Edition 2

WASHINGTON — Three significant federal investigations into alleged financial misconduct were closed without charges or public explanation during the final weeks of the last fiscal quarter, according to documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests reviewed by The Freethinking Times.

The investigations, which had been active for between fourteen and thirty-one months, involved two major financial institutions and one publicly traded technology company. The agency declined to comment on any of the cases, citing standard policy of neither confirming nor denying the existence of specific investigations — a position that critics argue functions as a permanent shield against public scrutiny.

“The pattern here is not subtle,” said one former enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he still consults with firms under federal oversight. “You don’t run an investigation for two and a half years and then close it quietly unless someone made a decision that had nothing to do with the evidence.”

What the Documents Show

The FOIA response, which took eleven months to fulfill and arrived heavily redacted, nonetheless reveals the dates on which the investigations were formally closed, the approximate number of personnel-hours logged, and — in one case — a single-line entry reading “matter resolved, no further action warranted.” No resolution agreement, consent order, or formal declination memo was attached.

Legal experts contacted for this article said that phrasing is unusual. A formal declination typically includes a written statement of reasons, even in heavily redacted form. Its absence suggests either that no such document was created, or that it was withheld in its entirety.

The agency’s budget justification submitted to Congress the same week included language touting “a record number of enforcement resolutions” in the fiscal year — a figure that, read alongside the investigation closures, raises questions about how the agency is counting its outcomes.

A Pattern Worth Watching

This is not the first time the agency has faced questions about the gap between its public enforcement narrative and its actual case outcomes. A 2023 audit by the Government Accountability Office found that the agency’s reported “enforcement actions” included a significant number of cases that resulted in no monetary penalty and no admission of wrongdoing.

The Freethinking Times will continue to pursue this story. Readers with relevant documents or direct knowledge of these cases are encouraged to contact the newsroom.

This article is based on documents obtained through FOIA requests filed in April 2025. The documents are available in full on our document archive page.

The following letter was submitted in response to our analysis piece, “How Regulatory Capture Actually Works.” It has been edited for length and clarity.

To the Editors:

I spent thirty-one years as a career attorney at a federal regulatory agency — not one I will name, for reasons that will become obvious — and your field guide to regulatory capture is the most accurate short account of the phenomenon I have read in the popular press.

I want to add one thing your piece did not cover, which I observed repeatedly over three decades: the role of what I came to think of as anticipatory accommodation.

Your piece correctly identifies the revolving door and the epistemic monoculture. What it underweights is the degree to which experienced agency staff learn to pre-filter their own recommendations based on their prediction of what leadership will accept — and leadership, in turn, pre-filters based on what the administration will support — and the administration pre-filters based on what will generate industry opposition of a kind that carries political cost.

The result is that by the time a recommendation reaches the level at which it might actually be acted upon, it has already been through three or four rounds of internal accommodation that nobody ever made explicit, nobody ever voted on, and nobody could easily point to as a decision. The capture happens in the white space between the formal steps of the process.

I raise this not to be dispiriting but because understanding it is necessary for any realistic reform proposal. You cannot fix anticipatory accommodation by changing the revolving door rules. You have to change the incentives at every level of the chain, which is a much harder problem.

Thank you for the work you are doing. This kind of journalism is needed.

— Name withheld at the writer’s request. Location: Washington, D.C.

There is a story that gets told about the decline of American newspapers. It goes like this: the internet came, advertising revenue collapsed, readers fled to social media, and the economics of print journalism simply became untenable. Unfortunate, perhaps, but nobody’s fault. A market transition, like the decline of the telegraph or the horse-drawn carriage.

This story is false in almost every particular. Or rather, it is true in the way that saying a man died of blood loss is true while omitting that someone stabbed him.

The American newspaper did not die of natural causes. It was acquired, leveraged, stripped of its assets, and left to bleed out — while the people who performed the surgery collected fees at every step of the process.

The Private Equity Playbook

The mechanism is not complicated, and it has been documented in exhaustive detail by researchers who have watched it play out in market after market. A private equity firm acquires a regional newspaper group, often at a price that requires significant debt financing. That debt is placed on the newspaper itself, not the acquiring firm. The newspaper must now service the debt it incurred by being purchased.

To service the debt, costs must be cut. The newsroom is cut first — reporters are expensive, and their output is difficult to value in a quarterly spreadsheet. The building is sold and leased back. The printing equipment is sold. Archival assets are licensed. Subscription lists are monetized.

The newspaper, now a skeleton, generates just enough revenue to service the debt and produce a thin margin for the fund. After five to seven years — the typical private equity hold period — what remains is sold again, often to another fund, at a loss that the fund’s accounting can turn into a tax advantage.

The community that depended on that newspaper for accountability journalism, for school board coverage, for the documentation of its own public life, is left with nothing.

Why This Matters Beyond Sentiment

The loss of local journalism is not primarily a cultural loss, though it is that too. It is a governance loss. The research on this is unambiguous: communities that lose their local newspaper see measurable increases in municipal borrowing costs, lower voter turnout, higher rates of undetected government corruption, and reduced civic participation at every level.

