In 1996, President Clinton campaigned on the promise of putting thousands of new police officers on the street. Looking back, it’s easy to see how this cheap brand of politics consciously avoided actually standing up to powerful forces victimizing working people. For every purse snatcher or burglar caught by the cops, there is a boss stealing workers’ wages and a banker cheating his customers. Yet for 30 years, too many Democratic politicians acted as if being tough on crime could be divorced from prosecuting the corporate criminals who rip off working families with brazen impunity. Three decades after Clinton’s campaign, one thing is clear: Billionaires and big corporations have wielded their outsized sway over our political system to devastate our government’s capacity to enforce the laws designed to protect American families.

It is no secret that working families today are getting crushed by an affordability crisis. People’s paychecks are being eaten away by endless corporate tricks and traps, including junk fees, illegally inflated prices, usurious loans, bait-and-switch subscriptions, dark pattern deceptions, and more. The government has not done nearly enough to rein in the devious practices devastating working people.

That’s not the only reason so many Americans feel like there is always more month than money. But it’s a big one.

For decades, a central plank of the Republican agenda has been the systematic crippling of the arms of government capable of taking on corporate abuse and power. Any entity with the authority to address the looting of working Americans has been ruthlessly targeted and stripped of its effectiveness. The result: Big Tech, Big Ag, and Big Everything have learned they can rip people off with impunity, knowing that the agencies tasked with policing markets against lawlessness have been systematically weakened—starved of resources and too often left to languish without the authority or teeth necessary to enforce the law.

Beyond the economic toll that this status quo imposes, our government’s failure to uphold even basic protections for consumers, workers, and small businesses has undermined people’s confidence that the law can actually play a meaningful role in their lives. That failure has fueled a crisis of democracy that seems to be spiraling more quickly every day.

That must change now.

To respond to this crisis, we must stake out a new political and governing vision ambitious enough to meet the massive challenges of the modern day—one that is grounded in our core values, recognizes the struggles of working people, and responds in kind.

A new President must campaign on, and then make real, a vision of putting 10,000 new corporate cops on the beat. That new generation of enforcers must have one clear and central mission: to crack down on the companies driving the affordability crisis and end the lawlessness that working people face every single day.

Here is how you do it.

New Resources for New Federal Enforcers

The most basic thing that Americans should be able to expect is that their government will enforce the protections that they, the people, have passed into law. But that fundamental function has atrophied over time, especially at the federal level.

The first step in reversing this decades-long path of institutional decay is simply getting more people in the building.

In my time at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), we made the decision to double the size of our Enforcement division. The goal of that expansion was simple: to tackle new, emerging threats and take on the largest companies driving the biggest harms to consumers. This shift of focus away from the smallest players toward the biggest required making sure we had the capacity to hold corporate goliaths accountable.

Doubling enforcement capacity should be a priority across the federal government.

Doing so will, of course, take resources. A future administration’s first legislative package—whether that is through reconciliation or another path for legislating, such as a new resolve to limit the filibuster—must include substantial funds for this project. Republicans have helped pave the way with their own approach to the reconciliation process, which opens up the Federal Reserve and other agencies to serve as revenue sources. These efforts must then be sustained and expanded in successive appropriation cycles. Success also requires ending the practice of raiding enforcement agencies’ filing fee collections—which are meant to support enforcement, but too often end up going elsewhere.

In addition, while adding new enforcement resources through legislation is important, the urgency of the moment requires us to look beyond Congress. Across two terms, the Trump Administration has repeatedly worked to ensure its priorities do not fail because of a lack of funding. If and when they return to power, progressives must do the same. For example, we should leverage the Department of Justice’s Assets Forfeiture Fund and Treasury’s Forfeiture Fund to enable the hiring of new enforcement attorneys, investigators, forensic accountants, and technologists on the front lines of protecting Americans from corporate abuse.

We must also look beyond just those sources. For example, a new administration should access the large fee-funded budgets of agencies like the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. In particular, financial auditors should be vigorously deployed under the direction of a new consumer protection working group—led by the CFPB, the Justice Department, and National Economic Council leadership—to target abuses by the largest banks and the companies they work with.

Equally important, these resources must be deployed immediately upon taking office. We cannot wait a year for investigations to start while we tolerate a meandering onboarding process. We must also immediately detail personnel from state and local governments, legal aid organizations, and other litigators to rapidly leverage ongoing cases into national ones. Our goal must be to turn resources and new personnel into action in months, not years.

New Relentless Focus on Ending Corporations’ War on Working Families

Too often, government enforcers have chased small players while the biggest corporate threats to working Americans have gone unchallenged. During the Biden years, we saw a precipitous drop in corporate crime enforcement. That must change.

When we talk about consumer protection, we often focus on agencies like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and CFPB. Of course, those agencies will play a critical and enhanced role in a world of expanded enforcement. But to meaningfully help working people, we should broaden our view beyond the usual suspects.

Most notably, the Department of Justice (DOJ)—which has unfortunately been mostly absent from the crucial work of protecting working people from corporate abuse—needs a clear, actionable, and affirmative agenda to tackle the economic hardships facing everyday families. That agenda must be marked by boldness, vision, and courage to meet the moment—and it must involve more than the Antitrust Division.

