The idea that the United States government should know who owns every company was once a very popular one.
A 2021 law that created a tool to track bad actors financing terrorism, paying bribes and hiding from the U.S. government passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. Then-Sen. Marco Rubio, who sponsored the proposal twice, called it “the most significant anti-corruption & money laundering law in decades” and pressed the Treasury Department to enforce the data collection as recently as 2023.
Six years in, the project is now all but dead, and the political consensus that led to the law’s creation has collapsed, leaving a major gap in the government’s ability to investigate financial crimes.