Late last week, President Donald Trump’s budget blueprint was released. Among many other headline-grabbing cuts—the EPA, Meals on Wheels, climate change funding, legal aid for low-income households, and on, and on, and on—it also included a less-noticed $1.1 billion, or 4%, cut to the Department of Justice. The DOJ, of course, includes two divisions of key interest to corporate America, namely, the antitrust division and the fraud section of the Criminal Division.

The budget blueprint doesn’t propose a funding level for the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose enforcement division conducts investigations into possible violations of securities laws and prosecutes civil cases. But internal sources say the SEC is also bracing for budget cuts.

At a recent conference in Washington, Michael Piwowar, a Republican economist who was first appointed to the Commission by President Barack Obama, and who was designated the Acting Chairman by President Trump, said, “Depending on which way the budget goes and stuff in the future, we’re going to have to make some tough choices in terms of using limited resources.” Some experienced lawyers there have already voted with their feet.

View photos President-elect Donald Trump wants Wall Street lawyer Clayton to be chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Dick Duane via AP More

And there is cultural change afoot in that agency, too. President Trump’s pick for SEC chairman, Jay Clayton, is a longtime corporate lawyer whose firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, has represented many of the people he’ll now have to police. Clayton hasn’t yet been confirmed, but in the meantime, Piwowar is starting to impose more centralized control over the investigative process, says one person familiar with events. This person points out that this was the playbook in George W. Bush’s administration as well, where Republican commissioners had significant input on what investigations got done.

Sessions’ March 8 memo

In the context of the overall DOJ budget cut, a mostly unremarked-upon memo sent by new Attorney General Jeff Sessions on March 8 now seems more pointed to some observers. Entitled “Memorandum for all Federal Prosecutors” it directs prosecutors to focus not on corporate crime, but on violent crime.

“It is the policy of the Department of Justice to reduce crime in America, and addressing violent crime must be a special priority,” Sessions wrote. “This memorandum directs a focused effort by the Department’s dedicated public servants to investigate, prosecute and deter crime.”

While fighting violent crime is obviously critically important, in the past, the local cases have been the province of the state’s attorneys, not federal authorities.

To prosecutors, the Sessions memo is a big deal. It’s a direct command from the AG. And it’s axiomatic that if the DOJ’s budget is shrinking, and the amount of money and time devoted to one thing—violent crime—is going up, then the amount of money and time devoted to another thing—white collar crime—will go down. ‘It [addressing violent crime] is for sure going to push resources away from other things,” says a former prosecutor, who adds that there is also a hiring freeze in the Southern District of New York, which is widely regarded as the office that does the most on white collar crime. As he points out, the freeze doesn’t stop departures, and fewer bodies also mean less ability to bring cases. (The SEC also has a hiring freeze.)