While all the media headlines attempt to blame President Donald Trump for the political weaponization of government, they conveniently ignore a recent major success story from the Trump administration that will de-weaponize and de-politicize federal regulations.
Recently, the nation’s primary regulator of national banks finally eliminated what had, over time, metastasized into an absurd and destructive intrusion of partisan politics into the country’s free enterprise system.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, joining with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, published a final rule prohibiting federal regulators from pressuring banks to drop customers on the basis of so-called “reputation risk.”
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No longer will regulators be able to force banks to close accounts or withhold products or services because of a customer’s “political, social, cultural, or religious views or beliefs, constitutionally protected speech, or solely on the basis of politically disfavored but lawful business activities perceived to present reputation risk.”
The new rule reverses a framework that traces back to 1995 and Eugene Ludwig, who was appointed comptroller of the currency by his longtime friend, President Bill Clinton. As comptroller of the currency, Ludwig had said that assessing reputation risk “recognizes the potential impact of the public’s opinion on a bank’s franchise value.”
But what it eventually came to mean in actual practice during the last two Democratic administrations was that regulators and their political overseers had a powerful weapon to pummel banks that opened accounts or provided other services for firms on the wrong end of prevailing elite liberal political orthodoxy in Washington.
Companies that had been steady, tax-paying job creators were suddenly “debanked.”
In a December 2025 preliminary report, the OCC named Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and seven other major banks as having engaged in debanking that targeted politically sensitive industries — from oil and gas to firearms manufacturers.
This had been documented for years. In 2024, Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen and a coalition of 15 attorneys general sent a letter to Bank of America accusing the company of “debanking policies and discriminatory behavior toward conservative and religious Americans.” Trump himself has said Bank of America and JPMorgan have rejected his deposits after leaving office in his first term.
In reversing the policy, the OCC and FDIC offered an unsparing verdict: reputation risk “increases subjectivity in banking supervision without adding material value from a safety and soundness perspective.” Their rule responded to concerns raised in an executive order from Trump that the use of reputation risk had become “a pretext for restricting law-abiding individuals’ and businesses’ access to financial services on the basis of political or religious beliefs or lawful business activities.”
As for Ludwig, he was not a passive observer of the supervisory complexity that followed his tenure. After leaving the OCC, he later founded a consulting firm to help banks navigate regulation, with his firm hiring heavily from the OCC and other federal banking regulators and earning roughly $927 million across three Independent Foreclosure Review engagements alone — before regulators scrapped the program after they felt it had become, in the words of the New York Times, “a boon to outside consultants and a barren maze for homeowners.”
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Ludwig’s firm, as the Washington Post once put it, traded “on its well-honed expertise of the financial markets and regulatory system — a skill that has only compounded its prestige even as it’s been drubbed in the press as a shadow regulator.”
Ludwig and Bank of America’s story illustrates a larger point. The political weaponization of the federal government and the profiting from it by the well-connected are nothing new. This dynamic is most dangerous when political power is paired with corporate power. If the media would finally absorb that lesson, we would all be better off.
Steve Cortes (@CortesSteve) is president of the League of American Workers and senior political adviser to CatholicVote. He is a former senior adviser to President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance and a former Fox News commentator.