two corporate FCPA actions in all of 2025 — a declination-with-disgorgement for Liberty Mutual and a deferred-prosecution agreement for TIGO Guatemala — totaling roughly $123 million, against nine DOJ corporate resolutions worth about $1.1 billion the year before. The SEC instituted no new FCPA actions in the second half of fiscal 2025.

The institutional shrinkage may prove more lasting than any single year's case count. The DOJ FCPA Unit's headcount fell from 32 prosecutors in 2024 to 22 in 2025 — its leanest in more than a decade — with the investigative docket reportedly cut in half during the four-month pause. And the SEC's dedicated FCPA enforcement unit was disbanded entirely after its chief and co-chief resigned. Rebuilding that expertise, several former officials note, takes far longer than dismantling it.

The Defense: This Is Not Legalized Bribery

The most important caveat — emphasized by essentially every law firm that advised clients — is that the order did not make foreign bribery legal, and companies that treated it as a green light courted serious risk. The reasons:

• The FCPA is still the law. As Holland & Knight, Norton Rose Fulbright, Morgan Lewis, White & Case and others stressed, the statute can only be repealed by Congress; the EO is a matter of prosecutorial discretion, not law.
• Other federal theories survive. Most conduct chargeable under the FCPA also violates the broad U.S. wire-fraud and money-laundering statutes, the Travel Act, and sanctions laws, none of which the order touches — as the Hobson conviction (which paired FCPA counts with money-laundering and wire-fraud counts) demonstrated. The 2024 Foreign Extortion Prevention Act (FEPA), which criminalizes the demand side of bribery, also remains in force.
• SEC civil authority is untouched. The order applies only to DOJ. The SEC retains civil authority over the FCPA's books-and-records and internal-controls provisions for U.S.-listed issuers — though in practice the SEC signaled it would follow DOJ's lead and disbanded its FCPA unit, so this backstop weakened considerably in 2025.
• Foreign regimes still apply. The UK Bribery Act (strict liability for failure to prevent bribery, up to ten years' imprisonment), France's Sapin II, the German Criminal Code, and anti-bribery laws in Australia, Singapore, Japan and elsewhere continue to bind multinationals regardless of U.S. policy.

There is also a genuine critique on the merits. Mike Koehler, a law professor and prominent FCPA scholar, argued that enforcement had "gone so far off the rails" in some cases that it did disadvantage U.S. companies, and noted that both Republicans and Democrats have raised such concerns for two decades. The administration's framing — that aggressive enforcement against routine conduct wastes resources and disadvantages American firms abroad — is the case its defenders make.

The Critique: A "Race to the Bottom"

Anti-corruption advocates were alarmed. Transparency International warned that the pause "will work to the advantage of unscrupulous business actors around the world" and called on other OECD Anti-Bribery Convention members to step up their own enforcement. Its chair, François Valérian, said weakening the FCPA "will empower wrongdoers and send a dangerous signal that bribery is back on the table," and the group cautioned against a "race to the bottom." Writing at Just Security, anti-corruption experts disputed the order's economic premise, arguing that the EO claims harm to "American economic competitiveness" without evidence and that studies generally find the FCPA reduces corruption and supports, rather than undermines, U.S. business — the same rationale Trump's own first administration cited for prioritizing anti-corruption work.

The international architecture the FCPA helped build did not collapse, but it did reorganize around Washington's retreat. On March 20, 2025, the United Kingdom, France and Switzerland announced a new International Anti-Corruption Prosecutorial Taskforce, explicitly framed as a response to the U.S. pause, and the head of the UK Serious Fraud Office said it would pursue bribery cases the U.S. was no longer in a position to bring. The U.S. also put itself at odds with its commitments under the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention and the UN Convention against Corruption.

Domestically, states moved to fill the gap. On April 2, 2025, California Attorney General Rob Bonta issued a legal advisory warning that foreign bribery remains actionable under California's Unfair Competition Law: "Illegal activity is still illegal... bribing foreign officials is illegal under California law and will not be tolerated." Legal observers, however, doubt how far state enforcement can go: the UCL theory rests on thin precedent (chiefly Korea Supply Co. v. Lockheed Martin), states lack the FBI and the foreign-cooperation channels that make cross-border bribery cases possible, the UCL does not apply extraterritorially, and the federal government could argue state action is preempted as interference with foreign policy.

The Durability Question

Whether this counts as a "major, durable" change — the threshold for the most serious rating — turns on a real tension. On one side, the institutional damage is hard to reverse on a normal timetable: gutted enforcement units, departed expertise, a halved docket, dismissed cases, and the forfeited credibility of the United States as the world's anti-bribery enforcer. Those effects compound, and even a future administration committed to revival would need years to rebuild.

On the other side cuts a structural fact that argues for caution. The FCPA's statute of limitations is five years for anti-bribery violations and six years for books-and-records offenses, and it can be tolled for up to three additional years under 18 U.S.C. § 3292 while the government seeks foreign evidence. That window outlasts a single presidential term. As White & Case, Cleary Gottlieb, Morgan Lewis and others repeatedly warned clients, conduct that occurs during this administration's de-prioritization remains fully chargeable by a successor administration with different priorities. A company that bribed in 2025 has not escaped liability; it has, at most, deferred it. That is a meaningful argument for rating this Concerning or Net Negative rather than Big Deal — the pause changed who enforces and how vigorously, but it did not change what the law forbids or extinguish the legal jeopardy of those who break it.

The case for the higher rating rests on the combination: not the four-month freeze alone, which lifted, but the first-ever suspension of the statute, the lasting hollowing-out of the enforcement institutions, the politicization of every charging decision, and the U.S. abdication of a leadership role that took decades to build and will not be rebuilt by guidance memos. On balance, the durable institutional and reputational damage tips it into Big Deal — while acknowledging that reasonable observers, weighting the surviving legal framework and the revivability of paused conduct, could land a notch lower.