The newspaper was infrastructure. We treated it as a luxury.

What Honest People Should Say About It

The people who executed this strategy are not stupid. They understood exactly what they were destroying and did it anyway, because the incentives of their industry rewarded extraction over stewardship. The people who regulated — or rather, declined to regulate — these acquisitions made a choice. The institutional investors whose capital funded the acquisition funds made a choice.

Calling this a “market failure” lets everyone off the hook. It was a series of choices made by specific people and institutions, many of whom are still operating, still acquiring, still cutting.

We started this publication partly because we believe that honest journalism requires naming what happened clearly. This is what happened.

When the Open Science Collaboration published its landmark replication study in 2015, finding that only about thirty-six percent of psychology findings replicated at the original effect size, the response split along a predictable fault line. Journalists and critics declared a crisis. Many working scientists pushed back, arguing the study was being misread and that the state of the field was not as dire as headlines suggested.

Both responses were, in their way, wrong — or rather, both were engaging with the wrong question.

What Replication Is For

The replication of experimental findings is not a quality-control check that science failed to perform and is now urgently retrofitting. It is the core mechanism by which scientific claims graduate from interesting results to established knowledge. The fact that many published findings do not replicate is not a malfunction. It is the system working.

The problem is not that findings fail to replicate. The problem is the set of institutional incentives — publication bias toward positive results, career structures that reward novelty over verification, the economics of academic journals — that caused replication to be systematically underperformed for decades while the public was encouraged to treat single published studies as reliable guides to action.

The Press Release Problem

This distinction matters enormously for how science journalism is practiced. The standard model — university issues press release, journalist writes article beginning “scientists have discovered,” reader updates beliefs — treats the publication of a study as the terminus of scientific process rather than a point along a much longer arc.

A single study, even a well-designed one, is not evidence of a finding. It is evidence that a finding is worth investigating further. The difference between these two things is not technical or pedantic. It is the difference between informing the public and systematically misleading it.

What Good Science Coverage Looks Like

Responsible science journalism requires engaging with effect sizes, not just directions. It requires distinguishing between studies and bodies of evidence. It requires communicating uncertainty as a feature of honest reporting rather than a disclaimer that undermines the story’s impact. And it requires a willingness to follow up — to report when findings fail to replicate, when meta-analyses revise the picture, when scientific consensus shifts.

This is harder, slower, and less amenable to the headline cycle than the current model. It is also what covering science honestly requires.

We will try to practice it here. When we cite research, we will tell you what kind of evidence it represents. When the picture is uncertain, we will say so — not as a caveat, but as the substance of the reporting.

The Gilded Age did not end because its beneficiaries had a change of heart. It ended because a set of political, legal, and social forces accumulated to the point where the existing order could no longer sustain itself against them. Understanding how that happened — specifically, mechanically, without romanticizing it — is one of the more useful historical exercises available to a reader in the present moment.

The Scale of the Thing

It is worth beginning with the actual scale of late-nineteenth-century American wealth concentration, because the numbers are clarifying. By 1890, approximately one percent of American families controlled more than half the nation’s wealth. The major industries — railroads, steel, oil, finance — were dominated by a small number of integrated enterprises whose owners had effectively captured the regulatory frameworks that were nominally designed to constrain them.

This was not hidden. It was, in many respects, celebrated. The ideology of the period held that the concentration of wealth in the hands of capable men was a social good — that it represented the natural outcome of a meritocratic process, and that the fortunes accumulated would be deployed for broadly beneficial purposes. The philanthropic institutions of the period were, in part, a demonstration of this thesis.

What Changed

The change did not begin in politics. It began in journalism. The writers who came to be called muckrakers — Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Upton Sinclair, and others — did something that seems straightforward but was, in context, radical: they described in precise detail how the existing arrangements actually worked.

Tarbell’s investigation of Standard Oil, published serially between 1902 and 1904, did not argue that monopoly was wrong in the abstract. It showed, through documentary evidence and interviews, exactly how Standard Oil had used its market position to extract favorable rates from railroads, undercut and absorb competitors, and construct a system of market control that its participants understood to be coercive. The argument was the evidence.

This is worth emphasizing because it is easy, in retrospect, to attribute the Progressive Era reforms to a change in values. The values had not particularly changed. What changed was the public’s ability to perceive clearly what was happening — because reporters made it visible.

The Legislative Mechanisms

The Sherman Antitrust Act had existed since 1890. It was not seriously enforced until Theodore Roosevelt’s administration made a deliberate choice to use it — a choice driven by political calculation as much as reform conviction. The regulatory state that emerged from the Progressive Era was built by people who had interests and made strategic decisions, not by idealists operating outside ordinary politics.

This matters because it suggests that the question for any era facing analogous concentrations of power is not primarily a values question — whether we believe monopoly is wrong — but a power question: whether there exists a coalition with sufficient political capacity to impose constraints that concentrated interests will resist, and whether the information environment is adequate to sustain public understanding of what is actually happening.

The first Gilded Age ended because both conditions were eventually met. Whether they will be met again, and how, is the question our present era is in the process of answering.

