Earlier this week, Bloomberg broke the news that the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, which helps regulate the securities market, was told to stop investigating an eye-popping case of potential insider trading. The direction came from a top adviser to the agency’s Trump-appointed chairman, who ordered investigators to retract a referral to the agency’s lawyers surrounding suspiciously timed and lucrative oil trades that were executed minutes before the president sent social media posts rescinding threats to attack Iranian power plants.

This sidelined CFTC investigation is just the latest in a growing pattern: Enforcement of financial crimes is dropping in Donald Trump’s second term, unraveling offices and reforms that will be difficult to rebuild. It also is laying the groundwork for more corporate fraud, or even a broader financial crisis, in the long term, experts say.

This trend has affected each federal agency that handles financial crimes—including the Securities and Exchange Commission, which oversees Wall Street, the Justice Department, and the White House itself. Just a few months after Trump’s reelection, the SEC dismissed a case against crypto exchange Coinbase, then halted a prosecution against a Chinese crypto entrepreneur who bought millions in tokens from a Trump family crypto venture. Several months later, the White House pardoned crypto giant Binance and its ex-CEO.

In May, a private-sector analysis found that the SEC had initiated just five enforcement cases against companies in half a year—the lowest number in the first half of a fiscal year in at least 16 years.

This spring, Sens. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) sent letters to the SEC expressing concern: The director of the enforcement division that brings cases against companies quit after just six months on the job, reportedly over disagreements with the agency about acting against entities that back Donald Trump. Staffing at........

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