Over the past year, ProPublica journalists collected, analyzed, and published more than 3,500 financial disclosure records for more than 1,600 Trump administration appointees — building the most comprehensive public accounting of the financial entanglements of the executive branch.
The project required obtaining records from the Office of Government Ethics and filing individual requests with dozens of federal agencies, many of which were slow to respond or didn’t respond at all. The result is a searchable online database that allows anyone to examine the assets, income sources, liabilities, and prior employment of officials from cabinet secretaries to lower-level appointees.
The database became the backbone for a series of investigations revealing how personal financial interests have collided with government decision-making. We found that Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg, co-founder of private equity giant Cerberus Capital Management, oversees the $151 billion Golden Dome missile defense program while at least four Cerberus-owned companies have received contracts under it.
The disclosures also showed that senior officials including former Attorney General Pam Bondi made well-timed stock sales ahead of “liberation day” market drops, and that Todd Blanche, the current acting Attorney General, held significant crypto investments while shutting down investigations into crypto firms — a finding that prompted congressional scrutiny and a formal conflict-of-interest complaint.
All of this unfolded as Trump rescinded Biden’s ethics pledge, fired 17 inspectors general, and left the Office of Government Ethics without permanent leadership.
The database transforms thousands of pages of dense government paperwork into a public resource that has already driven accountability reporting and congressional action, and will continue to serve as a tool for oversight as the administration progresses.
