Republicans Are Dismantling a Key Tool in the War Against Kleptocrats

GOP lawmakers are pushing forward a bill to repeal a vital shell company database—completely undoing the biggest anti-kleptocracy step forward the U.S. has seen in decades.

For the past 18 months, nearly all of the efforts to demolish America’s anti-corruption architecture have come from one source: the White House. Under President Trump, it was the White House that announced both the elimination of task forces specifically tasked with tackling kleptocracy and a pause on enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The Trump administration has also transformed everything from white-collar prosecutions to presidential pardons into an open-air feast of corruption. And all the while, the president and his family have watched their net worth explode, thanks to billions in ill-gotten gains streaming in from around the world.

It goes without saying that Trump now oversees the most corrupt White House the U.S. has ever seen. But it would be a mistake to say that he and his White House are acting alone. Indeed, in the latest assault on America’s anti-corruption edifice—perhaps the most destructive effort yet—the White House is taking a back seat, and is instead looking to Republican allies in Congress to undo the single most important anti-corruption step the U.S. has taken in years.

First, a bit of history. For decades, until the early 2020s, the United States stood at the center of the world of offshore finance. While places like Switzerland, Panama, the Cayman Islands, and other smaller locales got most of the headlines regarding offshore secrecy, in reality it was the U.S. that dominated the world of laundering illicit wealth, attracting billions (and potentially more) from narco-traffickers, arms dealers, kleptocrats, and others looking to wash their wealth clean.

Many industries accelerated America’s transformation into an offshore behemoth, including real estate and private equity, both of which enjoyed decades-long loopholes in basic anti–money laundering provisions. But there was one industry in particular that served as........

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