🎥Watch the Instagram video here🎥
A simple translation of legal mambo-jumbo. Here we go: on August 11th, under the flimsy guise of “Reducing the compliance burden on small businesses,” Donald J. Trump’s Treasury Secretary, he of the big personality, Scottie Bessent, issued a rule that permanently exempts U.S. companies and U.S. persons from the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) beneficial-ownership reporting, the rule took effect August 14, 2026.
This makes permanent a rollback Bessent first started in March 2025, which had already exempted over 99% of the roughly 32 million entities originally covered (Senate Banking Democrats).
The Act wasn’t a standalone bill, Congress buried it inside the FY2021 National Defense Authorization Act.
That bill passed with a veto-proof majority.
Trump vetoed it anyway (reportedly over unrelated gripes, including a fight over renaming military bases named for Confederates).
Congress overrode him anyway, 322 to 87 in the House, 81 to 13 in the Senate, the only successful veto override of his first term.
The House sponsor was Rep. Carolyn Maloney; the Senate push came from Ron Wyden, Sheldon Whitehouse, and Marco Rubio, who co-sponsored it and called it “the most significant anti-corruption & money laundering law in decades” (Rubio on X).
The point: force every shell company to name its real owner, so cartels, terrorists, and oligarchs stop hiding behind fake LLCs.
Ten million-plus companies complied, Treasury’s own Inspector General says over 16 million BOI reports had been filed by the end of 2025 (Treasury OIG).
👇👇Read on for how the Trump administration dismantled the law, what happened to the ownership information already collected, and whether Congress can make the blackout permanent.👇👇
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