Regulatory capture — the process by which regulatory agencies come to serve the interests of the industries they were created to oversee — is one of those concepts that gets invoked frequently and understood rarely. The textbook version describes a simple arc: industry lobbies, regulator bends, public loses. This is accurate as far as it goes, but it misses the texture of how it actually happens, which is considerably more interesting and considerably more difficult to remedy.¹

What follows is an attempt to describe the actual mechanics, drawn from decades of documented cases across financial services, telecommunications, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, and energy.

Stage One: The Knowledge Problem

Regulatory capture almost never begins with corruption. It begins with a more mundane problem: the regulator needs expertise it does not have.

When a new agency is established or a new regulatory domain is created, the agency needs people who understand the industry in question. The people who understand the industry work in the industry. And so the agency hires them — sometimes directly, sometimes as consultants, sometimes by convening advisory panels that are nominally independent but staffed predominantly with industry participants.

This is not conspiracy. It is the path of least resistance through a genuine problem. But it creates the initial conditions for capture: the people setting the regulatory framework are people whose professional formation, social networks, and often ongoing financial interests are industry-facing.

Stage Two: The Revolving Door

The revolving door between regulatory agencies and the industries they oversee is well documented.² What is less often discussed is how it shapes behavior before anyone has left for a private-sector job.

A mid-career regulator who is ambitious and talented has career options. They can stay in government, where advancement is slow and pay is limited. Or they can move to the private sector, where their regulatory knowledge and relationships command significant premium. The private-sector option does not require any corrupt agreement. It simply requires being known as someone who is reasonable, who understands how the industry works, who does not make enemies unnecessarily.

This creates a structural incentive — operating entirely through legitimate career calculation, with no explicit quid pro quo — toward a regulatory disposition that industry finds tolerable.

Stage Three: The Epistemic Monoculture

Over time, agencies that recruit heavily from industry and lose experienced staff to industry develop something that might be called an epistemic monoculture:³ a shared set of assumptions about what is normal, what is reasonable, and what is excessive that closely mirrors the industry’s own self-conception.

This is not the same as being corrupt. The regulators may believe, sincerely, that they are doing their jobs. But they are doing their jobs inside a framework of assumptions that was constructed substantially by the people they are regulating — and they have largely lost the ability to perceive that framework as contingent rather than natural.

Stage Four: The Structural Lock-In

By this stage, capture is self-reinforcing. Industry has invested in the relationships, the revolving door pipelines, the advisory committee structures, and the professional associations that maintain the epistemic monoculture. Any regulator who departs significantly from the shared assumptions faces not just industry opposition but skepticism from colleagues who have internalized the same framework.

Reform, when it comes, typically requires an external shock — a crisis dramatic enough to make the existing framework publicly untenable — followed by a narrow window of political will before the same structural forces reassert themselves.

Understanding this cycle is the precondition for disrupting it. You cannot fix a problem you have misdescribed as simpler than it is.

There is a category of literary praise that functions almost exclusively as discouragement. “Challenging.” “Demanding.” “Not for every reader.” “Rewards patience.” These phrases appear in reviews as commendations, but they communicate something closer to a warning label — this text will cost you something, and the reviewer is not certain you have it to spend.

The books described this way are not random. They cluster in ways that are worth examining.

The Pattern

Formally experimental novels in the Western tradition — those that disrupt chronology, multiply narrators, or refuse conventional closure — are frequently described as challenging in ways that position difficulty as an intrinsic property of the text. The implication is that the difficulty is the author’s doing, a choice made at the reader’s expense.

But translated literature from traditions that Western readers encounter less frequently — Arabic novels structured around oral storytelling conventions, Japanese fiction organized by emotional rather than causal logic, Latin American works that treat the boundary between the living and the dead as permeable — is described as difficult in a different register. The difficulty here is tacitly attributed to cultural distance, which is treated as the reader’s problem to overcome rather than a richness the text offers.

And then there is a third category: books by writers from marginalized communities that engage directly with the experience of marginalization. These are sometimes called difficult in a way that is transparently about the discomfort of the presumed reader — the white, educated, metropolitan reader whose experience the text declines to center.

What Difficulty Actually Is

Difficulty in literature is not a property of the text. It is a relationship between a text and a reader — specifically, a reader with a particular set of prior experiences, expectations, and reading formations.

A novel that is “difficult” for a reader formed entirely on linear Anglo-American realism may be immediately accessible to a reader formed on a different tradition. The difficulty is in the mismatch, not in the text.

This matters because calling a book difficult, without specifying difficult for whom, universalizes a particular reader’s experience — and typically, that particular reader is the one whose experience literary culture has historically treated as the default.

The Better Question

The more useful critical question is not “is this book difficult?” but “what does this book ask of its reader, and what does it offer in return?”

Every serious book asks something. The asking is not a flaw. The question is whether what it asks is worth giving — and that question cannot be answered in the abstract. It can only be answered by readers willing to find out.

We intend to review books with that question in mind, and to resist the comfortable condescension of the difficulty label.