Under Trump, Commodity Futures Trading Commission Scales Back Enforcement, Worrying Farmers

For years, American cotton farmers suspected that they were getting cheated by powerful companies that bought and sold their goods to overseas buyers.When a whistle-blower came forward who appeared to validate those suspicions in 2021, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal regulatory agency, began an investigation.During the last months of the Biden administration, the agency reached a settlement against one of the trading companies, Olam Group.The firm agreed to pay a $3.25 million fine after the C.F.T.C.

found it had misled the markets about its cotton exports to China.By that point, that same whistle-blower had accused Louis Dreyfus Company of doing the same thing.But just as lawyers for the C.F.T.C.were on the verge of recommending civil charges against Louis Dreyfus, the Trump administration took over.

The agency’s newly appointed acting chairwoman shut down the investigation, questioning whether the evidence was adequate, according to more than half a dozen people familiar with the inquiry who described internal matters on the condition of anonymity.The handling of the Louis Dreyfus matter came in the midst of an enormous rollback in enforcement at the C.F.T.C., a small but important agency that oversees the nation’s multi-trillion-dollar commodities markets....