Years ago, as a "baby lawyer," I spent months buried in a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) discovery review. Hundreds of hours reading emails between businessmen and foreign officials. Nobody ever wrote "bribe" or "kickback," instead these were carefully worded notes about being "helpful" or "offering assistance." It’s the kind of phrasing written by people who know precisely what they are doing, who know how to talk in code to avoid jail time. Once you have spent enough time reading this language, you will never forget it.
I spotted it again reading through the U.S.-Venezuela oil arrangement between Donald Trump and Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela’s interim president. At the recent United Nations General Assembly, you could not miss the smiles, photos and endless handshakes between the two as the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve hit its lowest level since October 1982.
The Trump administration claims it has secured majority control over 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan crude oil through a new venture that will last 100 years. Rodríguez describes a 25-year framework that will supposedly generate more than $200 billion for Venezuela's treasury. This is a deal cloaked in exactly the kind of language I learned to distrust as a young lawyer; vague terms, promises nobody can confirm, a process wrapped in enough layers of secrecy that it would not survive basic scrutiny under either administration. It was negotiated behind closed doors, with no competitive bidding, by an interim leader whose authority to commit her country to a generation-long arrangement is itself an open question. That alone should make anyone pause before celebrating the headline number.
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Here’s what worries me most, the part almost nobody is discussing. In February 2025, the Trump administration signed an executive order to pause enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) for 180 days. Just days before that, the attorney general had already dismantled the Justice Department's Corporate Enforcement Unit and its Foreign Influence Task Force and quietly deprioritized the resources that once went after sanctions violations, foreign lobbying and kleptocrats. Enforcement did eventually resume, months later, but under new rules requiring the attorney general to personally sign off on every case, with a mandate narrowed mostly to cartels and harm to identifiable American companies. The result: American anti-corruption enforcement is weaker, and so is our credibility on the issue everywhere else in the world.
FCPA was never perfect. The emails I read as a young lawyer prove that people find ways around almost any law. But imperfect leverage is still leverage. For nearly 50 years, the FCPA gave prosecutors a real tool to hold American businessmen and companies accountable when they crossed a line abroad. It gave everyone else a standard to measure a deal against when something looked polished on the surface and murky underneath.
We are seeing the impacts of this enforcement gap daily. Five hundred million dollars from the first Venezuelan oil sale moved through an account in Qatar, with no public record of who controlled it or how it was spent. The treasury secretary told Congress, under oath, that he didn't actually know which accounts were being used to manage the proceeds, all this despite an executive order explicitly putting his department in charge of holding those funds. If the people responsible for this money cannot tell the American public where it is, why would Venezuelans believe it is ever going to reach them?
Venezuela's oil wealth has never reliably reached its own people. Years of mismanagement and outright corruption, on top of sanctions, are a big part of why the country now produces a third of what it did back in 1998. Venezuelans have every reason to doubt that a new deal, no matter how big the numbers sound, changes anything without the kind of accountability the FCPA was designed to provide.
I have spent my career believing good policy and real economic growth are not at odds with accountability, they depend on it. Congress has introduced legislation calling for an independent audit of these oil proceeds, and that is a necessary first step, but not a substitute for the enforcement authority that should have been watching this deal from day one. Venezuelans deserve a government, and a partner, that can actually show its work. Right now, neither one can. Frankly, neither one is even required to try.
Alejandra Y. Castillo is former U.S. assistant secretary of commerce for economic development.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.