For too many Americans, the economy has become an unaffordable racket in which corporate interests seem always to have their way. This increases the disaffection that many Americans have with our democracy and the rule of law. It is hard to blame people for losing faith in a legal system that has allowed the powerful to trample their rights with impunity.
The good news is that many key protections — against fraud, wage theft, junk fees, abuses of monopoly power, union busting, corporate pollution, discrimination and much more — already exist. But a yawning gap has emerged between what the law promises and what it delivers. In our work, we’ve seen how a system of elite impunity has become the norm in the marketplace — a direct consequence of the underfunding of government agencies charged with enforcing the law and the myriad ways people are often functionally barred from taking legal action on their own.
If we want to restore public trust in government and democracy, we have to close this enforcement gap. That will need to start with funding and empowering watchdogs at the local and state — and eventually, federal — levels. And it will also mean attacking barriers to private enforcement by defending the power of ordinary people to sue to enforce their rights directly.
This must start with leveling the playing field between the agencies charged with enforcing the law and the deep-pocketed corporate attorneys who oppose them. These agencies have seen their budgets and staffing cut, in many cases across decades. Between 1978 and 2018, the number of compliance officers at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which enforces companies’ observance of worker protection regulations, fell from one officer per 60,000 workers to just one for every 180,000. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which protects Americans from corporate bad actors’ abuses and where one of us served as general counsel, has been targeted for elimination by the Trump administration. And the number of full-time employees at the National Labor Relations Board, which enforces protections against unfair labor practices and union busting, fell by about a quarter from 2010 to 2024.
Legislators and regulators must also increase penalties to make sure corporate bad actors have real incentives to follow the law. When several meatpacking workers in Colorado died of Covid-19 in 2020 after their employer failed to follow basic workplace health and safety laws, OSHA fined the company only $15,615 — which might not even cover the cost of one funeral, a worker’s family member said. Nevada regulators found Elon Musk’s Boring Company had violated environmental rules nearly 800 times while digging a $50 million tunnel system around Las Vegas. They fined the company just $242,800. In these cases and many others, the punishment for corporate wrongdoing is often so small, it feels like an invitation to keep breaking laws.
With real penalties in place, enforcement can generate far more in revenue than it costs the government to fund. From the day it opened its doors in 2012 until the day President Trump took office for the second time, the C.F.P.B. won consumers redress of well over $20 billion from corporate scofflaws on a budget that was only a fraction as large. Ill-gotten gains recovered by the government can be used to pay for further enforcement. State-level efforts have shown the way here. Washington’s robust consumer protection enforcement has helped recover billions from corporations and returned hundreds of millions to residents in the past decade — all while also funding the state attorney general’s office to do more crucial work.
In parallel, we must strengthen the tools of private enforcement. For decades, corporations and their lawyers have chipped away at the private cause of action, claiming that restricting people’s ability to go to court would somehow create efficiencies. Instead, it has put the corporations that play by the rules at a disadvantage while bad actors have fewer reasons to follow the law.
Researchers have estimated that more than 60 percent of e-commerce sales in the United States include terms that would take away consumers’ right to pursue redress in court. More than half of nonunionized private-sector workers are covered by similar terms by their employers. These clauses mandate the use of private arbitrators to resolve disputes individually instead of letting people or small businesses pursue their claims in court and in class action lawsuits — even when that is the only effective way for them to win redress. In employment cases involving issues including wage theft and discrimination, about 98 percent of claims are dropped once forced arbitration is imposed, according to one estimate. The same happens to consumers facing surprise add-on charges (also known as junk fees), predatory loans and fraud.
If we want to ensure that our laws can effectively police corporate misconduct, we have to regulate or prohibit the contractual fine print that denies people their day in court, including arbitration clauses, waivers and contractual traps that turn legal protections into little more than suggestions. We must also expand the rights of private individuals and organizations to sue to enforce critical protections of our safety, health, privacy and economic security — protections that are too often just words on a page.
Growing our enforcement capacity isn’t just about adding more lawyers or investigators. It’s about making the law real in people’s lives, turning long ignored promises written into our statutes into protections people can actually feel. When we invest in enforcement, we breathe life back into these tools. We show people that the laws written for them actually work for them.
At its best, the law is not a tool of the powerful but a promise to the people. Legislators and regulators must make that promise real again. In doing so, we will not only improve Americans’ lives and the material conditions in this country but also show that the law is not an abstraction or a stack of fine print that corporations can bend to their will. That is essential to renewing faith in the rule of law — and our democracy as a whole.
Seth Frotman was general counsel of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from 2021 to 2025. He is a senior fellow at Towards Justice and the University of California Berkeley Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice. David Seligman leads the economic justice nonprofit Towards Justice and is a candidate for attorney general in Colorado.
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