Government ethics watchdogs in Washington, D.C., say they have been overwhelmed by the scale of self-enrichment during President Donald Trump's second term, with one expert describing the situation as a "volcano of corruption" that has exceeded even their most aggressive projections. The challenge comes at a time when the existing framework of federal ethics infrastructure — built around financial disclosure rules, conflict-of-interest statutes, and oversight norms developed over decades — was already strain-tested during Trump's first term.

In a report published Sunday by The Atlantic, several leading oversight organizations acknowledged that strategies developed during Trump's first term — when they learned to identify misuses of taxpayer funds, cases of presidential profiteering, and allegations of nepotism — have proven insufficient for the breadth of activity in his second.

"This term, the watchdogs are even more alarmed by what they're witnessing, and they are racing to keep up," The Atlantic reported. In response, advocacy groups have significantly expanded their operations. Public Citizen brought on additional litigators and researchers. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) hired a specialist in cryptocurrency — a reflection of how digital-assets ventures have created a new and less-regulated frontier for potential self-dealing that traditional ethics monitoring tools were not designed to track. The Campaign Legal Center filed its highest-ever annual number of ethics complaints and launched a tracker of "corrupt transactions" to maintain an accurate count even as media attention to individual cases wanes. Saurav Ghosh, the group's director of federal-campaign-finance reform, said the tracker is designed to counter "the exhaustion factor" — a dynamic ethics groups worry could normalize what would once have been major scandals.

Jordan Libowitz, a spokesperson for CREW, told the outlet: "I think the big difference in this term is just how blatant all of it is. In the first term, there was at least a head nod towards Trump as president being separate from Trump the businessman. Now that's gone."

The Atlantic observed that first-term controversies — such as Housing Secretary Ben Carson's family purchasing a $31,000 dining set, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt spending $43,000 on a phone booth, and Ivanka Trump publicly endorsing Goya products after the company's leadership expressed support for her father — now appear comparatively minor. Extensive reporting was also devoted to Trump's frequent first-term trips to his own properties and the associated taxpayer costs.

Those costs have escalated. According to the CREW tracker, which updates daily, Trump had made 270 visits to his own properties a year and a half into his second term — a 14 percent increase over the comparable period in his first. HuffPost calculated that the taxpayer bill for his golfing trips reached $70 million by last fall. At the current pace, the analysis projected, second-term travel and golfing costs could reach $300 million — double the first term. Those figures include security for the president and his family; the Secret Service spent nearly $100,000 at Trump-owned properties in the first five months of the second term alone.

The Atlantic identified what it called the most significant category of self-dealing allegations — one with no first-term precedent. Days before Trump's second inauguration, an Emirati royal reportedly backed a deal to acquire a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial, the Trump family's primary cryptocurrency venture, for $500 million. The deal, reportedly signed by Eric Trump, included $187 million paid up front and at least $31 million directed toward entities linked to the family of Steve Witkoff, a co-founder of the crypto firm who also serves as a lead Middle East negotiator for the administration — a dual role that places a senior U.S. diplomat with direct policymaking responsibilities over the region in a financial relationship with a foreign government actor through a private business venture.

According to financial disclosures, the majority of wealth Trump has accumulated during his second term derives from his family's cryptocurrency businesses.