The new Trump Administration will not be the first to staff many of its top positions from the private sector; Trump himself filled his first cabinet with various corporate types. This time around, however, these business figures are coming aboard amid an atmosphere in which norms and rules regarding conflicts of interest and ethics are falling by the wayside.
This starts, of course, at the top. Trump has signaled that he will do even less than in 2017 to separate himself from his family’s ventures. Now, as ProPublica points out, he will also be the first president to take office as the majority owner of a publicly traded company, Trump Media & Technology Group.
In its most recent 10-Q quarterly filing, issued on election day, Trump Media listed as one of the risk factors for its investors the fact that Trump was the subject of numerous legal proceedings. By getting himself elected, Trump has in effect removed many of these risks, given the Justice Department prohibition against prosecuting a sitting president.
The question now is what steps he may take once in office to protect the company itself from oversight. Trump’s choice of Paul Atkins, described as a “regulatory skeptic,” to head the Securities and Exchange Commission will be a boon both to Trump Media and all publicly traded companies.
Trump’s picks for his cabinet and other top positions include numerous figures from the private sector who are currently affiliated with corporations that stand to benefit from a weakening of regulatory protections in various areas. These include companies with a history of misconduct. Here are some examples, drawing on data from Violation Tracker.
Howard Lutnick: Secretary of Commerce. Lutnick is the chief executive of the investment banking and brokerage firm Cantor Fitzgerald, which has racked up more than $50 million in penalties. This includes a $10 million fine paid to the SEC in 2022 for failing to comply with recordkeeping requirements.
Chris Wright: Secretary of Energy. Wright, an executive at Liberty Energy, which does business as Liberty Oilfield Services, is an outspoken defender of fracking and an ardent climate denier. Earlier this year, the company paid $265,000 to settle allegations from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that Black and Latino workers at its operations in Odessa, Texas were subjected to a hostile environment, including racial slurs. According to the EEOC, management took no correction action when informed of the problem. Liberty has also been cited numerous times by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, including a 2021 case in which it was fined $55,000 for serious and repeated infringements.
Stephen Feinberg: Deputy Defense Secretary. Feinberg is the co-chief executive of the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management. The portfolio firms controlled by Cerberus include Hospitality Staffing Solutions, which was fined $58,000 by the Labor Department for wage and hour violations, and Cyanco, which was fined $52,000 by the EPA. Cerberus used to own military contractor DynCorp, which has been involved in numerous controversies, including a case in which it paid $7.7 million to settle allegations of submitting false claims to the Department of State.
Frank Bisignano: Commissioner of the Social Security Administration. Bisignano is the chief executive of the payments company Fiserv. In 2020 Fiserv subsidiary First Data paid $40.2 million to the Federal Trade Commission to resolve allegations it knowingly processed payments and laundered credit card transactions for scams that targeted hundreds of thousands of consumers.
Additional examples come from the make-believe agency known as the Department of Government Efficiency, whose main cheerleader, Elon Musk, heads companies such as Tesla that have clashed with regulators and paid fines.
Not all of Trump’s picks are migrants from the corporate sector. There are also Fox News hosts, rightwing public officials and MAGA ideologues. There is even the wild card RFK Jr., who is critical of the food and drug industries.
Yet the new Trump government will have plenty of people who have come through the reverse revolving door and are likely to promote policies that benefit their former employers and Corporate America in general. The fact that many of them will be veterans of companies with a history of misconduct should make them enthusiastic supporters of Trump’s assault on regulatory safeguards.
If there is an opposite to economic populism, this is it.