​Trump’s unscrupulous reign is being ignored by America's most powerful organizations

Sorry to burden you with this question, but it nags at me.

Why haven’t the American Bar Association or the American Medical Association stood up against the unethical behavior of professionals in the Trump regime?

I was always told that professional associations existed to maintain professional standards, not merely to restrict the number of licensed professionals to maintain professional prices.

But Lindsey Halligan, now the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, is ethically unmoored.

She was appointed by Trump and Pam Bondi for the express purpose of prosecuting Trump enemies James Comey and Letitia James.

Halligan is a former insurance lawyer with no criminal law experience. (She had helped Trump “de-wokify” the Smithsonian.)

On November 17, 2025, a federal magistrate judge identified multiple instances of Halligan’s misconduct, including making “fundamental misstatements of the law” to a grand jury.

Halligan admitted she never showed the final indictment to the entire grand jury after it had rejected her first submission, a remarkable failure.

A judge subsequently found that Halligan had been illegally appointed U.S. attorney to begin with and dismissed the indictments against Comey and James. The Justice Department is now appealing.

According to the American Bar Association’s model rules of conduct (adopted by every state bar association), a prosecutor in a criminal case must “refrain from prosecuting a charge that the prosecutor knows is not supported by probable cause.” It is also considered professional misconduct for a lawyer to “engage in conduct that is prejudicial to the administration of justice.”

If legal ethics mean anything, Halligan should be disbarred.

If medical ethics mean anything, Dr. Vinay Prasad should no longer be a doctor.

Prasad, the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine regulator, recently claimed that Covid vaccines were dangerous for children and had caused the deaths of “at least 10 children.”

Twelve former FDA commissioners said Prasad’s claim broke sharply from long-standing scientific norms and posed “a threat to evidence-based vaccine policy and public health security.”

Inside Medicine reported that Prasad used incomplete information and that the pediatric death toll from Covid shots was between zero and seven.

More to the point, how many children would have died without the Covid vaccine? The Centers for Disease Control reported that more than 2,100 American children have died of Covid since the pandemic began.

I could have used many other examples of doctors now ostensibly serving the public in the Trump regime who have thrown their own integrity and ethics out the window and into the Potomac.

What is unfolding among doctors inside the Department of Health and Human Services is an attempt to rewrite the rules governing the entire U.S. public health system based on ideology rather than science.

Likewise, I could have found many other examples of attorneys in the Trump regime who are violating professional standards.

What’s occurring among lawyers in the Justice Department and the U.S. attorney’s offices is an attempt to rewrite the rules governing the entire U.S. system of criminal justice based on Trump’s vindictiveness rather than the rule of law.

If professional associations have any legitimate purpose in our system, it is to enforce ethical standards and hold professionals accountable to them.

Hell, if the American Economic Association can permanently ban Harvard economist (and former treasury secretary) Larry Summers for conduct “fundamentally inconsistent with its standards of professional integrity” (Summers had repeatedly asked Jeffrey Epstein for advice on Summers’s pursuit of a younger economist), surely the American Bar Association should ban Lindsey Halligan, and the American Medical Association, Vinay Prasad.

Where are the American Bar Association and the American Medical Association during Trump’s unscrupulous reign?

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.