New from the Brennan Center:

rump’s reelection and the start of his second term have also been notable for how extensively he leaned on ultra-wealthy donors to fund his campaign and staff his administration. Money has always played a role in American politics, but this moment is different. No winning presidential campaign has relied as much on such a small group of donors as the Trump campaign did in 2024 — a strategy made possible by Citizens United and subsequent Supreme Court decisions that dismantled key federal campaign finance regulations. Many of Trump’s biggest supporters were unusually vocal about their support and the outcomes they wanted to see over the next four years. And Trump has pulled them closer since the election, placing them at the center of his secretive transition and giving some of them big roles in the administration.

While winning candidates often reward supporters with ambassadorships or other administration jobs, Trump has given some of his biggest donors key positions with extraordinary potential to influence decisions impacting their own bottom lines. Chief among them is Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person and the biggest pro-Trump spender in the 2024 election. Despite Musk’s contracts with the federal government worth billions of dollars, the White House says he will decide for himself whether any conflicts of interest arise in his role as a “special government employee” leading the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on a slash-and-burn campaign across federal agencies and hundreds of billions of dollars in spending.

Musk and Trump’s other Cabinet nominees and White House appointees make up the wealthiest administration in history — including more than a dozen reported billionaires — with an abnormally long list of potential conflicts of interest. And while appointees (though not the president himself) are required to take some steps to avoid clear conflicts, these requirements are relatively easy to evade. So far Trump has also failed to require his political appointees to take an additional ethics pledge, breaking with the long-standing tradition President John F. Kennedy set in 1961.

The concentration of private wealth and political power in so few hands with so few guardrails could pave the way for Trump’s campaign backers and allies to reap massive financial benefits on a scale not seen since the Gilded Age. Many of the big-ticket policies the administration is set to tackle — including government contracts, tariffs, and regulatory decisions — can be precisely tailored to reward (or punish) specific recipients. And Trump’s refusal to step away from his own extensive business entanglements while in office means he could exercise government power to line his own pockets in addition to his political allies’. This comes alongside the administration’s aggressive steps to limit the government’s ability to fight public corruption….