We can begin this work by using a variety of authorities that are already available, but that have been allowed to atrophy. That starts with the DOJ Civil Division, which is rich with important tools that must be aggressively used to fight corporate abuse. For example, DOJ should use RICO to go after predatory lending schemes, combat financial institutions’ illegal practices using the authorities granted to DOJ after prior crises, and aggressively apply consumer protection statutes for military families. Additionally, False Claims Act cases can target companies exploiting unlawful fees and business models that prey on both the government and working Americans alike. Hospital systems that deprive families of critical financial relief and drive our medical debt crisis should be held accountable. The algorithmic price-fixing ubiquitous across market after market should be systematically attacked. DOJ Civil Rights should enforce anti-redlining laws to combat discriminatory tech algorithms. And we should demand accountability not just from scofflaw corporations, but from the individuals who run them unlawfully as well. None of this requires new laws—it requires enforcement of laws we’ve already passed.

And beyond civil enforcement, the brazen criminal conduct of corporations —from facilitating fraud to the rampant deception pervasive across tech platforms to the systems of indentured servitude that exploit workers for the sake of corporate profits—must be met with the full weight of criminal law when appropriate.

These law enforcement efforts must be visible in every community, every day. This mission should become a priority for each of the 93 U.S. Attorneys as a day-one focus and each day thereafter. These offices, working hand-in-hand with the FTC and CFPB, must also drive boots-on-the-ground investigations and enforcement actions on unfair and deceptive pricing schemes that too often escape Washington’s reach by using authorities in the FTC Act and the Consumer Credit Protection Act.

This work must extend beyond the DOJ. A new administration must come into office with a roadmap for every agency, methodically cataloguing where authority and enforcement power exists. Those under-utilized powers are there, and they are far-reaching: from the Department of Education’s enforcement authority over shady for-profit schools and student loan companies to the Department of Agriculture’s ability to go after anticompetitive practices wreaking havoc on rural communities.

New Drive to Empower State and Private Enforcers

This work and its success depend on more than federal efforts—as important as those will be. We must also recognize that decades-long right-wing efforts to capture our courts and our legal system have too often stymied and sidelined both state prosecutors and individuals themselves from holding the most powerful people and companies in the world accountable.

As part of our effort to revive corporate accountability and improve affordability, we must empower partners such as state enforcers and private attorneys, who already wield their own tools that can protect the working public. The past year has made clear that a “federal only” approach to enforcement has been an unmitigated disaster—with constant corruption and a brazen disregard for federal law that no federal official will raise a finger to stop, but no one else has the power to address.

Simply put, too many forget about federalism when we are in power in the federal government.

Empowering critical partners requires a sustained, focused effort across many fronts. First, a new Congress must prioritize legislation that authorizes dual enforcement with states on key areas of corporate accountability, and private rights of action must be non-negotiable. This principle should apply both to existing protections, like broad-based consumer protection statutes long on the books, and to new legislation, like efforts on privacy and AI regulation. Further, Main Justice and the US Attorney offices must work closely with state attorneys general, city authorities, and county officials to collaborate on investigations, cases, and resources as quickly as possible.

Second, we must attack all the ways that large corporate interests have limited public and private enforcement. We must aggressively use preemption determinations (that is, clear guidance to eliminate any bad-faith arguments that federal law blocks state law) to affirm the key role states play and end the reflexive response of government litigators to aggressively assert immunity. This also includes repealing lingering preemption documents and other often meritless claims that state laws are preempted. DOJ must make it explicit that the federal government is out of the preemption business in court filings, including over authorities at formerly independent agencies. And perhaps most importantly, there must be an all-of-government approach—including where the government serves as a market participant—to aggressively fight back against arbitration agreements that destroy accountability and distort our democratic institutions.

For this all to work, we need to fundamentally rethink the role of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs (IGA). IGA must play a central role in driving a national, cross-government affirmative agenda that strengthens enforcement agencies and authorities in states and cities throughout the country. The success of “Little FTC Acts” generations ago, which remain the foundation of modern-day state consumer protection, offers a blueprint that should be replicated dozens of times over to drive more federal–state collaboration. As part of this effort, a dedicated team with authority and resources across DOJ and IGA (but that reaches far across agencies) must scour federal and state dockets to fight back against bogus claims that lock public and private enforcers out of court, or that limit the reach of claims. We must also identify where agencies that might not have enforcement authority should clearly identify via policy statement those practices that are illegal, so that enforcers who do have the ability to hold companies accountable for “unfair” practices can take action.

Additionally, the federal government should make grants accessible to state attorneys general, labor departments, and other state and municipal enforcers to support this work. Models like the USDA grant program designed to drive competition work in the agricultural sector can provide a roadmap, but we must adapt them to be more effective. We must also explore funding models that reward states that not only strengthen their consumer protection authorities, but also generate new revenue streams that provide enhanced and dedicated funding to bolster labor offices, attorneys general, bank regulators, and beyond—using surcharges and additional revenue from big banks, big tech, billionaires, and private equity barons.

The Urgency We Face

Workers, consumers, and small business owners have borne the brunt of decades of corporate malfeasance. Putting thousands of cops on the beat of affordability will be a central part of building back a government that finally works for working people—and faith among the public that democracy can actually deliver for everyday Americans.